Antony Funnell: If you live in a country like Australia you get used to extremes of weather. In the north of the country they are just about ready to enter the storm and cyclone season. Hello, Antony Funnell here, and welcome to Future Tense.

[Storm and cyclone news reports]

It helps to be prepared of course, as it does in any situation in life really, but there are some people in this world for whom preparedness becomes an obsession.

[Excerpt from Doomsday Preppers]

If you've watched this National Geographic reality television show you'll be familiar with the term Prepper—Doomsday Prepper—someone obsessed with preparing for future catastrophe, be it an environmental one, a financial meltdown or even the breakdown of society.

[Excerpt from Doomsday Preppers]

The extremists are part of the Prepper story. But they're not the whole of the story.

On Future Tense today we'll meet people who aren't crazy, who aren't extremists, but who are, in their different ways, part of a growing global subculture that's focussed on preparedness, looking toward the future and making sure they and others are ready for whatever adverse circumstances might be just beyond the horizon.

Tom Martin: Tom Martin. I'm the founder of the American Preppers Network.

Antony Funnell: The American Preppers Network is an online repository, a network of blogs with news and information about all matters relating to preparedness. Their motto is 'freedom through teaching others self-reliance'. Tom runs the site in his off-time, when he's not driving a truck across the US. I caught up with him for a chat during a stopover he was having somewhere in Ohio.

Tom Martin: We've got a blog and a forum where people can connect with each other and on the forum people can discuss different ideas on how to be better prepared, and we've got a Facebook page. So we use a lot of social media to communicate with other people. And we also have a map where people can find groups close to them that they can connect with and meet those people in person and discuss ways that they can be better prepared in their communities. I think with modern technology and social media, just being able to see how often disasters happen makes people realise that it really can happen to them too.

Antony Funnell: According to Martin, the Prepper movement in the United States really got a shot in the arm after 9/11 and the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.

Tom Martin: Well, like I said, anyone who prepares by definition is a Prepper. They don't know what the numbers of people are that identify themselves as a Prepper or are using that term, but there are several million people that make preparedness a way of life. I don't know how many people are actively involved in the movement. It could be millions. As for our organisation, we've got about 50,000 subscribers and 130,000 Facebook fans, and our organisation is a little over five years old.

Antony Funnell: And where are most of those people in your network based?

Tom Martin: They are spread out all over the country. But I do think we have higher concentrations of them in areas that are more disaster prone, because I do know we have a lot more members in the south-east that is affected mostly by hurricanes, and then also in the midwest where they have a lot of tornadoes and winter storms every year. I also think that people who are hardest hit by the economy also tend to get more involved.

Antony Funnell: So in what ways do people prepare?

Tom Martin: Many different ways. The government has a website called Ready.gov, and they recommend a 72-hour kit, and I think that's a good starting place for anybody that wants to be prepared, is to have a 72-hour kit. Then I think the next best goal is to focus on having three weeks' worth of supplies. Then once you reach that goal, then a focus on three months' worth of supplies. And eventually you want to have a goal of having a year's supply of all the needful things that you would need, food and medicines and the ability to purify your water, in case there is a long-term sustained disaster. And then after that I think my biggest focus would be on learning skills to survive beyond that, should the need arise that you would have to survive more than a year.

Antony Funnell: Now, if you think that sounds a bit like overkill. Just remember back a few years. Back to 2005 and a hurricane that struck the southeast coast of the United States.

[Excerpt from Hurricane Katrina video]

The response to Katrina by city, state and federal authorities shocked people almost as much as the hurricane itself. Many people found themselves on their own. The state didn't come to their immediate aid. For Prepper Tom Martin it reinforced an existing belief that ordinary Americans needed to rediscover older values of independence and self-reliance.

Tom Martin: Well, what we are doing is nothing new, it's what people have always done. I think what is new is the dependency that people have on the system to think that someone else is always going to take care of them. You know, the modern technology and always thinking that the grocery store is always going to have the food you need, and if there's a disaster the government is going to be there the next day to take care of you. But that's really not true.

Our goal is basically to get as many people prepared and take the initiative to be prepared so that in the event of a disaster the first responders can focus on helping the people who actually need to be helped. I think the people that are able-bodied that could be prepared, if they are not prepared than they are actually a burden to the system in taking away from those resources that could be used elsewhere, helping people that really need the help.

Irwin Redlener: Preparedness has been a challenge forever. You know, during the Cold War there was a movement to have people build bomb shelters in their house fearing a nuclear or atomic confrontation with the Soviet Union and so on. But the fact of the matter is even with all that hullabaloo, probably only around 2% of American households at least took any of that seriously.

Antony Funnell: Dr Irwin Redlener knows all about disaster preparedness, and like Tom Martin he's all too aware of the limits of the state in being able to respond to crises.

Dr Redlener is the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and a special advisor to the mayor of New York on emergency management.

The history of official disaster preparedness in the US, he says, is one of recurring frustration.

Irwin Redlener: There is kind of a resistance to investing in the future, and it is more than just the issue of being prepared for things that are unlikely but may happen in terms of disasters. We don't really invest our children, we barely have a rational level of healthcare now since President Obama pushed through his plan, and even that is not complete. People dealing with the government or trusting the government or the government actually investing in the future is something that we have trouble with. And so when we had budgetary challenges in the last, say, 5 to 10 years, the low hanging fruit were some of these federal programs for disaster preparedness in our public health agencies and in our hospitals. So those were cut dramatically.

Antony Funnell: And yet we have the experience in the United States of Hurricane Katrina, of Hurricane Sandy in New York and the sort of damage that both of those natural events wrought. It does seem odd then that so little money would be directed towards preparedness, and as you say, that it becomes the low hanging fruit whenever there are budget cuts.

Irwin Redlener: Yes. So what happens here is that, as I said, it's easy to cut these programs when we're not actually having a disaster, so that's one thing. The second thing is that the motivation of the political system to do these investments in the future in terms of preparedness may be high in terms of interest level when we are in the middle of the drama, whether it's Katrina or 9/11 or Ebola. But what happens is then that people keep calling these wake-up calls, we do get aroused and there's a lot of media attention a lot of discussion of it, but when the cameras are gone and the reporters are gone it's like we hit the snooze button on that alarm clock that was the wake-up call and we are drifting back off into a state of complacency and we don't actually do what we need to do. And a lot of the lessons, for instance from Katrina, had not been applied when Hurricane Sandy hit the north east coast of the United States. So we have a long history of acute arousal followed by drifting off into complacency in this country.

Antony Funnell: And when there is a level of action taken…I know you've used the term 'random acts of preparedness'. So the coordination of the work that is done, I would imagine you are arguing it is not comprehensive, it's quite scattergun.

Irwin Redlener: It's very scattergun, and again this is…the American system is a federalist system. So the federal government cannot order a state or local government really to do anything. The federal government gives incentives by way of grants and programs, but there's nothing like a nationalisation of critical systems in the event of an emergency. I don't know what the situation is in Australia, but yes, even though money will be coming to the states from the federal government and then from the state to the local government, there's very little assurance that it's going to be followed.

And by the way, it's not just learning the lessons. We have an experience and there's a lesson and then we may learn the lesson but it's a question of whether we apply the lesson. So it's a three-stage process here in terms of these experiences. We often get from stage one of having experiences to stage two of delineating what the lessons are…I can't begin to tell you how many 'lessons learned' meetings we have after every major disaster. The question is what do we do with those lessons once we have absorbed them? We seem not to memorialise them in legislation or fund them so that the lessons can actually be implemented ready for the next disaster.

Antony Funnell: Dr Irwin Redlener from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness in New York. This is Future Tense, I'm Antony Funnell.

Montage of Prepper voices:

Lone-wolf-like people generally don't survive long term.

Have a team of trust worthy, like-minded people that you can depend on.

Who is in your team and how many?

Survival comes down to the individual.

I am responsible for me.

Your decisions, your actions, they all have an impact on your survivability.

Prepare for anything that might come your way.

Hurricanes, wild fires…

Antony Funnell: Now, as we've heard, the Prepper movement is big in the United States, but it exists in many other countries as well. In Australia in recent years it's started to increase its visibility.

I want to introduce you now to two Australians involved in preparedness. One runs a website and the other a preparedness training course. The first is Joycelyn who lives in rural north Queensland and who operates an online preparedness portal called the Big River Trading Company. Her website offers advice on what she says are practical Prepper issues. And, just like her American counterpart Tom Martin, her philosophy is about greater individual responsibility.

Joycelyn Morris: The environment we live in out here, it is very dry, so we are prone to bushfires. We are also prone, being in North Queensland, to cyclones and the resultant impact of that which is flash-flooding and roads being cut off. So the resupply of food into the shops, that sort of thing, we have to…we've got to be prepared for this sort of thing.

Antony Funnell: In a region like northern Queensland, in a region like rural Queensland, people have always had to have a level of self-reliance, haven't they.

Joycelyn Morris: They have, that's true.

Antony Funnell: Is this much different from what previously happened in the past for people, particularly in rural areas? Is the Prepper movement in a sense just the continuation of that on scale because of new technology?

Joycelyn Morris: I think it is being compounded these days by the pressures of the financial problems, the stresses of getting by every day, week-to-week. And by looking towards the Prepper movement they encourage combining important aspects such as sustainable gardening, homesteading and survival, lessons from history even, and problem-solving using scenario-based solutions, in order to help them to get through these troubling times.

Antony Funnell: So this is not just about preparing for possible future disaster scenarios, it's also about efficiency, about sustainability, in a sense, isn't it.

Joycelyn Morris: Exactly, that's right. Preparedness covers a lot of bases. It puts you in a better situation so that you have got the tooling behind you or the skills or the knowledge so that you can prepare for any change in direction out there that comes your way.

Antony Funnell: And what sort of information are you trying to share with other people who are involved in preparedness training?

Joycelyn Morris: Practical solutions for the home. Honestly I really like the idea of creating dual purpose strategies and systems for in and around the home, so that in the event that you are affected by disaster you will be better able to cope and adapt quicker, and easier in the aftermath. Something like creating, say, an outdoor food preparation and eating area with alternative lighting out there and maybe a water tank so that you can wash your hands and prepare food, and it will be cool, because a lot of people sit in air-conditioned rooms and when you lose power it's very hot. So if you can be outside in a shelter where you can still…life can continue without the disruptions because we are so reliant on electricity, for instance. Every day we use electricity, so a disruption to that is a huge disruption in our life. So by creating these dual purpose systems within our home and working towards that, it's going to make life a little bit easier for everybody.

Antony Funnell: How many people are there now who follow the Big River Trading Co website?

Joycelyn Morris: It has increased obviously from when I first started. I guess it's got about 2,000 readers a week at this stage, which I do hope I can increase and get the word out there to help people understand there is somewhere you can go to get information and ideas and inspiration to help them better deal with disasters.

Antony Funnell: And it really does cover everything, doesn't it, from people's stories from their own experiences, almost testimonials, to links to where they can get equipment to be prepared for natural disasters, or indeed human-made disasters.

Joycelyn Morris: That's exactly right, yes.

Antony Funnell: Is it in that sense a typical Prepper website?

Joycelyn Morris: I don't think so. I've tried to blend it in into what Australians would like to see. Obviously Preppers cover those main categories but I would like to see a little bit more Australian input because I do believe Australians are uncomfortable with the word 'Prepper', I think the word 'preparedness' is probably more comfortable for them. But it does offer solutions to problems, problems that everybody can relate to when they do go through a disaster or a personal crisis, they can hopefully find ideas and solutions to help them get through them better.

Antony Funnell: Why are they are uncomfortable with the word 'Prepper' do you think?

Joycelyn Morris: I believe with the way it has been portrayed through the media and in movies, it's the extreme, they've really focused on that extreme situation because of the entertainment value, whereas basically if you keep it simple and practical, that's where we need to bring it back down to so that everybody can say, hey, that's not too bad, that's something I need in my life right now. It's just a little bit more attainable.

Antony Funnell: And that was Joycelyn from the Big River Trading Company website, speaking to me there from rural Queensland.

Rich Hungerford: The Prepper tag has a certain level of connotations associated with it in terms of this is an extreme fringe group of people, while large in numbers, have got a particular philosophy to dealing with adversity, which is bunker up, arm up and be prepared to fend off the masses against taking the stores that they've carefully prepared and squirrelled away.

Antony Funnell: Rich Hungerford is the second Australian we want to profile in today's show, and, as you can hear, he too is no fan of the Prepper nametag.

Rich Hungerford: My preference is to have more of a wider community resilience and a family resilience, and of an individual resilience, and that ruggedness that Australians historically have been renowned for, just being able to make do and being able to look after your mates in a tough situation. That to me is more in line of where we need to be in this country as opposed to each individual family building its own bunker and stocking it with rifles.

Antony Funnell: Rich knows a lot about survival training and being prepared. As a former SAS soldier he has skills that he now passes on to those who come to his preparedness training courses. His company is called Bush Lore Australia, a name that deliberately harks back to another age and a different mentality.

He teaches people how to fend for themselves in a hostile environment. He wants people to be more resilient, but what he's dead against is the sort of paranoia and self-interest that seems so much a part of the radical side of the Prepper movement.

Rich Hungerford: I think there's a lot of strength, a lot of that innate knowledge that our forefathers only a generation or so ago possessed, just being able to look after themselves, wire things together and fix it with a piece of wire and some electrical tape. A lot of our equipment and our technology prohibits that in any case, but there's still a large proportion of the way we think that could escalate us forward to deal with things in a far more comprehensive way and a far more self-reliant way. If we can just take that little bit of wisdom and make it relevant today I think we are going to do a lot of good in terms of making us less slave to needing to have someone come and help us out.

Antony Funnell: You not only believe that many of us in a country like Australia where we are exposed particularly to environmental threats or there's always the potential of an environmental disaster, particularly, say, a cyclone, that we are not as prepared as we should be. But you also believe, don't you, that sometimes we are selfish when disasters come on.

Rich Hungerford: Yes, and it just seems to be…and it's only my personal observations, I don't know if there's any statistics gathered about that whole subject area or form an evidence base for that type of conclusion, just sitting back and observing and listening when these events are affecting us, like bushfires in Victoria, Tasmania or South Australia or other major natural and man-made events that affect big population areas, you get these massive fantastic reports of great heroism, one person helping another or helping others.

And yet we seem to have much more…whether it's just the way it's put across by the media I'm not sure, but there's a lot of people performing selfish acts; looking after myself, looking after my family, I'm all right, let's get out of here and don't worry about everyone else. And to me that goes against the way I understand myself to be as an Australian citizen, which is that whole concept of mateship that we've always understood to be there, but I'd hate to see that dissipate in any way, shape or form, or even lessen, and would rather see it go the other way, to bond us further together as communities and as families.

Antony Funnell: So helping not just yourself but those around you as well.

Rich Hungerford: Yes.

G'day guys, it's Rich Hungerford from Bush Lore Australia. We've just run a basic wilderness survival course here at one of our venues and I thought we'd just take the opportunity to look at some of the shelters. These are emergency shelters built out of natural materials that the guys have put together…

Antony Funnell: Just going back to Bush Lore Australia itself, tell us about the sorts of people who want to come on a course, the sort of courses that you offer. What are they looking for and how diverse are they?

Rich Hungerford: Look, from a business owner perspective it's been incredibly difficult to nail down a target market group, which is basically what you are asking me. The reason it's so difficult is I have such a diverse group of attendees, from mums and dads to family groups to professional police officers to professional soldiers. So you've got that massive scope. There's definitely a heavy leaning of Australian males aged between 25 and 45 who are into hunting and outdoors or camping or just dads who want to be able to show their kids that they are not completely inept in the bush and they can light the fire like a professional and have all these mystical skills that their kids, when they are removed from their iPhones, can look up and go, 'Wow, Dad, that's really cool.' I get a lot of dads like that, and I get a lot of mums like that.

Antony Funnell: And I presume you must also get some people who are at that more extreme edge of things, of being prepared.

Rich Hungerford: Definitely, and until about a year ago I had no idea what a Prepper even was. I thought the things and skillsets that we had already been discussing that these guys regard as core to their philosophy were just commonsense, pragmatic measures that any good Australian citizen would take on. And when mother nature vented her fury on us, we sort of garnered ourselves together and we got it done because we had some preparedness behind us.

So the term 'Prepper' was this alien concept to me of 'what's that?" And after a little bit of self-education and discussing that view with some of these people who came on my courses…because obviously with my background and the attraction of wilderness skills that would facilitate their plan for dealing with a calamity in a city space, where they are going to run to the hills, literally, there was this element of attendees on courses that were heavily…I wouldn't say right-wing, but they were heavily engaged in that very, very intense Prepper mindset of; I'm storing a year's worth of food, I've got three months' worth of water, I've got solar power and I've got a backup generator and I've got a bug out plan and a bug out bag and a bug out car. These are all things I had to update myself on because a lot of them were just like, wow, that's intense.

Antony Funnell: So I presume you've got to employ a bit of psychology in dealing with people, not just at that extreme end but also people who are probably quite rightly fearful because of the sort of media coverage that we get about catastrophes around the world and disasters around the world.

Rich Hungerford: Yes, it's definitely apparent to people like me who probably work in this area that that fear is well and truly entrenched and it is no doubt fuelled by what they see in the media. I guess a lot of what I'm trying to do with the courses and stuff that I offer is to inject that sense of common sense and literally being more prepared as opposed to being paranoid. It's a terrible thing for people and communities at large to live in a state of paranoia and fearfulness, that's not a healthy environment. If they can be more comfortable with knowing that things are under control, can be under control, and by some simple shifts in the way they think they can be just more resilient generally, that takes them into that good Boy Scout mode, to be prepared, don't be scared.

Antony Funnell: Fear. 'Be prepared, don't be scared'. All of the people we've heard from on today's program not only see a need for people to be better prepared for future difficulties, they also warn against getting carried away, against letting fear rule one's life. And as Rich Hungerford indicated just before, that can be a challenge for some, given the sort of sensationalist media coverage that regularly floods our screens these days.

Our final guest today, with the final word, is Dr Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine. Not surprisingly, his advice to anyone fearful of the future is to be sceptical about what you read and hear, and keep it all in perspective.

Michael Shermer: Yes, people follow the news instead of the numbers. Things are really actually getting much better. There has never been a better time to be alive then now. But most of us, our brains are not designed to follow long-term trends, it's why people have a hard time grasping evolution and climate change because it happens gradually over long periods of time and you just don't see those long arcs. What you see is the news. Like tonight I guarantee the lead story on tonight's news here in Los Angeles will be the Ebola story. And so one person has died, one person has gotten Ebola, and yet 40 people will die of lightning strikes this year alone. That rarely makes the news. 675,000 people will die of heart disease in the United States.

And so we notice the weird things that stand out. And what the Preppers are tapping into is that kind of 'if it bleeds it leads', and that's fuelled by talk radio. Conservative talk radio in the States here, in the course of an hour you will hear at least half a dozen commercials for gold, for silver, for various products you should invest in and buy that will prepare you for when the federal government is going to collapse. Now, I'm old enough…I just turned 60, I'm old enough to remember this going all the way back to the '70s, these kinds of stories, and yet the government has not yet collapsed and the doomsday has not come. And at some point you've got to step back and go, okay, wait a minute, maybe these people are wrong. But the problem is most people don't step back and take the long perspective, they just listen to what they hear in the immediate environment. And churches fuel this as well. Conservative evangelical churches definitely believe in the end times, Jesus is coming and soon. It's a mindset of there's a cycle to history and we are about to come to the end of a cycle. And that, in conjunction with the internet…there are all sorts of sites you can go on and order your own bomb shelters and have them delivered and all these doomsday kits, and there's money to be made in it and that fuels it as well.

Antony Funnell: Dr Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine, ending this week's Future Tense.

Thanks to producer Wendy Zukerman and sound engineer Peter McMurray. I'm Antony Funnell, cheers and bye for now.

© Australian Broadcasting Company

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Guests

Tom Martin
Tom Martin is the founder of the American Preppers Network, a network of blogs that inspires Americans to become more self sufficient.
Rich Hungerford
Rich Hungerford is an Australian based survival expert who runs Bushlore Australia, a wilderness survival school training people in survival techniques for when stranded in the bush and following disasters.
Dr Irwin Redlener
Dr Irwin Redlener is the founder and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Earth Institute.
Joycelyn Morris
Joycelyn is a prepper and owner/manager of the Big River Trading Co in Queensland.
Dr Michael Shermer
Dr Michael Shermer is a science writer and the founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine. He is also author of The Believing Brain, which looks at how the Brain constructs beliefs and reinforces them as truths.