Avian Flu Diary: You Don’t Have To Be Waiting For Doomsday

# 6147

As someone who has written extensively about the importance of preparedness, after watching the first three episodes of National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers series, I come away with very mixed feelings.

If you’ve not seen this show, NGC describes it this way:

Doomsday Preppers explores the lives of otherwise ordinary Americans who are preparing for the end of the world as we know it. Unique in their beliefs, motivations, and strategies, preppers will go to whatever lengths they can to make sure they are prepared for any of life’s uncertainties. And with our expert’s assessment, they will find out their chances of survival if their worst fears become a reality.

If you don’t get the National Geographic Channel extended excerpts from the series (and full episodes) may be found by searching YouTube.

This series builds on the popularity of such `disaster porn’ shows as the History Channel’s Mega Disasters and Discovery’s Perfect Disaster, by profiling the attempts of individuals, families, and larger groups to prepare for a variety of doomsday scenarios.

To say that these people are dedicated to the prepper lifestyle would be an understatement. Each episode profiles 3 or 4 prepper groups or individuals, and all of them appear consumed with the idea of preparing for doomsday.

We’re not talking keeping a couple of weeks of food and water, a decent first aid kit, and a family disaster plan . . . we’re talking about setting up heavily armed survival compounds with 10 years or more worth of dehydrated food squirreled away in an underground shelter.

Extreme? Well, yes.

This is television, after all, and in order to get people to tune in each week they need to show extreme preppers; not the sort of thing that FEMA, the American Red Cross, and Ready.gov recommend.

Like the Bear Gyrlls Man vs. Wild show on the Discovery Channel, this show is all about surviving extreme (and for the most part, highly unlikely) scenarios.

Instead of being dropped into the Amazon basin with nothing but a knife and a flint (and a camera crew) to survive for a week, preppers in this series explain how they plan to survive high impact, but low probability events like EMP producing CMEs, societal collapse, and nuclear war.

As a long time prepper, I consider it more prudent to prepare for `all threats’, rather than trying to anticipate some specific (and fanciful) `doomsday’ scenario, and my planning is for higher probability, medium impact scenarios.

For me that means hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, pandemics and other natural (or manmade) disasters.

Things that are both survivable with reasonable preparation and skills, and are fairly common.

I have a hard time envisioning myself surviving in a `Mad Max’ type world, and so I personally see little value in preparing for one.

Different strokes, I guess.

My biggest concern with the series is the way that non-preppers will react to it.

By highlighting `extreme’ preppers readying for `doomsday’ events, this series may leave many viewers believing that preparedness is either a `fringe’ pursuit, or far too complex and expensive to bother with.

And neither is even remotely true.

That is not to say this Doomsday Preppers series is without value.

Aside from the entertainment value, the core concepts of promoting preparedness along with family and community resilience are important themes, and are worth emulating.

Some of the techniques displayed (food preservation & storage, creation of disaster plans, `bug out bags’, etc.) are instructive, although I believe most people would want to seriously `scale down’ their preps to something more manageable.

While Doomsday Preppers provides a fascinating look at some of the extreme lengths that some people will go to prepare for a disaster, for more obtainable levels of preparedness I’d invite you to visit: