Many of us are worried about the future. Wars, disasters, emergencies, social unrest, economic impacts, food insecurity, and rumors about all of the above can cause a person a lot of worry. Worry can lead to fear. Fear can cause people to seek solutions.
The majority of people in the preparedness community are honest and caring individuals that genuinely want to help. I have found a few unscrupulous individuals that cash in on fear to sell bad information or cheap gear. Luckily those individuals are pretty rare, what you are more likely to find are honest folks that are trying to help but are naively passing on incorrect information.
I cannot count the times I have heard well-meaning people talk about “radiation pills,” Mountain Dew glow sticks, and heating a home using clay pots and a tea light candle. The explosion of preparedness communities on social media has caused bad information to be spread much faster than good information.
Preparedness involves effort. It takes work. Understanding that potassium iodide protects the thyroid from exposure to radioactive iodine released in nuclear power plants takes more work than just buying a bottle and thinking it is a cure-all radiation pill. It’s easy to watch a YouTube video and see someone pour household chemicals into a bottle of Mountain Dew and use a black light to make it shine. Actually conducting the experiment yourself to see if it will glow or prove it’s a trick is harder. Doing the math to see exactly how much thermal energy is in a teal light compared to the energy needed to heat a room is too concrete. It is not fun to find out something can’t work in real life. It is much easier to believe it does.
I grew up on a park; when I read a book on Indian lore or wilderness survival I had the freedom to experiment and learn by doing. When I joined the Marines, I found that my sergeant frowned upon wilderness survival experiments in the barracks. I got in the habit of feeding my experimental nature by reading instead of doing. After some years I started thinking because I read something I knew it.
Fast-forward a decade and I thought I was a survival expert. That is, until I needed to actually perform one of the skills I had read about time and again. Needless to say, I flubbed it up. I made up my mind after that I would start learning by doing. I created a list and started experimenting. To keep myself honest, as well as to share my journey with others, I began videotaping my actions. I soon realized that skills were transferrable, preparedness was useful, and that I was having a lot of fun.
Making cheese was one project I thought was beyond me until I got practice, now it’s fun.
Photo by the author.
As my skills improved, my confidence grew. I was able to take on more and more complex skills. After 10 years of experimenting I have a bunch of skills that I can rely on because I know they work. I have taken the time to learn the science behind why things are the way they are. Things that at one time seemed impossible are now easy.
This book is based upon decades of research, education, and practical experience. It is not the only way to prepare, and in the last section of the book I introduce authors, bloggers, and YouTube users that have their own ways of preparing for disasters.
I have learned from all of them. I don’t discount their methods, but I find that the system I present in this book will work for almost any situation and almost every person. Because it is based on emergency management principles, it is easier to explain to those who don’t yet feel the need to prepare because it is hard to dismiss someone as imbalanced for preparing for disasters if they are using terms and technology that originated with federal agencies created to deal with disasters.