How to Catch and Eat a Rat

We certainly have rats around our little Los Angeles compound, but we've never considered eating them. Thankfully potty-mouthed survival expert Cody Lundin, author of 98.6 Degrees The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive, shows you how in this youtube highlight. If you enjoyed the squirrel melt video we posted some time ago, you'll love this one as well. And the kids will dig those rat pelts!

Our Rocket Stove

Low-tech is the new high-tech, and the best example of the low-tech revolution is the miraculous rocket stove--a stove that makes it possible to cook with small twigs--no logs needed! Best of all rocket stoves are easy to build. We liked the idea so much that we decided to build a permanent one just off our back deck for entertaining and as a backup to our gas stove should an emergency take out our utilities.

The rocket stove was developed for use in poor nations where wood used for cooking has led to the vast, wholesale, deforestation of large swaths of the earth's surface. Rocket stoves can be built out of metal or masonry and consist of a L shaped tube, at the bottom of which you place your wood. The chimney effect creates a highly efficient, largely smoke-free burn. There's no need to cut down a tree to cook your dinner--all you need is a few small branches or twigs.

Before we built the rocket stove we considered making a cob oven, a mud domed wood fired oven in which you can cook bread and pizza. There's a trend in the eco-world to build cob ovens and we felt a certain pressure to keep up with the eco-Joneses. We started to build the base for one and then began to think about how often we would actually build a fire, especially considering that it has to burn for several hours before a cob oven gets hot enough to cook in. Also, where would we get the logs? And how good is it to burn such a fire and contribute to Los Angeles' already smog choked air?

Staring at the bricks we had scavenged to build the base of cob oven, we realized that we could re-purpose them for a permanent backyard rocket stove that we would actually use. Furthermore we realized that our rocket stove could burn some of the palm fronds that regularly tumble down from the iconic palm trees that line our old L.A. street.

Here's the materials we used:

36 bricks
4-inch aluminum stove pipe elbow
4-inch stove pipe
ash (scavenged from park BBQs)
1 tin can
50 pound bag of premixed concrete for the base
mortar mix
grill (scavenged)

The first step was to make a small foundation for the rocket stove. We fashioned a 18 by 18-inch by 4-inch slab with 2 x 4 lumber and a bag of premixed cement. Folks in cold places will need to make a deeper foundation to avoid frost heave.

Next we built a brick cube, leaving a small hole for the bottom of the stovepipe. For advice on how to build with brick we recommend taking a look at this. As you can see our masonry could use some more practice, but the results are not too bad--we like to think of our stove as being a bit "rustic". You can avoid the hassle of brickwork by making a simpler rocket stove--check out these two instructional videos, one for a metal model, and another version using bricks. We chose brick largely for aesthetic reasons and we're satisfied with the results.

Drawing from Capturing Heat

The next step is to put the pipe together fitting the elbow up into the longer pipe, and sized so that the top of the pipe is just below the bottom of the grill. Check out our earlier post for a video that can help with this part of the assembly. Serendipitously, on a bike ride, we found a grill in the middle of Sunset Boulevard that fit the opening in our brick rocket stove exactly.

You pour the ash into the completed brick cube to fill the space between the pipe and the inside wall. The ash acts as insulation to increase the efficiency of the stove. You could also use vermiculite but note that sand or soil will not work. Insulation works because of small pockets of air between particles, hence the need for ash or vermiculite, which are also non-combustible. We used a piece of scrap sheet metal with a 4-inch circular hole cut in it to keep the ash from spilling out the gap between the pipe and the squarish opening at the bottom.

Lastly you use a tin can sliced down the side and flattened out to form a shelf which you insert into the elbow at the bottom of the stove. Note the drawing above for the shape of the shelf. You put your twigs and kindling on this shelf and start the stove up with newspaper underneath the shelf. As the twigs burn you push them in over the edge to keep the fire going.

Our first test run of the stove was very successful--we boiled a pot of water and cooked some eggs in a a pan. The fire burned cleanly with little smoke except during start up. For more info on rocket stoves check out the Aprovecho Research Center.

And please people don't burn wood inside and watch out for embers. Make sure you put the fire out completely when you are done cooking!

Out of Water!

There's nothing like a utility outage to make one ponder the various Mad Max type scenarios that might play out when the power goes out for good and legions of zombified TiVo addicts stumble out onto the streets in search of the last remaining supplies of Doritos. Of all the utility outages we've experienced in our shabby 1920s bungalow, this weekend's water outage was the most annoying. Other than the intenets, a couple of lights and our kitchen mixer, electricity is not something we're big users of and, thanks to the many camping stoves we have, we're prepared to go without natural gas for a while. But water is a different matter.

Late last Thursday night our water pressure began to drop. By Sunday night nothing more than a trickle of water would come out of any of our faucets. We checked the little spinning red triangle indicator on the water meter to see if water was flowing (and perhaps leaking somewhere) but the triangle was motionless. We checked the shutoff valve at the street, turning it off and on, also to no avail. One of the few sensible things the previous owners did was replace the galvanized pipe with copper so we knew that corrosion was not the problem. We asked our neighbors if they had a problem and they said no. Finally, we called the Department of Water and Power on Friday and it was Monday morning before anyone showed up. By that time, mysteriously, the water began flowing again. The DWP worker checked the pressure, said it was fine, and shrugged when we asked what the problem might have been. We welcome comments from readers who want to speculate on the cause of this outage as we like to know how things work or fail around here.

While we have a few gallons of water around in case of an earthquake this episode was a wake up call that we may need to keep more water than the couple of plastic tubs we have in the garage. We also don't want to count on the water in the water heater and the back of the toilet. And when it takes three days to get service we can only imagine how long it would take in a large-scale disaster.

The whole notion of depending on our dysfunctional local government for anything in an emergency is foolish. Our friends at IlluminateLA helped run the emergency shelter at a local high school after the Griffith Park fire earlier this year. While it turned out that the emergency shelter was not needed, the Illuminaters discovered that the food supplies have to be trucked in from the San Fernando Valley, a not too promising scenario when you consider how bad the roads are here on an ordinary day not to mention when a couple of bridges come down in an earthquake.

This leaves us pondering keeping water in steel drums, which we first learned about in Aton Edward's book Preparedness Now!, the first book in Process Media's Self-Reliance series (our book the Urban Homesteader, due out in May, is the third in this series). It's one of the more expensive options in water storage, with new drums costing several hundred dollars, but avoids the problem of an off taste that plastic can impart. But while there's something to be said for avoiding all sources of potential crankiness when the shit cometh down, stainless steel drums are above our meager budget at this point. For now we'll probably have to go with a new 55 gallon plastic drum, though if enough of you buy our book we'll spring for the steel. Homegrown Revolution readers can hole up in the garage with us and share our water when those snack-crazed zombie hoards come stumbling down the street. Consider it a promise.

Pooh Power!

Unlike the Hollywood fat cats we live amongst here in LaLa land, Homegrown Revolution is more likely to find ourselves in possession of a Wag™ Bag rather than a Swag bag. What's a Wag™ Bag you ask? Here's the snappy copy from the Major Surplus & Survival catalog:

The Wag™ (waste alleviation and gelling) Bag Kit is the most complete, efficient and easy to use system we've ever offered. Each sealed kit contains: 1 waste bag with Pooh-Powder, 1 zip-close disposal bag, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and instructions. The amazing pooh-powder actually gels liquid in seconds, while it neutralizes the odor (no perfume cover-up) and the catalyst starts the decay process. The Black degradable poly bags are environmentally friendly and can be disposed of in trash containers. Can be used with any portable toilet or even in your standard home toilet when water flushing is unavailable. Can be used under or over (to keep sanitary) any toilet seat. After use, simply fold the Wag™ Bag into the zip-close bag and close. Dispose in trash container. An absolute must for your car, camper, boat, or plane (or those unsavory outhouses). Weighs 3 lbs. per kit.

The Wag™ and Pooh-Powder technology was developed by Phillips Environmental Products, a company that received a federal windfall after the weather and toilet disaster known as hurricane Katrina. FEMA soon became a huge customer as did the Pentagon which bought $1.3 million worth of bags to supply troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Major Surplus & Survival price of $39.95 for a pack of 12 Wag™ Bag kits works out to an expensive $3.32 a crap. So what are some cheaper alternatives when crap happens? Unfortunately, digging a "cat hole" is no longer politically correct. A study at Montana State University proved that human feces "remained alive with various disease-causing bacteria,” even after a year buried in the ground.

Our waste disposal preference is towards the humanure approach--turning your crap into useful compost. For the lowdown on how to humanure see Joseph Jenkin's compelling and entertaining book which is available free online.

For hiking or temporary water outages you can simply pack your crap up for later disposal in a toilet. This is how Homegrown Revolution managed during an arduous snow camping experience last year, with one unfortunate member of our party tasked with carrying a five gallon bucket full of crap through the high Sierras. A more egalitarian approach would have been to make everyone carry a "poop tube". You make a poop tube with 4-inch PVC pipe. Cap one end of the pipe and stick a threaded fitting on the other end. Crap in a paper bag or coffee filter, throw in some kitty litter to absorb the liquids and shove it all into your poop tube. You can then empty the tube when you get to the nearest toilet. You'll have to size the tube based on how much you think you'll be needing to use it.

Lastly an admission. Call us juvenile, but as some of you may suspect this missive was written in part with the purpose of exploiting the comedic potential of the expression "Pooh Powder". Our apologies.

Build a Rocket Stove

Rocket stoves are a highly efficient way to cook using just small branches rather than large pieces of wood and are twice as efficient as conventional open wood burning methods. They usually consist of a heavily insulated L shaped metal pipe, at the bottom of which you put small pieces of wood. You size the pipe to fit a pot, which fits down into the pipe. Efficiency is gained by the fact that the pot is heated on the sides as well as the bottom.

Homegrown Evolution was delighted to find a how to build a rocket stove video (with a Euro disco soundtrack!) hosted by a goth dude named "vavrek":


Other Rocket Stove Designs

The Aprovecho Research Center, a non-profit organization devoted to improving conditions in third world countries through the development of low cost, simple cooking and heating technologies have developed a number of rocket stoves that you can build for your urban homestead. They have a simple model called the VITA Stove made with sheet metal (note the better soundtrack music on the video) and an institutional model made with a 50 gallon drum.

We think we've found a use for all those fallen palm fronds . . . rocket stove cooking!

It's Official: The End is Near

Cheese doodles sandwiched by two images from a Qatar Airlines ad

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the price of corn has got so high due to its use for ethanol, that farmers are resorting to feeding livestock, "cookies, licorice, cheese curls, candy bars, french fries, frosted wheat cereal and peanut-butter cups."

GARLAND, N.C.--When Alfred Smith's hogs eat trail mix, they usually shun the Brazil nuts.

"Pigs can be picky eaters," Mr. Smith says, scooping a handful of banana chips, yogurt-covered raisins, dried papaya and cashews from one of the 12 one-ton boxes in his shed. Generally, he says, "they like the sweet stuff."

Mr. Smith is just happy his pigs aren't eating him out of house and home. Growing demand for corn based ethanol, a biofuel that has surged in popularity over the past year, has pushed up the price of corn, Mr. Smith's main feed, to near-record levels. Because feed represents farms' biggest single cost in raising animals, farmers are serving them a lot of people food, since it can be cheaper.

Connecting the stories and ads in the WSJ is our favorite game to play in the morning over our coffee. We're not alone in playing this game. Richard Jackson, Director of the CDC National Center for Environmental Health connected the dots with stories in the WSJ during a brilliant lecture we heard earlier this month at a public health conference (read one of Dr. Jackson's papers on our screwed up built environment here). Jackson held up the morning's paper and pointed out that separate stories on childhood obesity, air pollution and suburbanization are all related.

Today's WSJ is a reminder of how this associational game increasingly paints a picture of a mad and dystopic science fiction reality. Along with the story on feeding livestock junk food, we have a story on Fermat Capital Management L.L.C., a money management firm led by a biophysicist that sells bonds, "linked to natural catastrophes, such as hurricanes". So called "catastrophe bonds" are a method for insurance companies to ease the danger of losses on an uncertain future of global warming related natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina. On another page we find an ad for "America's newest stars" Qatar Airway's direct service between Washington D.C., New York and Doha. Together these stories and ads indicate a country so hooked on driving that our business and government power elites jet off to Qatar to cut deals with corrupt and homicidal oil interests while simultaneously sacrificing our agriculture to our gas tanks, all the while covering the environmental consequences with increasingly exotic financial instruments.

Madness! We fear comrades, that it's time to prepare,.

The 10 Day $25 Survival Pack

This month's issue of Backwoods Home Magazine, what Homegrown Revolution reads when we're in a foul Unabomber type mood, has a handy article inspired by this winter's Kim family tragedy. As you may recall the Kim family got lost on a seldom travelled road in Oregon and spent 10 days without supplies before James Kim finally made a fatal attempt to hike out through the cold. Playing armchair quarterback, the gun-toting off-griders at Backwoods Home have come up with an inexpensive survival pack and the best thing is the article is free and online!

Backwoods Home's $25 survival pack makes extensive use of the sort of highly prepared ready-to-eat crap food easily found in America's bloated supermarkets. Normally we wouldn't touch this stuff, what the French call malbouffe, but its long shelf life and ease of preparation make certain items, such as Knorr chicken and pasta dinner and Maruchan ramen noodle soup ideal foods for emergency kits. These convenience foods are also great for backpacking as they are much cheaper and often tastier than freeze dried camping foods. And Homegrown Revolution can't resist the irony here, that if and when the "shit comes down" we'll be using the very products that let to our own destruction.

Of course, the Backwoods Home survival pack is designed for the typical SUV drivin' American so you'll have to pimp it out with some lighter weight items to make your "escape from LA" on a bike (trust us, a delightful form of transport in gridlocked traffic). For some lighter options check out the new topics list you'll see on the right, particularly the preparedness section.

Safety Chic

According to today's Wall Street Journal, doom and gloom is out and "a new safety-chic is playing out across retail."

All the Chinese slave-labor employing big boxes have jumped in on the bandwagon including Wal-Mart, Dillards, Costco and Sears. They're all getting together to save our collective asses from hurricanes and suitcase nukes by getting us to . . . shop. Home Depot is coming out with a line called "HomeHero" which among other things includes the white fire extinguisher illustrated on the left.

"People just haven't thought about redesigning these categories," says Peter Arnell, founder of the design and marketing firm Arnell Group, a division of Omnicom Group Inc., which helped craft the Home Depot HomeHero line. "In the old days, you had a chunky old red fire extinguisher and you were going to hide it. That doesn't work anymore. The world has changed."

Funny, we thought fire extinguishers were red so that they would stand out in an emergency. But Homegrown Revolution likes the idea of yuppies in their burning kitchens accidentally grabbing the cappuccino frother. The article ends with this zinger:

"They have clearly recognized an absence in the market and that's the fundamental proposition," says Dale K. Cohen, founder of DKC Resources, a New York marketing strategy and growth catalyst firm. "Fear is an emotion. And whenever you tap into the emotional component of something in selling, you have a very strong, resonant angle".

Bucket Crapping

Those ubiquitous five gallon buckets we've used to make self-watering containers are good for another purpose-- an improvised crapper.

When the shit hits the fan, you'll need a place to shit and thankfully the fine folks at the World Toilet Organization have come up with a clever design for an improvised flush toilet using just a five gallon bucket, a coat-hanger, and a plastic bag. Now, not to be too graphic, but thanks to the Sierra Club we've had the opportunity to #2 in a five gallon bucket before and surplus stores even sell toilet seats for buckets. But the World Toilet Organization design has some distinct advantages, mainly keeping odors to a minimum. Advanced versions of the same five gallon bucket can even be used for composting and adapted for flushing with water.

Buddy Burner

An easy craft project for the family survivalist, taken from the brilliant 70’s Mormon classic: Roughing it Easy, by Dian Thomas.

A buddy burner is a heat source for camping or emergencies made out of a tuna can, candle stubs and cardboard. It acts like a Sterno can, will burn for 1 1/2 - 2 hours, and can be recharged and reused.

To make a buddy burner you need to gather: a clean tuna can, a piece of corrugated cardboard, a bunch of candle stubs, and a soup can or something similar to melt the wax in so you don’t get wax on your cookware.

Cut the cardboard into strips as wide as the can is deep. Cut across the corrugation, across the ridges, so that when you look at the edge of the strip you see the open channels. Capiche? You are going to coil the cardboard in the can, so you will need maybe 3 or 4 feet of cardboard. One Amazon mailer made 3 BB’s here at Survive LA. Roll your strips up like a sweet roll and tuck them into the can. It does not have to be tight, but you do want to fill it up.

Pile your candle stubs next to the tuna can to get a sense of how much you need. The wax soaks into the cardboard, so you always seem to need more than you expect. Don’t worry about the wicks, dust, soot, those little metal things--the purity of your wax doesn’t matter.

Melt the wax. If you melt your candle stubs over direct heat the wax will burst into flame if it gets too hot. Therefore it is safest and best to use a double boiler set up. Now, if you own a double boiler you probably don’t want to coat it with wax, so use a tin can to hold the wax, and place the can in a saucepan of simmering water. Here we balance the can on a metal cookie cutter to keep it off the bottom of the saucepan.

When the wax melts it will liberate bits of old wick. Fish these out first and tuck one or two or three between the cardboard layers to help with lighting the burner. Then pour the hot wax slowly into the can. It will fill up fast, then the wax level will sink as the cardboard soaks up the wax. Keep adding wax--you want to be sure the can is absolutely full of wax and the cardboard completely saturated.

To cook with your buddy burner, all you have to do is figure out how to elevate your cooking pot above it. You could use your fondue set up, or perhaps stack up some bricks on either side, or best of all, make a stove for it out of a big #10 can. That will be the subject of another post.

To light the BB, light the wicks and turn the can up on its side so that the cardboard catches fire too. The cardboard is a huge wick. That inferno effect is what you want. Control your flame by making a damper out of a piece of aluminum foil folded into a long rectangle three or four layers thick and as wide as the can, but much longer so that you can use the excess as a handle. Slide the foil back and forth to expose or repress the flame as needed.

To recharge the BB, place chunks of wax on top of the BB while it is burning. The wax will melt down and refuel it. The wax will always burn at a lower temperature than the cardboard, so the cardboard should last a long time.

UPDATE - 7/1/08

Reader Michael writes:

"Hey! I love your site. But some thoughts on Buddy Burners! I made SOOOO many of these as a kid growing up (Mormon, y'know?), but they are not safe anymore. Most aluminum cans are now fully lined with plastics and other coatings (to prevent botulism, yay!) but they cannot be burned (boo!). Please please please do not suggest people make these as burning the coatings can be TOXIC."

I'm beginning to wish we had a science lab here at the Homegrown Evolution compound to test these sorts of problems. I'd add to Michael's concern that these plastic coatings leach estrogenic compounds into our food. BooII! See this alarming article from Cornell University on the connection between plastics and breast cancer.

Make an Aluminum Can Lamp

Inspired by an article in Wilderness Way, SuriviveLA made our own post-apocalyptic lighting out of two aluminum cans. According to the author of that article, Del Gideon, the Vietnamese used to make these lamps back during the war. You can also use these lamps to heat up water. Making one is easy:

1. Remove the top off a can. We like to do this by scoring the inner ring of the top with a razor blade and then using a pair of pliers to bust it out. The fastidious and safety conscious may want to file down the sharp edge.

2. Cut a 2 1/2 inch square window out of one side of the can with a pair of scissors.

3. Now cut the bottom 1 1/2 inches off of another can. We like to do this by taping a razor blade to a piece of metal and inserting it in a book. Simply rotate the can against the blade a few times and you will get a nice even cut. Precision isn’t necessary for this project (unlike the Pepsi can stove) so you can also do this step with a pair of scissors.

4. Punch out a 1/4 inch hole in the bottom of the can for the wick.

5. Cut a 1/2 inch by 3 inch piece of cotton from an old shirt for the wick.

6. Cut out a 2 inch by 1 1/2 inch piece of aluminum and use it to wrap up the wick tightly.

7. Fill the can with the window with lamp oil. Insert the aluminum wrapped wick in the hole you drilled in the other can and squeeze both cans together as shown in the image at top.

8. Trim the wick, light it, and wait for WWIII.

Hexayurt

SurviveLA reader jbjhill, responding to our rant about designing for a world dominated by 4 x 8 building materials, sent a link to this unique yurt-shaped emergency shelter which can be built out of 4 x 8 sheets of nearly anything (the globe shaped thing on the right is an inflatable satellite dish). Designed by software engineer Vinay Gupta, who is working on this project full time, the "Hexayurt" costs somewhere between $200 and $500 to build, and requires only six cuts for each unit. The Hexayurt stacks flat for easy deployment in emergencies.

Gupta has a suggested "Infrastructure Package" which includes heat, lights, water purification, and a composting toilet bringing the cost up somewhat, but still much less than FEMA's $30,000 trailers.

While not the most thrilling video (at least as compared to this), thanks to the wonders of youtube you can watch Gupta assemble an 8 foot Hexayurt:

Roughin' It

SurviveLA is off to Joshua Tree this weekend for the graduation ceremonies of the Sierra Club's Wilderness Travel Course. We took the WTC class earlier this year both for tips on backpacking and for gaining general self-sufficiency. The Sierra Club's approach to roughing it is to, well, not really rough it but to go down to REI and load up on all the latest stoves, tents and "technical" fabrics. This contrasts starkly with the mountain-man-live-off-the-land approach epitomized by survivalist types like Christopher Nyerges and Eustace Conway.

At SurviveLA we like our comfort and believe that the best way to train for a survival situation is to studiously avoid survival situations by making sure to always have extra food, extra water, extra clothes, a map and a compass. In short, we like the WTC way. And the nice thing about having the backpacking gear around is that should an earthquake or other disaster strike our urban compound we are prepared to camp out in the backyard and, if necessary, head out on the Xtracycle.

The Wilderness Travel Course starts up this January and we highly recommend it. The class includes ten classroom sessions, two day trips, and two overnight trips all for a very reasonable price. The class ends with a challenging weekend of snow camping in the high Sierras. Take this class and your urban homestead will be ready for most contingencies.

And speaking of camping, the velorutionaries at C.I.C.L.E. are hosting a weekend camping trip on November 11-12 that will feature a wild food hike with the aforementioned LA survivalist Christopher Nyerges.

Homegrown Evolution Food Review: Backpacker's Pantry Huevos Rancheros

On our recent Homegrown Evolution journey to Santa Rosa Island we taste tested another freeze-dried food item, Huevos Rancheros from Backpacker's Pantry. While this product has an impressive shelf life and ease of preparation, making it appropriate for emergency food supplies, we've had better freeze dried entrees. Our fellow campers had the same reaction to the visual look of the cooked and re-hydrated product: dog vomit. The taste wasn't all that bad, but it had the overly salty and questionably seasoned feeling of almost all dehydrated foods. Imagine eating just the seasoning packet from a bowl of ramen. We've had much better luck with some home made foods that we'll share in future posts.

And, perhaps this is a cheap shot, but Backpacker's Pantry has really got to consider redesigning the package which has a sort of rear view of a llama in an Andean landscape. The marketing folks probably want us to have the feeling of, "wow, isn't this food great - now I can take a hacky-sack break on my high altitude Peruvian trek" rather than "so that's what end of the animal this food comes from."

Escape from LA

Sometimes in order to survive LA you've gotta escape it, which is why we are headed to Santa Rosa Island, part of the Channel Islands National Park, tomorrow for a weekend of backpacking and general self-sufficiency. We're going in part to experience what the landscape of Southern California would have been like had it not been fucked up by freeways, strip malls and Spearmint Rhino billboards to name just a few of the many indignities we face each day.

We're also going to Santa Rosa to experience a place which was home to the Chumash Indians who lived for 13,000 years off the bounty of the land and the sea without needing to load up the kids in the mini-van and head to the 99 cent store.

Santa Rosa Island is also a land of mystery that once was home to the paradoxical combination of pygmy mammoths and giant prehistoric rats.

Sadly, in order to commence this journey we will be commemorating World Carfree Day by . . . driving, as we have to get to the Ventura pier early in the morning to catch the boat. We suggest that those of you who are stuck in LA this Friday to consider not driving if you can, and attending the vigil for Ilia Pankin, a cyclist who was killed earlier this week by a hit-and-run driver.

Essential System #4 - Illumination

It's all about LEDs my friends. LEDs are the way to go, lasting nearly forever and using very little battery power (make sure, of course, that you have batteries on hand). We have LED headlamps in our grab and go bags, but we also are looking into a new generation of LED bulbs for our Urban Homestead's interior lighting.

As far as house lighting goes, while LED efficiency is rapidly advancing, compact fluorescents are still better from an economic perspective even though there are concerns about the trace amounts of mercury that compact fluorescents contain contaminating landfills. Still, compact fluorescents are far better than incandescents since they consume less power and hence create less greenhouse gas. Remember that power plants are America's single greatest producer of greenhouse gases. And as far as conservation goes, it's estimated that if every American replaced one bulb with a compact fluorescent it would be the energy equivalent of taking 1.3 million cars off the road.

But back to LEDs. For emergency purposes it might be wise to have a Forever Flashlight that requires no batteries. You shake the thing back and forth to run the light, with no batteries ever needed - the device's only real disadvantage in fact is that the charging gesture, which uses Faraday's principle of electromagnetic energy, is really lewd and may lead to crass comments from bystanders.

Essential System #5 - First Aid Kit

The assumption we make around the SurviveLA compound is that in a large scale emergency, such as an earthquake, we'll be on our own for a while. Anyone who has been unlucky enough to visit the hospital emergency rooms of Los Angeles or any big city, even during non-peak hours, knows that your sorry ass often ends up on a stretcher parked in a forlorn hallway waiting for hours for a distracted and overworked doctor. Which is why, once again, we've relied on the world of mountaineering to inform our choice of first aid supplies. The assumption with a first aid kit in the wilderness is that it will be quite a while before you can be reached by a paramedic.

But first some disclaimers - we are not medical experts here, and this first aid kit is in a "first draft" status. We welcome any suggestions for items that should be included. We have copied this list (and added a few things) from the book Mountaineering The Freedom of the Hills.

Adhesive bandages - six 1-inch

Butterfly bandages - three, in various sizes

Sterile gauze pads - four 4-inch b 4-inch

Carlisle dressing or sanitary napkin - one 4-inch (note sanitary napkins are much cheaper and make excellent bandages and provide some low-brow humor potential to cheer up the patient who may find themselves with a sanitary napkin duct-taped to their forehead)

Nonadherent dressings - two 4-inch by 4-inch

Self-adhering roller bandages - two rolls 2-inch width by 5 yards

SAM splint - one

Athletic tape - one roll, 2-inch wide

Triangular bandages - two 36 inch by 36 inch by 52 inch for slings (large bandanas will do)

Moleskin or Molefoam - 4-inch to 6-inch square for blisters

Tincture of benzoin - One 0.5 ounce bottle - to keep tape sticking and to protect skin

Providine iodine swabs - two packages

Alcohol or soap pads - three packages

Themometer

Sugar packets - to treat diabetes or hypoglycemia intervention

Aspirin

anaplasmosis (epinephrine) kit (EpiPen) - for people with severe allergies

Elastic bandage - one 2-inch width to wrap sprains or compress injured area

Latex gloves

Safety pins

Tweezers

Plastic bag - for contaminated items

Breathing bearier - for administering CPR - we have one on our key chain that the Red Cross sells, but note that you will need to take a CPR class in order to know how to administer CPR

Duct tape - a wonder product, cheaper than medical tape - use it to adhere bandages, deal with blisters and a host of other things

Any prescription medications that you take

Syringe - for cleaning out wounds - you can also improvise this with a water bottle

Antibiotic cream

If you already have a first aid kit you can pimp it out with a few of these items. We can't emphasize enough the importance of large bandage material such as the sanitary napkins. One acquaintance of ours who was unlucky enough to have been severely cut by falling glass in the Northridge quake stumbled around bleeding for hours while her friends could only find small band-aids. Also, just because you have these items does not mean that you know how to use them. The Red Cross offers low-cost first aid and CPR classes but one thing to remember about Red Cross classes is that they assume that you have access to the emergency medical system and that the first aid you deliver is to stabilize the patient before the paramedics arrive. The Wilderness First Aid Course Inc. offers a more comprehensive first aid class that assumes that it will be awhile before your ass is swooped up in the little red paramedic wagon.

We keep these items in our grab and go bags and once again, this is a first stab at a kit. An anesthesiologist we have hiked with in the past carries a larger first aid kit full of potentially recreational prescription drugs and she's more than prepared to do some fairly gruesome field surgery and appetite-suppressing improvised dentistry. They'll be much more on the first aid topic in future post and until that time we welcome comments and suggestions.

SurviveLA Scoops Field and Stream

Looks like Field and Stream Magazine, the Robb Report of the guns and pickup crowd, has their own survival system in a Altoid can. We don't like to brag too much here but in an earlier post, thanks to the folks at Illuminate LA, we featured a similar system with more items that is half the size.

Speaking of Illuminate LA make sure to check out the handy preparedness info they have posted on the right side of the page as well as all the fun destinations and bike rides they have planned.

Essential System #6 - Fire

On the crazy path of life you may someday find yourself needing to build a fire. When it's wet and when kindling wood is lacking this can be a challenge. Which is why we always have fire starting implements on hand including a butane lighter and waterproof matches. Most importantly we carry something to really get the fire going - our homemade wax and dryer lint fire starters.

To make a wax and lint fire starter, save up the ends of a few candles and a bunch of lint from the dryer. Take a paper egg carton and put a big wad of dryer lint into each cup of the carton. Melt the candle wax in a double boiler, or in a can that you can throw away, and fill each cup of the carton up to the top with wax, soaking the lint. When the wax solidifies tear the carton apart, but keep the wax and lint in the individual paper carton sections. Light the torn edges of the cup to start the firestarter burning. The paper of the carton helps to get the wax and dryer lint burning. And burn it does! You will quickly learn why it's a good idea to clean out the lint in the dryer vent - lint is seriously flammable.

With your dryer lint fire starters and some waterproof matches, you'll be ready for any situation.

Essential System #7 - Repair Kit and Tools

We were going to use this category to wax poetic about the early 90s Leatherman multi-tool that we wear on our belts at all times but, hold the blog press here, self-sufficiency geniuses Stephen Box and Enci gifted us with a category-busting set of tools that, get this, fit within a tiny 30g (1.5 oz) Altoid tin!

Believe it or not this pocket size Altoid tin contains the following items:

1 inner tube piece - a section of a bicycle tire that can be used as a tourniquet, bandage, or slingshot

1 boot lace - always handy to have a section of string

1 saw wire - you can cut wood with this sharp wire

2 finger rings

1 can opener

1 duct tape (40cm) on straw

2 saw blades - these attach to two screws on the bottom of the altoid can so that the can functions as a saw handle

2 fasteners (#6-32 x 3/8")

2 Exacto blades #11

1 needle/thread

1 upholstery needle

2 needles

1 red LED bulb - the bulb and the small hearing aid batteries fit in a tiny hole in the side of the Altoid can, thus turning the can into a flashlight - the red bulb is so that you can read in the dark without ruining your night vision

2 batteries for LED

6 match heads (sealed in wax)

1 striker for match heads

6 fire-starters made out of lint and wax (we'll describe how to make these in a future post)

1 tin foil

1 rubber glove - for gathering or distilling water or for one-handed first aid

8 water purification tables (in straw) - see our earlier post on water

6 safety pins - for, among other uses, creating a sling with a shirt for a broken arm

2 medicated Bandaid strips

1 package first aid cream

6 aspirin

1 baling wire

4 fish hooks (snelled #2/#8) - for fishing!

4 split shot sinkers - also for fishing

1 snap swivel (#10)

1 filament (10 meters)

Beyond having enough items to repair virtually anything, this tiny kit can be used for signaling, trapping, fishing, filleting small animals and first aid.

A tip of the SurviveLA hat to Box and Enci for producing an innovative response to the problem of how to lug around basic essentials!