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Unfortunately, some of these are unavoidable, and many will lead to massive die offs of the human population.
- A new pandemic sounds scary, but small scale ones have even happened in recent years. SARS, Swine Flu, even salmonella outbreaks from tainted produce. While society remains functional, hospitals and health specialists will continue to fight and mitigate the effects of new diseases, but if a breakdown in societal structure occurs, we might be left to fight through it on our own. I was talking with my co-author the other day about the upcoming end of the antibiotic age, where diseases and bacteria are becoming resistant to any currently available antibiotics, and the overuse of them has led to a future where we will be once again at the mercy of diseases and the strength of the human immune system while scientists develop new medicines and cures. In a pandemic scenario, you might now understand one of the benefits of staying home; no interaction with the infected population.
- Yellowstone National Park, for all of its beauty, is actually a deadly place. The park sits atop what is known as a caldera, which is a massive pool of magma below the earth's surface. Here on the graphic it shows its last eruption being 640,000 years ago. The problem is, Yellowstone has erupted in the past in a rough frequency of every 600,000-800,000 years. According to the USGS, the spread of ash from a super-eruption would be a foot deep for hundreds of kilometers away, and at least a few inches thick further away than that. This next image from the USGS shows the approximate spread of ash from the last major eruption. You can see that it covers an area from North Dakota, to Southern California, all the way east into Louisiana and Arkansas. The likely decrease in global temperature, blocking of the sun, and the breathing of volcanic ash would kill off a huge amount of plants, wildlife, and humans. This probably won't happen in our lifetime, but would change the world if it did.
- Agricultural Collapse - This one, as the graphic notes, doesn't sound quite as scary, but with the population continuing to skyrocket, and only a finite amount of arable land, it is easy to see that our food supply vs. demand will be on the wrong side of good in the next 50-100 years. Maybe a less obvious underlying problem is the explosion of population over the last century:
Every graph on this topic looks the same. The massive spike of population, even in the last 100 years is alarming. This is, in my opinion, the single best reason to learn how to garden and produce your own food. In the coming months and years, we will teach you how.
- Water Shortage - I'm not going to go real in depth here because this is a topic that we will certainly have more information on later. Suffice it to say, there are a number of methods for collection, storage, and purification of water that we will discuss extensively. Having a few cases of bottled water on hand isn't a bad idea for short term emergencies (blackout or localized flooding) but in a long-disaster scenario, we are going to need to learn new methods. One of the first e-books in our series will focus extensively on water techniques every prepper should know.
- Electrical Grid Blackouts - Another serious problem that most preppers have no direct control of. Ice storms, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes are all sources of serious power outages. And, it's no secret that the infrastructure (at least in the USA) is starting to show its age. Without some serious upgrades in the next few decades, a massive solar flare or any of the other mentioned disasters could wreak some serious havoc in North America. A generator is a good short term back up plan, if you can afford one, but eventually gas supplies will dry up as well (most gas pumps need electric to run). It may very well come down to the fact that we will need to find something other than facebook to entertain ourselves, and items needing refrigeration may no longer be available. This also includes life saving medicines like insulin; unfortunately, there is little that can be done as society is currently so reliant on functioning power systems.
The point of this post is not to scare you; it's to make you think. What would you do if you had no power for the next month? Could you survive? Do you know how to garden and produce your own food? Maybe you do. That's a good thing. We are all going to (possibly) find ourselves in these situations together, and the point of this blog is to help us all survive them. There isn't much we can do to stop the western half of the USA from being covered in ash; but for everything else, let's get prepared.
-CT
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