When the World Changes: Surviving Environmental TEOTWAWKI

I spent the day at an environmental event yesterday. I realize that sounds a bit strange; but my wife is the Executive Director of an organization that deals with environmental issues, specifically air quality. No, she’s not an extreme environmentalist, she’s an environmental scientist. There’s a huge difference between the two. She spends more time battling against the rabid environmentalists, than she does battling against big industry. Actually, many members companies in her organization are from the petroleum industry.

Of course, whenever the term “environment” comes up, people’s minds instantly jump to all the hoopla about global warming, climate change or whatever they are calling it this week. My wife doesn’t believe in man-made climate change any more than I do. The climate has always been changing. That’s reality. But that doesn’t mean that the world is going to end in the next ten years if we don’t give billions of dollars to government bureaucrats and the more extreme environmental organizations.

In reality, I find that the average prepper is just as concerned about the environment as most non-preppers are. In other words, we don’t willingly destroy our environment. More than that, we care about the impact that our environment has on us, which clearly includes environmental TEOTWAWKI events, such as a CME, the eruption of the Yellowstone super-volcano, and a massive asteroid striking the Earth. But it’s not limited to those major disasters, as most smaller disasters are environmental events as well.

As always, even though I was at an environmental event, I was thinking survival. To start with, I have to say that if we don’t believe in manmade climate change, and I don’t, then there’s little we can do to stop climate change at all. What we need to concentrate on is how we will survive these TEOTWAWKI events, should they occur, just like we might survive any other natural disaster.

Is It Possible to Destroy the Environment?

I first heard about man-made climate change back in middle school, more than 50 years ago. According to one movie we saw (they were 16mm movies back then, not videos), scientists couldn’t decide whether the world would be burned up in fire, or destroyed by ice. In either case, the message was the same; man-made pollution was going to destroy the world. It hasn’t happened yet and I doubt it ever will.

That’s not to say we can’t cause serious harm to the environment. The Exxon Valdes disaster caused the death of a significant number of fish, 250,000 birds, 2,800 sea otters, bald eagles, seals and killer whales. In addition, 1,300 miles of shoreline habitat was destroyed. Now, 35 years later, there is still measurable impact to a number of species, as well as subsurface oil deposits that exist.

Likewise, the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil Spill killed off much wildlife, including sea turtles, dolphins and seabirds, as well as who knows how many fish. Twenty-five years later, there are still negative impacts on wildlife, as their habitats slowly return to normal. The fishing industry is still severely curtailed in the gulf, having destroyed the livelihood of countless professional fisherman.

Yet somehow, we, and the world we live in, have survived these environmental disasters, just like we survived the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980. The environmental impact of that eruption destroyed entire forests, changed watercourses and created new lakes; while existing lakes and ponds were filled with sediment, killing everything that lived in them.

Neither of these eruptions compares to the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. That one was so severe, that it impacted weather around the globe for more than a year. Even so, the world recovered from that disaster, just as it is in the process of recovering from the other disasters I mentioned.

Is it possible that mankind could cause an environmental disaster so huge that the world couldn’t recover from it? it was widely accepted, during the height of the Cold War, that global thermonuclear war would destroy the entire world’s environment, leading to the ultimate destruction of mankind. Yet, when we compare the destructive power of an atomic bomb to a hurricane, we find that it would take the explosive equivalent of more than 10,000 nukes, to equal the power of just one hurricane. Considering that there hasn’t been a hurricane yet, which was powerful enough to destroy the world, I doubt that mankind can do the job.

The Bug-In Dilemma

If we set aside the idea of manmade climate change destroying the world, we find that nature herself has much more potential to bring about that destruction. The natural disasters I just mentioned have all brought about much destruction; but nowhere near as a super-volcano can. Yet we really don’t need to be anywhere near as concerned about any of them, as we do a localized natural disaster. That’s simple math; we’re much more likely to be faced by a local or regional natural disaster; tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires and all the others.

There are a number of these environmental or weather-related disasters that make bugging in impossible, even though the prevailing theory in the prepping community is to bug-in, rather than bugging out. But if your home is flooded, blown down by a hurricane or tornado or consumed by fire, you can’t very well bug in. Even trying to bug in could end up being deadly.

In these cases, we need to bug out, and we need to do it as soon as possible; preferably before we become trapped or our homes become ruined. Waiting too long adds to that problem of them being deadly, by putting us at risk of being trapped inside our homes, when those homes are destroyed.

The Bug-Out Dilemma

If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us aren’t ready to actually bug out. Oh, we’ve got our bug out bags ready; but what about after that? If a bug out bag only has three days’ worth of food In it, what is the owner of that bag going to do when those three days are up?

This Device Easily Turns Air Into Water!

Many of us have the idea that we’ll just bug out to the woods. That’s a great idea, if you own a cabin in those woods and have it all stocked to be your survival retreat. You’d better have some stout locks and bars on it too, so that others don’t break in first and steal your supplies. But what if you don’t own that cabin, like most of us?

Besides that cabin, there are few places you can go in a bug out, which you can be sure of. Anyplace you could choose to go, can be chosen by many others. The only thing that would guarantee that you could use that place as your survival retreat, if you don’t own it, is to get there before anyone else does. Even then, there’s a chance that you’ll have to fight to keep it.

Better Have a Plan “C”

If bugging out is your plan B, then you need a plan C as well. Better yet, you should have several different plan Cs that you can change plans, if you need to. If, for example, your primary bug out plan is to head west, but the disaster that hits you moves west, hitting other communities to the west of you, then bugging out to the west doesn’t make sense. Likewise, if you’re heading north to get away from a potential disaster, but a major winter blizzard hits to the north of you, it would be better to pick another direction.

The other thing to consider, as part of your plan C, is what to do if one of those environmental events has a major impact on the weather. Remember the “Year Without a Summer?” What would you do for food, if weather patterns were changed to the point where temperatures were lower and there was less sunlight to grow food? You might have enough food in your stockpile to last several months, or even a year, but what about after that?

Just because the climate change cabal is constantly talking about a 2°C change in our climate, that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing we have to worry about. Actually, I’m not sure why we’d need to worry about a 2°C change anyway. But if that chance was caused by something blocking sunlight, we’d have a much bigger problem than a change in temperature; we’d be dealing with problems in growing food, especially fruits and vegetables that need a lot of light.

If we look at it from that viewpoint, environmental changes after a disaster could actually be more deadly than the disaster itself. We might survive the disaster, only to die because we can’t feed ourselves. So, we shouldn’t ignore the environment, even if we ignore the extreme environmentalists. Rather, we should consider environmental changes and what they would truly mean for our survival. Then we should look for solutions to those problems; something the extreme environmental crowd doesn’t seem to have thought of doing.