The final countdown

When it comes to surviving the end of the world, it pays to have your survivalist manbag at the ready – complete with peanut butter

When does having a bug-out bag packed and ready to go “just in case” stop being the preserve of cranks and start being a sensible precaution? Well, judging by the sudden rush of reports about a surge of interest in survivalism (in G2 last Friday, but also here, here and here) that time might be now.

That I even now know what a ‘bug-out bag’ is (a portable kit which allows you to survive for 72 hours after evacuating from a disaster) probably says much about the current atmosphere of anxiety. Whatever your fear – global food crisis, climate disaster, Avian bird ‘flu, nuclear war, terrorism strikes, earthquake, peak oil, economic meltdown, [insert your own paranoia here] – it seems that more and more of us and contemplating a growing chance that our comfortable lives might soon be receiving a sudden jolt and that we had better prepare ourselves for a world where we will be – often desperately – fending for ourselves.


(Context being everything, of course; with the world’s sympathies and thoughts currently directed at the people of Burma, westerners worrying about whether they’re going to suffer, say, a power outage somehow barely registers).

Personally, I think there’s a little bit of the survivalist’s fantasy in all of us and that it doesn’t take much to tease it out. We have all probably wondered how we’d cope on our own, against the elements and against each other. For example, would we be the one, as so often plays out in disaster movies, who remains focused and survives, or the one who panics and meets a sticky end? Would we sink or swim if thrust into such a Darwinian extreme?

Guardian