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Photograph by Dwight Eschliman for The New York Times
The Douglas Family Stockpile
- 1 Staples in 6-gallon buckets include: rice, beans, nuts, sugar, salt, matches, wheat, flour
- 2Freeze-dried meals
- 3Assorted canned foods: cheese, butter and meat
- 4 Water-bath canner
- 5Vacuum sealer
- 6 Pressure canner
- 7 Pot
- 8 Canned meat: red is pork, green is turkey
- 9 Broth: beef and chicken
- 10 Salt: 25-pound bags
- 11 Aluminum foil
- 12 Portable first-aid kits, lighters, U.V. light sticks, fast-acting glue
- 13 Candles
- 14 Sunflower seeds
- 15 Cough drops
- 16 Canned turkey
- 17 Stackable containers of canned food
- 18 72-hour backpacks
- 19 Charcoal chimney
- 20 Potatoes
- 21 Grill
- 22 Solar oven
- 23 Beef jerky
- 24 Vinegar, white and cider
- 25 Olive oil in cans
- 26 Wall-mounted first-aid kit
- 27 Canned staples: rice, dried carrots, dried onions
- 28 Powdered milk and eggs
- 29 Laundry detergent
- 30 The Douglas family
- 31 Heirloom seed bank
- 32 Bleach
- 33 Pasta
- 34 Dehydrated mashed potatoes
- 35 More assorted staples
- 36 Miscellaneous canned goods
- 37 Stackable containers of canned food
- 38 Powdered hot chocolate
- 39 Generator
- 40 Propane burner
- 41 Water filter
- 42 Hand warmers
- 43 Surgical masks
- 44 Empty Mason jars for canning
- 45 Jars of roasted peppers
- 46 Rifle, shotgun and pistol
- 47 Buckets of honey
- 48 Cans of sardines
- 49 Foldout tent
- 50 5-gallon gas cans
- 51 Solar panels
- 52 Plastic hose
How to Survive Societal Collapse in Suburbia
By KEITH O’BRIEN
Published: November 16, 2012 104 Comments
On a clear morning in May, Ron Douglas left his home in exurban Denver,
eased into his Toyota pickup truck and drove to a business meeting at a
Starbucks. Douglas, a bearded bear of a man, ordered a venti
double-chocolate-chip Frappuccino — “the girliest drink ever,” he called
it — and then sat down to discuss the future of the growing survivalist
industry.
How we photographed the Douglas family’s disaster-preparedness supplies from above.
Photograph by Dwight Eschliman for The New York Times
The Douglas Family Stockpile
- 1 Staples in 6-gallon buckets include: rice, beans, nuts, sugar, salt, matches, wheat, flour
- 2Freeze-dried meals
- 3Assorted canned foods: cheese, butter and meat
- 4 Water-bath canner
- 5Vacuum sealer
- 6 Pressure canner
- 7 Pot
- 8 Canned meat: red is pork, green is turkey
- 9 Broth: beef and chicken
- 10 Salt: 25-pound bags
- 11 Aluminum foil
- 12 Portable first-aid kits, lighters, U.V. light sticks, fast-acting glue
- 13 Candles
- 14 Sunflower seeds
- 15 Cough drops
- 16 Canned turkey
- 17 Stackable containers of canned food
- 18 72-hour backpacks
- 19 Charcoal chimney
- 20 Potatoes
- 21 Grill
- 22 Solar oven
- 23 Beef jerky
- 24 Vinegar, white and cider
- 25 Olive oil in cans
- 26 Wall-mounted first-aid kit
- 27 Canned staples: rice, dried carrots, dried onions
- 28 Powdered milk and eggs
- 29 Laundry detergent
- 30 The Douglas family
- 31 Heirloom seed bank
- 32 Bleach
- 33 Pasta
- 34 Dehydrated mashed potatoes
- 35 More assorted staples
- 36 Miscellaneous canned goods
- 37 Stackable containers of canned food
- 38 Powdered hot chocolate
- 39 Generator
- 40 Propane burner
- 41 Water filter
- 42 Hand warmers
- 43 Surgical masks
- 44 Empty Mason jars for canning
- 45 Jars of roasted peppers
- 46 Rifle, shotgun and pistol
- 47 Buckets of honey
- 48 Cans of sardines
- 49 Foldout tent
- 50 5-gallon gas cans
- 51 Solar panels
- 52 Plastic hose
Many so-called survivalists would take pride in keeping far away from
places that sell espresso drinks. But Douglas, a 38-year-old
entrepreneur and founder of one of the largest preparedness expos in the
country, isn’t your typical prepper.
At that morning’s meeting, a strategy session with two new colleagues,
Douglas made it clear that he doesn’t even like the word “survivalist.”
He believes the word is ruined, evoking “the nut job who lives out in
the mountains by himself on the retreat.” Instead, he prefers
“self-reliance.”
When prompted by his colleagues to define the term, Douglas leaned
forward in his chair. “I’m glad you asked,” he replied. “Take notes.
This is good.”
For the next several minutes, Douglas talked about emergency
preparedness, sustainable living and financial security — what he called
the three pillars of self-reliance. He detailed the importance of solar
panels, gardens, water storage and food stockpiles. People shouldn’t
just have 72-hour emergency kits for when the power grid goes down; they
should learn how to live on their own. It’s a message that Douglas is
trying to move from the fringe to the mainstream.
“Our main goal is to reach as many people and get the word out to as
many people as we can, to get them thinking and moving in this
direction,” he said. “Sound good?”
The preparedness industry, always prosperous during hard times, is
thriving again now. In Douglas’s circles, people talk about “the end of
the world as we know it” with such regularity that the acronym Teotwawki
(tee-ought-wah-kee) has come into widespread use. The Vivos Group,
which sells luxury bunkers, until recently had a clock on its Web site
that was ticking down to Dec. 21, 2012 — a date that, thanks to the
Mayan calendar, some believe will usher in the end times. But amid the
alarmism, there is real concern that the world is indeed increasingly
fragile — a concern highlighted most recently by Hurricane Sandy.
The storm’s aftermath has shown just how unprepared most of us are to
do without the staples of modern life: food, fuel, transportation and
electric power.
The survivalist business surged in the wake of 9/11, when authorities
instructed New Yorkers to prepare disaster kits, learn how to seal doors
and vents with duct tape and be ready to evacuate at any time.
Threat-level warnings about possible terrorist attacks kept Americans
rattled for years, and were followed by various disasters of other
types: the financial meltdown, Hurricanes Katrina and Ike, drought,
blackouts and concerns over everything from rising sea levels to Iran’s
nuclear program.
Late last year, Douglas and his partners formed the Red Shed Media
Group, a single corporate home for several endeavors: the Self Reliance
Expo, conventions that Douglas founded in 2010, dedicated to showcasing
survival gear and skills; Self Reliance Broadcasting, an Internet-based
channel devoted to the cause; and an entity that controls the rights to
publishing “Making the Best of Basics,” a popular survivalist handbook.
The name Red Shed was symbolic for Douglas. “When your grandfather went
and did a project,” he told me, “he went out to the red shed and pulled
out all the tools he needed for the job.” Douglas wants his virtual red
shed to be a single place where people can get all the preparedness
information they need. Five expos this year have drawn 40,000 people who
pay $10 each. The radio network has logged more than two million
podcast downloads; in one day alone in July, it reported nearly 90,000
downloads. The book, which was first published in 1974, includes recipes
for everything from wild pig (“they are easy to prepare”) to dove pie
(“simmer for one hour or until doves are tender”). Douglas said it had
sold about 20,000 copies this year.
But the goal isn’t just to sell to the same old preparedness crowd. Red
Shed wants to attract liberals and political moderates to a marketplace
historically populated by conservatives and right-wing extremists. “It’s
not the end of the world,” Douglas told me last spring, making a bold
statement for someone in his industry. “It’s not doomsday.” It’s about
showing the gun-toting mountain man in his camouflage and the suburban
soccer mom in her minivan that they want the same thing: peace of mind.
“We don’t say, ‘Hurry up and buy your stuff because Obama is going to
ruin the country,’ ” Douglas said. “We don’t get into the political
crap. We just want to teach people the lifestyle.”
The first thing you notice about Douglas’s neighborhood
in Frederick, Colo., about 30 miles north of Denver, is that it’s not
particularly noticeable. He doesn’t have a mountain stronghold or a
20-acre spread. He doesn’t have a bunker or anything resembling a barn.
Instead, he, his wife, Heather, and their six children, ages 4 to 16,
inhabit a typical American suburban home. There’s an in-ground sprinkler
system and a play structure in the backyard. The siding on the house is
an innocuous beige. Pink tulips bloom in the flower beds come spring.
The children can walk to school.
The fact that Douglas not only told me where he lives but also invited
me to visit him would be considered a huge mistake by many in the
prepping world. Revealing your location runs the risk of compromising
your Opsec, or “operations security,” an abbreviation coined by the
military and adopted by survivalists. “I don’t even mention what state I
live in,” James Wesley Rawles, the editor of SurvivalBlog.com,
a popular prepping Web site, told me. “All I’m at liberty to discuss,
with consent of my wife, is that I live somewhere west of the Rockies.”
For Rawles and others, it’s a matter of security. Revealing your
location gives the Unprepared a road map to the stockpiles of the
Prepared, in the event of Teotwawki. “I don’t want to wake up and find
out that I’m the go-to guy — literally,” Rawles says.
If civilization breaks down, Douglas’s house is definitely where you
want to be. In his home office — the de facto headquarters for Red
Shed’s six shareholders and two independent contractors — he keeps not
only his iPad and his MacBook but also a ham radio and a C.B. radio. In
his basement, there is roughly a year’s supply of wheat, rice and other
staples. And outside, he tries to keep a year’s supply of chopped wood
and, in his garage, 375 gallons of water.
If he needs to leave, Douglas has modified a Chevy Suburban so that it
can travel 850 miles between fill-ups. If he stays, he’s ready to
protect his family and his provisions. Douglas can’t even remember how
many guns he owns. “Twelve?” he guessed when I asked. “Not as many as
most.” But he knows his favorite: the Governor, a Smith & Wesson
handgun that fires shotgun shells. “This is the home defender here,” he
said. “You just point it in the right direction, and it’s over.”
Yet unlike others in his industry, Douglas doesn’t waste energy worrying
about things like Opsec. And though he owns guns, he doesn’t push gun
ownership.
At a meeting at an empty Hooters restaurant in Colorado Springs this
year, Douglas listened impatiently as a salesman tried to get him to buy
some ads on a local radio station for a coming expo. He was saying he
could offer the same rates for a typical gun show. Douglas told the man
that he wasn’t getting it at all. “I’m not just a gun show,” Douglas
said to him.
The salesman’s confusion must be forgiven. The last
time anything like Douglas’s expos hit convention halls was the 1990s.
Y2K was coming. The threat of computers — and everything else — failing
was a boon for a show called the Preparedness Expo. Civil rights
organizations denounced the early incarnations of these gatherings,
organized by a Utah man named Dan Chittock, as havens for political
extremism and hate, an image that Chittock disputed even as he seemed to
invite it. His biggest draw at the expos, Chittock told me, was James
Gritz, known as Bo, a leader of the right-wing survivalist movement who
offered paramilitary training and promoted Idaho as a refuge for
antigovernment patriots. Dave Duffy, the editor and publisher of
Backwoods Home Magazine, said: “I pulled out of Dan’s shows after
awhile. It was conspiracy stuff. And it was making my magazine, along
with the other vendors, look bad.”
Y2K offered a clearer threat; attendance at the expos doubled. But when
the millennium dawned without widespread computer meltdowns, Chittock’s
audience disappeared, and the expos disbanded. “It was kind of like
crying ‘wolf,’ ” Chittock says. “Nobody wanted to hear it anymore.” Many
small survivalist companies folded, while others struggled to carry on.
Sun Ovens International, an Illinois company that manufactures
solar-powered ovens, had sales fall to less than $200,000 in 2000 from
$1.6 million a year earlier — a staggering 88 percent decline made worse
by the fact that the company got stuck with $100,000 in unpaid invoices
after the Y2K bust. “When Y2K was a nonevent, almost everybody in the
preparedness industry declared bankruptcy,” Paul M. Munsen, the
company’s president, says.
Sun Ovens limped along, critically wounded. “I refinanced my home three
different times just to eat,” Munsen says. But in time, business began
to improve, thanks in part to Barack Obama’s presidential victory four
years ago, which alarmed many on the right worried about everything from
his economic policies to his middle name. “The day after the election
was one of the best sales days we ever had,” Munsen says. “Some people
were just so upset about the election that they said, ‘We had better be
prepared.’ ”
Ron Douglas wasn’t a part of the preparedness gold rush of the 1990s. He
was working at the time as a corrections officer in Texas before moving
to Colorado, where he bought a Critter Control franchise. Not long
after Sun Oven sales began to rise, Douglas got out of the pest-control
business. As a Mormon, he was taught the virtues of living a prepared
life. He had been stockpiling food for years. But now, Douglas was
beginning to sense a larger void — and a commercial opportunity — that
needed to be filled.
He held his first Self Reliance Expo in November 2010 and tried to put a
new spin on survivalism. Instead of lining up speakers to offer
right-wing screeds, Douglas organized a homemade bread bake-off. The
prize: a new wheat grinder. The products — and even the vendors at times
— may have been the same from the expos of the past. But the packaging
felt different, less threatening. Duffy says he noticed it immediately:
“It was apparent right off the bat — no nut cases.”
Scott Valencia, a business developer from the video-game industry who
formed Red Shed with Douglas last year and owns a stake in the company,
helped see to that. He instructed vendors to avoid fear tactics and
improve their displays while also making sure that the venues were
welcoming and well lighted with wide aisles — the better to fit baby
strollers and families. There was to be no more doom and gloom. “We lost
some vendors when we told them that we weren’t doing it anymore — and
Ron worried about that,” Valencia says. “But I said, ‘You’re going to
pick up new ones.’ And we have.”
At an expo in May in Colorado Springs, at least a
hundred people were waiting to get inside when the doors opened for the
day. Some bought water filters; others learned fire-building skills. An
audience gathered at the main stage to listen to Alan Madison talk about
his reality TV show on the National Geographic Channel, “Doomsday
Preppers,” whose second season began this month. “To me, it’s like a
giant American studies project,” Madison, an executive producer of the
show, told me. “I think it captures America at the beginning of the 21st
century.” By the time the first season finished in April, the show had
become the channel’s highest-rated series ever.
Not everyone at the expo was a fan of “Doomsday Preppers.” Terry
Browning, a 41-year-old Army veteran, said the show unfairly depicts
people like him as “militant psychos.” “Half the people here are
probably not even thinking about the bunker underground or the 10,000
rounds of ammo — stuff like that,” he told me. “Most of these people
just want to be safe in their homes with enough supplies to get them
through whatever may be.”
In other words, they’re a lot like Linda Thrower, a home-health nurse
from New Mexico. She and her husband, Troy, started prepping only
recently, and they hesitated to even attend the expo. “We didn’t want to
be inundated with a bunch of way-out-there radical followers,” she told
me. Yet once inside, she was pleased with what she found. Yes, there
was ammunition for sale and classes to help people obtain
concealed-weapons permits. But Thrower, 59, left the expo that weekend
with canned cheese, baking supplies for her Sun Oven and some practice
in emergency suturing, the subject of one of the expo’s many seminars.
“I think that’s a good thing for me, as a nurse, to be able to do,” she
said. “Because if we have a disaster, whether it’s natural or man-made,
there’s not going to be enough doctors.”
Just across the aisle from the Tea Party booth at the expo stood
EnerHealth Botanicals, a Colorado company whose signature product is a
“super green energy drink” that is organic, gluten-free, caffeine-free
and G.M.O.-free. As a founder of the company in 2005, Steve St. Clair,
EnerHealth’s chief executive, was focused on health-minded liberals. In
the spring of 2011, however, St. Clair bought a booth at one of
Douglas’s expos. “People just ran over us,” St. Clair told me. “They
just loved the stuff.”
Since then, EnerHealth has sold products created for the preparedness
market, especially its Survive2Thrive Organic Preparedness Pail. It
sells for $270 and consists of 40 days’ worth of vacuum-packed organic
food, including five pounds of rolled oats, four pounds of millet, three
pounds of garbanzo beans and so on. Business at EnerHealth doubled last
year. “And it looks like it may do it again this year,” St. Clair said.
Sales were brisk before Hurricane Sandy. And natural disasters always
help the preparedness industry.
The week Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey, Douglas was
getting bombarded with e-mail from exhibitors asking him to organize an
expo in the Northeast. To date, the farthest east he has been is
Hickory, N.C. The demographic for preparedness generally tilts Western
and rural. But since Sandy, Douglas has been considering putting on an
expo in New York or New Jersey. “This is exactly what we’re trying to
prepare people for,” he told me. “Everybody talks about doomsday, the
end of the world — apocalypse nonsense. This is New York’s doomsday
right now.”
One night last spring, Douglas invited friends and
neighbors to his house in Frederick for what he called a “modern-day
barn-raising.” The tasks for the night included clearing the back corner
of the lot, erecting new garden boxes for the season and chopping wood.
Everyone was well fortified for the work; Heather, Ron’s wife, had
cooked a large dinner of spare ribs in a Sun Oven. And the weather was
perfect for the chores. Within 90 minutes, the garden boxes were ready.
Heather served homemade root beer and store-bought ice cream, and the
men gathered in the driveway to talk as the sun set behind the Rocky
Mountains.
“You’re coming to my house next week,” Chad Tone, one of the men, told Douglas, joking.
For months, Tone had been talking to Douglas about wanting to be more
prepared. He bought canned goods at Costco, and he figured his family
could live off them for months, if necessary. But Tone wasn’t canning
food or growing his own food; he had no garden. Douglas knew Tone still
had a lot of work to do and, standing in the driveway, he asked his
friend a cosmic question of great importance.
“Are you ready?” Douglas said.
“No,” Tone replied.
Douglas just shook his head and smiled. “Gotta get ready,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 18, 2012, on page MM36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: How to Survive Societal Collapse in Suburbia. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/magazine/how-to-survive-societal-collapse-in-suburbia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&
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