This board is a good idea. I'm glad you created it. Thanks.
For starters, I'm using Dragon naturally speaking right now, and that sometimes leads to bizarre mistakes. I'll try to proofread before I save, but I find that as I get older and my eyesight worsens, more and more get past me.
I think it would be a good idea to clarify what you mean by ' Survive'. Survive what? One board member might think that we're talking about surviving a hurricane or fire - where the priority is to get out of the danger area and back to safety and/or civilization. Another might think we're talking about survival when lost in a forest - where the goals might be to sit tight, forage for water and food, get fire and build a shelter.
Even the scenario I worry about, societal collapse, could come about in a lot of ways, each of which might require its own preparations.
There was a TV show, Doomsday Preppers, that aired on cable for a while. I recorded quite a few of the episodes. Even on this show, the subjects were focused on all kinds of different threats. The ones I remember included an electromagnetic pulse, supervolcano, climate change (believe it or not), global pandemic, nuclear war and my personal favorite, economic collapse. While there were some similarities in the steps that people were taking, there's a big difference between what you do if a nuclear war is coming and what you do if smallpox and yellow fever are the threat.
While I think that plague and all-out nuclear war are realistic possibilities during my life, I don't plan to start preparing for them. I not only don't know what to do about them, I'm not at all sure that they would be survivable if the area I lived in were contaminated with radiation or disease. I'd be happy to survive whatever might come up, but I'm not going to prepare for something as unpredictable as war.
The same is true for a pandemic. Which pandemic? Via which vector would it spread? Air, water, mosquitos, sex, ticks, surfaces? Again, while I would be happy to survive a pandemic, I'm not going to worry about it. Living in an isolated location, which is what I will be doing in a couple of years, is perhaps the most useful thing that could be done anyway.
To me, survival preparation means getting ready to survive without the benefit of society, and being able to deal with some of the problems that are likely to arise if society collapses. In other words, attempting to gain long-term self-sufficiency.
I'd be happy to discuss how to build a snow shelter or how to find edible plants in the woods, but neither strikes me as particularly important when the problem is long-term, not short-term.
Does anyone else care to weigh in on this?
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