The "Bible" for Emergency Prep & Survival, Plus Green & Healthy Living

Is it not already too late if one waits until one is thirsty to begin digging a well?

-Chinese Proverb

The devastation of New Orleans, combined with the current rash of wild fires in the West and severe weather in the East, brings home the fact that climate change and ecological collapse are bad for business (and people's lives). Ready or not, life as we know it is going to change radically over the next decade. I doubt that we will see technology fail completely, but I am certain that we will see increasing environmental and political instabilities that will create disruptions in the flow of electricity, goods, and central services to huge numbers of people, and that America will not be spared from societal disruptions on a global scale.

When Technology Fails, a book by Matthew Stein, provides something for everyone, from folks who just want to help their families when disaster strikes, to the go-it-alone survivalist, to the eco-minded person who wishes to tread more lightly on the earth, whatever the future may hold. Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami in Asia, and 9/11 really bring it home. How many of us are prepared for disruptions of this magnitude? How will you cope if the water stops flowing out of your tap, or if gasoline and electricity are unavailable? If the doctors and hospitals are overloaded, can you deal with common medical emergencies? How can we do our part to minimize our impact on this planet, and to live more sustainably?

400 Chernobyls: MIT engineer warns of impending cataclysm, urges preventative measures

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Figure 1. Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), SOHO image, June 9, 2002.

There are nearly 450 nuclear reactors in the world, with hundreds more either under construction or in the planning stages. Imagine what havoc it would wreak on our civilization, and the planet’s ecosystems, if we were to suddenly experience not just one or two nuclear melt-downs, but 400. In this article, you will come to understand that unless we take significant preventative measures, this Apocalyptic scenario is not only possible, but probable.

Over the past 152 years the Earth has been struck by at least two naturally occurring severe geomagnetic solar storms of such a magnitude that if they were to occur today, in all likelihood would initiate a chain of events leading to catastrophic failures at most of our world’s nuclear reactors. During the Great Geomagnetic Storm of May 14-15, 1921, brilliant aurora displays were reported in the Northern Hemisphere as far south as Mexico and Puerto Rico, and in the Southern Hemisphere as far north as Samoa. Just 62 years earlier, an even more powerful solar storm, referred to as “The Carrington Event,” raged from August 28 to September 4, 1859. Solar storms occur when the sun launches a huge mass of charged plasma directly towards the earth, in what is commonly referred to as a “coronal mass ejection” (CME). Since we are headed into an active solar period, much like the one preceding the Carrington Event, scientists are concerned that conditions are ripe for the next extreme “geomagnetic disturbance” (GMD).

The extreme GMDs of 1829 and 1921 induced massive current and voltage spikes in telegraph and power lines, disrupting telegraph communications over much of the planet while sparking numerous fires in and around telegraph equipment. Prior to the advent of the microchip, most electrical systems were relatively robust and resistant to the effects of GMDs. Given the fact that a simple electrostatic spark can fry a microchip, and many thousands of miles of power lines tend to act as giant antennas for capturing massive amounts of GMD spawned electromagnetic energy, the electrical systems of the modern world are far more vulnerable than their predecessors.

Building the Ultimate Survival Kit

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Every time a disaster strikes, you see pictures of people walking down the road. Usually they are thirsty and hungry. Often they are cold, wet, injured, and sick. Before a disaster struck close to home, every one of these people thought that disasters were something that happened to other people in other places. When the scope of a disaster is huge, most of the doctors, nurses, firemen, and policemen are either injured themselves, busy caring for family members, or evacuated from the area, and those civil servants that remain will be seriously overworked and under-supplied. In times like these, the majority of survivors are left to fend for themselves for several days, and sometimes for weeks or months. This is called “YOYO Time”, and YOYO stands for You are On Your Own! Mother Nature built into each and every one of us a desire to provide food, shelter, water, and protection for ourselves and loved ones. This article will help you put together a supply set to do just that!

We will start out with more basic items that every family should have on hand, followed by several highly recommended optional items, ending with a few additional items that will be extremely helpful in the event of a long term catastrophe or collapse-type scenario. Using the article links to purchase recommended products will help support this web site through modest associates commissions paid by the linked vendors. I have spent years collecting information, speaking to the public, and writing my books. Some may think I am getting rich off these efforts, but I still have a ways to go before I break even, much less actually make a dime of profit. Your use of the following article links to recommended products will help support this web site and these efforts, won’t cost you an extra penny, and will help us to expand our efforts to provide useful information that could save your life someday, or that of a loved one

The Perfect Storm

Six Trends Converging on Collapse              

By Matthew Stein, P.E., Author of When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability and Surviving the Long Emergency, ISBN #978-1933392455, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT (800) 639-4099 www.chelseagreen.com www.whentechfails.com

Failure is not in falling down, but in refusing to get up.

               —Chinese Proverb  

There are dark clouds gathering on the horizon. They are the clouds of six hugely troubling global trends, climate change being just one of the six. Individually, each of these trends is a potential civilization buster. Collectively, they are converging to form the perfect storm—a storm of such magnitude that it will dwarf anything that mankind has ever seen. If we are unsuccessful in our attempts to calm this storm, without a doubt it will destroy life as we know it on Planet Earth! 

There is a popular saying that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.” If we keep doing business in the same way as we have for the past century, each of these six trends will continue their steep rates of decline, collapsing the natural systems that form the foundation for our civilization and the lifeblood of the global economy. Perhaps the recent Gulf oil spill is the wake up call that mankind needs to snap us out of our complacency, realize that we are soiling our nest and that continuation of “business as usual” will destroy the world as we know it? Time will tell whether we heed this warning, go back sleep once the oil spill is contained, or simply tire of the endless media coverage, numb ourselves, and set these critical issues to the side.

We already have the technology and the means to turn this dark tide, but we lack the commitment to make the hard choices and sweeping changes that are necessary for shifting the future of our world from its current course of collapse to a new course of sustainability.

The following six trends are converging to form the perfect storm for global destruction, each of which is a potential civilization buster in its own right, if left unchecked:

When a Super-Bug Strikes Close to Home, How Can You Deal With it?

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By Matthew Stein, P.E., Author of When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability and Surviving the Long Emergency, ISBN #978-1933392455, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT (800) 639-4099 www.chelseagreen.com www.whentechfails.com

Certain bacterial infections now defy all antibiotics.

—Stuart Levy, M.D.

We have to recognize that we are in the most dramatic moment of the epidemic… And the number of cases will unfortunately increase and that's why we will reinforce all the measures necessary to contain the outbreak.

—Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova, Monday April 27, 2009

It appears that the “next pandemic” may be budding right now in the form of a new strain of deadly swine flu that has spread throughout large parts of Mexico, closing schools in Mexico City and sending millions of people to their homes. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Cases of this new strain of swine flu has already been confirmed in California, Kansas, New York, Ohio and Texas, as well as several other countries, raising the specter for its potential to blossom into a global pandemic. Much like the 1918 pandemic of Spanish Flu that killed an estimated 20-50 million people world wide, the scary part about this most recent outbreak is that most of Mexico’s dead are young previously healthy adults, ages 20-40. None of them were over 60 or under 3 years old, which are the age groups that are generally most susceptible to common human flu viruses.

The current swine flu may run its course, like SARS did, never reaching pandemic proportions, but that does not mean that one of a number of existing antibiotic resistant superbugs won’t come knocking at your family’s door some day. There are a host of antibiotic resistant superbugs that are already well established in our world, each with the potential for bringing great tragedy to an individual, or to explode into a global pandemic. In this article, I am going to provide several examples of the former, but also balance that fear with knowledge and hope gained from stories of individuals who have used a variety of alternative medicines, procedures and herbs to heal when the high-tech pharmaceutical arsenal of mainstream western medicine had failed to work its magic.

12 Tips for the Sustainability Shift

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-stein/making-the-shift-to-susta_b_...

These days, most people sense that our world is off balance and that we are sliding steadily towards some dark abyss. It can be hard to keep a cheerful positive outlook when you consider just these three signs of trouble:

Do The Right Thing!

Most of us just want to “do the right thing” for our selves, friends and families, but what is this “right thing”?

First, we must educate ourselves (knowledge is power!) about where our world is headed so we may have a realistic view of the challenges facing the world in the next few years and the following decades.

A Perspective on Relative Threats

In spite of the very real threat of terrorism, I believe that our greatest threats are from other sources. To gain some perspective, let's compare the impact of several major events:

The Main Threats to Our Future

As I see it, the four main threats to a stable American and world future are:

  •  PEAK OIL: The oil crisis of the 1970's was a result of a 5% drop in global oil production due to the OPEC oil embargo. We are facing an imminent, unavoidable drop in global oil production as most of the world's oil fields are now in decline. Many oil industry experts state that global oil production has essentially already reached a plateau and predict that it will start to decline sometime between this year and the year 2010. This is happening at precisely the same time that the huge populations of China and India are rapidly expanding their industrial capacities and their appetite for oil.

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  •  ECO THREAT: Global warming and other climate changes (super storms, etc.) coupled with major ecosystem collapse are the basis for the Eco-Threat. Hurricane Katrina is a powerful example of the effects of climate change. When you consider that a single degree F of global warming so far has contributed to the changes in weather that most of us now acknowledge (RE: severity of hurricanes Katrina, Andrew, Mitch, etc.), and that a continuation of current consumption patterns is projected to result in a global warming that is 2.5 to 10 times as great over the next century, it is obvious there are potentially dire consequences for the stability and quality of human life on our planet.

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  •  BIO THREAT: We face a potential for massive plagues due to: 1) The ability of viruses to mutate into new forms that make the jump from animal to human species (i.e. Bird Flu). 2) The widespread use of antibiotics in animal feeds makes a perfect breeding ground for growing bacteria that are resistant to modern antibiotics. 3) The potential for terrorists to secretly infect populations with deadly bacteria or viruses and for them to spread the infection globally (air travel) before it is detected.

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  •  TERROR THREAT: The threat of terrorism is obvious. What is not quite as obvious is the connection between our dependence upon foreign oil and how it funds terrorism while putting our soldiers, engineers and oil company personnel in harms way, and draws the attacks of fanatical Muslim minorities in their attempt to drive American influences from the entire Middle East.

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Preparedness Planning

I suggest that you develop a personal preparedness plan, and have prepared the following checklist which may be printed from this web site's “Articles” section:

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