Of course, disasters aren't scheduled, so you shouldn't count on having much notice. A family project for a three-day weekend might be a drill based on "What to Do With Less Than 3 Days to a Nuclear Disaster!" by Shane Connor (www.ki4u.com/guide.htm).
Do not take the internet for granted: print out needed instructions now. Whether to stay or evacuate is the first question to be answered. If you decide to evacuate during a nuclear crisis, you need a high level of confidence that you will be able to reach your destination, and not be stranded, without shelter, amid a panic-stricken horde of refugees, Connor advises. If planning to stay, water storage is the first priority. Connor devotes considerable attention to upgrading available shelter. For constructing expedient shelter, there is no substitute for Nuclear War Survival Skills (see ).
DDP members often ask about supplies to acquire. Connor offers a list of items to keep at home. Eric Palmer emphasizes what you might want to carry with you in your www.oism.org/ddp/evackit.htm under "Civil Defense", also include "Uses of a Pocket Knife," "Safe Water in an Emergency," and "Uses of a Shovel."
Of special interest in Palmer's "What Is a 72-Hour Kit?" are methods of communication: radio, whistles, drumming, and the prisoner's tapping code. He considers the need for hygiene, light, fire, money, tools, and ways to carry things.
The shovel, a tool found among the oldest artifacts of mankind, is a key life-saving tool. Palmer explains how to choose one, and how to use it to kill rattlesnakes, obtain water from a barrel cactus, or cross a swift stream.
After a disaster, with hard economic times and shortages of essentials like energy, it will be necessary to improvise. Steve Harris explains how to acquire materials cheaply and build a solar window heater, water heater, oven, desalinator, and water pasteurization device. If matches are scarce, you can use a fresnel lens made from a sheet magnifier. See Sunshine to Dollars, www.KnowledgePublications.com. Building some of these items now would make a good science project, as well as a disaster preparation.
The advocates of global energy rationing have promulgated three successive scenarios, all to be remedied by shutting down hydrocarbon-fueled generating facilities and rationing energy. The first was that we would use up all the "fossil fuels" that existed or could exist in the future. The second was global cooling and a new ice age brought about by emissions. And the third and most dangerous is human-caused global warming. In a $125-million epic slated to open May 28, Hollywood shows Manhattan frozen on The Day After Tomorrow. Global warming melts the Arctic ice caps, diluting the salt in the ocean, thereby shutting down the Gulf Stream and plunging the earth into a new ice age.
The film is based on a novel by Whitley Strieber, also the author of Warday, a post-nuclear war scenario, and books on alien abductions, such as Communion: a True Story.
Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, says "it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age." He notes that the movie's budget could have funded his research group for his entire lifetime, 10 times over (see www.sepp.org for more details).
Niger Innis, a spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, stated that environmental extremism has saddled people of color with "debt and death."
"We must stop trying to protect our planet from every imaginable, exaggerated or imaginary risk. And we must stop trying to protect it on the backs, and graves, of the world's most powerless and impoverished peoples," Niger said.
For example, "Kyoto would create a carbon cartel that would leave the developing countries of the world with the enormous burden of living without energy," stated Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas.
Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria said, "It's time Congress put all these environmental policies in the cross hairs because the policies are killing people," alluding to the death of an African child every 20 to 25 seconds because of the ban on DDT.
For minorities around the world, Earth Day should be a day of mourning.
Norris McDonald, president of the African American Environmentalist Association said, "Earth Day is dead" (www.techcentralstation.com; 4/23/04).
"Malaria kills millions of people every year. The careful use of DDT in developing countries could drastically reduce that number," states Tina Rosenberg (NY Times Magazine 4/11/04). She shows how South Africa is leading the way in a successful battle against one of the world's top killers.
In a campaign of spraying the inside walls of houses in affected regions once yearly, South Africa has chosen the most effective insecticide: DDT. It lasts twice as long as the alternative, repels mosquitoes as well as killing them, delays the onset of pesticide resistance, and costs one-quarter as much as others.
The amazing thing, Rosenberg says, is not that South Africa and five other nations are using DDT, but that dozens more do not. One reason is that Western donors are willing to finance only one tool: treated bed nets, a mere auxiliary of limited effectiveness.
DDT has been used on such a huge scale that any serious adverse effects on humans would surely be known. It is the environmental impact that is feared.
"DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment," Rosenberg writes. "Silent Spring is now killing African children because of it persistence in the public mind." (See "DDT Ban: For the Birds," DDP Newsletter, Nov. 1999).
There is no law that says that Mozambique can't use DDT just because it is banned in the U.S., but that's how it works. One reason is economic: a load of tobacco from Zimbabwe was refused in the U.S. because it contained traces of DDT, so that farmers there are an anti-DDT lobby. The World Bank refused to finance the use of DDT in Ecuador in the wake of El Niņo despite a recommendation by the Pan American Health Organization.
"DDT has an awful impact on the biosystem and is being eliminated by the world community. There are alternatives. We are not the only species on the planet," said World Bank official Walter Vergara, head of the unit that refused the loan to Ecuador.
"Probably the worst thing that ever happened to malaria in poor nations was its eradication in rich ones," Rosenberg concludes. "That has made one of Africa's leading killers shockingly invisible.... DDT is a victim of its success, having so thoroughly eliminated malaria in wealthy nations that we forget why we once needed it. But malaria kills Africans today. Those worried about the arrogance of playing God should realize that we have forged an instrument of salvation, and we choose to hide it under our robes."
Maybe West Nile virus will remind us.
DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, (520)325-2680, www.oism.org/ddp