2012: Investigating the Possibilities

How to survive flood, famine, flu, and financial catastrophe

Neil Strauss has a tough assignment ahead of him- survive the worst:

Like any good journalist he documented his journey in The Game’s successor, Emergency. Emergency works both as a gold-standard piece of gonzo journalism, with Strauss sharing the extraordinary lives and motivations of his subjects, and as a detailed manual on how to prepare yourself before the long wild party of civilisation comes to a messy end.

Longer chapters detailing his quest to transform himself from an effete, deskbound writer to a self-reliant woodsman are interpolated with short two-page comic strip ‘how to’ segments on everything from evasive driving to sawing through plastic handcuffs with a pair of shoelaces.

I’m here today, at a self-sufficient farm outside Guildford, to get a small flavour of Neil’s research. Despite the jeremiads you might see in some of the more excitable newspapers, the chance that ours will be generation that sees a colossal social collapse like the Fall of the Roman Empire or a pandemic on the scale of the Black Death is still reassuringly slim.

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