Realistic Survival?

Ferfal:

I just wanted to send you a quick note to thank you for adding advertising of the Berkey water filters to your blog. I frequent a number of preparedness related web sites/blogs and many of them also have links to those water filters. I have been considering purchasing one of the Berkey filters for some time and your adding it pushed me over the edge and thus went ahead and ordered one yesterday. (I told the vendor I found the link from your blog.) I have been following your blog for well over a year and half now and I respect your opinion highly. I also ordered your book and look forward to reading it. Your common sense and realistic approach to preparedness is a breath of fresh air compared to many of the other preparedness sites which seem to focus on preparing for situations that have a low to unrealistic chance of occuring.

Thanks again,
Robert

Thanks Robert for your kind words. The Berkey is indeed a great product, I didn’t know those ceramic filters were created for British royalty, that was interesting to learn. The website has pretty much everything you need for your water treatment needs.

Hello, FerFal: I just got your book in the mail, and I want to thank you for taking the time and making the effort to help us out with this information. Your book is much more valuable than all the other survivor books combined.
Best to you and your family.
Dave

Thanks a lot Dave.
Survivalism and urban survival in general became of interest for the main media during Y2K and was boosted later by 9/11 and Katrina. Suddenly many of those guys were not that crazy after all. They had a point. Bad things happen, better to be ready for it.
By then a lot of wilderness survival teachers and instructors found a sweet new niche. The only problem was that even tough they knew their field of expertise, they knew very little of what they were writing about because they had no personal experience on what’s needed during social unrest or other urban survival type situations, nor did they research the subject thoroughly to learn from other people’s experience. Many tried to adapt with little success bushcraft and wilderness survival to urban situations, nearly all of them ignoring the greatest problem in this type of scenario: other people, and the fierce competition to survive.
I bought a few of those books and after finding that none delivered what the title promised I gave up. The last one was “When all Hell Breaks Loose”. I though, “OMG, what the hell…” not only was it not living up to the title, it was even giving advise that could easily get people killed if hell really did break loose in a city. There are several other wilderness survival authors that did the same thing with little success. Finding that none of these books delivered what the title and cover promised and what people were looking for was one of the things that encouraged me to write my own book. My book, “The modern survival manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse”, actually has information on how to survive in the modern world when thing go wrong. Came close to calling it “Urban Survival Manual”, because in many ways that’s what it is.
Survival in the modern world involves not only homesteading type knowledge, it also involves a lot of street smarts, practical knowledge on dealing with daily inconveniences when everyone is trying to get by. This includes dealing with people of all sorts, some like you , some are social predators. You have to stay out of trouble, protecting yourself and at the same time make a living, take the kids to school, live life.
I recently saw several new reviews on Amazon. I’d like to take this opportunity to thanks all of you for your constant support. I’ll keep doing my best to improve this blog as much as possible, making it a resource for those that want to adapt to these new, challenging times.
Take care folks and again, thank you.
FerFAL