I was watching the news in January and saw a report on a fire at an apartment complex in New Jersey that affected 400 people. That seemed like a huge number of people to be affected but the buildings seemed to be wood structures and the fire spread quickly.
The report included an interview with a family who had to leave their apartment very quickly, and they lost everything. How devastating. They started talking about how they really had nothing, they had lost all of their identification, important documents … works. Yikes.
A couple of summers ago I saw a report on Colorado I believe where torrential rains had washed out a number of bridges and people in between had to get out quickly because the bridges might be out for months.
And I thought, you know what, these people needed “Bug Out Bags.” I know, I know what you’re saying. Mather has cracked, and now he’s a survivalist and will soon be doing reports on the proper color of camo. Or you’re saying, “What’s a Bug Out Bag?”
Well that’s just it. That’s why I think this is an important conversation. A “Bug Out Bag” is simply a backpack you keep near your door in case someday some law enforcement person or someone in authority comes to your door and tells you that you have to evacuate … NOW! No time to start rifling through your apartment for stuff, you just have to go.
Extreme weather seems to be increasing the frequency of these events with extreme rain turning into floods, and multiple tornadoes ripping through areas and “super storms” too. There are all sorts of great fun for weather junkies but kind of disconcerting for anyone affected.
We have friends in Boston and this winter they have been buried in snow. It just doesn’t seem to stop. Transit has been shutdown, schools canceled, the city is closed. And in a tightly wound, technologically dependent society which uses a just-in-time model of delivering food and supplies to cities, it would seem that the times of assuming that someone in control will look after you are rapidly drawing to a close.
And that’s where our new bookThe Sensible Prepper comes in. This book evolved from our book Thriving During Challenging Times which posited that if those trying to govern our society just had to deal with climate change and extreme weather, or the economic crisis, or peak oil and resource depletion, or you name it, they might do it very well. But because these are all happening simultaneously they will be hard pressed to keep a lid on things. Our system is highly connected and tightly wound and complex systems like ours are very prone to shocks.
So, you should take some basic steps to make sure you’re not the person lined up waiting for bottled water that might not come today. So The Sensible Prepper is full of “Practical Tips for Emergency Preparedness and Building Resilience.” Nothing Mad Max/Book of Eli/The Road sort of apocalyptic madness and mayhem. I simply suggest that it’s time you took some basic steps to make sure you’re ready for the next disruption of normalcy that is becoming more common. My daughter who lives in downtown Toronto, in a wealthy, well financed, vibrant city was without power at her apartment for 7 days over Christmas last year after an ice storm devastated the electrical system. The system is too tightly wound. It is not resilient enough, so you need to be.
While Michelle and I live off-grid and power our home independently, our lightning strike damage which knocked out all our essential systems two summers ago taught me that I needed to have a better back up plan. It wasn’t the grid that went down, it wasn’t someone else’s fault, it was just Mother Nature doing her thing. It was a huge and costly hassle but it reminded me that I had to have a redundant system if I wanted to really achieve the goal most look for in power independence. In the book I share how to do that using the grid as your first source of power and then developing a backup system as well. And I talk about how do deal with food production and storage.
We also added a section on the basic emergency preparedness that governments throughout the developed world are now starting to suggest their citizens undertake. The systems that support us have been so dependable and robust for so long we’ve just come to accept that they will always be as reliable and a whole series of circumstances from budget-challenged governments to extreme weather are working to undermine that great record. No one is to blame, you should just make sure you’re ready if and when it happens.
That’s all. No camo required. No guns and ammo, although I do discuss security issues. Here are the details and a table of contents.
We really struggled with the title for this book. Some people have never heard of “prepping.” Thanks to National Geographic’s “Extreme Prepping” show others just assume this involves installing a concrete bunker in your backyard and spending weekends learning knife fighting. Sorry, no such fun in our book. But the reality of putting some extra canned goods aside with a way to cook them in your apartment in a blackout is prepping, so we just decided to call it what it is. In the old days this is just what people did. Today, we have to make a conscious decision to make ourselves more independent. And this is a good thing. It’s not radical or extreme, it’s just smart.
The past 17 years of our lives have been a constant upheaval for Michelle and me. We left a comfortable suburban life to move off-grid when the technology was still in its infancy and there was no good information on how to do it. We gave up a stable source of income to publish books about renewable energy and sustainable living and saw that evaporate with the economic collapse in 2008. We have scrambled to replace that income and have adapted to a new reality of drastically reduced income running a CSA, while loving it. It can feel like crap while it’s happening, but when you sort the mess out it feels amazing. The more you plan for an alternative future and realize that change is the norm, the easier it is to deal with it, should it begin to affect you. We are very proud of this book and we hope our readers will learn from our experiences.
And here’s the challenge I make to you. I am confident that at some point, if you follow a few of the suggestions I make in the book, you’re going to be grateful you did. Even it’s the time you’ve got a minivan full of kids when you pull up to the gas pump with the tank on empty and realize you left your purse/wallet in the hockey change room. You’re going to reach under your seat and pull our some cash and say, “Man did that avert a huge day-ruining mess! Great idea Cam!” That would be my main hope. Should there be something more extreme than a forgotten wallet in your future that you’d taken steps in advance to deal with, well, then, my work here has been successful!
Happy reading.
Our new book is available on ourwebsite.
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