There’s a piece on Charles Hugh Smith’s blog recently about how bat guano is a good investment during these troubled times.  Because oil is going to deplete and become something only rich people can use, bat guano is supposed to come back as a fertilizer source.  Oil is well known as an essential component of fertilizer creation, as well as processing and transport of most farm products these days.  So, I can definitely see his argument there.  People have to eat, after all.

Yet, it makes me uneasy to tell people to invest in bat guano.  Perhaps it is an example of a concept I’ve picked up recently: the “single product solution” as a red flag.  When you Decentralize All The Things, that must include fertilizer sources, and it must include investment advice and opportunities.  I understand the appeal, though.  It is a physical asset, not easily captured by highway robbers, and not easily taxed because they’d rather tax farmers and eaters (useless or not) instead.  There are bigger pockets there, you see.

When you scout out doomer investment advice, a bunch of them talk non-stop about two things: cryptocurrencies, and gold/silver.  Nobody talks about bat guano.  They do talk about their doomstead/farm, but usually in terms of how much money they have to earn outside of it to keep it functional and running.  Medical care and veterinarian bills ain’t cheap.  Neither are property taxes or the interest on mortgages and seed loans.

If you scour the corners, you can find more interesting things doomers invest in.  For example, some doomers set up their own local electricity grid.  Some people who aren’t doomers do the same, because they can.  Maybe their particular location just works a lot better with a solar/wind combo, and village scale solar recharged battery distribution.  Usually the village scale makes it worthwhile, or at least that’s the stories I come across.  I hear whispers of local water purification and distribution along the same lines, but that sort of thing is a lot quieter.

Water privatization is a thing that people don’t like to talk about.  Big multinational corporations swoop in and take over the country’s water system, start charging big bucks, and the demand drops to zero as does their profit, while the water pirates go all Robin Hood on the locals.  Who could blame them?  Who has the arrogance to declare that they own all of the drinking water that falls on the commons?  The Water Rights holders do, of course.  The almond orchards of California were watered decently while the drought continued and a small number of cities dried up.  This means, in case you are paying attention, that one can purchase all the water rights in an area, if one wanted to short some kind of stock that depended upon large amounts of clean water to be profitable.

Is that a better investment than bat guano?  (shrug)  I couldn’t say.  Is it any better that a Total Stock Market Index Fund?  Is it any better or worse than investing in quality long pork?  Or electrical companies?  It is better than investing in government bonds.  Those are essentially backed by absolutely nothing, because governments can just declare that they won’t pay them back for another 50 years if they like.  Perhaps the strategy that must be considered is one of satisficing peanut butter.  Peanut butter spreads investments over as many different categories as possible.  Satisficing means you aren’t chasing the best yields.  All you are doing is avoiding the ones with the greatest risk of ruin.  If you don’t get the best yields, you pay less legal fees, so there is that.

Maybe your investment strategy, instead of just bat guano, is to invest in the manufacture of tools which the Amish will buy.  That way, at least the Amish will buy them.  When everybody else needs them because the oil gets too expensive for them, then your market will expand.  These are physical items, with a demand which won’t be filled by drones and robots no matter what the technocopians may dream, which, while they are taxed, aren’t a deep pocket type of item to be really aggressively stolen by those who steal all the things they can.

It is certainly a better idea than investing in Solar Roads, or a couple of those Elon Musk pipedreams.  There are plenty of other really bad investments out there, like real estate on the Florida waterfront, or pharmaceuticals which have a bunch of covered up scandalous studies showing harmful effects of the drugs they are selling.

It is hard to think about investment strategies if you are also thinking about NTHE.  It is hard to think about investment strategies if you are really into climate chaos and peak oil reducing the global population by at least 50% through food crops, clean water, and habitat loss.  You really do need to expand your definition of investment to include people, and local utilities, and the surrounding village’s health and well-being.  You can not be a loner hiding in a bunker when you get so injured that you can’t walk anymore, because everybody gets injured eventually, and then you need your village to harvest your crops for you that year.  You can’t do this alone.  You can’t invest alone either.  Getting out of debt must be a village effort then, with no city debt allowed.  No bond issues for the local schools, but rather coming up with the money up front.  You can raise that kind of money through crowd-funding these days, if people have sufficient amounts of discretionary cash lying about.  Do they?  Or have they been taxed too much?