Brunch at the End of the End of History

...stress people turn to subjects such as growing food, canning, mending, and preparedness. Enthusiasm for these subjects surged after the stock market crash of 1929 and the oil crisis of the 1970s. Catastrophic financial trauma usually results in a rightward turn: fascism in the 1930s, Reagan in the 1980s and the shape-shifting postmodern right of our time. By now, myself included, we’re likely fatigued by a tsunami of premature hot takes on the U.S...

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How to Store Bulk Goods

...parties, has been helpful. We check in via Zoom once a week, trade food and backyard fruit and run errands for folks in deep quarantine. We need not equate emergency preparedness with the sort of destructive individualism partly responsible for getting us into this mess....

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Out of Water!

...g water in steel drums, which we first learned about in Aton Edward’s book Preparedness Now!, the first book in Process Media’s Self-Reliance series (our book the Urban Homesteader, due out in May, is the third in this series). It’s one of the more expensive options in water storage, with new drums costing several hundred dollars, but avoids the problem of an off taste that plastic can impart. But while there’s something to be said for avoiding al...

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Survival Chic

It would seem that preparedness is now hip, with SurviveLA’s mention in a Los Angeles Alternative article entitled “Duck and Cover”. While the article correctly states that we at SurviveLA are on the more eco-crunchy side of things, we think it’s important to restate what we are not – we are not part of what Setha M. Low, an environmental psychology professor calls the “new emotions of home: fear and paranoia and insecurity.” You see, the Man wan...

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