Written Interviews & Articles About Matthew Stein

An interview with the author of When Technology Fails, a field guide to to surviving long-term disaster.

Released in 2008 , When Technology Fails has quickly become the definitive guide to surviving a long-term disaster.

And yet the author, Matthew Stein , a mechanical engineer and MIT grad, had no intention of ever writing such a handbook. The idea came to him in a vision, presented in the form of “a pictorial storyboard outline, from start to finish.” He would spend the next two years researching the earth’s most prominent threats, as well as ways to combat them.

You’ve said that this book originally came about because of a voice you heard while meditating?



I’ve had a practice of daily prayer and meditation. I’ve often used the prayer for help in seeking solutions for difficult engineering problems.

Rarely in the specialized milieu of industrial civilization does one encounter a Renaissance man or woman-someone who is well-versed in a wide spectrum of disciplines and who can expound upon them in writing that is both articulate and engaging. So when I discovered Mat Stein's phenomenal When Technology Fails: A Manual For Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving The Long Emergency, I immediately contacted the publisher, Vermont's own Chelsea Green, for a review copy of this fabulous tome on preparing wisely for the end of the world as we have known it.

Helpless situation: A TV grab shows the 2003 blackout in the US

My father once vowed that he would never use a cellphone in his life. Now, he swears by the gadget and thinks that he is in a mess while not carrying it. Things have changed so fast in the last 5-6 years. With the burgeoning use of technology, we are becoming over-dependent on it.

Ill-effects of this over-dependence are thriving in tandem. We tend to fumble on occasions we never used to. Be it with our cell phones, TVs, or the escalators in Metro stations ? anxiety goes up after a slight of disruption in our daily ‘technology routine’. Terrorism, global warming, super-storms, record-breaking floods and droughts are crippling overloaded electronic systems all the time. And everything comes to a standstill.

A celebrated prophet of low-tech self-reliance and renewable energy finds sanctuary on Maui

By Gary C.W. Chun

gchun@starbulletin.com

Engineer Matthew Stein denies that he is a survivalist, but, instead, a practical, down-to-earth realist.

The Haiku, Maui, resident, who has made a name for himself with his independently published book "When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance & Planetary Survival," moved from California with his environmentally friendly business EarthWorks International Design & Construction.

"I don't feel great making money off of the misery in the world, but I was guided to this for a reason," he said.

Stein said by phone from Maui on Tuesday that he just registered a new name for that business, now called Aloha Aina Builders. His firm uses innovative building methods and materials with low toxicity compared with the commonly used copper-arsenic treated lumber that, while termite resistant, is carcinogenic.

[See the above link for the entire article]

Technology supports the modern American lifestyle like a giant spider’s web; it is woven into everything that we do, but it is surprisingly fragile. Without technology, an act as simple as driving to the store to pick up dinner would be nearly impossible. No electricity? You can’t buy gas--the pumps don’t work. You can’t buy food or water--the cash registers don’t work.

None of this surprises Matthew Stein. The 1978 MIT graduate and Truckee-based mechanical engineer is the author of When Technology Fails, a book that aims to prepare you for Earth’s impending technological collapse.

“In 1996, my brother and sister-in-law were caught in the Central Valley of California during a power outage,” he said. “They had to wait, on a hot day, in a gas line for five hours. They couldn’t even buy a bottle of water or check into a motel.”

Perhaps this image lingered in Stein’s subconscious, growing, developing and waiting to be set free. It emerged a year later, while Stein was meditating, something he has been doing for more than 20 years to help him solve problems.

We've taken the past 200 years of prosperity for granted. Humanity's progress is stalling, we are facing a new era of decay, and nobody is clever enough to fix it. Is the future really that black, asks Bryan Appleyard

It's been said before, of course: people are always saying the world will end and it never does. Maybe it won't this time, either. But, frankly, it's not looking good. Almost daily, new evidence is emerging that progress can no longer be taken for granted, that a new Dark Age is lying in wait for ourselves and our children.