So say that a big wall is built around your country and nothing can get in or out.
Then imagine the country is further broken down into smaller, walled-off, self-sustaining regions. In the US, the states are walled off and then regions inside the states are walled off.
How far do you think your area would need to stretch in order for it to be self-sustained?
For example, I live in the Northeast Ohio region. I think we’d be pretty damn self-sufficient from the PA border west to Mansfield and south to Canton. We’d also get part of Lake Erie.
We’ve got farm land, fresh water and plenty of manufacturing. We’ve also got a lot of universities.
We’d be short on coal, though (I suspect much of America would have this problem being blocked from WVA). But we do have nuclear power (not sure where we’d put the waste w/o NV) and can use our manufacturing plants to build wind turbines. Unfortunately I’ve left Toledo out of my region, which is very windy…
We’d also be short on cotton. I suppose we’d have to switch to wearing a lot of sheep wool and alpaca. Oh! But we do have polymer sciences so we’ll all be wearing synthetic fibers in no time!
If you drew a circle around Chicago with a radius of 100 miles or so, we’d do pretty well in terms of agriculture, coal, and fresh water. Plus, we’d control a huge continental access point, from the Atlantic/Great Lakes to the Mississippi/Gulf, which would cause other regions incentive to trade with us.
Our close neighbors have iron and other ores we could trade for, and we have considerable manufacturing capacity we could pull out of mothballs.
The 200 mile dia circle I describe would go from Milwaukeeon the N, down and to the west to include Rockford, just past Kankakee on the S, to maybe S Bend on the E (do we HAVE to include Notre Dame?), and would include the SW corner of Michigan (you see, it’s like a mitten …)
We have the fishery (lobster is only bringing in $3.25/lb). A very little wind power, some hydro. Still lots of coal in the ground. Not much population so what few crops we produce might sustain us.
Well, New Jersey would first have to suffer a massive die-off of population, but after that, I’d think we could survive quite nicely. We’d just have to turn all those front lawns back into gardens and farms.
We would have plenty to eat, but we would be driving horse drawn wagons. There’s no petroleum or refineries in our region. Manufacturing is a bit short, but we’d be fine for natural gas and electricity, so there would be lots of power to run our lovely new computers. Computer chips, food, and wood products being pretty much the only manufacturing we have around here.
We’d do pretty well - the Greater Toronto Area has a large source of fresh water (Lake Ontario), lots of farmland suitable for growing fruits/vegetables and raising livestock, several power plants, two highly respected universities and a dozen colleges.
Some natural resources might be a challenge, though… most of the area was tapped out years ago, so we’d be hurting for metals and timber. So, we’d just fix that by annexing Northern Ontario. Plus, if we annex South Western Ontario too, we could add auto manufacturing, vineyards, additional farmland and a great source of hydroelectric power (Niagara Falls).
Sadly, we’d have to say goodbye to luxuries like citrus fruits, nuts, chocolate, coffee and tea, as well as any form of fresh produce from November thru May.
Wall off a 100 mile radius around San Francisco, and I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t be inside the wall other than coal mines and buggy whip factories.
Inside the wall, we’ve got lots of agriculture, growing pretty much any edible plant you can imagine. Towards the south-east edge, there’s dairy and beef cattle, so we have milk and beef. Chickens and eggs are plentiful as well.
No shortage of high-tech manufacturing, and no shortage of heavy industry either - hardly anyone knows that there’s an automobile factory in Fremont. Speaking of cars, we have lots of refineries. There was an article in today’s paper about opening up offshore drilling, so we’ll have oil and gasoline.
In the Applegate Valley, we would have lumber, fruits & veggies, farm animals and the hay to feed them. There’s also an abundance of game to be had. Horse drawn wagons would be plentiful and horse logging is making a come-back.
There are plenty of weaving guilds, so we wouldn’t be naked (unless you wanted to be!)
And lots and lots of wine and beer. Vineyards and hop fields aplenty.
Alternative power sources would power our sattelite TV’s and internet and cell phones.
We’re ready for The Big One.
Yeah you’d have your water as far as your state or country’s border extends on a political map. That’s why in my area we’d still have part of Lake Erie.
As for vitamin C…you can get it from loads of plants, including parsley and broccoli. Mmmmm parsley…
Wild Roses grow here like, in the wild… Rose Hips will be the new codfish except we won’t be as inclined to batter and deep-fry them. (Oh wait. We do that with everything, even Parsley)
I thought potatoes had more vitamin C than they do. I HOPE we don’t have to resort to parsley. Mmmmm, edible garnish…
All the folks who are busy mining gypsum to feed the wallboard factories down the Eastern Seaboard can be relocated to the mothballed coal mines.
