Some thoughts in no particular order.


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The name of the site is "Equipped to Survive" not "Trained to Survive" or "Fit to Survive". There are many issues involved in survival that go beyond tools. Any set of skills properly practiced and combined with whatever extensive set of tools imagineable will do little good for an insulin dependant diabetic who is long separated from his medication or the extremely overweight individual who can't walk a mile a day without compromising his cardiac health.

There is no human survival for long without tools. The only reason us small, week, naked mammals are at the top of the food chain is that we learned to make and use tools. Without that one talent we are doomed. The question is more rightly put - Can you make the tools you need if you aren't carrying them?

There are situations that are dire enough that we will not be able to prepare for them in anyway - skills, training or gear. When armeggedon / nuclear war / asteroid strike / extreme tectonic activity / TEOTWAKI finally comes it will be few who survive and it won't be through prior preparation but grace / luck / coincidence.

There are situations that (due to our own circumstances) we consider unlikely enough that we won't bother to prepare for them. The urbanite in Manhattan will not suddenly find himself so distant from society that he needs to fish for survival unless he has planned a trip out of the city. The rural farmer will not suddenly find the need for rapelling out of a skyscraper.

The basics of Warm, Dry, Fed and Whole are required for any human to survive. For each of us we must look at what we have and who we are and best determine how we are to prepare to maintain the basics in the face of whatever potential disasters we may think are likely enough to be bothered preparing for. For some of us the idea of learning to rapel from a burning skyscraper or base-jumping is a more valid survival skill of everyday need than the ability to make a fire by rubbing two boy-scouts together. For others the ability to stay hydrated while lost at sea is far more important than anything else. For some, loosing a hundred pounds and getting strong enough to lift our BOB and carry it for a mile is more important than even having the BOB. For some, the most important part of the kit is a months supply of a needed medication (insulin, nitro-glycerin etc.)

I often think that a good side forum here could be "Fit to survive" where we could focus our discussions on the physical training aspects of being ready to survive in a stressful survival situation. Another could be "Survival Skills" Where the focus could be on urban and wilderness skills that are needed to get by without gear or to properly use the gear that we are collecting. As we discussed on this forum recently in a thread on fire-starting, even a pocket full of gadgets won't make a fire for you if you haven't practiced using them in adverse conditions. Even using tools requires a bit of skill and to rely upon the gadgets is similar to blaming the gun for the homicide. It is the will and skill of the sentient being using the tool that determines the outcome of tool use.
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