Doomsday Preppers: Riley Cook

I don’t have much to say about this episode’s last segment, which looks at Riley Cook, also from Colorado.
He’s yet another polar shifter, which is to say he has latched onto a popular pseudoscientific notion he doesn’t really understand.
He reveals that he has spent three hundred thousand dollars on preps over the years. Between that, his family’s intermountain location high in the Rockies, and the multiple blonde, blue-eyed offspring, he has Mormon written all over him.
As a welder, he’s a pretty handy metalworking type of guy, and has designed and built a neat little aluminum rickshaw for pulling his family and supplies around in the event of a disaster. It’s supposed to be balanced so he can pull like, ten times his weight when it’s loaded. And it’s also waterproof, so that he can pole them across rivers or whatnot. But I really wouldn’t want to pull a cart loaded with family and supplies around for like, twenty miles (he claims he’s done this before); they can get out and stretch their atrophied, civilized legs. I’d like to see him make the plans for the cart available online (it’d be a friendly gesture), because in a re-localized post-collapse world, human-powered carts like that would be in demand.

They do a ‘bug-out to bug-in’ practice, loading up the kids in the SUV to brave the treacherous mountain roads to their underground bunker. Even though they probably have months worth of food already stashed, he mentions that in the event of a real long-term emergency, if they “had to resort to obtaining our food from [elk and deer]”, they could. Hey mister, furry critters shouldn’t be your food of last resort; I guarantee that wild game is healthier than the processed crap you’ve likely stocked your bunker with.

(I actually first saw this ad at the multiplex, ironically playing before–of all things–the extended cut of AVATAR.)

Watch it, and then tell me if there’s anything funny about this bit of narration:
“This was once a country where people made things…beautiful things…and so it is again.”

It’s a nice notion, and while I would like to believe it, I find it hard to do so considering that the line is immediately preceded by shots of ROBOTS ASSEMBLING CARS.

Besides, what’s all this nonsense about “the things we make, make us“?
We’re not really making things; these things might be made in the USA for a change, but we’re still just having machines make our machines for us…though I suppose that’s slightly better than having Chinese machines make our machines for us.

The Green Man Says: H2O

part of an ongoing series of columns I’ve written for the TU Rambler; reprinted here in full (instead of the trimmed-down snippet of drivel they published under my name).

September, 2009.
Let’s talk about water.

We can’t live without it; it quenches thirst better than Gatorade, and apparently, it’s on the moon.  For most of us living in the First World, it also comes out of the tap for free.  And yet, for some reason or another, lots of people insist on buying bottled water.  I’m sorry, but am I missing something here?  You pay money…for something that you could get for free…that you can only use once. Meanwhile, people in Fiji live under a military dictatorship, suffering from typhoid and without access to clean drinking water.

This really puzzles me.  Fiji Water sells for almost three times as much as regular bottled water, is now our country’s #1 imported water, and yet is considered by many to be a “green” bottled water because the company that owns it contributes to liberal and progressive causes (like, for example, John McCain).

Fiji Water is put into heavy bottles (fresh-made with Chinese plastic) in a diesel-fueled factory in a town where the water is considered “unfit for human consumption”.  Bottled water is wasteful enough, but the very fact that this “green” water has to come across the ocean on a gas-guzzling cargo ship makes this a huge steaming pile of hypocrisy. Maybe politicians who are having trouble ending our addiction to foreign oil should start smaller and instead try ending our addiction to overpriced, greenwashed bottled water.

So, you might ask, how can we help solve the bottled water problem?  It’s simple—don’t buy it.  Ask your grandparents how they got through their days without their bottle of Evian or Aquafina or Fiji.  They didn’t, because such a thing would be totally preposterous to them, and it should be to us, too.  Buy a reusable Nalgene bottle from the campus bookstore, and then go over to the water fountain or the faucet (last I checked, every building on campus had running water; just be grateful you don’t have to pump it by hand), and fill ‘er up!  Commit to using your reusable bottle, and start making sustainability the new standard.