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American society today is highly mobile. Few of us work close to our homes, so we are constantly running from one place to another, burning gasoline and putting miles on our cars. According to the National Auto Insurer’s Association, this is on the increase, with the average American driving twice as many miles per year as they did 30 years ago. With so much time in our cars and trucks and so much of that time being a ways away from our homes, it only seems logical to make sure that our vehicles are prepared to help us survive; yet few...

Modern life is complicated. We rely on a vast network of other people, who provide us goods and services that we can’t produce ourselves. This has made modern life much more comfortable, with conveniences that our ancestors didn’t even dream of. Yet, everything has its price, and the price of such comfort and convenience is dependency on that vast network of other people. Anything as complicated as our modern infrastructure is bound to have problems and failures. We see this happen from time to time, with loss of internet service, roads shut down by storms and even toxic chemicals being...

I was watching a few episodes of the program “Fat Guys in the Woods,” just to see what it was like. The program is a bit humorous, with a survival instructor taking three overweight city boys out in the wild and teaching them basic survival skills for a week. The first night, they’ve got to come up with shelter and fire, before calling it quits for the night. The host and survival instructor plays up on that a bit, always stacking the deck against the guys, especially in fire making. So, what’s so special about shelter that it becomes one...

In his book “One Second After,” author William R. Forstchen painted a well thought out picture of what life would be like in a post-EMP world. Faced with the sudden loss of power and everything electronic they depend on, the population of a small mountain town has to figure out how to survive. While many die, those that survive adapt, learning new skills and fending off a number of problems, including a large-scale armed attack. Like most Americans, these people were totally unprepared for the crisis that faced them. They hadn’t educated themselves or their families on what to do in a survival...

Survival requires a lot of things and the longer a period of time we are in survival mode, the more things we realize that we need. But ultimately, most of the things we find that we need boil down to providing the most basic survival needs of warm shelter, clean water, and nutritious food. Of these three, coming up with enough clean water to survive is often our biggest problem. Of course, if you live beside a major river, that’s probably not going to be an issue for you. But few of us actually live beside a river that flows year-round; and...