What happens when the power goes out, and their cooling towers stop working? Within 10 days the diesel tanks will be exhausted, and the nuclear fuel rods will melt down and burn through their containment walls. This will scatter radioactive debris in all directions, poisoning countless people, animals, and plants. Where once there was lush forests and teeming citys, there will instead be huge dead zones where nothing can survive. Extrapolating from chernobyl, we can assume a 30 km exclusion zone around each of them. Running away won't help anyone: Somebody has to secure those reactors after the collapse and keep them operating, or millions will die. Thats merely one consideration.
Heres another bummer for the SHTF crowd: Although modern farming techniques need only 2 acres of land to feed an adult male, they are dependant upon fossil fuels for their fertilisers, machinery, pesticides, irrigation, etc. Without them, the vast majority of farms would cease to function, and something like 240 million people would be doomed to starvation. * Real people, dying really slow and painfully. Unless you can set up your own pre-industrial farm, which requires a large plot of land (in a remote, defensible area no less!) just to feed a family, your statistical likelihood of survival is low. Paradoxically, if things get so bad that you need to permanently bug out, then you probably won't endure a peak oil event.
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“Members of the survivalist movement put a lot of time, effort, and money into preparing to deal with a catastrophic collapse of society. They anticipate that such an event will be followed by a period of total anarchy. Commercial distribution systems will self destruct, urban populations will face mass starvation, and roving mobs will scour the countryside fighting over scraps of food. Every historical example in the past 300 years suggests that such a total breakdown won't happen. There has never been a case in which a modern, economically developed society suffered total economic and political collapse followed by a lengthy period of anarchy.”
“What has happened is that gangs of organized thugs with guns moved in, took over the government, and imposed a new order of tyranny. Sometimes they were mobs turned into soldiers by a revolutionary leader, sometimes they were the same old army troops of the nation under new leadership, and sometimes they were foreign troops. In every instance, except for the military occupation of Japan and the western part of Germany after World War 11, the new order proved to be less free than the society that was "rescued" from disaster.” -Joseph P. Martino.
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Going the way of a hunter-gatherer definitely isn't an option either, because the wildlife population simply isn't able to support such huge masses of humanity. America has about 318 million people, but there are only around 50 million ducks, 90 million rabbits, and 30 million deer! Forrests are 3/4ths the volume they were prior to the arrival of european settlers, and the volume of edible plants has shrunk by an even greater amount. As can be seen, subsistence lifestyles are a zero sum game that most people will lose. But again, this is just courting the impossible: A complete societal disintegration has never happened in all of human history. Few would deny that the nation is experiencing a rapid decline, but this does not imply that a zombie apocalypse is right behind!
The united states has large amounts of infrastructure in place that are intended to prevent these kind of nightmare scenarios. Thats fairly obvious to most people. What these systems cannot prevent, however, are economic melt downs. If we see a repeat of the great depression, most jobs involving a college or university education will end up being wiped out. The common man and woman will lose whatever scraps of dignity and prosperity they have left. To survive in this environment, you don't need to exile yourself to some remote F]forrest and prepare to fight off hoards of sheeple. All you need to do is invest in precious metals, store basic supplys that you would take along on an extended camping trip, and enjoy the sight of americas sheeple reaping the just reward for their decades of ignorance.
*Beyond Collapse, by Joseph T. Miller (page viii).
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