A paper released by the Corporate Climate Centre, Munich, Germany shows an increase in natural catastrophes by a factor of about three within the last 35 years. This year we’ve confronted the first pandemic the world has seen in 100 years which, until recently, saw normally laid back Australians having punch-ups in supermarket aisles during tussles over toilet paper. Meanwhile in the US, widespread civil unrest and looting has accompanied protests over the death of an African-American man at the hands of law enforcement officials. Mass gatherings spawned further mass gatherings despite medical advice highlighting the risks of doing so during COVID19. I saw a comment the other day to the effect that; if America was watching itself from afar at the moment, it would probably invade America in the interests of upholding law and order.

35 years of world wide data does not lie

Let’s hope the social-media driven craziness abates soon; along with the dissemination of misinformation and poorly researched statistics by protestors and Big Media alike. Otherwise, if we can’t maintain sensible social distancing protocols - hold onto your surfboards. There’s another wave of COVID19 coming and a vaccine is still a year out!

When I was in high school, you needed twelve units of subjects to obtain the Higher School Certificate. Because I was one subject short and had maxed out my science and math allocation, I elected a subject called Social Studies. In this unit, students were asked to turn-up to school an hour and a half early on Tuesday morning. Then we’d sit down together and go through the morning newspapers with the teacher. While I don’t remember much from the course, I do remember our teacher saying: ‘There’s only one certainty in life and that is; we (the human race) are destined to destroy our selves’. The message was sobering for a teenager - and it stuck with me.

Combine this early life lesson, with a childhood of periodic deprivation and an adult life spent in the military, law enforcement and security industries, and it’s probably no surprise to learn that I became a ‘Prepper’. I’m not fanatic about it – but prepping is lens through which I make day-to-day, and major decisions, about my continued wellbeing and that of my family. And it’s true to say that recent events have convinced me that more people need to get a dose of prepping about them too.

I don’t mean for everyone to be a ‘Doomsday Prepper’ of the type popularised in US television. But it’s pretty clear that more people need to maintain more supplies than just one or two days of food and other essential items in their homes. And this doesn’t mean panic buying of the type that caused the ‘toilet paper crisis’ of 2020. Not only did this event show how few commodities people stock at home, but it also underscored the fact that – when the loo paper ran out - most people couldn’t conceive of a more suitable to way to clean their butts. I’d heard that workers were finding folded foreign currency in the sewers at the height of the poo-paper problem. Were people really wiping their arse with money? Haven’t they heard of showering?

The main problem I saw during the height of the COVID19 pandemic was the lack of a national supply chain that has a surge capacity. There are no longer warehouses full of staple goods sufficient enough for what happened. Company’s logisticians have cleverly deduced how much of what we need - and when – so that industry only produces the minimum. To do otherwise adversely affects companies’ bottom lines. Trouble is that this approach only works when society is operating at a steady state. Not when things go arse up.

The common urban dweller (who I like to refer to as ‘homo urbanensis’) has a pathetic need to get whatever they want – whenever they want it. Even goods sourced from interstate are expected to arrive overnight. It’s why the trucking industry trumps rail – even though rail is more economic, is better for the environment, and can help reduce the national road toll. Railroads are ideal for hauling large loads at low cost; but because no one can wait a week for a delivery anymore, it has to be brought over night via a truck instead. The prevalence of this privileged mindset helps explain why most people simply can’t see how vulnerable they are to disruptions in supply.

The fact is that prepping makes sense – for everyone. And if you don’t believe me, well –the Red Cross and the NSW Government’s Health Department both recommend that we store at least two weeks’ worth of food at all times. Even the Federal Government suggests that every household should store at least three extra days’ worth of food for emergencies. And this is in normal times for ‘just in case’. These recommendations don’t take into account the effect of another pandemic.

Prepping isn’t hard. Simply buy the same things you would normally, but when they’re half price buy two. Use one, and store one. When the meat is marked down for a quick sale, buy it and put it in the freezer. The meat isn’t spoiled, it’s simply the case that the store hasn’t sold as much of the product as was planned and the next delivery is arriving tomorrow. There’s no space to store the new product out the back, so the goods on display today have to go – today.

Buy one for now and one for later, you were going to buy it anyway.

Think about what else you can do to reduce your dependency on the national supply chain. For example, if you have the space, plant a fruit tree or two in the back yard, and start a veggie garden. Or, if your options are more limited, ‘small space’ gardening is a growing trend and there’s plenty of material available online, and from your local nursery, to get you started. Also, teach your kids where food comes from and they’ll have more respect for it. My daughter sometimes comes home upset because someone at school disagrees with her hunting, fishing and eating meat. On one occasion, the taunting came from a kid eating spaghetti bolognaise. When my girl pointed out that the mince was meat too, the other kid simply refused to accept that the beef mince on his spag-bolls came from cows. Her story reminded me of a day at Uni when a fellow student, who’d recently left Sydney, tried to argue with me that veal didn’t come from baby cow – but instead came from ‘veal’. This same student was studying to be a primary school teacher... This is the world we’re up against.

If you’re a camper, you already have the upper-hand. So don’t leave the tucker box empty when you return from your holiday. Stock it back-up with tinned and long life goods ready for your next road trip – or other contingency. And focus too on the products that emptied first from the grocery store shelves in the recent spate of panic buying: Go for meat, toilet paper, flour, rice, pasta and soap.

Remember, pandemics aren’t the only events that disrupt our normal lives. If we get conditions again like the giant wind storm that took out the South Australian electricity grid for a week back in 2016, preppers and campers will simply turn on their generators, plug-in the solar panels to their 4x4s, campers and caravans, and continue life as normal. As for me, I’ve only this week run out of my pre-2020 home stocks of toilet paper. So I topped-up my supplies today - at half price.

If you’re not prepping, you’re not paying attention …