Glen
December 15th, 2005, 12:35 AM
My fellow uptimers.
As your newly elected Chairman of the Executive Council, I have recently been going over the reports about the available areas for settlement. The opinion of many of our people is that the Berkley region, approximately 40 miles from here, would be the best location for all our futures.
The climate is clement, more so than this one will be come summer. There is good land for farming, hunting, and rivers and a bay for our fishing. There is also, significantly, a seam of coal nearby. While we have ample wood for burning, there are several chemicals that can be extracted from coal tar, and thus this will be useful in the foreseeable future.
I know several of you are anxious to make your mark on this brave new world the ASBs have landed us in. I know that several of you wish to stay right where we are now, rather than make is forty mile trip. While it will be quite an undertaking, if agreed to by the community, your council will make every effort to make it as smooth a trip as possible, including establishing weystations on the way, and sending an advanced team to secure the area and begin construction of necessary initial infrastructure.
While Ian's apartment is a poiniant reminder of our uptime world, and perhaps one of the sturdier structures in the entire downtime world, it is a small place, bereft of connections to water and electricity. It is not, in my opinion, of enough value to make this a place for a first settlement.
So to those who are thinking of staying here, and to those who are thinking of trekking off on their own, I strongly urge you to reconsider.
We are a small group, preciously small. Each one of you is an invaluable part of the uptime world we left behind. You have knowledge and skills, perhaps ones you are hardly even aware of, that are invaluable to our efforts to preserve all we can of the 5000 years of advancement and history to which we are all heirs.
We are cautioned by the examples of Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego, places where humanity managed to reach in prehistory, but in very small numbers. Too small numbers, it would seem, for the archeological record shows that basic skills were lost.
This could happen to us. Our literacy is one of our best weapons against this, as we can write down and record our knowledge for when there are enough of us and our civilization to take up more pursuits than our own small colony can do in the near future.
But with every one of us we lose, every dispersal of our population, we risk those losses. A single community pulling us all together gives us the greatest chance of preserving our knowledge and civilization. It will allow for the most rapid possible growth of specializations in labor and industry. Scattered settlements of a few dozen or hundred will need to devote themselves almost entirely to food production, perhaps sparing one or two members for a blacksmith, if metal is even available.
However, one community of several thousand will be able to support more diversity of specialized trades beyond food production. It will foster that diversification, and thus aid us in our rebuilding of civilization.
Therefore, I humbly ask each and every one of you to stay with our community, to trek with us to the new promised land, and to help us work together to preserve and build the best future possible for ourselves, our children, and our children's children.
As your newly elected Chairman of the Executive Council, I have recently been going over the reports about the available areas for settlement. The opinion of many of our people is that the Berkley region, approximately 40 miles from here, would be the best location for all our futures.
The climate is clement, more so than this one will be come summer. There is good land for farming, hunting, and rivers and a bay for our fishing. There is also, significantly, a seam of coal nearby. While we have ample wood for burning, there are several chemicals that can be extracted from coal tar, and thus this will be useful in the foreseeable future.
I know several of you are anxious to make your mark on this brave new world the ASBs have landed us in. I know that several of you wish to stay right where we are now, rather than make is forty mile trip. While it will be quite an undertaking, if agreed to by the community, your council will make every effort to make it as smooth a trip as possible, including establishing weystations on the way, and sending an advanced team to secure the area and begin construction of necessary initial infrastructure.
While Ian's apartment is a poiniant reminder of our uptime world, and perhaps one of the sturdier structures in the entire downtime world, it is a small place, bereft of connections to water and electricity. It is not, in my opinion, of enough value to make this a place for a first settlement.
So to those who are thinking of staying here, and to those who are thinking of trekking off on their own, I strongly urge you to reconsider.
We are a small group, preciously small. Each one of you is an invaluable part of the uptime world we left behind. You have knowledge and skills, perhaps ones you are hardly even aware of, that are invaluable to our efforts to preserve all we can of the 5000 years of advancement and history to which we are all heirs.
We are cautioned by the examples of Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego, places where humanity managed to reach in prehistory, but in very small numbers. Too small numbers, it would seem, for the archeological record shows that basic skills were lost.
This could happen to us. Our literacy is one of our best weapons against this, as we can write down and record our knowledge for when there are enough of us and our civilization to take up more pursuits than our own small colony can do in the near future.
But with every one of us we lose, every dispersal of our population, we risk those losses. A single community pulling us all together gives us the greatest chance of preserving our knowledge and civilization. It will allow for the most rapid possible growth of specializations in labor and industry. Scattered settlements of a few dozen or hundred will need to devote themselves almost entirely to food production, perhaps sparing one or two members for a blacksmith, if metal is even available.
However, one community of several thousand will be able to support more diversity of specialized trades beyond food production. It will foster that diversification, and thus aid us in our rebuilding of civilization.
Therefore, I humbly ask each and every one of you to stay with our community, to trek with us to the new promised land, and to help us work together to preserve and build the best future possible for ourselves, our children, and our children's children.