i saw your post about one of your 'prepper' skills being stuffed animal making. do you have any more like this? i try really hard to be disaster prepared without falling into Prepper Dude mindset (and i was raised by one, so its especially hard) and its so hard to find resources outside of that sphere of the internet
I find it helpful not to try to imagine some vast possible apocalypse but to start with the smaller disasters that are more likely to precede it: what could I do during a flood? an earthquake? a killer heatwave with vast forest fires? a war? Forget zombie movies and look at what happens during actual disasters.
In these situations, rescue and shelter of large groups of displaced people will be our first priorities. Some of the skills we will definitely need within the first weeks and months are:
- All medical skills as well as medicine production skills.
- Plumbing and water filtration
- The engineering skills to get life saving devices (medical devices, communication, air filtration, etc) up and running and to hook up generators, solar panels, heat pumps, etc.
- Child care skills and toy production
- Psychological care and community skills, particularly trauma prevention, conflict resolution and recreation.
- Food preservation like canning, curing, drying, storing. Since getting actual food production going will take months and is season dependent, our first priority will be to make everything that isn't shelf stable into shelf stable goods.
I am just one person and I'm probably overlooking a lot of things. Luckily I will not have to do this alone and it is fine if I can only do parts of a one or two things on this list.
(The things I can do on this list are sewing stuffed animals, first aid, food preservation and trauma prevention work)
mutual aid disaster relief are the folks to learn from/work with when it comes to this stuff. i can vouch for them from personal experience
as disaster becomes more and more of a daily reality this is something everyone should be thinking about imo
