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Although modern day technology has made outdoor living easier than the last few thousand years it is still very important to have knowledge of primitive survival skills. Knowing primitive survival skills will ensure survival without gear or supplies.
A vast majority of people lately have been gathering gear and supplies for various scenarios such as natural disasters, economical collapses, and even possible martial law. However, although having a stockpile of gear and supplies is great, preparing to survive without gear is even better. This is because situations may occur where individuals and even entire families may not have an opportunity to gather their supplies in case of an emergency.
This is where primitive survival skills come in handy. Knowing how to stay warm, create shelter against the elements, construct weapons and tools, and of course gather and hunt for food without any modern gear will prove to be a useful feat that many others may not even be aware of.
The first task that should be completed is creating tools and weapons that can be composed together from the elements that are around. This includes sharpening rocks to be used as knives and spear like weapons as well as wrapping strips of vine around both wood and blunt rock in order to create tools such as mallets or hammers for building shelter. Keep in mind that this task should be done immediately as the tools will provide for a much easier experience while completing the other tasks such as gathering food and building a fire.
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Maybe you’re brand new to prepping and not sure where to start. Maybe you aren’t really interested in emergency preparedness but your well-meaning in-laws keep sending you links to websites about the topic. Maybe you go to those websites and you see so much doom and gloom that you immediately exit. Maybe you say to yourself, “Holy cow, no! I’m not one of those crazy Doomsday Preppers!” (Maybe you’re the in-law sending the articles!)
If any of the above apply, then this post is for you. It’s chock-full of links, supplies, resources, and information for those who are new to preparedness that may not be ready to dive in 100% just yet.
It’s all about what I like to call “prepping-lite”. It’s for people who aren’t into apocalypse scenarios but who are sensible enough to realize that, well, stuff happens. Remember, prepping doesn’t mean you’re a doom-and-gloomer. It’s actually the ultimate act of optimism!
There are three types of emergencies that can strike nearly anyone. These don’t require that you systematically pick apart every episode of The Walking Dead so you can figure out how to survive the impending zombie pandemic
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How to make a campfire that will last all night with little or no further maintenance beyond the initial phase. This fire lay (or a variation) was a traditional fire used in the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Norway and Sweden. It was and is used as an all night fire lay for traditional type camping while using open front shelters. It is known there as “Rakovalkea” or “Nying”. In english it would be known as possibly “gap fire” or “long fire”.
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Regular readers may remember a humorous post from November of 2014 by Mrs. Cog titled ‘Amps Times Volts Equals Watts’. In that article Mrs. Cog relates with a giggle her struggle to understand the basic fundamentals of electricity, something she had previously given no more thought to for her entire life than where is the nearest outlet or light switch. I think I enjoyed that piece more than any other article by Mrs. Cog to date. If you haven’t read it, please take a moment and do so before proceeding. This article picks up (sadly sans most of the humor) where that one left off.
I wrote an article some time back describing the process of physically and financially decoupling from the Matrix. In it I described how we were selling assets to eliminate as much debt as possible in order to reduce the need for cash flow. While we are grateful some of our assets contained capital gains, we were not delighted with the idea the tax man would remove a sizable portion of ‘our’ money for ‘its’ despotic redistribution. Unfortunately the process of withdrawing often involves becoming more entangled, or at least still feeding the beast in many unexpected ways, even if this is temporary in nature and leads to less involvement in the system and a more sustainable lifestyle.
Needless to say the tax man’s wrath was felt in 2014, making us reluctantly resigned but very unhappy campers. Unfortunately, in a financial system which rewards those who continue to double down, the escapee who walks away is heavily penalized. Still, we were looking to repurpose some of the cash into tangible working assets of the sustainable homestead nature. If doing so happened to provide a tax credit, thereby reducing the tax man’s cut from a pound of Rump Roast to a twelve ounce Porterhouse, then all the better for us.
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Believe or not the Transition Health Check is not about measuring everyone’s blood pressure in your Transition group or seeing how fit you all are. It’s actually a great tool for you to use to see how your group is doing, one that many Transition groups have already found to be really useful. It is very important to state upfront that the Health Check is there to help your group, it is not a test that you pass or fail. Over the next few weeks we hope to hear from some groups who have already done the Health Check for their reflections.
A healthy group
Interestingly the similarities between a healthy human body and a healthy Transition group are both about taking an holistic view of what is happening in order to prevent problems by checking that all the different parts are working well. The Health Check is based around the following elements of the Transition support offer. It has been shown through research, actual experience and feedback that if a group covers these they are more likely to be successful, sustainable and healthy:
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Popular media today, including television and cinema, are rife with examples of what is often referred to as moral relativism — the use of false and fictional moral dilemmas designed to promote the rationalization of an “ends justify the means” narrative. We are also bombarded lately with entertainment depicting an endless array of “anti-heroes,” protagonists who have little to no moral code fighting antagonists who are even more evil, thus vindicating the otherwise disgusting actions of the heroes. From “24” to “Breaking Bad” to “The Walking Dead,” American minds are being saturated with propaganda selling the idea that crisis situations require a survivor to abandon conscience. In other words, in order to defeat monsters, you must become a monster.
This theme is not only unavoidable in film and TV, but also in military journals, politics, and even within liberty movement discussion.
What I see developing is an extremely dangerous philosophy that rests on the foundation that victory (or survival) is the paramount virtue and that it should be attained at any cost. Moral compass becomes a “luxury” that “true” apex survivors cannot afford, an obstacle that could eventually get one killed. I have heard some survivalists and liberty proponents in anger over the trespasses of the corrupt establishment suggest a strict adherence to the eye-for-an-eye ideology, up to and including torture, harming of the enemy’s families, and even harming the children of those who would harm us.
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I have a new book out from Counterpoint Press! It is titled The Age of Consequences: a Chronicle of Concern and Hope and it includes an Introduction by Wendell Berry. Here is a brief description, followed by a selection from the Prologue. For a review (and to order) see:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-61902-454-0
This is a book about questions and answers.
We live in what sustainability pioneer Wes Jackson calls “the most important moment in human history,” meaning we live at a decisive moment of action. The various challenges confronting us are like a bright warning light shining in the dashboard of a speeding vehicle calledCivilization, accompanied by an insistent and annoying buzzing sound, requiring immediate attention. I call this moment the Age of Consequences – a time when the worrying consequences of our hard partying over the past sixty years have begun to bite hard, raising difficult and anguished questions.
How do you explain to your children, for example, what we’ve done to the planet – to their planet? How do you explain to them not only our actions but our inaction as well? It’s not enough simply to say that adults behave in complex, confusing, and often contradictory ways because children today can see the warning light in Civilization’s dashboard for themselves. When they point, what do we say?
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All things considered, 2015 just isn’t shaping up to be a good year for believers in business as usual. Since last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, the anti-austerity party Syriza has swept the Greek elections, to the enthusiastic cheers of similar parties all over Europe and the discomfiture of the Brussels hierarchy. The latter have no one to blame for this turn of events but themselves; for more than a decade now, EU policies have effectively put sheltering banks and bondholders from the healthy discipline of the market ahead of all other considerations, including the economic survival of entire nations. It should be no surprise to anyone that this wasn’t an approach with a long shelf life.
Meanwhile, the fracking bust continues unabated. The number of drilling rigs at work in American oilfields continues to drop vertically from week to week, layoffs in the nation’s various oil patches are picking up speed, and the price of oil remains down at levels that make further fracking a welcome mat for the local bankruptcy judge. Those media pundits who are still talking the fracking industry’s book keep insisting that the dropping price of oil proves that they were right and those dratted heretics who talk of peak oil must be wrong, but somehow those pundits never get around to explaining why iron ore, copper, and most other major commodities are dropping in price even faster than crude oil, nor why demand for petroleum products here in the US has been declining steadily as well.
The fact of the matter is that an industrial economy built to run on cheap conventional oil can’t run on expensive oil for long without running itself into the ground. Since 2008, the world’s industrial nations have tried to make up the difference by flooding their economies with cheap credit, in the hope that this would somehow make up for the sharply increased amounts of real wealth that have had to be diverted from other purposes into the struggle to keep liquid fuels flowing at their peak levels. Now, though, the laws of economics have called their bluff; the wheels are coming off one national economy after another, and the price of oil (and all those other commodities) has dropped to levels that won’t cover the costs of fracked oil, tar sands, and the like, because all those frantic attempts to externalize the costs of energy production just meant that the whole global economy took the hit.
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Please stick with this piece dear reader for it does not end on the same path from which it starts.
Being a child of the 50’s and 60’s, it comes as no surprise to anyone from that era that I’m a bit of a space buff. From the moment I saw my first televised rocket launch I was hooked and have never fully recovered from my childhood obsession. Beginning withProject Mercury and the suborbital flight of Alan Shepard in 1961, followed shortly by the three orbits of John Glenn, then progressing through Project Gemini where America practiced the space skills needed to eventually land on the moon and culminating with the Apollo Program and (supposedly) several trips to the moon, one thing they all had in common was the seriousness of everyone involved. Going to space was serious business performed by serious people. There was no joking around because failure wasn’t an option.
Who can forget the early years watching stern (mostly baby faced) engineers hunched over their monitors at the Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral (Kennedy) and Mission Control in Houston, nearly all wearing the standard dress uniform of white short-sleeve shirt with tie along with the mandatory plastic pocket protector, headsets firmly affixed to one ear while the other was left open to hear those around them.
There were always several huge loose leaf binders at their side, dog-eared and well thumbed, complete with handwritten notations and addendums. And of course, endlessly pacing the back of the room or moving from one monitoring station to another, there was the Mission Director riding herd over his minions. There was no doubt by anyone in that room who the man in charge was and where the buck stopped.
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Joan Dye Gussow will be 87 this year. I visited her last August at her lovely home on the Hudson River north of New York City. The house, designed by her and her late husband, the painter Alan Gussow, abuts the road at the front. Most of Joan’s energy, however, goes into the narrow lot running behind the house down to the Hudson. The lot is all garden—vegetable and flower beds and fruit trees. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy decimated her garden, drowning it under six feet of water. At 83 she rebuilt her garden beds, raising them a foot and constructing a small dike to withstand frequent flooding. I did not paint Joan Gussow for the Americans Who Tell the Truth series because she is an octogenarian heroically struggling to save her gardens from climate change and its effects on a massive river. I chose to paint her because for longer than almost anyone else in this country she has been preaching the necessity—for human health, ecological health, and energy health—of local, organic agriculture. About Joan Gussow, Michael Pollan, author or The Omnivore’s Dilemma and whose portrait I have also painted, said, “Once in a while, I think I’ve had an original thought, then I think and read around and realize Joan said it first.” The New York Times calls her, “The matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement.”
An idea whose time has come is a curious phenomenon. What prepares a culture to adopt a new idea, an idea that precipitates a change in values and lifestyle? A change in language, a change in perceived wisdom? A change in how we instruct and raise our children?
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“I rebel; therefore we exist.” –Albert Camus
Here’s the thing: the earth is not fucked. The earth will go on evolving with or without us. In fact, in many ways it is better off without us. No, it’s the human world that’s fucked. Either we adapt and overcome by making cooperation primary and competition secondary, or we’re fucked. It really is that simple. Unfucking the world will not be a walk in the park. It will be a complete upheaval of what we think we know about how human beings are “supposed” to live on this planet. We’ll have to turn the tables on our egos, our so called leaders, and even our loved ones. We’ll have to outgrow being indifferent and get used to being different. We’ll have to awaken and clear outdated, multigenerational patterns that need interrogation and then integration at a higher vibration. Here are five ways to attempt unfucking an otherwise fucked up world. Without further ado, let the unfucking begin.
“To be human is necessarily to be a vulnerable risk-taker; to be a courageous human is to be good at it.” –Jonathan Lear
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Is “resilience” the new sustainababble? | Grist.
Suddenly, “resilience” is everywhere. It’s the subject of serious books and breezy news articles, of high-minded initiatives and of many, many conferences. After Superstorm Sandy, it was triumphantly plastered on city buses, declaring New Jersey “A State of Resilience.”
What’s going on? Does all this talk about resilience mean that we’ve basically given up on averting climate change and other environmental catastrophes — and that our only hope is to roll with the punches? Have we leapfrogged over denial, anger, and bargaining, landing squarely in acceptance?
Not necessarily. Resilience, like sustainability before it, is an idea with potentially transformative power. Resilience is all about our capacity to survive and thrive in the face of disruptions of all kinds. If we were to take resilience seriously (highly recommended in our increasingly disruption-prone world), we would make some far-reaching changes in how we live.
A truly resilient city would look very different from those we now inhabit — in ways that would make Grist readers proud. For example, our resilient city would:
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MIUSYNSK, Ukraine — Natalia Shevchenko, 57, doesn’t know if she and her husband are going to survive the winter. Her last pension check arrived in June, and since then, she and her husband have eaten through most of the pickled tomatoes and canned food on their shelves. “Now we understand that no one needs us,” she said.
Shevchenko lives in Miusynsk, a village in eastern Ukraine of fewer than 2,000 people that hugs the border between Luhansk and Donetsk, the two regions controlled by pro-Russian rebels fighting Ukrainian forces.
Elsewhere across the region, some help has trickled in. Russian Cossack commanders have set up a soup kitchen for the elderly and distributed a one-time payment of 1,000 hryvnia, about $63, to pensioners in other cities. Russian and international aid groups have delivered food, clothing and basic medical supplies to the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukrainian aid trucks made a delivery to other parts just before the New Year.
But it appears that no humanitarian help has reached Miusynsk. With no money and no food aid to speak of, many villagers here say they feel forgotten in the 10-month conflict that has left more than 4,700 dead.
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Chapter 26 of the Crash Course — the final chapter — is now publicly available and ready for watching below.
If there’s one message to take away from this newly-updated Crash Course video series, it’s this: It’s time for you to become more resilient and more engaged. Things are changing quickly and nobody knows how much time we have before the next economic, ecological or energy related crisis erupts. Nobody knows when, but we do have a pretty good idea of what is coming.
Either you respond to these inevitable changes or they will happen to you. That’s the simple choice we all face.
Yet I really want you to understand that this is not a message of doom and gloom, but one of excitement and hope. How so?
Because it is within your control to enter the coming future with a higher degree of security, prosperity and fulfillment than you enjoy now.
By using the time we still have available to us now, before the trends described within the Crash Course arrive in force, to build resilience. To invest in the practices that will increase your quality of life, whatever the future may bring.
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10 Lessons from Living Life Off the Grid | Alternet.
It was in 2011 that I first understood what off-grid living really meant. Before then I had heard people claim they were off-grid if they switched their cell phone off for a day or two. Other people thought anyone who lived in remote places was off-grid. None of that made any sense. It was when I first visited British Columbia’s Lasqueti Island and later the floating home community ofClayoquot Sound that I got a real taste of the off-grid life: life, that is, in a place disconnected from large natural gas and electricity networks.
For the next two years, photographer/videographer Jonathan Taggart and I travelled close to 105,000 kilometres together across Canada to find people who live off-the-grid and visit them in their homes. Occasionally we lived with them for a short period of time. Sometimes we followed them around as they fished, harvested, collected wood and built or fixed their homes. And we too practiced living in off-grid homes and cabins for short stretches of time. Overall we visited about 100 homes and interviewed about 200 off-grid Canadians, as well as many American and British expats living in Canada. We managed to find off-gridders in every single province and territory, and through our book and forthcoming film we narrated our travels and chronicled the experiences, challenges, inventions, aspirations and ways of life of a few of them.
