When the World Economic Forum does something, you should probably pay attention. Every year, world leaders and their billionaire ventriloquists meet in Davos, Switzerland, and make plans for the rest of humanity.

They’re the makers of “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

Well, they decided to make 2026 “the year of water.”

Yay.

Back in January, the UN declared a global “water bankruptcy” and started calling for radical solutions to the water crisis. The American West is currently facing its worst drought in more than a thousand years. Areas across the country are going through their worst shortages since the Dust Bowl. It’s hitting Europe, too. Right now, the Danube is so low that WWII shipwrecks are surfacing.

All this includes me. We’re no longer in hypotheticals. As data centers gulp down our water, local officials tell us to take shorter showers.

We decided to stop doomscrolling and do something about it. In fact, my family has spent the last several years trying to come up with a way to make some form of rain harvesting viable out in the American suburbs. I’ve been working on this project all summer, and it’s done. We perfected our setup. If you’ve read previous versions of this post, you’ll want to read this latest version. If nothing else, it’s got a much snazzier breakdown of all the contaminants our lab tested for.

Harvesting rain isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds.

But it’s doable.

Australia gets it

You see, nearly 80 percent of homes in the U.S. use asphalt shingles for roofing material. Compare that to a country like Australia, where they make up less than 5 percent. Most homes down under have metal roofs.

They’re designed to endure the harsher conditions. As such, Australia has normalized rainwater harvesting. Roughly 1 out of 4 homes in Australia has a rainwater tank. In rural areas, they’re a common sight.

Meanwhile…

Americans have defaulted to poisonous asphalt shingle roofs because they’re easier and cheaper to slap on a home. They don’t last nearly as long, and they’re terrible for harvesting rainwater. The standard asphalt shingle roof contains petroleum byproducts and hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals, and arsenic.

We tried to hire rainwater specialists in the U.S. to help us install a rainwater harvesting system. They declined.

“Don’t bother,” they said.

Because asphalt shingles have become the default, metal roofs cost a lot more to install. That leaves 80 percent of homes with very limited options during a true longterm emergency or a disaster that hits the water supply. You can only store so much water in a home, and it’s not practical. Water takes up a lot of space. It’s heavy. Most homes don’t really have a great place to put a few hundred gallons of water. Tanks and cisterns cost a fortune. Even if you can find a way to get them on the cheap, there’s the whole poisonous chemical problem.

Complicating matters further, most counties and cities won’t let you harvest rain from a shingle roof for regular drinking water while staying connected to the grid. You’re either on the water grid, or you’re off. You can try to live in both worlds, but it’s a dizzying labyrinth of regulations. If you just want to harvest rainwater and use it for emergencies, you’re kinda SOL. You have a toxic roof. You have no infrastructure or culture to work with. You’re on your own.

We found a way.

If you can’t move to Australia

We couldn’t afford to install a metal roof, and we couldn’t afford to move to Australia. So we came up with a plan that works.

We found a way to harvest rain from our poisonous shingle roof and transform it into drinkable water for emergencies. We installed rain barrels. We made a filtration system with a portable pump and hoses. We treated the water with a homemade chlorine product. We sent a sample to a lab that analyzed it for 100+ contaminants, including VOCs, heavy metals, and bacteria. It passed.

This plan isn’t for wannabe survivalists. It’s the real deal. It’s going to take a little work, but it’s doable. It’s cost-effective. We’re going to explain it in detail, step by step, so that it’s simple to replicate.

Let’s get into it:

First, dig out your foundation

Add paver base and paver sand. This step helps you level the ground and provide a good substructure for your rain barrels. You want to dig below the topsoil and into the harder clay. If it’s too hard, soak the area with a hose and leave it for 24 hours. You can also use a pickaxe, but don’t swing it overhead like they do in the movies. Use it more like a hoe. Letting a 5 lb mattock drop into the ground will help break it up. Use a level to get the bare dirt as even as possible, but understand that the paver base helps the most. Tamp it down. You can get paver base from any hardware store. You’ll need at least eight bags. Get ten to be safe.

Next, put down your pavers and cinderblocks.

We used 24 x 16 inch pavers for the base. They’re heavy as hell (50 lbs), but they’re worth it to create a large, even footprint. Lay cinderblocks on top. Two cinderblocks with one turned perpendicular match the paver size. The cinderblocks give you the clearance for hooking up hoses, filling up buckets, etc. You’ll put another layer of pavers on top for a smooth surface.

Prepare your gutters

Remove the bottom section of gutter. You’ll probably have to unscrew the downspout straps. You might be able to simply reconfigure your gutter pieces like the image shown above. We placed our barrels 2 feet away from the house to help protect the foundation. We wound up using a hacksaw on a piece of downspout to get the right length. It can be frustrating to cut gutter, but it works. We tried aviation snips, but a hacksaw provided the cleanest cut. If you don’t want to mess with cutting gutter, you can buy pre-cut lengths from places like Gutterworks.

Make sure to measure the gutter heights. You want a few inches of space between the barrel and the gutter exit. Remember that your gutter will be heading down at a 75-degree angle. Don’t use a 90-degree elbow.

Some people skip this step and just buy diverter kits. We couldn’t find a diverter kit with consistent reviews. Biggest complaint: They’re either flimsy, or they don’t collect much rain during light showers. We’re building for extreme droughts, which means a free-flowing gutter. We also skipped the first flush. My full illustrated guide talks about them, but we opted for something simpler.

Many rain barrels come with screened holes, but you might want an extra layer of protection. You can buy barrel nets that fit over the entire top part of the barrel. They’re easy to put on. All the debris from the first gutter gush ends up on the net. You just pull it off and shake it.

Get your barrels

You can buy rain barrels from almost any hardware or big box store now. We decided to go with Epoch. They have a strong reputation. They use upcycled food barrels. Ours arrived clean, with all the parts already installed. We could’ve drilled out the holes ourselves, but it can be a real hassle if you’re also digging a foundation and working on other projects. These are tough barrels that will last a long time, and that’s the goal. They’ll take a beating. Remember, these things will be holding hundreds of pounds of water when they’re full.

You can link the barrels at the top and bottom to ensure they fill at the same time. Just add hose splitters to the faucets. Get a short hose for the top link. You can cut it and then add a female hose repair to the other end. You technically only need one splitter, but two means you can draw water from either barrel.

Add a more serious overflow

Unfortunately, most preconfigured barrels come with tiny garden hose outlets for the overflow. They’re not going to handle a major storm or a flash flood if you’re using a free-flowing gutter. Companies assume most people will be using a diverter kit. If you’re using a full gutter, then you need a bigger overflow.

We did the math and arrived at a 2-inch hose. Combined with our two-barrel system, it can handle up to 3 or even 3.5 inches of rain per hour. Believe it or not, even during a drought, you can expect flash floods. You don’t want floods spilling rain over your barrels and into the foundation you dug.

It’s not easy to find a 2-inch heavy duty hose, but we finally got one from Gloxco with a male NPT nipple. It’ll fit right into a 2” bulkhead union. For that, we’re drilling a 3-inch hole on the backside, just the first barrel. Yes, you drill a 3-inch hole for a 2-inch bulkhead union. That’s how it works.

Here’s a closeup shot of the hose splitters. Pretty standard. But if you want a heavy duty one that’s lead-free, try Morvat.

The first filter setup

Now we’re going to walk you through the trial-and-error process for getting the pump and filters set up. That way, you’ll understand it all better.

(It’s called scaffolding.)

The hardest part was coming up with a way to filter the roofwater. Most of the filtration systems we looked at were expensive and impractical on a budget. Then we got the idea to use a battery pump.

It was a gamechanger.

This portable battery pump gave us the pressure and gallons per minute (gpm) needed to push the water through inline hose filters you see in the image above. Just to be crystal clear, no, you can’t rely on gravity to push the water through these filters. You need a heavy-duty pump. Ideally, you need one with a battery you can take out and charge on a solar backup system. It’s a major plus. It makes the system much more resilient during power outages.

• First, add a 60-mesh hose filter to the pump intake. This step keeps grit from the barrel water from ruining the pump. The phrase “60 mesh” means 60 openings per inch of screen. You can go as high as 400, but don’t. If the screen is too fine, it can choke pumps and deflect water.

• Uxcell and Giex sell reliable brands of garden hose sediment filters.

• Next, a Camco TastePure filter (20 micron) acts as a sacrificial first defense. It removes finer sediment. It also strips out some of the VOCs and heavy metals. Its main job is to protect the other filters.

• The Envig Catalytic KDF55 uses a stronger type of carbon that strips out a lot more VOCs and heavy metals.

• The Clear2O does a final sediment mop-up to catch anything that got through the first two filters, including any carbon particles.

These filters don’t strip out any viruses or bacteria. They do prefiltering for our gravity-fed setup at the end. You can add a little bleach (about 1 ounce) to each full barrel to help knock out those threats early. Be careful. Bleach can interact with roof runoff to create toxic byproducts. You can also use HOCl. It’s safer, more effective, and it won’t ruin your clothes.

The good news:

All of these filters use garden hose thread. They come with garden hose attachments. So does the pump. You don’t have to fuss with adapters.

Simple.

The second filter setup

We improved on the first filter setup in a few ways.

First, we added a Sawyer Tap to the end. It’s a tight little .1 micron filter that also features a garden hose thread for easy attachment. The .1 micron filter blocks 99.99 percent of bacteria and other threats like Giardia and Cryptosporidium. It also stops microplastics and fiberglass dust that can shed from a shingle roof. One of the only things it doesn’t stop: viruses. (For that, we use a gravity system, discussed later.) Even better, this filter costs around $30 or $40, and it doesn’t need replacements. You can clean it by reversing the water flow.

We also added a pressure release hose.

The more filters you add, the more backpressure risk you add to your pump. That can strain the motor and cause damage. We bypassed this problem by adding another Morvat hose splitter on the pump outlet. Route one spigot into your filter lineup. Route the other back to your barrel.

This way, your pump pushes as much water into the filters as they can handle. The excess goes back to your source. That’s especially important if you’re going to use submicron filters.

Problem solved.

The third setup

Portable electric pumps offer convenience, but you might wind up in an emergency with no power, not even solar panels to charge a battery.

That’s why we got a manual pump.

It took a long time to find something capable of delivering the right pressure to push through 3-4 different inline filters, but we finally landed on the Bosworth Guzzler. There’s a model with a short handle for around a hundred bucks. It’s moderately hard to operate. We shelled out the extra money for the upgraded version with an extended handle, because… who knows? Maybe we’ll get injured. Maybe our kid will wind up needing to run the pump. The upgraded version makes operation way easier. If you order a Guzzler, you can choose garden hose threads for the native ports. With the manual pump, you have a lot more control over the pressure and flow. You’ll still probably want to add a 60-mesh sediment filter to the inlet.

Add your collection tank

The filter line feeds into a bucket. We got 2-gallon and 5-gallon foodsafe buckets from Leaktite. Some days, you’ll want to filter several gallons. Other days, you’ll just want something light. For the hoses, we went with Camco 4-ft premium RV drinking hoses. They’re foodsafe. You don’t want to run standard garden hoses into your pump or your bucket. They can reintroduce contaminants.

On the filter end, if you need any adapters, look for ones made with lead-free brass or 304 steel. That way, you keep it all clean.

If you want something bigger than a 2-gallon bucket, Epoch sells 17-gallon mini rain barrels. We got one. The plan: Fill it up once a week by running the pump. Use the filtered water for growing food. We can also collect drinking water from it during an emergency if we need to do that.

The fourth & final setup

If you’re setting up your filters and taking them down every few days, that can turn into a real chore. We learned that firsthand. You can avoid a lot of the headache by using a 3-stage RV filter frame with universal housings.

Benefits: It’s a lot faster to set up and take down. You can replace the original filters with any 10 x 2.5 inch filters from any brand. That’s a good thing, because it means you can experiment a little with different filtration options. For example, we found something even better than the Sawyer Tap, which has a tendency to slide off under intense pressure. In the fourth setup, we’re using a .01 micron filter from Envig. That’s ultrafiltration, baby. It catches bacteria, cysts, parasites, and fine particles. It’s a powerful addon to KDF 55 carbon.

Like the other components, these come with native garden hose threads (just to keep things simple). We got ours from iSpring, the CW31. We also got a carrying case from Clearsource, but it’s not completely necessary. The RV filter system is compact, but it’s just heavy enough (16 pounds dry) that you might want to think about a way to make lugging it around a little easier.

Once we’re done with our inline filters, we’re probably moving to this streamlined setup to make everything more manageable.

We tried it, and…

We like it.

Quick tip: storing the filters

When you’re not using your filters, store them in a fridge to control bacterial growth. It’s best to use a separate mini fridge. It might sound like a hassle, but it’s worth it to protect the filters.

The final stage: gravity filtration & HOCl

The first set of filters removes heavy metals and VOCs, along with sediment. They don’t remove viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. The Sawyer Tap .1 micron filter can’t get the viruses, even though it stops the rest. Even the Envig .01 micron filter doesn’t stop all viruses. So we needed a final stage.

That’s where the gravity-fed systems come in. We spent a long time untangling all the claims and ad copy to find out which gravity filters actually do what they say. We looked at several different brands.

Ultimately, we went with Alexapure.

There was one last problem we had to deal with: Our filtered water kept triggering home bacteria tests. We finally figured out why. Basically, unchlorinated water will almost always trip a bacteria test. We didn’t want to just shrug it off. That’s what a hobbyist prepper would do.

So, we added a HOCl treatment. If you’re not familiar, HOCl is a powerful disinfectant that your own body makes to fight pathogens. I’ve written about it before. It has an established reputation in food safety. Hypochlorous acid (HOCl) is a free chlorine that’s already used to treat water during emergencies. We scoured various state health departments and university pages to arrive at this: You can shock-treat water with HOCL at 100-200 ppm to ensure that you’re killing any viruses or bacteria that made it through the filtration process.

So, we added 1/4 - 1/3 cup of HOCl (200 ppm) to every 1 gallon of water to kill any remaining viruses or bacteria. The lower dose (1/4 cup) takes us to roughly 3 ppm of free chlorine, considered safe for drinking. The higher dose (1/3 cup) takes us to roughly 4.08 ppm, just barely over the 4 ppm threshold. So if we stay within that range, we’ll maximize pathogen killing and stay in the safe zone.

People have asked us which type of HOCl generator we use. We’ve been using the Eco One for about a year, with test strips. It works.

You probably don’t want to add HOCl to your gravity-fed system, because it’s corrosive over time. So, we added a second container. We’re using a 2-gallon sports cooler. Just open your gravity spigot and pour it right in. We keep the cooler next to our Alexapure. We fill the cooler.

Then we add the HOCl.

The lab test results

We sent a sample of our filtered rainwater to a lab for testing. We used Tap Score’s “advanced rainwater test,” which looks for more than 100 different toxins including heavy metals, VOCs, and bacteria.

And drumroll…

It’s clean.

No VOCs. No heavy metals. No bacteria. Everything falls right in line with the EPA’s federal MCLG (maximum contaminant level goal). It’s a strict, unenforceable guideline that many municipalities strive for. So, our water might even be cleaner than what comes out of many taps.

Take a look:

Our conclusion:

This plan works. We like it. We’re not going to drink this water every day, but we have a system ready to deploy for longterm disasters.

The entire setup costs about $1,000. Once you’ve set it up, you’ll spend a few hundred bucks a year to replace all the filters if you’re using them continuously. You could save money if you only use them for emergencies.

If you’re only using them for emergencies, you have to follow the instructions that come with the filters for safely storing them.

All told, it’s a fraction of what a full system would cost if you installed a metal roof and hired professionals. If we wanted to install a metal roof with a cistern and a pro filtration system, connected to our plumbing, that would easily run $30,000 - $50,000 to get the whole thing in place.

One can dream…

But that’s the whole point. We don’t have time to daydream about our perfect survival setup. We can’t just sit in envy of Australians, where they’ve normalized rain collection. We have to do the best we can where we are.

If you can’t afford this on a single budget, consider crowdsourcing it. A small group could share pumps and filters.

I’ve done my best to list all the specific parts and brands we used for the project. I’ve started keeping detailed lists of parts and supplies for all of our survival projects on this site. All of this information is free. I’m not doing this for commissions. We don’t use affiliate links. We’re not making any money off the sales. People have just asked for me to be as specific as possible, and I’m honoring that.

Do whatever you want with it.

It would be great if we could start normalizing rain harvesting. Maybe one day, we’ll be more like Australia. This is where it starts.

Wells can run dry. Reservoirs take a long time to recharge. After fifteen minutes of rain, we have 100+ gallons of water. We’ve had water during one of the worst droughts in our community’s history.

It sounds like a lot of work, and it sounds expensive. Well, it’s all relative, and it all depends on how badly you want to live. If you don’t want to do any of this, feel free to place your faith in the hands of the billionaire ventriloquists at Davos. Celebrate the “year of water.” I’m sure they’ve got your back.

We decided to try something else.

It worked.

Well, here we go again…

Weeks after a dude went viral for telling everyone to stop paying their mortgage because we were going to have a famine in July, yet another survival article has gone viral, racking up more than a thousand fans in a few days.

It tells me something:

People are waking up to the idea of prepping. It’s just sad that they’re choosing to promote this kind of content to the exclusion of everything else.

What’s wrong with it?

We could talk about the problems all day, but I’ll skip to the heart of the matter. Down at the bottom, this article links to a clickbait video promising to teach you “a simple method that could help generate water even during extreme drought.” Like most clickbait videos, it takes forever to get to the point.

Well, I managed to make it through the entire thing.

What’s the secret?

It’s a water generator, something we’ve talked about in this newsletter for years. It’s not classified information. The government isn’t trying to scrub it from the web, as the article claims. That’s all nonsense.

The so-called innovator of this system makes you wade through his entire life story before finally plugging his digital book. The book tells you how to make a DIY water generator with simple parts.

That’s interesting…

Because I explain the same setup here. I didn’t invent it from scratch. The idea has been around for a while. We modified it. We tested the results. If you want an even more sophisticated filtration system, you can look at the setup I talk about here.

At first, I second-guessed myself. Surely I didn’t just tell everyone exactly how to make a DIY water generator for free, in one article, in the same way that a dude takes an entire video and a 180-page book to explain.

So I bought the book.

And…

Yep, it’s pretty much the same thing. The “water freedom system” tells you to go out and buy a new dehumidifier, then walks you through a complicated series of steps to rig it up with a filtration system and storage tanks.

It’s not just about the link promoted down at the bottom. It’s the entire disposition. It’s all the AI peppered in. This is problematic.

That’s what you get from survival slop.

Survival slop doesn’t actually show you how to survive. It markets the idea of survival. It sponges up half your day just to explain what a water generator does, then tricks you into thinking you can build one for less than two hundred bucks, as long as you buy their guide. Well, you can’t. I actually made one, and it cost a little bit more than that. Mine works. We tested it. Simplicity is the superpower.

Closets full of rice and beans won’t save you without a rotation system. We actually explain how to build one here. Oh, and you also might want to know a few different ways to cook those rice and beans.

I’m not here to beat up on one single article. I’m here to point out a problem with the fact that these articles continue to go viral while content that goes deeper and further continues to get so little support by comparison. I’m here to talk about why the people who shower this kind of work with so much praise regard the rest of the survival and sustainability canon with so much animosity.

So, look, I’ll just say this:

Last year, my family decided we were going to learn how to actually survive in a suburban hellscape. We were going to learn how to grow food. We were going to learn how to harvest water. We were going to learn how to address problems like sanitation without running water or electricity.

We were going to prepare for disasters. We were going to learn how to do it without moving out to the country. We were going to do it right here.

We did it.

Sometime later this month, we’ll install two hot composting bins that won’t piss off our neighbors, and that will be the end of phase one. Of course, there’s going to be a phase two, and a phase three, and a phase four. But phase one is probably the hardest part. It’s the part we didn’t think was possible.

What bothers me so much about survival slop is the lie. It’s the fact that some dude is taking up all the oxygen in the room, making misleading claims, leading people down deadend paths, selling false comforts, and doing it while perpetuating the very systems that are accelerating the collapse.

Real survival doesn’t have to cost a fortune. But it’s also not cheap. It’s not impossible. But it’s also not easy. Sometimes, the hard part isn’t making a humanure compost pile. It’s making one in a neighborhood where everyone else has a manicured lawn. It’s not stockpiling food. It’s figuring out how you’re going to share your food without attracting unwanted attention.

I’m sorry, but “don’t tell anyone about your stockpiles” isn’t going to work when your neighbors start to realize, halfway through the famine, that you don’t ever seem hungry or stressed. You’re going to need a plan for that.

I don’t think guns will work. Are you going to shoot every single person in your neighborhood, including their kids? Are you going to barricade yourself in your house and let them all eat each other?

I just wanna know…

This is what real preppers are thinking about. It’s an investment. You have to make that investment. You can’t just share an article or make vague plans to buy rice and beans and think you’re being sustainable.

This is my project, and it doesn’t involve filling closets with spam or pretending that I’m a genius for plugging a dehumidifier into a bucket stack and hiding it behind endless walls of clickbait. My journey was funded by AKET, an organization that sees the value in this kind of work. It’s free.

You’re welcome.

It came from the attic. It didn’t mean us any harm.

I almost walked right into the thing.

In the middle of the night, a black widow rappelled into our hallway and started making its way toward the living room. I trapped it in a jar. In the morning, I called our pest control company.

Do you know what the guy said to me?

“Are you sure it’s a black widow?”

“It’s really unlikely.”

That’s the kind of reaction intelligent women around the world have come to expect. It’s why I trapped the widow. So I sent photos. He said wow, it really was a black widow. He said he’d call back with treatment plans. He was almost certain that we were overreacting. It wasn’t a problem.

He never called back.

At this point, I decided to post about it online. What a great idea. Instantly, a dozen strangers all had expert opinions on what I should do.

They agreed I was overreacting. A black widow in your house? No big deal. So-and-so grew up with them everywhere. Just check your shoes each and every time you put them on. And your bed. And your closet. And your laundry. Grow up. Stop being so fragile and precious. Learn to live with widows.

Someone else consulted AI.

The AI told them the risk of death posed by black widow bites remained low, almost zero. You probably won’t die, as long as you get to a hospital fast enough. Only 33.5 percent of widow bites require medical treatment. Only 1.4 percent experience “life-threatening complications.” Only 1.4 percent.

Yet another person killed their subscription. He sent me a long note explaining how disappointed he was that I was “scared” of spiders. He had some parting advice. I should just carry a stick with me and warn the widows I was coming by rattling it around corners and crevices. That’s what he did when he went camping with his friends, out in the woods (i.e., not his house).

It reminded me of something:

This is how the world deals with threats. They see one threat. They shrug. They don’t want to overreact. That’s what they care about. They don’t care about letting a problem spiral out of control. They care about how they look. They want to let it spiral out of control before they do anything about it. Then they wring their hands and tell everyone about what a serious problem they have.

This is not how I managed threats, and it makes me an outlier. It makes me weird. It makes me unpopular. But it also keeps my family… alive.

So, we got a new pest control company.

The new pest control company arrived the same day. Wouldn’t you know, they started finding more black widows. On the house. In the attic. They found old, ragged insulation with potential egg sacs. It was hard to tell. The insulation looked like one big egg sac. This is where textbooks conflict with experience. Textbooks say widows don’t like to lay eggs in insulation. Experienced pest control experts tell you, it depends. Black widows lay eggs where they can.

“It’s a ticking time bomb,” one of them said.

“I’d call that up there a death trap.”

So, we dealt with it.

We’ll never know what would’ve happened.

We’ll never know how many black widows would’ve moved into our house. We’ll never know how many times they would’ve bitten my daughter or me in the middle of the night. We’ll never know how many times they would’ve bitten one of our cats. We’ll never know if we’d wound up in that 1.4 percent.

We do know…

A big portion of society doesn’t take black widows seriously, not when they’re living in your house. They’re quick to downplay the threat. They’re happy to sit around and throw numbers at you. They’re content to consult AI and memories of camping trips to give you advice from their phone. They’re perfectly at peace to wait and see what happens to you. After all, it’s not their problem.

It’s yours.

Maybe you see the analogy.

Personally, I would’ve liked to live in a world where we would never know how fascist America could become. I would’ve preferred to never know what a war with Iran would look like. I would’ve loved a future where we never knew how bad the climate crisis could’ve gotten. What a nice world.

Instead, we’re finding out the hard way.

You see?

It starts with one black widow. It starts with one fascist politician. It starts with one outbreak. It starts with one piece of misinformation.

This is the story of my life.

You’d think we would learn. We don’t. The same people telling you how bad fascism is now are telling you to live with black widows. They’re telling you to live with all the other threats. They can only deal with the threats they allowed to explode into everyone’s lives. They act like heroes cleaning up their own mess, the mess you tried to warn them not to make in the first place.

On that note…

It’s been a rough week in a rough year. I’ll get right to the point. After I posted about the issues that matter most to me—issues that should matter to the rest of the world—this newsletter lost nearly a hundred subscribers.

Over the last 12 months, my newsletters have shed almost 1,000 paying subscribers. Absconding readers often send me a note explaining why they’re leaving. It’s not their finances. It’s not the content.

It’s not my writing.

They often make a point of telling me how valuable they find my work, as a preamble to airing a petty grievance that’s driving them away. It always comes down to the same thing. I tried to warn them about a black widow.

They found that…

Unacceptable.

But I’m not going to stop talking about things that make people uncomfortable. I’m not going to pretend we only have one threat to deal with. I’m not going to act like you’re saving the world because you attended a No Kings protest, while not wearing a medical mask, or because you liked a post from some flunkie journalist promising to take on corruption somewhere. I’m not going to pretend our problems will get better once Trump dies or leaves office. I’m not going to act like JD Vance doesn’t still have a fairly good shot at winning in 2028. I’m not going to act like Trump won’t try to run. I’m not going to pretend his base is fragmenting. I’m not going to speculate about his health or mental state. That’s amateur hour.

Dismissing threats is how we wound up where we are. I’m not here to dismiss threats. I’m here to explain them and deal with them. I’m here to talk about the world as it actually is, not how I want it to be.

Aren’t you?

Right now, everyone is dealing with threats some of us tried to warn them about years ago. They’re not listening to us about the ones that just rappelled into the hallway. They don’t seem to care about rain harvesting or composting toilets. Once again, they see the one black widow and shrug. They call us crazy.

It wasn’t like my life was going just cottagecore before a black widow infestation. It wasn’t like I was bored. I had other problems and responsibilities. But this is how responsible adults behave. When you see a new threat, you deal with it. You don’t shrug it off. You don’t ignore it. You don’t rationalize it away. You don’t fantasize about a zombie apocalypse while black widows are laying eggs in your house. You have to hold multiple things in your head.

You deal with them.

This old mindset has to change. We live in a completely different era now. You can’t deal with one threat at a time anymore. You have to see how they’re entwined, like that mess in our attic. You have to deal with all of it.

Some of you already see what I’m saying. If nothing else, I hope this personal fable provides you with a little relief. You’re not the only one who sees the world this way. You’re not the only one who would rather live in a world where we never knew how bad things would get, because we dealt with them.

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Thanks for sticking around.

It’s a real buzzkill to watch all these prepper videos on YouTube show you how to build a rain harvesting system, only to realize that you can’t do it. Why? The rainwater from your shingle roof contains an ungodly amount of deadly toxins and poisons. Or maybe it doesn’t. But it probably does. We kept getting different answers. We emailed some rain harvesting specialists a few years ago and asked them if there was any way to do it. They said, “Don’t bother…” That felt conclusive.

Like I said, a real buzzkill…

And then there’s all the survival and homesteading guides that kinda tell you how to build a rain harvesting system, but not really…

My family brainstormed, but we kept running into walls. Then finally, we started piecing together a plan. After all, we’re not interested in drinking rainwater every day. We don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cisterns, pumps, and special plumbing. We don’t want to ditch the grid just yet. We just want a simple backup water source for emergencies, and now would be the time. If you’ve been going through the same frustrations, hitting the same dead ends, then maybe this post will help. We’re laying out the plan in maximum detail. We barely got any rain last week, and our barrels have already filled up. 100 gallons.

Since our first update, we got our lab results back from Tap Score. They analyzed the water for 100+ contaminants common in roofwater. It’s clean, with one exception, and we already found a solution. If you just want the results, then scroll down to the last section. Otherwise, start here.

Let’s get into it:

First, dig out your foundation. Add paver base and paver sand. This step helps you level the ground and provide a good substructure for your barrels. You want to dig below the topsoil and into the harder clay. If it’s too hard, soak the area with a hose and leave it for 24 hours. You can also use a pickaxe, but don’t swing it overhead like they do in the movies. Use it more like a hoe. Letting a 5 lb mattock drop into the ground will help break it up. Use a level to get the bare dirt as even as possible, but know that the paver base helps the most. Tamp it down.

We used 24 x 16 inch pavers for the base. They’re heavy as hell (50 lbs), but they’re worth it to create a large, even footprint. Lay cinderblocks on top. Two cinderblocks with one turned perpendicular match the paver size. The cinderblocks give you the clearance for hooking up hoses, filling up buckets, etc. You’ll put another layer of pavers on top for a smooth surface.

Remove the bottom section of gutter. You’ll probably have to unscrew downspout straps. You might be able to simply reconfigure your gutter pieces like the image shown above. We placed our barrels 2 feet away from the house to help protect the foundation. We wound up using a hacksaw on a downspout to get the right length. It can be frustrating to cut gutter, but it works. We tried aviation snips, but a hacksaw provided the cleanest cut. If you don’t want to mess with cutting gutter, you can buy precut lengths from places like Gutterworks.

Make sure to measure the gutter heights. You want a few inches of space between the barrel and the gutter exit. Remember that your gutter will be heading down at a 75-degree angle. Don’t use a 90-degree elbow.

Water will pool…

Some people skip this step and just buy diverter kits. We couldn’t find a diverter kit with consistent reviews. Biggest complaint: They’re either flimsy, or they don’t collect much rain during light showers. We’re building for extreme droughts, which means a free-flowing gutter. We also skipped the first flush. My full illustrated guide talks about them, but we opted for something simpler.

You can buy barrel nets that fit over the entire top part of the barrel. They’re easy to put on. All the debris from the first gutter gush ends up on the net. You just pull it off and shake it. Your barrels will also have a mesh screen over the top entry hole. It’s two layers of protection.

You can buy rain barrels from almost any hardware or big box store now. We decided to go with Epoch. They have a strong reputation. They use upcycled food barrels. Ours arrived clean, with all the parts already installed. We could’ve drilled out the holes ourselves, but it can be a real hassle if you’re also digging a foundation and working on other projects. These are tough barrels that will last a long time, and that’s the goal. They’ll take a beating. Remember, these things will be holding hundreds of pounds of water when they’re full.

You can link the barrels at the top and bottom to ensure they fill at the same time. Just add hose splitters to the faucets. Get a short hose for the top link. You can cut it and then add a female hose repair to the other end. You technically only need one splitter, but two means you can draw water from either barrel. The second barrel is probably going to have the cleaner water.

Unfortunately, most preconfigured barrels come with tiny garden hose outlets for the overflow. They’re not going to handle a major storm or a flash flood if you’re using a free-flowing gutter. Companies assume most people will be using a diverter kit. If you’re using a full gutter, then you need a bigger overflow. We did the math and arrived at a 2-inch hose. Combined with our two-barrel system, it can handle up to 3 or even 3.5 inches of rain per hour. Believe it or not, even during a drought, you can expect some pretty intense surges. That’s part of the problem. The rain comes in short bursts and flash floods. It’s not steady. You don’t want a flood to send water gushing over the top of your barrels. It’ll soak your foundation and ruin all that hard work. It’s not easy to find a 2-inch heavy duty hose, but we finally got one from Gloxco with a male NPT nipple. It’ll fit right into a 2” bulkhead union. For that, we’re drilling a 3-inch hole on the backside, just the first barrel.

A closeup of the hose splitters. Pretty standard. But if you want a heavy duty one that’s lead-free, try Morvat.

The hardest part was coming up with a way to filter the roofwater. Most pump systems we looked at were expensive and impractical on a budget. Then we got the idea to use a battery pump. It would give us the pressure and gpm needed to push the water through inline hose filters. While a battery pump will ultimately overheat and die if you run it like this for hours, we’re not doing that. We’re running the pump long enough to fill up a bucket for emergency drinking water. Or we’re running it long enough to feed our plants with a soaker hose. That’s 10-15 minutes max. The filter setup looks complicated, but it’s not that bad.

• First, add a 60-mesh hose filter to the pump intake. This step keeps grit from the barrel water from ruining the pump. The phrase “60 mesh” means 60 openings per inch of screen. You can go as high as 400, but don’t. If the screen is too fine, it can choke pumps and deflect water.

• Next, a Camco tastepure filter (20 micron) acts as a sacrificial first defense. It removes finer sediment. It also strips out some of the VOCs and heavy metals. Its main job is to protect the other filters.

• The Envig Catalytic KDF55 uses a stronger type of carbon that strips out a lot more VOCs and heavy metals.

• The Clear2O does a final sediment mop-up to catch anything that got through the first two filters, including any carbon particles.

These filters don’t strip out any viruses or bacteria. They do prefiltering for our gravity-fed setup at the end. You can add a little bleach (about 1 ounce) to each full barrel to help knock out those threats early. Be careful. Bleach can interact with roof runoff to create toxic byproducts. You can also use HOCl. It’s safer, more effective, and it won’t ruin your clothes.

The good news:

All of these filters use garden hose thread. They come with garden hose attachments. So does the pump. You don’t have to fuss with adapters.

Simple.

You can go the extra mile in your prefilter setup by adding a Sawyer Tap. It’s a tight little .1 micron filter that also features a garden hose thread for easy attachment. The .1 micron filter blocks 99.99 percent of bacteria and other threats like Giardia and Cryptosporidium. It also stops microplastics and fiberglass dust that can shed from a shingle roof. One of the only things it doesn’t stop: viruses. (For that, we use the gravity system.) Even better, this filter costs around $30 or $40, and it doesn’t need replacements. You can clean it by reversing the water flow. Adding this element brings our system into peak performance. The gravity-fed system gets nice, clean water to do a final round of purification.

One last thing:

The more filters you add, the more backpressure risk you add to your pump. That can strain the motor and cause damage. Bypass this problem by adding another hose splitter on the pump outlet. Route one spigot into your filter lineup. Route the other back to your barrel. That way, your pump pushes as much water into the filters as they can handle. The excess goes back to your source. That’s especially important if you’re going to use submicron filters.

Problem solved.

Battery pumps offer convenience, but you might wind up in an emergency with no power and no water. That’s why we got a manual pump. It took a long time to find something capable of delivering the right pressure to push through 3-4 different inline filters, but we finally landed on the Bosworth Guzzler. There’s a model with a short handle for around a hundred bucks. It’s moderately hard to operate. We shelled out the extra money for the upgraded version with an extended handle, because… who knows? Maybe we’ll get injured. Maybe our kid will wind up needing to run the pump. The upgraded version makes operation way easier.

If you order a Guzzler, you can choose garden hose threads for the native ports. With the manual pump, you have a lot more control over the pressure and flow. You’ll still probably want to add a 60-mesh sediment filter to the inlet.

The filter line feeds into a bucket. We got 2-gallon and 5-gallon foodsafe buckets. Some days, you’ll want to filter several gallons. Other days, you’ll just want something light. For the hoses, we went with Camco 4-ft premium RV drinking hoses. They’re foodsafe. You don’t want to run standard garden hoses into your pump or your bucket. They can reintroduce contaminants.

On the filter end, if you need any adapters, look for ones made with lead-free brass or 304 steel. That way, you keep it all clean.

If you’re setting up your filters and taking them down every few days, that can turn into a real chore. You can avoid a lot of the headache by using a 3-stage filter frame with universal filter housings and native garden hose threads (just to keep things simple). You can get them from various companies like iSpring. They fit many of the same filters from the same companies, like Envig. They’re just modified to fit the filter housings. You’ll probably want to go with the slim 10 x 2.5 inch cases and filters. They’re the most common. When you go with this setup, you can even upgrade the end stage to a .01 micron ultrafilter. That will stop virtually all bacteria and most viruses. You can’t do much better without moving into nanofiltration and reverse osmosis, and those don’t exist for this kind of setup.

A .01 micron filter will definitely slow your flow down to a gallon per minute or less. That’s fine. The backfeed hose takes care of the extra pressure. It’s worth the wait if you want to maximize your filtration.

Quick tip: When you’re not using your filters, store them in a fridge to control bacterial growth. It’s best to use a separate mini fridge. It might sound like a hassle, but it’s worth it to protect the filters.

Once we’re done with our inline filters, we’re probably moving to this streamlined setup to make everything more manageable.

We tried it, and…

We like it.

The inline filters remove heavy metals and VOCs, along with sediment. They don’t remove viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. Even the Sawyer Tap .1 micron filter can’t get the viruses, even though it stops the rest. That’s where the gravity-fed systems come in. We spent a long time untangling all the claims and ad copy to find out which gravity filters actually do what they say.

Ultimately, we went with Alexapure.

Since our first update, we added yet another stage here: HOCl treatment. We added 1/3 cup of HOCL (100-200 ppm) to every 1 gallon of water to kill any remaining viruses or bacteria. You probably don’t want to add HOCl to your gravity-fed system, because it’s corrosive over time. So, add a second container. We’re using a 2-gallon sports cooler. Just open your spigot and pour it right in.

Then add the HOCl.

The Lab Test Results

We sent a sample of our filtered rainwater to a lab for testing. We used Tap Score’s “advanced rainwater test,” which looks for more than 100 different toxins including heavy metals, VOCs, and bacteria.

And…

Our sample looks clear across the board, with one exception. Although the lab found no E. coli, they did detect bacteria. We figured out why. Unchlorinated water will almost always trip a bacteria test. Going forward, we’re going to use HOCl (a chlorine-based compound) as a final treatment in the water. If you’re not familiar, it’s an extremely effective germ killer that’s safer than bleach.

(But you can still use bleach…)

HOCl isn’t great for carbon block filters, so we emptied the water into a final container, a regular 2-gallon sports cooler, and that’s where we added the HOCl, at roughly 2/3 cup with a 200 ppm solution. You add the HOCl. You stir. You wait about 30 minutes. You test with strips. If you’ve still got 3-10 ppm HOCl in your water, then it should be safe to drink. Virtually all viruses and bacteria are dead, and the remaining HOCl will protect your water for at least a day or two. We’re sending another sample to the lab. We’ll see how things go.

You can see the first round of results below.

It’s some pretty clean water:

Our conclusion:

This setup works. We probably won’t be drinking rainwater every day, and definitely not until we get the final results back from the second sample, but we feel good about using it during an emergency.

The entire setup costs about $1,000. It’s a fraction of what a full system would cost if you installed a metal roof and hired professionals. You can knock that price down even further if you don’t mind buying cheaper barrels and installing your own faucets. The biggest cost lies in the pumps. You could probably install something like this system for $600 if you went with an ordinary pump. You’d just need to find a way to power it for off-grid use. That’d be doable. The battery-powered pumps offer convenience and portability, but they’re not essential.

A basic cost breakdown:

Used DIY foodgrade barrels: $100 each.
Construction materials: $100
DIY gravity filter bucket: $200
Filters: $150
Pump: $50

If you can't afford this on a single budget, consider crowdsourcing it. A small group could share pumps and filters.

Wells can run dry. Reservoirs take a long time to recharge. After fifteen minutes of rain, we had dozens of gallons of water.

We made it safe to drink.

Mission accomplished?

There I was, 15 years old, sitting in front of the cops, trying not to cry.

Some of us learn this lesson early in life:

Nobody is coming to save you.

Of course, that’s not entirely true. Someone will come to save you, for a fee. They’ll save you if it serves their interests. You have to be worth saving. That’s not what I believe, but that’s how the system works. Always has. It’s just becoming a lot more transparent these days.

As the climate crisis deepens, as the grip of fascism tightens, more of us are starting to see it. Some of us are panicking. Some of us are trying to fight. Some of us are posing as resistance. Others wallow in denial. Sooner or later, though, they’re all going to learn what I learned as a kid. It’s a lesson that almost nobody wants to understand until it’s too late.

How did I learn it so young?

That was the day.

It was the day I sat on the porch, trying not to cry in front of the cops. If I remember, two of them went inside to get my mom. The other two stood on the porch. One of them looked at my brother and me. She had this look on her face. Pity, maybe? Her mouth opened. She was about to say something like, “You poor things.” But she stopped herself. The other cops came out with my mom in handcuffs. They left, and that was it. Finally, we were safe. But not really.

It was temporary.

That was just the beginning. There would be more days like that, so many I lost count. My teens are a blur of ER waiting rooms, coming home, wiping up bodily fluids, or locking the bedroom door and trying to see a better future in the moonlight. They’re a prism of aborted vacations, following a schizophrenic down the beach at night, trying to keep her from walking into the ocean, while a dad sits on the balcony smoking cigarettes, wondering what to do.

Our families didn’t help.

Sure, they showed up with the best of intentions. Grandparents. Uncles. Aunts. Cousins. They all drove across state lines with care and courage in their hearts. Within 24 hours, they all gave up.

They said, “I can’t deal with this.”

They left.

My friends didn’t help.

They didn’t want to hear about someone’s crazy mom. They didn’t care about the hallucinations, the conspiracy theories, the physical attacks. It made them uncomfortable. They didn’t have a spare bed or even a couch for someone in crisis. It was rude of me to ask. One of my best friends cussed me out. Another rolled their eyes and told me to grow up. Years later, after my mom’s death, they tried to apologize. They thought I was being dramatic. They didn’t know. That’s just it. They could’ve known. They could’ve listened. They didn’t.

Boyfriends didn’t help. Talk about your schizophrenic mom too soon, and you scare them away. You’re damaged goods…

Doctors didn’t help.

They took our money. They ran the tests. They sat on the results. They prescribed medications. They rolled their eyes.

The system didn’t help.

Social workers called me out of class to answer questions. They read from a form. You could tell what kind of answers they wanted. They wanted lies. They wanted to fill out the sheet, and they wanted to get out of there. If I could pretend to be normal, that was good enough. That’s when I started to learn a related lesson:

Nobody wants the truth.

It’s inconvenient.

Courts ordered medication, but a judge won’t come to your house and force your mom to take her pills. You have to do that.

Police didn’t want to come.

Your mom won’t let you into the kitchen? She says you can’t eat? She says you’re an alien clone? Weird. Moms, huh? Aren’t you 16?

You can’t deal with it?

Insurance companies didn’t help. They did everything they could to avoid the cost of caring for a schizophrenic. The bills almost bankrupted us. Savings? Gone. College fund? Gone. The only scholarships available were ones I had to earn with perfect grades and test scores. The one time someone did actually listen to my problems, they said, “Why don’t you just run away?”

Some of us learn early. In America, especially, you don’t get help. You get lectures on self-reliance and attitude adjustment.

This isn’t the kind of lesson you learn once.

You learn it over and over again:

Nobody is coming to save you.

So I saved myself.

I made the grades. I crushed the tests. I earned the scholarships. I earned a spot on varsity track. I earned a reputation as one of the best cellists in the state. I researched trauma and recovery. I negotiated with my demons. I was the teen who learned how to buy groceries, do laundry, cook dinner, all while dodging attacks from a paranoid schizophrenic. I learned how to act normal. I learned how to convince everyone I wasn’t broken. I earned a PhD. I earned tenure.

Yes, I had nightmares. I had meltdowns. I had episodes of uncontrollable rage. But I learned how to keep it all safely tucked away from the workplace and the classroom. I learned to perform the version of myself everyone expected.

It worked.

I saved myself by learning how to put my own pain aside and provide value for a capitalist society. I became the friend that listens to everyone else’s problems. I got married. I started a family. I bought a house.

No, that’s not really how you recover from trauma. But that’s how you create the space and the circumstances to do the recovery work yourself. It’s how you avoid winding up in your own padded cell. I thought I’d won.

In early 2020, life looked pretty good.

And then…

The last few years have reminded me that nobody is coming to save us. Not from fascism. Not from a world on fire.

A lot of different groups out there think they have it right. They think they have the answers. They have part of an answer. They won’t listen to anyone who has the rest of the answers. They’re not interested.

When I look at the socio-political landscape these days, I see the people who showed up thinking they could solve my problems with words, forms, and court orders. But you can’t debate away a schizophrenic mom, any more than you can debate away the climate crisis or a genocide. They stay.

They destroy.

It’s hard to overstate the disadvantages of growing up with a schizophrenic parent. Everything you learn from a mom, every source of comfort or protection they provide, imagine getting none of that. Imagine the one person who’s supposed to be there for you, well, they’re not. They don’t just die. They don’t just abandon you. They become a continual threat to your life. And it was like that from the beginning. It just didn’t get bad enough to involve the cops until later.

Little did I know my trauma was just a training exercise for a dystopian future, but that’s how it turned out. So in some ways, I’m almost grateful for those early lessons. It was a crash course in survival.

I’m not looking for comfort or protection from someone else, because I never had it. Nobody allowed me time to grieve or recover. I had to make it for myself, while staying alive. For a long time, I tried to change the system. I tried to make it more caring, more compassionate. But it’s too late. The system itself is falling apart now. We’re not going to change it.

It’s just going to collapse.

It’s going to collapse because despite a few good eggs, the world is full of people who can’t find a way to help a 15-year-old girl with a schizophrenic mom. And if they can’t do that, how likely is it they’ll solve the other problems?

In my opinion, not likely…

The world is also full of people trying to find comfort or protection from someone else, instead of solutions. They want moms and dads.

Pep talks don’t work on people like me because I never got them. Nobody ever sat me down and told me to have hope. I was either going to survive my trauma, or I wasn’t. I had to find a way. The help I got was information. It was knowledge. It was skill. I had to find it. I had to learn it. Now that I’ve got it, I’m trying to show it to others. That’s how you can actually help someone.

All this other stuff…

Now more than ever, you have to save yourself, for as long as you can. That’s why my family doesn’t swaddle ourselves in the promises of politicians, even the ones who seem to be getting a few things done. They can make things better, but they have limits. Mamdani or AOC might do their best, but they can’t save you from a flood or a drought 500 miles away. You have to do that.

Twenty years after I saved myself the first time, I’m saving myself again. This time, I’m doing it with rain barrels and composting toilets. I’m doing it with solar panels and raised beds. And here’s another lesson:

Just because nobody is coming to save you, that doesn’t mean you can’t try to help someone else. That’s the hardest lesson of all, to realize that nobody is coming to save you, but to keep that from turning you cynical.

You can be the person you always needed.

Even in a dystopian hellscape.

That’s real power.

You know what they say:

Great minds discuss ideas.
Average minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people.

Sometimes, you have to use a person as a gateway into an idea. So, let’s talk about Anthony Fauci, who’s been dragged back into the public spotlight by small minds who’d rather talk about people than ideas.

In 2023, Anthony Fauci was trying to get away from the small minds. Nonetheless, he did an interview with BBC where he said vulnerable populations “will fall by the wayside” as Covid continued to spin new variants and drive new waves of illness. In that moment, he stopped being a hero for many. Of course, one of life’s biggest lessons is that you’re better off without heroes. Maybe that sounds cynical, but that’s not my intention. We spend far too much time talking about people, and far too little time talking about ideas. We should champion ideas. We should realize people hardly ever measure up to our expectations. Our notion of heroism comes from fiction. In real life, nobody can be a hero all the time.

That’s the trap on full display this week as Congress hauls Fauci to yet another hearing, with the explicit purpose of entrapping him and prosecuting him for purjury. They’re throwing all kinds of accusations at him. They’re saying he lied to Americans. They’re saying he abused his power.

Republicans are trying to make a villain out of Fauci, but he’s not. Maybe you think he’s a hero. Maybe he was just a guy with good ideas. These days, someone with good ideas certainly looks like a hero.

As for the vilification, it’s all nonsense.

As I wrote last year, there’s a substantial and even overwhelming amount of evidence that the kinds of protections Fauci pushed at the beginning of the pandemic saved countless lives. If anything, more effort and better communication about masks would’ve saved even more lives. Of course, it wasn’t just Fauci. It was legions of epidemiologists, immunologists, physicians, and medical researchers. It was a team effort. We all did our part, and that’s the story.

That’s not a person, it’s an idea.

The small minds that occupy the right can’t really discuss ideas. Or, perhaps, they prefer to talk about people because they want to appeal to small minds. They also want to shrink your mind down.

It’s easier to control.

They know they lose on the ideas front, because their ideas are horrible. They can’t contest that N95 masks and air purifiers work. So they engage in personal assaults and retribution. Consider what the Trump regime has managed to do in less than two years. They’re responsible for outbreaks of everything from measles to explosive diarrhea. We’ve never had a less qualified, more reckless group in charge of public health. So it’s really the height of irony that they would try to project all of their malicious incompetence onto someone who actually got a few things right.

But we have to understand, the right’s relentless pursuit of Fauci isn’t about Fauci. It’s their avenue to attack ideas. It’s not about the man. It’s about what the man represents. During the early pandemic, Fauci reassured Americans that somebody with a brain was still in charge. He made Trump look stupid, even when he wasn’t trying. Trump never forgave him.

Beyond that, there’s a much broader effort by the super rich to rewrite the history of the pandemic. They’ve been doing it since the Great Barrington Declaration, a document produced by the likes of Jay Bhattacharya, current director of the NIH. We could tell you things about this guy that would send chills down your spine, but again it’s not about people. It’s about their ideas.

Bhattacharya doesn’t think children should be vaccinated for Covid. Even in 2020, he vehemently insisted that we should let the disease spread throughout the population to “establish herd immunity.” That idea was wrong, because actual science has shown that Covid weakens your immune system. Dozens of papers document Covid’s impact on immune function. If you just want a quick summary, you can read this article in The BMJ. It gets right to the point: “A growing number of scientists believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may instead [of immunity debt] be subtly altering our immune systems. If correct, their hypothesis will change how we understand everything from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to shingles to sepsis.

Continuing to let Covid spread was always a very bad idea.

No matter who pushed it…

By prosecuting Fauci, guys like Bhattacharya and political flunkies like Rand Paul are trying to control the narrative. They want the public to believe that their ideas were right, even though they were catastrophically wrong and they are the architects of a massive public health failure. Do you see how it works? If they can jail Fauci, they can complete their project of rewriting the pandemic.

If we’re going to talk about ideas…

Fauci’s remarks about the vulnerable “falling by the wayside” tell us less about Fauci, and more about a tragic turning point in the public’s perception of disease. There’s almost no room left in public discourse to talk about ideas anymore, and certainly not with any nuance. We seem to have welded them together. People and their ideas have become one in the same, and that’s dangerous.

You see this trend all the time now, and you saw it in 2023. You couldn’t criticize Fauci or anyone else when they did something that contradicted the ideas they were supposed to uphold. The public defends their heroes, no matter what. Ideas? Not so much. Ideas are disposable now.

Everyone cries in outrage over the Trump regime’s anti-vaccine policies, but they won’t update their flu or Covid shots. They’ll rightly skewer RFKJ over his failures or his bizarre remarks about snorting cocaine off toilet seats. They’ll rightly burn Elon Musk over gutting funding for Ebola prevention. Then they’ll chuckle when Christina Applegate jokes about giving Covid to Jimmy Kimmel. They won’t call her out. They won’t say anything about it.

That’s a problem.

If you criticize the Biden administration’s public health failures, then they accuse you of supporting MAGA. And so it goes with Fauci. You can either think Fauci is a hero, or you can think he belongs in jail.

But we should be able to call out celebrities and politicians when they tacitly endorse, promote, and execute ideas that upend public health or basic human rights. When we refuse to hold our own “heroes” accountable, we let bad ideas spread like disease. We become the villains of our own story.

And then there’s people like me, and hopefully like you. We reject the binary. No, it’s not fair to put Fauci on a pedestal. He’s human. He’s flawed. He caved to political pressure to prematurely end precautions for a disease that’s killed millions and disabled tens of millions more—a disease that remains a threat to public health. This isn’t conjecture. It’s fact. Unfortunately, it’s a fact that a large majority of western society has decided to ignore, much like climate change, much like Gaza, much like the true implications of our technofascist future.

Multiple ideas can be true.

I’m sure I’ll get comments saying we’d be a thousand times better off with someone like Fauci now than the current lineup. Yes, obviously. Doesn’t this go without saying? I guess not. So let me just go ahead and say it: Yeah, we were a thousand times better off with public health officials like Fauci. Compared to RFJK and Dr. Miracle Cure (Oz), any sane person would pick someone who isn’t going out of their way to destroy the little bit of public health we have left.

No, Fauci doesn’t belong in jail.

But if we’re truly interested in building a better society, it doesn’t help us to stay mired in the realm of small minds.

This is what bugs some of us when we see the constant hero worship in both parties. Yes, I get irritated at posts pouring out praise for people instead of ideas. This is the stuff of small minds. I don’t worship AOC. I don’t worship Bernie Sanders. I don’t worship Fauci. They’re not my heroes.

They’re simply adopting good ideas.

There’s a reason why it’s so dangerous to engage in hero worship, regardless of your political orientation. It’s called moral licensing. When you weld people to their ideas, when you give the credit for the ideas to them, everything gets tangled up. When those people fail to live up to those ideas or they miss opportunities to put them into practice, it becomes hard to call them out. Instead, you find people justifying and excusing everything they do.

Everyone’s identities become bound up with their heroes. If you criticize their heroes, then they feel like you’re criticizing them.

Instead of listening, they do the opposite.

They silence you.

That’s moral licensing in a nutshell. Once someone adopts good ideas, they establish themselves as a good person. They do a few good things. They earn their place in society, and then society protects them.

That’s one reason why society keeps getting stuck. We idolize people instead of the ideas they represent. We fail to see witch hunts against Fauci as what they are, an attempt to tear down entire ideas.

As for those ideas:

It’s really something to hear people chant “protect the vulnerable” in 2026, after spending three years saying that they’re going to fall by the wayside, and that has to be okay. Do we not see the contradictions here? When it comes to ICE, we’re going to protect the vulnerable, but when it comes to fighting pandemic diseases, we’re going to let them fall by the wayside?

We’re going to simply look the other way as someone we’ve put on a pedestal says something like that, as a casual observation?

Perhaps we shouldn’t even put this on Fauci. Yes, he said that. He was making an observation. He was making it about us—as a society. He observed that we as humans were going to let our vulnerable fall by the wayside. If nothing else, we should’ve pushed back against the idea. We should’ve made a decision not to do that. Some of us did make that decision. Many others instead chose to shrug and agree, and then they went out and proved Fauci right.

They left the vulnerable by the wayside.

That’s also small-minded.

This is what the persecution of Fauci seeks. They want to make it okay for us to continue leaving the vulnerable by the wayside, not as a concession, but as a starting point for all public health issues going forward. They want everyone to think they’re invincible while treating each other as disposable. They want to make it a matter of public policy. They want to make it official.

If you’re going to protect the vulnerable, then protect all of the vulnerable. Understand that it doesn’t always or even usually require acts of cinematic heroism. Understand that we’re all going to be vulnerable one day. In fact, we’re even vulnerable now—just in ways we don’t see yet.

That’s not a person.

That’s an idea.

Let’s start with some good news.

For months, we’ve been working on ways to harvest water during emergencies. Water matters more than anything. You can’t last more than a few days without it, and you certainly can’t grow food.

This project has gone through several phases.

In the first stage, we debunked dew harvesting as a viable way to survive. We tried Warka towers. They don’t work in most areas. Next, we tried a passive dew harvesting system with several different kinds of plastic. They worked, but scaling them up would mean covering half a yard in panels with a metal framework to protect them from the wind. We’re talking anywhere from 500-800 square feet (50-75 square meters) of panels just to collect a couple of gallons. It would cost at least a thousand bucks. The solution just doesn’t scale.

But something did finally work.

This:

We spent weeks on a DIY water generator. If you know, water generators have become popular over the last few years. Several companies sell them now. The problem? They cost $2,000 or more. They often come with proprietary parts, meaning they’re hard to replace. The filter kits also cost a lot. It’s the safest route, but it’s also expensive and exclusive.

Meanwhile, you can find dozens of videos on YouTube that show you how to make a water generator with a dehumidifier. They use the same basic technology. Of course, they’re not designed to produce potable water.

So you have to get creative.

Filtering dehumidifier water poses a major challenge. It takes a long time to produce enough to fill a gravity-fed water system like Alexapure or Boroux. These gravity-fed purifiers need “head pressure” to operate well, meaning it’s best to submerge them. You need at least 2-3 gallons to do that. A lot of YouTube videos recommend large containers for DIY water generators. In the real world, that means running a dehumidifier for hours on end. That translates into a lot of electricity. Dehumidifiers produce grey water. Even companies like Alexapure and Boroux don’t recommend drinking it. The water can clog or degrade expensive carbon block filters. It’s just not very practical.

We found a better way.

First: We got a brand new 50-pint GE dehumidifier for about $300. On paper, that means it produces 50 pints over 24 hours of operation. That’s roughly six gallons (23 liters). On a good night, with the window open, and 50-60 percent humidity, it can produce about 2-3 gallons of water over 12 hours. On average, you can expect one gallon every six hours. That will help keep a small family alive. So, we had to find an effective way to filter one gallon of water with a gravity system without overwhelming the carbon filters.

We shrank the containers.

We bought a bunch of different-sized containers and experimented with them, using the setup in our diagram. We made a triple stack. The top container holds a suction line filter with 100 mesh. That filters out a lot of sediment and gunk that would otherwise clog a carbon block filter. The middle container holds the carbon block filter that strips out heavy metals, VOCs, and microbes. The bottom container holds your clean water.

First, we moved down to 2-gallon Cambro containers. Then we finally settled on Rubbermaid 1.1 gallon “Flex & Seal” containers. They have just enough room to hold the suction line filter and the carbon blocks. They’re small enough that you can fill them up to generate the necessary head pressure. So even if you only have one gallon of water, it works.

The real question: Is the water safe?

Nobody will ever tell you it’s “safe” to drink water from a dehumidifier, but we’re talking about an emergency situation with no access to water at all. If you have any way to run a dehumidifier, like an emergency solar array, then it gives you a lifeline. With that in mind, we sent our dehumidifier water to Tap Score to analyze for heavy metals and other contaminants. It’s pretty clean. There was no detectable lead or other heavy metals, other than a trace amount of manganese. “No evaluation possible” means that nothing was detected for that analyte. They found fluoride in our sample, which is baffling, but we did wash the containers. They might’ve held on to the fluoride.

For this test, we used one Alexapure filter. Our choice ultimately came down to Alexapure and Berkey/Boroux. They’re the only two brands that have ever claimed their filters can remove viruses and bacteria.

Here are the results:

So, here’s the verdict:

We’re confident that we can use this DIY setup as a last resort. That said, the quality of your water will depend on the quality of the air. Your air can absorb VOCs and other toxins and those can wind up in your dehumidifier water, even if the unit itself isn’t leaching metals.

If you’re going to do this: Buy a dedicated dehumidifier that you only use for water emergencies. Keep it clean. Run an air purifier next to it to help with the air quality. If you can, try to run the dehumidifier in the evening with an open window to take advantage of maximum humidity. Consider sterilizing the water further, by boiling it or adding water purification tablets. Understand that you’re taking on a risk, but it’s less of a risk than dying of thirst.

More than a few people said we were nuts for trying to do this.

Well, we did it.

Now for the even better news:

You’re not going to feed a garden with dehumidifier water. So, we’ve finished our rain barrel setup. We made a filter train that cleans the water down to .1 microns. We sent the water off to a lab for testing. We’ve also used Varify for home testing, and the results look good. We’re perfecting the setup, finding ways to store the filters safely between uses, and also finding ways to knock down the cost, and we’ll have more updates on that soon.

This matters. Why? Because most of us can’t slap a new retal roof on our house. Besides, birds still poop on metal roofs. Leaves and pine cones fall on them. You’ll still have to filter that water.

Earlier this summer, we developed a cheap composting toilet that you can set up and take down as needed, without spending thousands of dollars. Now we’re working on a way to hot compost your toilet material in the safest way, even out in the suburbs with neighbors who won’t tolerate open piles of hot compost in your yard. We’ve found sanitary, sealable containers for the job.

More updates on that soon...

We’re going to update the survival guide with all of this information in the fall. We’re also going to launch a page on this site that lists out all the detailed parts and vendors we’re using for supplies. Finding this stuff has been half the challenge. So, it’ll make your job easier. We’re also going to make playlists of YouTube videos with vetted content. That way, you won’t have to sift through a dozen viral “dew harvesting” clickbait traps to find information.

All of this takes an immense amount of time and work. We’re trying to design affordable setups. We get there by trial and error. Supplies and tests cost a lot. So if you can throw us some support, that would be nice. We have a couple of very generous backers, but we need a large base to keep this work going.

It’s easy to churn out content that simply feeds the hamster wheels of outrage, hopium, and despair. We’re trying to rise above that and produce practical, grounded takes that can help everyone get through this era. I’m not going to lie to you and make promises about taking on billionaire fascists that I can’t keep. I’m not offering moonshot crusades. I’m not telling you how to protest or prepare while spitting out reams of AI-generated images that negate my points. I’m not engaging in performative politics or culture wars. I’m not predicting famines that might or might not happen in the next 60 days. I’m not interested in vibes.

I’m testing our specific, concrete ideas that could actually save someone during a crisis. I’m making them as accessible as possible. I’m maintaining a guide that’s completely free, community vetted, and licensed under Creative Commons. I’m doing my best to align my principles and actions.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with elections, revolutions, or anything else. But I do know how to harvest and conserve water now.

That’s worth something.

We all talk about building communities, units of survival, and enclaves of resilience. I’m trying to make a blueprint for that. If you find this content valuable, please help sustain it. If you’ve been doing that, then... thank you. I hope we can keep earning your support.

Take care,

Jessica

Everyone seems to have forgotten the urgent predictions from earlier this summer about empty shelves, fuel shortages, and famines. They were supposed to happen in early July. We’re still waiting. They’re running late. I don’t know what everyone else did to get ready. My family spent the last few months growing vegetables, installing rain barrels, building composting toilets, and testing water generators. I finished a course on electrical wiring so I can actually do stuff.

Back in May, the internet was filled with dudes telling Americans how screwed they were. They weren’t talking years.

They were talking weeks.

60 Days…

These viral podcast interviews and clickbait articles were generating millions of views. They spawned endless discussion threads full of anxious Americans who had no idea what to do other than fill their pantries with canned tuna and “start a garden.” What specific advice did the doomsday bros offer? Abandon your financial responsibilities. Quit paying your mortgage. Devote every last penny to prepping. Sit down on the kitchen floor and melt into a blob of despair.

And so on…

In an interesting plot twist, many women (including myself) tried to offer a different message. After years of trying to sound alarms, suddenly we were the calm mongers. Once again, nobody wanted to listen.

Suddenly, it was cool to overreact.

What did we say? We pushed back on the fear. Because this time, the fear was unwarranted. The advice was reckless.

Yeah, things were going to get bad. They were always going to get bad—for reasons far wider and far deeper than any single war or any fascist regime. But you can’t put a date on collapse. Sixty days? A hundred days? A thousand days? Nobody really knows. That’s the whole point of developing more sustainable systems, so that you don’t freak out when “it” finally hits your personal fan. If anything, that’s been my central message for nearly half a decade now. You don’t prepare because you know when it’s going to happen. You prepare because you don’t.

We advised everyone to consult history and science. We advised them to come up with a systematic plan to address their anxieties. We told them the fears of shortages and famines would subside, but the need to develop sustainable and resilient ways of living would persist. That’s the underlying reality.

Above all, we advised everyone to keep paying their rent and mortgage. We said they would have to keep going to their jobs, even as they planned for doomsday. We told them that the financial system wouldn’t collapse overnight. The data centers that calculate their debts would remain intact.

The strangest thing happened:

Those who’d spent years telling “doomers” like us to calm down suddenly took the opposite stance. They lectured us on the gravity of the situation. They presumed to explain prepping to us. They bashed us for not taking the problem seriously. They questioned our expertise and credentials.

A handful of men said it was time to overreact, it was time to put your life on hold because disaster was imminent…

Everyone stopped and listened.

Readers left condescending essays in the comments on my posts, or they sent me nasty emails explaining why they were pulling their support. They called me irresponsible. They accused me of misleading the public.

It’s been eight weeks, 60 days.

In fact, it’s been longer.

There’s no famine.

We’re still looking at very rough crop reports, compounded by droughts and supply chain problems. And yet… You still have to pay your bills. You still have to show up to work. School is still starting back in August. We probably will experience shortages and higher prices, but what’s new? That’s the story of the 2020s. People respond, defending the doomsday bros. “Things are still getting worse,” they say. No kidding. They’ve been getting worse for a long time, and they’ll continue to get worse. Maybe they just weren’t paying attention until someone with the appropriate status managed to say something that soaked through.

Meanwhile, I wonder how many people took practical steps to prepare for an actual disaster. I wonder how many of them built the communities they called for. I wonder how many of them gave up when they learned how hard it is to engage in “prepping” while meeting all of your other responsibilities, because those don’t simply go away because there’s no food.

While the rest of the world was busy trying to prove their predictions, some of us just got to work. This is how I’ve spent my time.

For so many people, doomsday predictions are simply a fantasy. They’re an excuse to abandon their obligations. They give us all permission to envision a different world, to dream about escaping the systems we’re trapped in, because the systems are certainly killing us. There’s no question about that.

But you don’t need a super drought to install rain barrels. You don’t have to live in fear of starvation to start a garden. You don’t need to have panic attacks over Ebola to start wearing an N95 again. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make, and that’s the point so many people don’t want to hear.

This is the crucial flaw we have to overcome. You can’t just “prep” when you think you’re going to die. You have to do it all the time. You have to stop thinking of it as prepping and see it as a necessary way of life. You have to nurture the communities even when you think you don’t need them.

And yet…

It’s easy to sit around and guess when we’re going to have shortages or famines. It’s easy to watch YouTube videos and think you know how to harvest dew with twenty dollars of supplies. It’s easy to run around the internet telling everyone how to build community or quit their jobs and start a commune on a farm. But that’s not how life works. That’s a fairy tale. That’s how you die. That’s how you end up in a cage match at a box store over the last case of bottled water.

If this is what it means to be a doomer, to sit around on your phone or a laptop constantly predicting bad shit and doing nothing at all to get ready for it, then I’m not a doomer. I never was. It was just an insult launched at me, a term that I reappropriated for a while. But that’s not me. It’s not you. From the very first days of the pandemic, we took action. We helped people. We tried to inform them, and that’s how we wound up with the label.

The ones who actually manage farms and homesteads will tell you. The real deal? It’s difficult. It’s a commitment. It’s not something you pick up after a viral article and then put down when the doomsday predictions fade.

And if you live in the suburbs…

It’s even harder.

Guess what?

Hundreds of millions of Americans aren’t going to survive by moving to the country. They’re not going to adopt the lives of their supposed homesteading forefathers. The math doesn’t add up. It’s not sustainable.

Millions of us are going to survive by staying exactly where we are. We’re going to survive by adapting. We’re going to survive by transforming our suburban hellscapes into enclaves instead of trying to escape them.

We’re going to survive by building loose networks with people we might not like very much, instead of fantasizing about utopian communities where everyone agrees with each other and sees the world the same way.

We’re going to survive by learning to harvest rain from our shitty asphalt shingle roofs and learning how to filter it. We’re going to survive by learning how to rejuvenate our back yards full of hard clay. We’re going to survive by repurposing tools. We’re going to survive by scavenging and dumpster diving.

As for this summer, my family has done a lot. We grew our garden. We reorganized our garage from top to bottom as a survival nook. We installed our rain barrels. We made our composting toilets. We came up with ways to do all this without running afoul of our neighbors and their manicured lawns. We did it while the rest of the internet was freaking out over tank bottoms.

We built our water filtration systems. We tested them. No lead. No iron. No mercury. Safe levels across the board.

For the next week, we slow down a little.

We wait for final lab results on our water harvesting systems. (I’ll post them as soon as they’re ready.) We polish our plans. We get ready to do a major update on the survival guide, which already runs 200 pages.

We live.

This is how you survive. You plan. You execute. You live. You don’t wait for another viral article warning you about a disaster. You don’t sit around trying to put a date on collapse, because that date will almost always be wrong. You learn to accept the uncertainty of a chaotic future, and you manage it.

It’s the way now.

It’s a real buzzkill to watch all these prepper videos on YouTube show you how to build a rain harvesting system, only to realize that you can’t do it. Why? The rainwater from your shingle roof contains an ungodly amount of deadly toxins and poisons. Or maybe it doesn’t. But it probably does. We kept getting different answers. We emailed some rain harvesting specialists a few years ago and asked them if there was any way to do it. They said, “Don’t bother…” That felt conclusive.

Like I said, a real buzzkill…

And then there’s all the survival and homesteading guides that kinda tell you how to build a rain harvesting system, but not really…

My family brainstormed, but we kept running into walls. Then finally, we started piecing together a plan. After all, we’re not interested in drinking rainwater every day. We don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cisterns, pumps, and special plumbing. We don’t want to ditch the grid just yet. We just want a simple backup water source for emergencies, and now would be the time. If you’ve been going through the same frustrations, hitting the same dead ends, then maybe this post will help. We’re laying out the plan in maximum detail. We barely got any rain last week, and our barrels have already filled up. 100 gallons. We’re getting ready to send a sample off to a lab for a full test. (I’ll post the results here.)

Meanwhile, let’s get into it:

First, dig out your foundation. Add paver base and paver sand. This step helps you level the ground and provide a good substructure for your barrels. You want to dig below the topsoil and into the harder clay. If it’s too hard, soak the area with a hose and leave it for 24 hours. You can also use a pickaxe, but don’t swing it overhead like they do in the movies. Use it more like a hoe. Letting a 5 lb mattock drop into the ground will help break it up. Use a level to get the bare dirt as even as possible, but know that the paver base helps the most. Tamp it down.

We used 24 x 16 inch pavers for the base. They’re heavy as hell (50 lbs), but they’re worth it to create a large, even footprint. Lay cinderblocks on top. Two cinderblocks with one turned perpendicular match the paver size. The cinderblocks give you the clearance for hooking up hoses, filling up buckets, etc. You’ll put another layer of pavers on top for a smooth surface.

Remove the bottom section of gutter. You’ll probably have to unscrew downspout straps. You might be able to simply reconfigure your gutter pieces like the image shown above. We placed our barrels 2 feet away from the house to help protect the foundation. We wound up using a hacksaw on a downspout to get the right length. It can be frustrating to cut gutter, but it works. We tried aviation snips, but a hacksaw provided the cleanest cut. If you don’t want to mess with cutting gutter, you can buy precut lengths from places like Gutterworks.

Make sure to measure the gutter heights. You want a few inches of space between the barrel and the gutter exit. Remember that your gutter will be heading down at a 75-degree angle. Don’t use a 90-degree elbow.

Water will pool…

Some people skip this step and just buy diverter kits. We couldn’t find a diverter kit with consistent reviews. Biggest complaint: They’re either flimsy, or they don’t collect much rain during light showers. We’re building for extreme droughts, which means a free-flowing gutter. We also skipped the first flush. My full illustrated guide talks about them, but we opted for something simpler.

You can buy barrel nets that fit over the entire top part of the barrel. They’re easy to put on. All the debris from the first gutter gush ends up on the net. You just pull it off and shake it. Your barrels will also have a mesh screen over the top entry hole. It’s two layers of protection.

You can buy rain barrels from almost any hardware or big box store now. We decided to go with Epoch. They have a strong reputation. They use upcycled food barrels. Ours arrived clean, with all the parts already installed. We could’ve drilled out the holes ourselves, but it can be a real hassle if you’re also digging a foundation and working on other projects. These are tough barrels that will last a long time, and that’s the goal. They’ll take a beating. Remember, these things will be holding hundreds of pounds of water when they’re full.

You can link the barrels at the top and bottom to ensure they fill at the same time. Just add hose splitters to the faucets. Get a short hose for the top link. You can cut it and then add a female hose repair to the other end. You technically only need one splitter, but two means you can draw water from either barrel. The second barrel is probably going to have the cleaner water.

Unfortunately, most preconfigured barrels come with tiny garden hose outlets for the overflow. They’re not going to handle a major storm or a flash flood if you’re using a free-flowing gutter. Companies assume most people will be using a diverter kit. If you’re using a full gutter, then you need a bigger overflow. We did the math and arrived at a 2-inch hose. Combined with our two-barrel system, it can handle up to 3 or even 3.5 inches of rain per hour. Believe it or not, even during a drought, you can expect some pretty intense surges. That’s part of the problem. The rain comes in short bursts and flash floods. It’s not steady. You don’t want a flood to send water gushing over the top of your barrels. It’ll soak your foundation and ruin all that hard work. It’s not easy to find a 2-inch heavy duty hose, but we finally got one from Gloxco with a male NPT nipple. It’ll fit right into a 2” bulkhead union. For that, we’re drilling a 3-inch hole on the backside, just the first barrel.

A closeup of the hose splitters. Pretty standard. But if you want a heavy duty one that’s lead-free, try Morvat.

The hardest part was coming up with a way to filter the roofwater. Most pump systems we looked at were expensive and impractical on a budget. Then we got the idea to use a battery pump. It would give us the pressure and gpm needed to push the water through inline hose filters. While a battery pump will ultimately overheat and die if you run it like this for hours, we’re not doing that. We’re running the pump long enough to fill up a bucket for emergency drinking water. Or we’re running it long enough to feed our plants with a soaker hose. That’s 10-15 minutes max. The filter setup looks complicated, but it’s not that bad.

• First, add a 60-mesh hose filter to the pump intake. This step keeps grit from the barrel water from ruining the pump. The phrase “60 mesh” means 60 openings per inch of screen. You can go as high as 400, but don’t. If the screen is too fine, it can choke pumps and deflect water.

• Next, a Camco tastepure filter (20 micron) acts as a sacrificial first defense. It removes finer sediment. It also strips out some of the VOCs and heavy metals. Its main job is to protect the other filters.

• The Envig Catalytic KDF55 uses a stronger type of carbon that strips out a lot more VOCs and heavy metals.

• The Clear2O does a final sediment mop-up to catch anything that got through the first two filters, including any carbon particles.

These filters don’t strip out any viruses or bacteria. They do prefiltering for our gravity-fed setup at the end. You can add a little beach (about 1 ounce) to each full barrel to help knock out those threats early. Be careful. Bleach can interact with roof runoff to create toxic byproducts. That’s another reason why you have to do so much prefiltering. The good news:

All of these filters use garden hose thread. They come with garden hose attachments. So does the pump. You don’t have to fuss with adapters.

Simple.

You can go the extra mile in your prefilter setup by adding a Sawyer Tap. It’s a tight little .1 micron filter that also features a garden hose thread for easy attachment. The .1 micron filter blocks 99.99 percent of bacteria and other threats like Giardia and Cryptosporidium. It also stops microplastics and fiberglass dust that can shed from a shingle roof. One of the only things it doesn’t stop: viruses. (For that, we use the gravity system.) Even better, this filter costs around $30 or $40, and it doesn’t need replacements. You can clean it by reversing the water flow. Adding this element brings our system into peak performance. The gravity-fed system gets nice, clean water to do a final round of purification.

One last thing:

The more filters you add, the more backpressure risk you add to your pump. That can strain the motor and cause damage. Bypass this problem by adding another hose splitter on the pump outlet. Route one spigot into your filter lineup. Route the other back to your barrel. That way, your pump pushes as much water into the filters as they can handle. The excess goes back to your source. That’s especially important if you’re going to use submicron filters.

Problem solved.

Battery pumps offer convenience, but you might wind up in an emergency with no power and no water. That’s why we got a manual pump. It took a long time to find something capable of delivering the right pressure to push through 3-4 different inline filters, but we finally landed on the Bosworth Guzzler. There’s a model with a short handle for around a hundred bucks. It’s moderately hard to operate. We shelled out the extra money for the upgraded version with an extended handle, because… who knows? Maybe we’ll get injured. Maybe our kid will wind up needing to run the pump. The upgraded version makes operation way easier.

If you order a Guzzler, you can choose garden hose threads for the native ports. With the manual pump, you have a lot more control over the pressure and flow. You’ll still probably want to add a 60-mesh sediment filter to the inlet.

The filter line feeds into a bucket. We got 2-gallon and 5-gallon foodsafe buckets. Some days, you’ll want to filter several gallons. Other days, you’ll just want something light. For the hoses, we went with Camco 4-ft premium RV drinking hoses. They’re foodsafe. You don’t want to run standard garden hoses into your pump or your bucket. They can reintroduce contaminants.

On the filter end, if you need any adapters, look for ones made with lead-free brass or 304 steel. That way, you keep it all clean.

The inline filters remove heavy metals and VOCs, along with sediment. They don’t remove viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. Even the Sawyer Tap .1 micron filter can’t get the viruses, even though it stops the rest. That’s where the gravity-fed systems come in. We spent a long time untangling all the claims and ad copy to find out which gravity filters actually do what they say.

Our conclusion:

Alexapure does the most. Their filters will strip out any remaining VOCs and heavy metals. They’ll also strip out viruses, bacteria, parasites, you name it. But you have to read the fine print. While the filter technically works for thousands of gallons, they only filter the really dangerous stuff up to 200 gallons.

Berkey/Boroux once promised a similar level of protection, but they ran into trouble with the EPA and had to remove their claims about viruses and bacteria.

British Berkefeld (Doulton) has the best certifications from NSF/ANSI for safe materials that remove lead and other heavy metals. Unfortunately, they don’t promise anything when it comes to viruses or bacteria.

You can find other gravity-fed systems, but all of them come with tradeoffs. That’s why we decided to go with Alexapure for our trial. We’re going to run this whole system, and then send the water off to a lab for testing. It’s going to tell us just how much we can trust our setup.

The entire setup costs about $1,000. That probably sounds like a fortune. I guess it is. But it’s a fraction of what a full system would cost.

Wells can run dry. Reservoirs take a long time to recharge. After fifteen minutes of rain, we had dozens of gallons of water.

We’re going to look at the results and then decide on the next steps. We might have to make some tweaks to the system, but we think it’s going to work. If it does, those of us cursed with shingle roofs might finally be able to make rain catchment work for us out here in the suburbs.

In a week or so, we’ll know for sure.

Let me know your thoughts…

Our drought has officially reached emergency status. Soon, we’ll be seeing mandatory water restrictions. Meanwhile, toxic wildfire smoke from Canada shrouds the horizon. Our air quality index drifts toward “hazardous.”

A birthday party moves indoors. A hiking trip is postponed (let’s be honest, canceled). My social media is an endless stream of fire and ash. All this while the president airs conspiracy theories and openly plots to take over this fall’s elections. And tech companies plan hyperscale data centers in our backyard, with the intention of piping out all of our available drinking water.

Otherwise, it’s been a nice week.

I feel fine.

Needless to say, we spent the last few days finalizing our rain harvesting plan. We installed two barrels. For those of you following my natural disaster plans, we built a filtration rig that uses:

60 Mesh Sediment Pump Prefilter;
Camco TastePure inline filter;
Envig Catalytic Carbon KDF inline filter;
Aqua Crest 5 micron Hose Water filter

From there, we’ll filter the water one last time through an Alexapure rig. We might add several drops of bleach. All of these filters use garden hose thread. We’re using foodsafe hoses from Camco. Finally, we’re using a Milwaukee M18 battery-powered pump to push the water through the filters into a collection bucket (then it goes into the Alexapure). As a backup, we finally found a good manual pump that generates enough forward pressure for the filters: The Bosworth Guzzler GH-0400N-5 with an extended handle. One day, my daughter will use it.

Next week, we’ll send that filtered rainwater off for testing to make sure our system works well enough. Then we’ll be done.

For a while…

We have our N95 masks. We have our half-face respirators with 3M P100 filters (60926) for organic and acid vapors if the air turns hazardous. We’ve been dealing with these threats for years now. This is the way.

Sometimes, people ask:

How long do you plan to survive?

This question comes from the newly initiated. They ask me if there’s any point in going through all this trouble, in doing all this research, in testing all these strategies, in developing all these systems.

Are they actually going to work?

What if they don’t?

The answer has wafted around in the back of my head. Now it’s finally on my tongue and in my fingers. Do I think these plans will protect my family forever? How long am I planning to survive? I have a response:

20 years.

That’s how long our equipment will last. It might last even longer if we take good care of it, but 20 years feels like a nice, solid number. Beyond that, all bets are off. By then, we’ll be living in a different world, one more like the futures that actuaries and dystopian novelists warn us about. That’s when the threats will probably, finally, begin to outpace our ingenuity.

It might happen sooner, but so far we’re keeping up. It’s not easy. Digging the foundation for the rain barrels took days. It took another day to lay the cinder blocks and pavers. It took days to research the filters and pumps we would need. A lot of people either can’t or don’t want to do it. I can’t worry about that, not anymore. All I can do is figure out what works, and try my best.

What happens if someone steals your barrels?

Then we’ll get new ones.

The barrels aren’t the point. The point is knowing how to use them. The point is knowing how to filter the water.

What if a fire burns down your house?

Then we’ll bug out. We’ll take what we can.

We’ll start over.

What if it gets so bad that your neighbors turn on you?

I don’t know.

We’ll figure that part out. I’m not going to worry about that because other people’s actions are beyond my control. I can’t shoot them. If I shoot them, I have to bury them somewhere. Once you start shooting people, I think it’s over. It’s only a matter of time before someone overpowers you. You and I can predict a lot, but we can’t predict what Todd or Heather are going to do when they run out of food and water. I hope they start cooperating with us, and accept our help with grace. All we can do is try to build a community that protects them. We can’t force them to join it. One day, someone might murder me for a bean burrito.

It’s easy to get lost inside the doomscroll. It’s easy to tell yourself it doesn’t matter what you try to do, because life will just get harder and harder until it finally beats you. Once, someone tried to tell me none of this mattered because if you can’t live until your 80s then you might as well die now.

I refuse to accept that.

I’ve got a family. I’ve got a life. Even on the bad days, we still have a good time. It’s worse than ever out there, but there’s still something to live for.

This year has taught me one thing. Even during an historic drought, it still rains. Things still grow. Things still live. For how long?

As long as they can.

Duh.

In March, Google made it official. They’re going to build three giant, hyperscale data centers in western Virginia. They’ll sit down the road from the George Washington & Jefferson National Forest in the kneebend of the Appalachian Mountains. The plans are underway, even as the state trudges through its worst drought since 1941. Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, urges ordinary people to conserve water while publicly rejecting proposals to ban new AI data centers because it would “hurt the economy.” She would know: VA is home to the largest data center hub in the world, and soon they’ll be giving their water to the biggest one of all.

The Google site also happens to reside roughly three miles from Carvins Cove, a protected park and reservoir that supplies the main drinking water for the Roanoke Valley. These data centers will start pumping 2 million gallons per day (MGD) out of the cove by early 2028. Google wants the option to expand their water consumption up to 8 million gallons per day to quench the project’s thirst. They’re already planning a pipeline big enough to accommodate that.

Botetourt County officials told Google yes.

They did it in closed sessions.

If all this goes through, and Google realizes their dream, this data center site will become the biggest water guzzler in the entire world, easily surpassing the 2-5 MGD used by other giant data centers.

Even at a baseline of 2 MGD, the Google project debuts as the eighth largest worldwide. Their goal of 8 MGD puts them in the lead. They’ve also recently bought the entire output of a nearby wind farm, which falls around 600 megawatts on any given day. Google has already said it probably won’t be enough. In fact, the entire wind farm might not even cover half the electricity demand. They’re going to pull the rest of it from local utilities.

The cove’s treatment plant can generate 10 million gallons of daily drinking water right now. By 2030, Google’s gigantic data centers could be gulping down 80 percent of that. Before the data centers, experts projected that our water supply would last into the 2060s. It includes a backup spring, forming a total of 9 billion gallons or more. Now, we’re on track to run out by 2030. Officials with the county and the water authority have promised it won’t come to that.

People have their doubts.

Fortunately, local journalists and lawyers pressured the county to give a more accurate timeline, and that’s when they admitted the truth: we’ll need more water by 2030. In February, an alliance of water conservationists in Virginia compelled the water authority to finally release a full, unredacted agreement on Google’s water usage. The spear: An indie journalist named Henri Gendreau of The Roanoke Rambler filed a complaint against the water authority, and a circuit court judge decided in his favor, requiring the full release. You can read that agreement here. (You might have to open it in Chrome.) I’ve also uploaded the full document:

Utility Services Funding Agreement

250KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

This agreement explicitly grants Google up to 8 million gallons per day, under its “Day N Water Solution Plan.”

The exact wording:

“The WSP will analyze all aspects of water supply planning… in order to assess and evaluate viable alternative water supply sources and needed water supply infrastructure in order to meet the Day N Water Solution, which the Parties understand could require up to eight million gallons per day, or six million gallons per day above the Day 1 Water Solution, without impairing the utility’s ability to meet the current and future water supply capacity needs for future system demand.”

In essence, at some vague point in the near future, our water authority will do everything in its power to help a tech giant use more water than our entire valley population. They promise it won’t hurt us.

Pinky swear…

Google has a poor track record of sticking to their original water usage agreements. For example, their data center in The Dalles, Oregon area tripled over the course of five years. Ultimately, Google wound up hoarding up to 40 percent of the city’s drinking water. The city even tried to sue a local newspaper to keep the public from finding out about it. You can find similar stories all over the country. Google moves in and starts using up everyone’s water. Local officials bend over backward to try and please them, but it’s never enough.

Let’s stop and summarize:

Before Google started barging in, the Roanoke Valley enjoyed an abundance of water. Now authorities are scrambling for a way to feed three giant data centers that will gulp down more than the combined consumption of three entire counties. It’s a massive sign of corruption and incompetence.

The water authority was trying to hide the full 8 MGD amount, because they knew it wouldn’t go over very well. They knew they didn’t have a sound strategy for protecting our drinking water, but they were going to let Google build the data centers anyway. It amounts to a hostile takeover of our region’s entire water supply, with only the vaguest of plans about securing more water for ordinary residents. They could solve the problem preemptively, but instead, they’re going to open the site and then worry about the water shortages later.

Many state leaders are doing less than the bare minimum to address the drought crisis. For example, Virginia will soon require data centers “to try and limit their water use” in “water scarcity areas.” They have to “show they’ve minimized the use of any water for cooling purposes” by 2032. Look at this map and tell me what parts of the state aren’t experiencing “water scarcity.”

And yet, the governor has tried to introduce amendments to bills that give these data centers more leeway in using water for evaporative cooling in water-scarce areas. Correct, she wants to make the laws nicer to tech giants. Neither the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) nor the governor currently claims the authority to shut down data centers, even during severe droughts.

There’s some good news:

Nearby cities and counties that rely on the cove are speaking up and mobilizing resistance. Action groups are putting pressure on the governor and state assembly to do more. That’s just the beginning.

The Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance and the Botetourt County Data Center Information Group have mounted a legal challenge. They’ve retained Chap Petersen & Associates. The firm just recently stopped The Prince William Digital Gateway, another massive data center corridor that would’ve dropped up to 37 data centers on the edge of a Civil War memorial park in northern Virginia. Pestersen and his team beat them. The team included law partners, homeowners associations, historical societies, environmental councils, national parks associations, and conservation alliances. From The Prince William Times:

"We stood up to some of the largest companies in the world, and we were able to pull off essentially a miracle,” Petersen said Thursday afternoon.

What can you do?

Well, we need to make this a national story. It’s a big deal. What happens here will provide a template for what happens across the rest of the country. We’re at a pivotal moment in the legal battles against data centers. The tide is turning in our favor. A victory here will resonate across the country and send a clear signal to tech giants that they’re not going to sneak in and take our water. They’re not going to hoover up our electricity and drive up utilities. They’re not going to poison our parks and forests with their massive backup diesel generators. They’re not going to torment our neighbors with light and noise pollution.

You don’t have to share my post if you don’t want to, but you could share this one, or this one, or this one. You can also donate to the legal fund for Chap Petersen & Associates. They’re already doing work on the case. These cases succeed because they don’t target the tech giants directly. They contest the zoning law changes.

Finally, support the local alliances and independent journalists fighting data center expansion in your towns and cities. Sadly, when we were researching this piece, we learned that The Roanoke Rambler came under new ownership and drove off their small underpaid staff. They’ve largely ceased publication. This paper was essential in compelling the truth on Google’s water usage.

Now, they’re gone.

But: As Erin Brockovich has written, movements to stop data centers are winning. Communities are banding together.

A hundred years ago, lumber barons stripped Appalachia bare in their quest for money and power. They clearcut entire forests. They drove out local sawmills and brought in massive engines of destruction. It’s taken generations to restore the land. Now a new group of profiteers and tycoons wants to destroy it all over again. The question is whether we let it happen.

We’re going to stop tech giants from ruining our future. Not just here. Everywhere. We’ll win, even if we have to do it county by county. If you make a donation, please drop a comment down below. It would be great to keep a tally. Also drop a comment if you’re involved with a group fighting a data center.

Billionaires don’t own this planet.

And they don’t own us.

Let’s show them.

Recently, I’ve heard these questions:

When should we start preparing? When is it going to happen?

Can you actually survive what’s coming?

What if nobody listens to you?

What if it never happens?

These questions used to keep me up at night. Now, they don’t. They’re obsolete, relics from an age bound for the archives. In my life, the more I think about it, the more I realize, it’s not going to happen. It’s happening.

It’s not future tense anymore.

It’s the present.

I’ve already walked through a 117F heat index (47.2C). I’ve already driven through a brushfire that made one of our mountains look like an erupting volcano. Rare storms and F3 tornadoes already knocked out our power and tore apart the homes of our neighbors. Hurricane Helene already destroyed the cities where my friends and family live. For us, it’s not theoretical. Not anymore.

Right now, my town is going through the worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Friends and acquaintances are starting to ask us for advice. We’re the only ones who look like we know what we’re doing.

As our county starts to implement water restrictions, we dust off the Berkey we’ve only used for disasters. We give it a permanent home. We start cycling through our stored water earlier than usual. We dig places for a full rain catchment system. We rig up a battery-powered pump. We research portable, in-line filtration systems. We research how to chlorinate barrel water if necessary.

We’re already running a water generator on solar power.

We’re already testing a DIY model.

We’re not preparing for the worst drought since the Dust Bowl. We’re in the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, and we’re dealing with it. We’re not preparing for storms and tornadoes that might never happen. We’re recovering from ones that have already hit us and will hit us again. We’re not preparing for heatwaves that might never come. We’re putting plans in place for the ones that we’ve already lived through, and we’ll live through them again.

It’s my reality now, and that reality is shared. Nobody looks at us like we’re weird anymore, even if they’re not taking the same steps.

At least here, my family doesn’t have to warn anyone. My spouse doesn’t fret over cutting the gutters anymore. He doesn’t wonder if we’re going too far. He’s worried. He’s glad we’re doing all this.

There’s no more urgent conversations in hushed tones. There’s no more panic. There’s no more sleepless nights. Everything we ever worried about is here. We’re at war with a country that owns a chokehold on the world’s fossil fuels. We’re in the worst droughts and heatwaves in a century.

We’re ruled by puppets in service of billionaires who fantasize about the apocalypse. It’s all out in the open now. We plan. We execute.

We live.

Family conversations about doomsday events used to be stressful. Now I casually mention, “The idiots are bombing Iran again. Should we go ahead and get the other rain barrel?” He says, “Sounds good.”

My daughter learns about water filtration. Not because we think she might need it. We know she’s going to need it. We already need it.

In all honesty, people like me aren’t experts. We never intended to live like this, but it’s what the situation calls for.

We’re adapting.

We’re figuring all this out as we go, doing our best to sort through all the information and misinformation on the web. It would’ve been nice to learn this at school, or from our elders, but that didn’t happen. The world raised my generation to hustle and grind, not collapse. So, we hustled and hustled.

Now we have to learn a different way to live. Earlier generations had decades to figure out homesteading, and they had the assurance of a grid to fall back on when they messed up. We don’t have that. We’re actively losing the assurances and safety nets that would catch us when we mess up. I’m not saying that to be confrontational or bitter. I’m simply stating a reality that needs airtime.

If you’re trying to do this, if it feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. As I previously wrote, millions of us are trying to figure out survival on the fly. We’re doing it in backyards in the suburbs or downtown apartment blocks. Some of us are going about it in a cavalier, reckless way. Others of us have some sense of what we don’t know. We still get it wrong, but we learn.

There’s an interesting term in psychology.

It’s called the third layer of fear.

The third layer of fear also goes by the name “anticipatory anxiety.” Basically, you develop a fear of being afraid. For example, you’re so afraid of the future, you don’t even want to think about it. Or you develop unhealthy coping mechanisms, like toxic optimism or hoarding. Some of us have broken past the third layer of fear. It helps when you actually start to wake up.

When you move into the realm of certainty, your mind stops racing. A peace comes over you, even if it’s not the certainty you wanted. At least, that’s open. It’s better than continuing to dwell in that third layer.

Us?

We’re not preparing for dystopia and disasters. We’re living in them. The anticipatory anxiety has drained out. It’s gone.

In the old era, you packed a bugout bag that you hoped you’d never need. Now you repack a bugout bag you’ve already used.

This is life beyond the third layer of fear. It’s a life where you no longer have to justify your decisions or spend hours scrolling to validate your thoughts and emotions. The thing you were scrolling is right in front of you. You’re not scrolling doom anymore. If anything, you have entered the scroll. You are the content.

They told you to go outside and get some fresh air.

They told you to touch grass.

Now you go outside and touch the crisp, sun-beaten grass. You hear it crunch beneath your feet. You go inside and check yourself for ticks.

That’s why I’m no longer prepping.

It’s not prepping anymore.

It’s just living.

There’s getting things wrong, and then there’s…

This:

A homesteader gives all of YouTube a tour of his rain catchment system. Unfortunately, it’s also a swimming pool for rats. Jerry-rigged pipes run into a water heater hemmed in by charred, torn mesh. “You have to be careful,” he said, talking about the time he almost burned down his house.

Meanwhile, a woman walks us through the deep pantry she’s been building for years. “I’m out of space,” she proudly announces while showing off the industrial freezer in her garage. She’s storing an entire cow.

She’s ready for the famine that’s coming…

Any day now…

Last but not least, a couple describes their new composting toilet on TikTok. It’s so easy. Just take out the bag, and then throw it in the trash. Of course. Why would you want to put compost in your compost pile?

Compost goes in the landfill.

Duh.

A hundred videos tell you how to make a dew catcher using techniques from ancient desert civilizations. All of them forget to mention this factoid: they were coastal deserts, with high humidity. These techniques won’t help you much anywhere else. And yet, countless experts tell me they’ll just throw up a mesh net in their yard and make water for free. They won’t. (I learned the hard way.)

Are you face-palming yet?

According to The Economist, nearly 20 million Americans are preparing for disasters now. That’s how they’re doing it. All this speaks to a new problem, one that seems distinctly American when you think about it.

Everyone is suddenly an armchair expert at prepping. There’s always money to be made by pretending to know how to do something and pretending to teach it to someone who only wants to pretend to learn anything.

How do you know what’s slop, and what’s real?

You have to try it.

If thousands of people actually tried to make a dew harvester in their yard, they would quickly find out why it doesn’t work that way.

Some advice:

When you see a video that says you can make a solar array out of cheap mirrors or harvest water from desert air, don’t just like it and then assume it works. Ask for details. Try to make it. See if it works. If it doesn’t, find out why. That’s what I’m doing. One idea at a time. It’s sad that millions of preppers are already liking slop videos promising them water from desert air.

That’s how 20 million Americans are prepping.

It won’t end well.

In 1968, the Beatles recorded “Revolution.” It became one of the most misunderstood songs in modern music history, because most people didn’t actually take the time to hear what John Lennon was saying:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know,
We all want to change the world…
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know,
We’d all love to see the plan…
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know,
You better free your mind instead

More than fifty years later, on the eve of an Independence Day few of us feel like celebrating, these lyrics make perfect sense to me. Don’t they make sense to you? Everywhere you look, someone wants a revolution. But they don’t really have a plan. They only want to push their cause. They’ll yell in your face that all the things you care about don’t matter. They drag their own biases and prejudices behind them like chains, along with heaps of arrogance.

That’s what John Lennon meant when he said you’d better free your mind instead. Unless you can learn to practice basic compassion and self-awareness, you’ve got no business trying to charge up a revolution.

It’s just going to get people killed.

I’ve been trying to figure out how we can actually change the world. I’ve been diving back into history, and I’ve been finding answers.

Here’s two:

The first history lesson

John Lennon ultimately rejected violent revolution, because he knew where it led. He wasn’t some naive hippie. He studied history, and he knew all about the French Revolution. Americans often cite it as some kind of benchmark for American activism. According to more serious historians, it’s a perfect example of how a revolution can turn into a nightmare.

During the Reign of Terror, Jacobin revolutionaries turned on each other and started sending their own allies to the guillotine. They couldn’t agree on what to do with the outgoing aristocracy. They couldn’t agree on how to redistribute the country’s wealth. They couldn’t agree on how to organize a new government. Even when they agreed on basic points like freedom of religion, they couldn’t agree on the details. Some groups wanted to impose atheism. They vandalized churches. They tried to make public worship illegal, even punishable by death (via guillotine). Some of them wanted to declare war on neighboring monarchies. Others didn’t. Instead of working out their differences, they started killing each other.

With guillotines…

Maximilien Robespierre emerged from that bloodshed, executing anyone who argued with him—even a little. When groups tried to tell Robespierre they supported him but he was killing too many good guys, guess what he did? Yep, killed them. By the mid 1790s, the revolution grew so bloodthirsty that you could be executed for anything, without evidence or even a trial.

You could be executed for serving beverages to an enemy of the state, even if you didn’t know they were an enemy of the state at the time.

You could be executed for having too much food.

You could be executed for “spreading defeatism.”

You could be executed for “lack of enthusiasm.”

You could be executed for selling bad wine.

You could be executed for crying.

In the end, what was left of the original revolution got so sick of the gorefest that they overthrew Robespierre and then executed him, via guillotine. And that was just the end of the beginning of the revolution.

So many guillotines…

After the Reign of Terror ended, The White Terror began. Vigilantes tracked down and murdered Jacobins and former executioners. A weak coalition government called The Directory tried to restore order, until you know what…

Napoleon showed up.

Napoleon took control. He was a mixed bag. On the one hand, he introduced reforms that laid the foundation for modern democracy. On the other hand, he completely stripped away women’s rights.

Napoleon eradicated freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He put his own family members in charge of the countries he conquered. He locked up his critics and political dissidents without a trial. He plunged Europe into ten years of total war that led to millions of deaths. He committed war crimes as bad as any we’ve seen recently. For example, in Jaffa, he ordered the mass execution of nearly 4,000 prisoners of war because he didn’t want to feed them.

Finally, Napoleon reintroduced slavery to the French colonies and did his best to crush the Haitian Revolution. In the end, Haiti won its independence in 1804 at the cost of 200,000-300,000 lives. Some estimates suggest it was nearly half of their indigenous population. So, that’s the cost of revolution.

That’s what it can take.

The second history lesson

A lot of Americans (and international observers) like to cite the Civil Rights movement as an example of citizen power. They want to know why we can’t do that now. They suggest that Americans today are just lazy, entitled, or uninformed. In reality, it took centuries to build the Civil Rights movement, going all the way back to the foundation of the NAACP in 1909—even earlier. You could say it was a tad more successful than the French Revolution, and a bit less violent.

It was 100+ years in the making.

Historians tend to agree that the American Civil Rights movement succeeded where the French Revolution failed precisely because Civil Rights leaders spent generations building deep, resilient communities and alliances. For them, the community wasn’t a means to an end. It was the whole point.

The French Revolution rushed it, putting ideology first and either abandoning or executing anyone who got in their way. They built fragile communities only to use them as a means to an end.

The Civil Rights movement didn’t start with marches in the 1960s or even the bus boycotts in the 1950s. You have to go back to the early 1900s and even the 1890s. In fact, you could trace the roots of the Civil Rights movement all the way to the foundation of the Bethel AME Church in 1791. The 19th century was filled with conventions, organizations, organized protests, and boycotts. Before Brown v. Board of Education, Benjamin Roberts filed the very first anti-segregation lawsuit in U.S. history. He lost, but he inspired a grassroots movement that led to school integration across Massachusetts in 1855.

It took Frederick Douglass. It took the Harlem Renaissance. It took W.E.B. Du Bois. It took Langston Hughes. It took Nella Larsen. It took Aaron Douglas. It took Richard Wright. It took Ralph Ellison. It took Zora Neale Hurston. It took James Baldwin. It took Rosa Parks. It took Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It took Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis. It took writers, poets, musicians, artists, organizers, and activists. All of them had different ideas and approaches.

Sometimes, they disagreed.

Churches and schools made up the backbone of the Civil Rights movement, a network started in the 1790s by pioneers who were sick of how they were treated in white churches. The networks grew across hundreds of years, providing spaces for ordinary people to form deep social bonds over generations. It was decades of showing up to help each other and build things together. It ran across the entire country, every city, every town, every neighborhood. That’s how you get the power of a movement that can change things across a country this size.

It’s slow, until it’s not.

When Martin Luther King famously said the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice, he was drawing from an 1853 sermon by Theodore Parker who used the same metaphor. That was the meaning.

So when I say we’re not ready for a revolution, that’s what I mean. We have a lot of heavy lifting to put in. We have a lot of damage to repair. It’s not always about marching in the street. It’s often about just taking care of people and making them feel seen, respected, even loved.

If you want to run a marathon, you have to get in shape.

Unity and solidarity are more than cheat codes to make other people do what you want them to do. It means you have to change, too.

You have to give.

Before you get to the boycotts and protests, you have to build the bonds. You have to build the friendships. You have to build the communities. You change the world along the way, every step. It’s radical and it’s incremental. It’s also harder than ever. More obstacles than ever. I’m not saying we need churches, but we need something more than our phones and our snark. You have to show people you care about them. You have to do that for years and years.

You can’t fastforward to the revolution.

Even as the world barrels toward climate hell, we have to take this steady approach. I don’t think there’s any other way to do it. Go to your protests. Organize your boycotts. Don’t forget to take care of people. For some of us, that’s a full time job, it’s a lifelong commitment, and it’s even more important. Understand that a movement draws its power from generations of love and support and mutual respect.

You say you want a revolution?

Well, you know…

There’s a new strain of hopium going around. It sounds like this: We’re probably on track for 3C of global warming by the end of this century, and we should celebrate. The apocalypse is canceled. Well, they’re wrong.

Anyway, 3C is just a number and a letter.

It almost sounds like a bra size.

What does it look like?

And is 3C likely?

Yes, that’s the new scenario we’re being sold. That’s the consensus. Not 1.5C. That’s dead. Forget that ever happened. The new goal is 3C. It was always 3C. Who ever said 1.5C? Lol, ridiculous. It’s entirely possible that most of the planet could breach 3C of warming as early as the 2050s.

One major study by scientists at Stanford, Colorado State, and ETH-Zurich analyzed 10 different climate models and found that the majority of Earth will blow past 2C of warming by the 2040s, landing firmly in 3C territory by the early 2060s. The German Physical and Meteorological Societies issued a joint warning that the planet could go 3C over preindustrial levels by 2050.

Work by James Hansen and Leon Simons has predicted the planet will start hitting 2-3C of warming by the middle of the century. Simons has also commented on the 3C scenario and finds it plausible. In early 2025, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the University of Exeter released a report laying out the worst case: We hit 3C of warming by 2050.

According to the actuarial report, 3C of warming would result in 4 billion deaths, leading to “significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states… and extinction events.” They also predict a 50 percent drop in GDP.

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries isn’t a bunch of Reddit doomers. They’re one of the most respected groups in the world. They assess financial risk and uncertainty for institutions. It’s their job to be right. When they’re wrong, they face consequences, unlike podcast bros who can say whatever they want. The University of Exeter is one of the best universities, part of the Russell Group, considered the “American Ivy League.” They’re known for their intellectual rigor.

You can trust them.

If you want to see the world at 3C, I would recommend three books: Our Final Warning by Mark Lynas, 3 Degrees More edited by Klaus Wiegandt, and Racing to Extinction by Lyle Lewis. Let’s go ahead and paint the picture: We can already expect 4 billion deaths coupled with a 50 percent collapse of the global economy, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to happen over a period of decades, a slow grind punctuated by disasters like Hurricane Helene.

At 3C, large parts of Europe and North America turn into deserts. Dustbowls reminiscent of the 1930s in the U.S. become permanent, with a 40-50 percent collapse in agricultural production. According to a 2020 study in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, “the United States depletes nearly all of its wheat reserves” within four years, triggering a larger “loss of 31 percent of global wheat stocks.” According to a 2016 study in Nature, soy and corn drop by 40 percent. Every degree above the preindustrial average would make it 25 percent worse. Famine ensues.

At 3C, cities like New York experience catastrophic flooding on a regular basis. High tides invade large areas of downtown every night.

Eventually, they’re underwater.

Dangerous heat waves envelope large parts of the world during their springs and summers. Power grids start to buckle. In large cities like Phoenix, up to half of the city could wind up needing a hospital.

In a 3C world, a billion people around the planet routinely endure "temperatures that exceed the workability threshold, where it becomes impossible to safely work outside artificially cooled environments, even in the shade.” We see four times more floods. They cause 10 times more damage, killing at least 20,000 people a year, and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless. That alone guarantees the collapse of the insurance industry.

Pandemics become routine events. Mosquitoes and other insects migrate north, bringing everything from malaria to yellow fever with them. Ticks become an ever-present threat in your back yard. Diseases we thought we conquered with vaccines will mutate and strike back harder. F5 tornadoes become normal. Category 5 hurricanes become normal. Catastrophic floods and fires that used to happen every 100 or 1,000 years happen almost every year. Supply chains won't withstand the bombardment. Neither will power grids. A 3C world pushes us beyond many of our tipping points. The ice sheets melt. AMOC collapses. Permafrost thaws. The rainforest dies. The boreal forest moves north. We know for sure these events will release even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They'll unleash new pandemics. Most of Africa and the Middle East will become completely uninhabitable.

That’s what a 3C world looks like.

It is not a fun place. There is no reason to celebrate this. Even suggesting so is either deeply naive or deeply disingenuous.

That’s not fearmongering. That’s not doomerism. It’s science. It’s reality. It’s a hard look at the future, unadulterated by our hopes and wishes about what happens. That’s the path we’re on. We’re currently not on a plan to avert this world. This is the world that most scientists agree we’re heading toward. The only disagreement now is whether we’re going to get there by the end of the century or the middle of the century. Anyone who tells you that renewables alone will save us doesn’t know about Jevons Paradox or the corruption of climate conferences by the fossil fuel lobby. Accept this reality or don’t. It’s your choice.

Is there hope?

When the party that promises to save us from fascism engages in climate hushing and completely ignores anyone who talks about degrowth or steady-state economies, I think we have to be honest.

That won’t work.

This is the part where emotionally fragile adults start whining and demanding that we, the ones who pay attention, present them with solutions that they find convenient and acceptable. Well, sorry, buddy, there are no convenient or acceptable solutions. There are difficult solutions. There are solutions that require some sacrifice and hardship. There are solutions that require cooperation. There are solutions that won’t save everyone or prevent every bad thing.

There are solutions that won’t seem fair.

These solutions require us to do things we don’t want to do. They’re the only solutions we’ve got. Everyone knows what they are at this point. They’ve been said over and over. People just don’t want to do them.

I’m not saying this to scare or panic anyone. Do I sound scared? I’m not. I’ve been living with this news for a long time. I’m doing what I can to prepare, and I realize the limits of preparedness. I’m getting ready to die. I’m not letting it stop me from enjoying my life. I’m doing all the things I enjoy. I’m doing all the things I find meaningful. I’m not sitting on my phone doomscrolling. But I also can’t just sit back and let toxic optimists and climate hushers control the discourse. They’re wrong, or they’re lying, and they deserve to be called out.

When someone accuses you of being a doomer, you can say: What would you rather have? Do you enjoy being lied to? Do you enjoy being treated like a child or a small pet that can’t handle the truth? Do you enjoy being coddled? Or do you want to join the adult table and have real conversations every so often about what we can do to make the rest of this century a little less painful?

I like the adult table.

Many people prefer the kids’ table.

That’s the real reason we keep seeing all the hopium and goalpost-shifting on the climate targets. It’s why the new climate optimists want you to throw a party over 3C of warming, when it’s actually going to kill half of us.

We already have all the solutions.

We just won’t do them.

The dad works from morning until night. The mom works from night until morning. The mom grabs as much sleep as possible, then she picks her kid up from school. She runs what errands she can with the energy she has. She picks the dad up from work. They share one late dinner, then she goes back to her job.

Two jobs, one car.

Imagine telling that family it’s their moral duty to resist fascism. Imagine lecturing them on their carbon footprint. Imagine telling them to start a garden or collect rain. Imagine telling them there’s going to be a famine and they’re going to starve in eight weeks. Imagine telling them they’re complicit in genocide. Imagine giving them an extra list of things to do to save the future.

If you spent your day getting yelled at by entitled customers and bossed around by entitled managers, then standing in line for groceries, dealing with toddler tantrums, and you knew you’d have to do it all over again tomorrow, how would you want to spend the one or two hours you had free? Would you want to spend that time reading about how screwed you were, and how it was all your fault, or would you want to watch husky videos? I know what I would want.

When you make your living from a laptop or a garden, it’s easy to forget how life actually works for a majority of Americans.

It’s easy to judge them.

Most Americans live on the brink of homelessness now, one car problem away from ruin. And it’s not just them. Everyone they know does the same thing, working multiple jobs, barely getting by. They don’t have a retirement fund. They don’t have savings. They have enough to afford this month’s bills. They’re keeping their heads above water. They’ve got enough energy left to fight the next data center or the next direct corporate assault on a family member.

That’s it.

We know these families. They’re our friends. They’re in the communities we’re building. They’re the plumbers and electricians who open up to us, because we actually talk to them. They’re my dad. They’re my brother. They’re my in-laws. They’re my readers. They’re not living in carefree oblivion.

They just don’t want to hear it anymore.

They don’t want to hear about protests. They don’t want to hear about boycotts. They don’t want to hear about elections. They might not even get a day off to go vote. They don’t want to hear theories about what they’re doing wrong and why they aren’t doing enough to save democracy. They’ve had it with all this.

They’re done.

I’m saying this because I think some of us need to come back down to reality. We spend so much time wondering why Americans don’t seem to care or why they’re not fighting back like the citizens of some other country with a higher relative minimum wage and nationalized healthcare. There’s a simple reason. It doesn’t take a team of political strategists or a bunch of psychologists to see what’s going on with everyone. In fact, political strategists are probably the least qualified group on the planet to diagnose our problems.

I’m in the laptop class for now, but my membership remains tenuous. I often feel like I don’t belong here. I come from the working class. I’m probably returning to the working class eventually, and I foresee a future where I don’t have the time or energy to bang out opinions online.

My brother works all the time. Like me, he’s finally rebuilding his life after decades of trauma. My dad spent his entire life working 12 hours a day and taking care of a mentally ill wife who hated him. He’s done. He has a few years left to relax. He’s not going to spend it trying to fix the world.

Can I blame him?

When I talk to my friends with ordinary jobs and ordinary schedules, they’re not talking about wars and scandals. They’re talking about small things because that’s all they can handle anymore. They’re squeaking out a living.

They’re not joining movements because they don’t trust the movements. Are they going to risk getting thrown in jail and fired?

There’s this thing called survivorship bias.

You and I see the Americans on the internet who have the time and energy left to run our mouths about everything. We see the trolls and the bots. We don’t see the ones who are just keeping their heads above water. We don’t see the ones who don’t have time to swipe and gripe online.

That’s the bias.

If we want to change things, that’s where we have to start. We have to make them feel safe again. We have to make them feel seen and heard. We have to start doing things for each other again without expecting it to trigger a revolution overnight. In other words, we have to rebuild the foundation of actual kindness and caring before we ask anything else of them. We have to build a society that doesn’t reward narcissists and psychopaths, and we have to do it from the ground up. We have to do it in the age of instant gratification and dopamine hits.

It’s going to take a long time. I’m not sure we have enough time left to get it done. Then again, all we’ve got now is time.

So, remember:

Every time we’re condescending and inconsiderate, every time we mistake politeness for kindness, every time we exempt ourselves from basic human decency because we think we’re right and it’s justified, every time we don’t do what we’re demanding everyone else to do, we’re putting a dent in the future we want to see, and we’re sabotaging the society we need to create.

The corporate fascists spent decades wearing us down and grinding us up precisely so we’d all be too tired and irritable to unite.

It’s going to take a generation to undo this damage. Maybe before we can expect the boycotts and the protests to have any bite, we have to rebuild the social infrastructure that made that kind of resistance possible in the first place. We have to build it from nearly scratch, with almost nothing. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be slow. It’s going to be frustrating.

So if you’re wondering why Americans aren’t doing more, that’s why. They work all the time just to stay alive a little longer. They don’t have time for gardens and book clubs. We could spend all day arguing about how we got here, but we’re here. Not everyone willfully signed up for it.

They were just born into it.

Heads above water.

We figured the billionaire bunkers would fail, but get this…

It’s happening early.

I’ve been following bunker stories ever since Douglas Rushkoff wrote about them. Soon after, someone sent me a 2017 article from The New Yorker that revealed the secret bunker culture of bankers and hedge fund managers. They really do get together over tapas and brag about their doomsday plans.

And then there’s the story of C. Wesley Morgan, a Kentucky bourbon baron who advertised the bunker under his mansion on Zillow. It attracted the attention of an ex-military dude who invaded his home. Morgan’s daughter died in the gunfight that ensued. The bunker is now an Airbnb.

Maybe you’ve heard of Vivos xPoint. It’s an old bunker site in South Dakota where the military used to store bombs. It’s home to hundreds of bunkers. About ten years ago, a real estate grifter named Robert Vicino bought the place and started advertising it as the safest haven on earth, somewhere the super rich could bug out during an extinction event, like nuclear war or a global famine.

Things haven’t gone so well.

It’s been getting some attention lately. According to recent news, a bunch of bunker bros have filed a class action lawsuit against Vicino. Why? Well, he promised them a doomsday utopia with a medical facility, a laundromat, a general store, a security force, even a gym. He didn’t build any of it. Instead, he took their money and required them to “improve” the bunkers by installing their own plumbing and utilities. Then he used predatory lease contracts to evict them.

He kept the upgraded bunkers.

And leased them again.

(Lol…)

The tragi-comedy of Vivos xPoint recently graced the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Canadian Prepper also did a beautiful takedown. When you put a $55,000 downpayment on a bunker at xPoint, here’s what you get.

Have a good laugh:

There’s not much going on at xPoint. No guilds. No orchards. No farms or gardens. No ranch. There’s not much in terms of lakes, rivers, or streams. It’s really just a bunch of bunkers out in the middle of nowhere. Look at the history, and you learn that the military built them for an entirely different purpose than survival. The high altitude and low humidity of South Dakota maximized the shelf life of bombs. They put the bomb depots in the middle of nowhere so they wouldn’t kill anyone if they accidentally exploded. The bunkers were designed to keep explosions on the inside, so they didn’t damage other depots.

The bunkers themselves don’t come with the modern infrastructure and air filtration systems to protect anyone from radiation. That would fall under the “improvements” that residents have to add themselves.

About the community:

According to the reports, residents have been getting into a lot of fights and feuds. They’ve been litigating each other. They’ve been harassing and threatening each other over things like failing septic systems. They’ve been pulling guns on each other. In one incident, a bunker bro even shot a contractor during a prolonged confrontation with the site management.

It’s exactly what you’d expect to happen when you put a bunch of entitled jerks together in a remote location. They don’t know how to cooperate. They got where they are by exploiting everyone and everything around them. Of course they weren’t going to make it out there. They never were.

The same goes for the rest of them.

By now, we’ve all heard about the bunkers. Stories have saturated the internet. The mainstream media can’t stop talking about them. Some of them are carved into mountainsides. Some are built into old missile silos. Some have actual drawbridges and lakes of fire built around them. Celebrities all have them now. So do all the tech billionaires and their friends.

None of them will make it. Many of us predicted these bunkers would fail at some point during the collapse of civilization. It’s just a bad idea to put a bunch of rich people together in a remote location on the premise that they’ll build a community. That’s not how they accumulated their wealth. They built their wealth by extracting it from us, and then flattering themselves.

What’s interesting is that they’re already failing.

It’s ahead of schedule.

Places like xPoint have already collapsed. The doomsday events they fantasized about haven’t even started happening yet, and they’re already pulling out their guns and trying to kill each other. Another bunker project failed a couple of years ago. Maybe you remember a piece in The Lever about Barrett Moore, a doomsday tycoon who tried to build a bunker community, conning hundreds of thousands of dollars out of rich people. He wound up drowning in lawsuits.

Bradley Garrett wrote an entire book on bunker culture called Bunker. He spent months touring all the bugouts and came to the conclusion they wouldn’t last six months inside these things. They were already joking about making dungeons and chaining up teenage girls in them.

Some of them were even fantasizing about going Rambo on nearby neighborhoods and putting everyone’s heads on pikes.

Sounds lovely.

There’s a definitive lesson here: Don’t envy the billionaires and their bunkers. Don’t envy their security teams. Don’t go around believing they know something the rest of us don’t. They know nothing that climate scientists and activists haven’t been screaming for decades. That’s all they know. And they know because they’re the ones who’ve been committing all the destruction.

It’s all liability dressed up as privileged. In almost every case, you’re better off where you are. You’re better off doing what you’re doing. It’s sad that the groups with the power and resources to undo some of this damage are, instead, choosing to build bunkers and weep into the arms of Davos prostitutes about how screwed we are. They’re not going to change.

So, there you have it, rather conclusive evidence that bunkers aren’t going to help anyone. Not only were they a terrible waste of resources in the first place, they’re already failing. They were always going to fail.

It’s just happening early.

The entire world is already dealing with killer heat waves. There’s no need for me to run through all the news stories. We’ve all seen them. It’s not just “a little hot.” These heat waves are killing people and destroying infrastructure.

How bad could it get?

Well, a 2023 study predicted that a heatwave accompanied by a blackout in major cities like Phoenix would send half the population to the ER. According to a separate analysis covered in The New York Times, two-thirds of North America already face “shortfalls in the electrical grid, particularly during periods of extreme heat when demand for air conditioning spikes, straining resources.” That was before the world’s billionaires started mass-building data centers.

Europeans are now facing the hottest summers in recorded history, in places that were never designed or built to see such temperatures.

Odds are, you or someone in your family will be living through something like this in the foreseeable future—an intense heatwave accompanied by a blackout, or at least a grid flickering as it buckles under energy demand.

So, how do you survive?

Here’s what I know.

Yes, you can survive

Melissa Norris and her family survived several days at 120F degrees without air conditioning. Their indoor air temperature topped out at 88F degrees. It wasn’t comfortable, but they made it. They explain what they did in this video, and it covers a range of simple strategies like blinds and blackout curtains, limiting stove use, and strategic use of fans at night to promote air exchange.

Frozen towels and sheets do the job

Melissa Norris is spot on with the advice about frozen towels. If you’ve heard this before, there’s a fancier term for it in emergency medicine. It’s called ice sheet cooling (ISC), and the military considers it a standard intervention in field medicine to treat heat-related illnesses and injury.

A 2023 study in The Journal of Emergency Medicine found ice sheets effective in treating heat stroke and preventing mortality, and it’s a good alternative to the “gold standard” of cold water immersion. If they’re reasonably effective in treating someone already suffering from heat stroke, then it stands to reason they’re even better at keeping you cool to prevent it in the first place.

A 2022 study in Military Medicine reached a similar conclusion. In this study, participants exercised in a heated chamber until they underwent “exertional hyperthermia,” and then they were treated with “bed sheets soaked in ice water… at the neck, chest, and groin with another sheet covering the body.”

So, get soaking.

Leverage your freezer if you can

It’s worth keeping this method in your playbook, because brownouts and grid failures will increasingly accompany heat waves as cities that aren’t prepared for the climate crisis struggle with thousands of residents blasting their AC all day. Air conditioners are a modern luxury that we probably can’t count on for the indefinite future, especially as grids start to flicker and fail. Even before grid failures become the norm, power bills will soar and price a lot of us out.

It’s difficult to keep an air conditioner running with solar power. I’ve done the math. A decent, affordable portable battery setup with a handful of solar panels can produce 750-1000 watts per hour. A window unit or portable AC would consume most of that, and probably all of it, depending on the size and the circumstances. Even a fully-fledged rooftop solar system would struggle to power a central AC unit during a heatwave. Central AC needs roughly 3-4 kWh to keep a house cool. If you can afford rooftop solar and you live in a good location, it’s doable.

If you don’t, it’s not.

But…

You can power a freezer with a few solar panels. Your average chest freezer uses half the electricity of a window unit, at 80-200 watts per hour. Depending on size, a freezer can even use a third or even less electricity.

Freezers are far more energy efficient because they cool air and then keep it insulated. So, freeze something and then put it next to your body’s hot spots to cool you down, around your neck or under your arms.

You can still try to run a portable AC with solar panels, but you can leverage an energy-efficient freezer as a backup.

It could save lives.

Take a bath

Just like ice, liquid water cools you down.

According to science, it takes 3200 times as much energy to heat water to the same temperature as air. It also transfers heat away from your body at a high rate. Water’s density also makes your body work harder to heat it up. This piece in The Conversation recommends water at 26 or 27C degrees (80F) for someone suffering heatstroke (to avoid cold shock), but you can go lower if you’re not having an emergency. Generally, your tap water comes out at 10-20C degrees (50-70F). So, just taking a cool bath or shower could save someone’s life.

If you can’t take a bath or shower, you can just submerge your hands or feet in a tub of water or wrap them in sheets. You can also use a mister.

They all work.

Turn off the lights and appliances

During a heatwave, you want to add to the problem as little as possible. According to HVAC experts, people don’t think about the significant amounts of heat they’re adding to their homes throughout the day with lights, electronics, and appliances, especially ones like dryers and stoves. Even a high-performance PC in a closed room can feel like you’ve got a heater running. This article also explains the way overlooked appliances and lightbulbs add heat to your home.

So in our dystopian, low-energy future, it’s going to make sense to use less electricity so you don’t cook yourself in your own home.

Not fun news, I know.

Use fans strategically

Fans can help with air flow, but they work better if you understand the basic principles of positive and negative air pressure. Simply parking yourself in front of one can actually speed up dehydration and heat illness. Above 35C degrees (95F), they start to pose more of a liability than anything.

It’s a little counterintuitive…

Just putting a fan in the window often doesn’t do enough. This article from Instructables explains how to create pressure systems to manage the air in your home depending on the time of day.

So, use fans to exchange air in your home.

For example:

If you want to cool one room, like a bedroom, then open a window at the other end of your home. Seal the other rooms.

Put a fan near but not in the far window opening to create a vortex, then open the bedroom window. That creates a windstream that replaces warm, stuffy air with fresh, cool air. Do this at night, and then keep your place sealed during the day to keep that cooler air inside, and the hotter air outside.

Let’s repeat that part:

Don’t try to do this in the middle of the day. Develop a system. Vent your house at strategic times, like at night and early morning.

It works.

Invest in good curtains

Sunlight heats rooms. It’s called heat gain. The more you can do to block out sunlight during a heatwave, the better. Even basic curtains can reduce heat gain by 33 percent. Window quilts do an even better job.

Make a zeer

Cultures around the world have been keeping goods cool with zeer pots, or pots within pots, for thousands of years. You can cool food, or you can cool water, and cool water can help you stay alive during a heat wave.

Drinking cool water lowers your core temperature.

This guy shows you how to make one.

So does this article.

The inside temperature of a zeer pot can be 20-30F degrees lower than the outside temperature, especially in drier climates. They can chill down to 40F degrees (4C), even during the summer. They still work in more humid environments, just not quite as well. So, that’s a powerful tool.

They’re simple and robust.

Make a terracotta cooler

According to a 2024 study in the Journal of Engineering Sciences, terracotta has resurfaced as a material for cooling as the world cooks. Research has found that terracotta coolers can lower indoor temperatures “up to 6-10C in arid and semi-arid regions,” or up to 18F degrees. They work best in areas with low humidity. Some companies like Team Solstice have even designed air conditioners with terracotta that use much less energy while lowering room temperatures to 22-27C (mid-upper 70s in farenheight). Other companies like CoolAnt have designed terracotta beehive structures to cool the air up to 15C (27F).

This video shows you how to make a “mud pot air cooler” that can cool air from 40C down to 15C and distribute the air with a simple DC fan.

Here’s an alternate design. Some versions use a water pump, but it’s not essential. You basically mount two small fans on a clay pot, fill it with water, and take advantage of terracotta’s natural cooling properties.

The terracotta option is going to work better under certain conditions than others, but it’s a good option to know about.

You can also scale it up.

Other long term options

Go downstairs, or into a basement if you have access to one. For the long term, it’s not a bad idea to find a home with some kind of underground level. It’s always going to be cooler. You can also grow a vine trellis outside your home to provide shade. Vines do a great job of blocking heat, and growing them on a trellis means you don’t have to worry about them damaging your home itself. Studies have shown that vines on a building can reduce inside temperatures by 3-4C degrees (6F) or more, when you cover 40-70 percent of the walls.

According to an article in Interesting Engineering, earth-sheltered homes offer a wide range of advantages for our dystopian future, especially when it comes to disasters and heat waves. Native Americans built quite a lot of these structures across the plains, further demonstrating how much better they understood this continent and how poorly adapted our lifestyles remain.

Also, improve your insulation.

Seal any windows you don’t plan on opening up. If you can afford it, upgrade them to reduce heat gain. Look at the R value (5-7 ideal). Also inspect your walls for gaps around power outlets or other areas where your living space could be bleeding cool air to the outside. The more seals, the better.

So, that’s what I’ve got.

To survive the heatwaves and grid failures of the future, the kind that’ll send half the populations of major cities to the ER, I would start implementing these strategies and helping other people do it. If you’re building community, share this information and help your friends ruggedize their homes. Think about setting up some cooling centers, even underground ones.

Other strategies exist, and I can’t cover them all in one article. These work. They’re some of the simplest, most immediate things you can do.

What are your heatwave survival strategies?

Let me know.

Someone recently told me:

You’ve got it all figured out. You have a left brain. You can do physics and engineering. Your ideas look so impressive, but they intimidate me. I can’t do any of that. I keep failing. Maybe I should give up. Maybe I’m just going to starve.

It’s funny, because that’s how I often feel when I read posts or watch videos from preppers and homesteaders further along than me.

I’ve got a few things to say about all this.

Let’s face an uncomfortable truth, shall we?

All of our prepping and homesteading plans amount to squat if we don’t have regular, reliable access to clean water for drinking and growing food. It’s also not going to matter much if we have no way to dispose of our pee and poop. I’m sorry if this sounds blunt or negative, but it’s reality.

I like reality.

We’ve been struggling with these fundamental problems for years, and they’re exactly the kind of problems swept under the rug by all the doomsday slop out there that presents perfectly organized root cellars, workshops full of clean tools, and blossoming food gardens. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone. We’re very much on the suburban homesteading bandwagon, growing food, composting kitchen scraps, and developing DIY plans for emergencies and disasters. But we have limited resources, and we have to manage our priorities. We still wouldn’t last a month on what we manage to grow, and that’s reality.

Like I said, I like reality.

For us, solving the water problem is a priority. It goes on the top of the list. Because we don’t want to invest huge amounts of time and money, only to wind up in a drought so bad we can’t even run a drip irrigation system. Given that the UN has officially declared a water bankruptcy, given that many parts of the world are now living through their worst droughts in history, given that our leaders are doing almost nothing about it, given the growing threat of data centers, it feels like a logical place to put our efforts. Water first.

I’ve grown increasingly fatigued with the doomsday slop that’s been taking over the internet, promising easy solutions wrapped in fear. So I’m going to tell everyone what has actually worked for us—and what hasn’t.

I think there’s a lot of untapped value in talking about what doesn’t work. We should be doing it more often.

Let’s go.

What hasn’t worked: dew harvesting

After months of trying to make it work, I’m finally pivoting away from dew harvesting. Not because I failed. Because I finally succeeded.

We found the right material. We ironed out the science. We built a prototype that reliably catches dew every night. So, what’s the problem? This: By the time we scaled up our concept and ran the math, it was going to cost thousands of dollars. It was going to take up 500-800 square feet… to collect a few gallons of dew, on an average night. If we had the budget, if we had the space, we could do it. But we don’t have either. So, when you see those doomsday slop videos promising dew harvesting at pennies on the dollar, don’t listen to them.

It’s mostly hype.

You need to know this so you don’t spend countless hours trying to make it work and then judging yourself. Physics doesn’t answer to our whims.

It only answers to itself.

Moving on…

What works: rain harvesting

Rain harvesters can actually help you in a drought.

We think of droughts as periods with no rain. But that’s wrong. Here’s what actually happens during a drought: Warmer air holds more moisture, and the “rain” gets trapped in the atmosphere. You go long periods without rain, and then it dumps down on you in violent storms. The parched ground can’t absorb the water, so it runs off. The problem compounds, and that’s why it takes so long to recover.

Rain harvesting helps with that.

When you harvest rain, you store some of the water that would normally run off. You’re not hoarding water. Plenty of it still reaches reservoirs and aquifers. Meanwhile, you’re watering crops and keeping the soil healthy. So, it’s actually a good idea to build one if you can.

Here’s the problems:

You need a very specific kind of roof to eliminate contaminants and toxins if you plan to use harvested rain for growing food and drinking. I’ve covered that in our illustrated guide. Most of us don’t have these roofs.

Further research has shown that you can use a shingled roof to some extent, but you have to be extremely careful filtering your water, and that’s the hard part. We looked into in-line hose filters as a solution, but they only work with city water pressure. They won’t work with gravity-fed systems. We’re currently looking into the feasibility of rigging other types of gravity-fed water filters to a barrel or IBC tote, but it’s slow going. Sometimes, we find something and…

It’s out of stock.

So.

We’ve troubleshooted and come up with alternatives, but none of them are foolproof. None of them work 100 percent of the time. None of them completely eliminates the risks of contaminated water.

But we’re working on it.

That’s the point.

What works: an atmospheric water generator

We’ve been running a commercial atmospheric water generator for about a year now. It’s an H2O Machine from here. It really does generate several gallons of drinkable water a day. We tested the water, and it’s safe.

You can search online and find a few different brands. I can’t speak to all the different models, but they all use the same tech and draw about the same amount of power. Paired with a beefy solar backup system, you’ve at least got water to sustain a small group over a long period of time.

Upsides: You’re not storing hundreds of gallons of water. You’re not managing complicated harvesting and storage systems. You plug it up. You follow the instructions, and you have water.

Downsides: Ours takes 72 hours to cycle when you first turn it on. So, you can’t just mothball it and then roll it out for emergencies. You turn it on, and leave it on. Fortunately, it’s a lot like an appliance. It’s not consuming huge amounts of power when it’s not actively generating water.

We use just enough water to cycle through the tank once a week. This keeps it in good working condition and prevents anything from growing in stagnant water or ruining the filters. For us, this makes the most sense.

It’s not going to water your garden.

If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars, this feels like a better investment than building a dew catcher. Sure, the dew catcher doesn’t use any electricity. But at 800 square feet for a few gallons, the AWG wins.

So, that’s our solution.

What works: A Dehumidifier

There’s a lot of debate about the utility of a dehumidifier. Some say that’s what an atmospheric water generator is, a glorified dehumidifier.

We tried a new dehumidifier. We tested the water, and it was clean. But we’re going to do a more extensive test before recommending that. For the money and space, it’s vastly more efficient than anything else.

A solid water filter like Boroux or GSR’s Guardian, or Grayl, will reduce the risk of metal contamination. These companies have said that while it technically works, they can’t recommend it as anything other than a last resort.

Yes, it requires power.

It’s risky.

What works: composting toilet

Some people are so sure they’ll always have a working toilet. Well, maybe. Then again, there’s no harm in having a backup. You don’t want to wait until there’s actually a problem before coming up with a solution.

So, we adapted a cheap, portable composting toilet design for a long-term emergency situation. It works. Here’s the design.

We’re still fine-tuning aspects of it.

But it works.

Ignore the doomsday slop

Here’s one of the most important things I’ve learned over the last few years, trying to prep for various disasters and emergencies.

Ignore the doomsday slop.

Doomsday slop promises dew harvesting for pennies on the dollar. It shows you a root cellar full of vegetables while downplaying or completely hiding all the time and money invested in building the thing. It willfully overlooks how most of our systems still rely on some kind of functional grid and a network of supply chains while touting itself as “self-reliant.” It pushes batteries and generators that cost thousands of dollars. It ignores all the backend deals these influencers use to get their stuff for free, because their job is to market it to you, regardless of whether it really works, regardless of whether you actually need it.

In the real world, prepping is hard. Homesteading is hard. Survival is hard. You have to budget your resources. You have to drive to the hardware store and get the stuff. You have to endure the trial and error.

You have to do it when you’re tired.

You have to expect failure.

You have to keep going.

Sometimes, it feels like the homesteaders and market gardeners look down on the rest of us who don’t already have 20 acres and a greenhouse. It’s a little irritating when they go on and on about how “anyone can do it,” because when we try and then fail, it makes us feel like losers. It feels a little condescending when they lead us to believe composting kitchen scraps will save humanity. Look, we’re composting the kitchen scraps. We’ve done it for years now.

But:

If someone built their homestead 20 years ago, they were doing it in a vastly different landscape. Land was cheaper. Materials were cheaper. Your money went further. You could hold down a simple job to supplement your garden hustle. In most places, you had a reliable grid to fall back on when your crops failed or something broke. In fact, many of the original homesteaders actually worked seasonal jobs for part of the year to pay for their supplies. Nobody tells you that.

We’re dealing with a completely different picture. We’re trying to build in an era defined by resource scarcity, buckling supply chains, unprecedented political instability, endless war, historic inequality, and endless inflation. No, it was never easy. But it’s harder than ever now. I can’t tell you how many times, just over the last couple of weeks, I’ve sighed when something I needed was out of stock or on back order—or it cost double what it would have just a few years ago.

It’s really, really frustrating.

This doesn’t mean we give up. But I think it’s important to be honest about the challenges and obstacles we face now.

That’s why I’m trying to be honest about my trials and failures. My warka tower failed. My next design worked, but it’s not scalable. Fortunately, I’ve already got plans to repurpose all the parts. I’m moving on to the next idea. We’ve got a couple of things in place that work, and it’s better than nothing.

It’s important to talk about the failures along with the successes. To me, that’s encouraging. Not the doomsday slop where everyone pretends they’ve already got it figured out and everything works the first time.

In the real world, sometimes you come up with the perfect idea, but it costs too much to make or it takes up too much space. The materials you need are out of stock. Or a tariff has made them expensive overnight.

That’s prepping in the real world.

It’s messy.

I love it.

Recently, Lex Luthor’s irl twin Jeff Bezos showed up at a tech conference in Paris, where he supposedly declared that humans were drinking too much water—and that it was slowing down AI’s evolution.

The internet filled up with justifiable outrage. Everyone had something to say about his psychopathic disregard for humanity. Full disclosure, I reposted some of the memes on X. (Yeah, I rejoined the platform under my old name.) My spouse and I had a nice long bitch fest about Bezos while making dinner and talking about our dew harvester plans (update on that in a minute).

There was just one little problem. There’s no record of Bezos ever making those comments about AI and human water consumption.

Just as outrage over Bezos was abating, new outrage erupted over Israel’s violation of the peace deal with Iran, prompting another Hormuz closure and another spate of viral videos about how screwed we are.

Honestly, it’s so boring…

I’m not writing this to exonerate Bezos or shame anyone for spreading misinformation. I’m writing this for a different reason.

The reason:

Hopefully, we can all agree that spending hours fuming over something that someone didn’t even say is a waste of our time. So is spending hours wondering if or when we’re going to have a supply chain collapse or a famine. It does nothing. It doesn’t stop data centers. It doesn’t conserve water. It doesn’t prepare anyone for the droughts that are actively drying up the nation’s crops and water sources. And if you can’t even trust what’s real online anymore, why give it so much energy?

I’ve noticed something in myself and others over the last several months, and it’s something new. It’s a shift. It’s a new approach. We’re not ignoring the news. We’re not living in a fantasy world. We’re not numb. We’re not decencitized. We’re not selling hopium or oblivious ignorance.

We’re just processing the doom faster.

We’re acclimated.

We’re getting right to the do something part. These days, I don’t have to spend days convincing my spouse to get on board with a rain harvesting project. I don’t have to spend all night reading about droughts to convince myself it’s a thing. He sees the droughts now. He’s worried. He wants one.

I don’t have to pitch it anymore.

So, my bandwidth no longer goes toward trying to convince my family we have a problem. I don’t need quite as much doom to validate my thoughts and feelings about the state of the world. I just need to know what’s going on, and that’s it. We’re in the design stage. It makes a big difference to have someone who’s actually helping you think through concepts instead of constantly doubting and second-guessing your entire worldview. A very big difference…

Ironically, it was nothing I said or did that finally got through to them. It was just reality. The reality of our doom has become so apparent, so self-evident, that at least some people are finally starting to wake up a little.

(I know, not everyone…)

Exhibit A:

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a dew harvester design for months. I’ve failed a few times. Last night, I finally started moving in the right direction, with a design that sits 3 feet off the lawn and harnesses plant transpiration. I’ve changed materials to sanded coroplast and silicone-coated aluminum (AMS panels) backed with xps foam. Instead of a bulky wooden frame or a flimsy PVC one, I’m using steel construction pipes that fit together with an allen wrench. Based on my trial runs, my prototype is going catch a gallon of dew a night, even in low-average humidity. It’s going to double as a rain harvester. We’re going to run the gutter into 30-gallon Aquatanks, daisychained with PVC.

I’m probably never going to build something as big as this massive dew and rain harvester in Texas, which spans 2,674 feet. But at least I know about the project. I know someone else out there is doing.

Soon, we’re going to make a permanent ground install that runs along the back of our yard. We’re also working through a hinged model that can fold out from the side of a deck or a house and rest on two legs.

So, it’s working.

This is what we’ve come up with, because we can’t completely redo our roof. We can’t install a super-expensive rain harvesting system. We engineered our way through problems rather than letting them stop us.

What else?

A couple of families in our area have started asking us for prepping advice. We’re sharing our plans with them. We’re in the early stages of converting our garage (now that we have one) into a workshop and temporary disaster shelter. We can’t save everyone. But we can help someone.

Slowly and surely, community is happening. Not because we forced it. We’re building it, and we’re attracting the right people to us.

These days, I’d rather obsess over dew harvester designs than sit on my phone, scrolling hate posts about something someone didn’t even say. I already have enough reasons to despise Jeff Bezos. I already know what he thinks about humanity. I don’t need to make up new quotes for him.

Do I regret my years of doomscrolling?

No…

Five years ago, doomscrolling wasn’t a sign of mental illness. It wasn’t a condition that needed treatment. It was a logical, intuitive response to a world where threats suddenly outnumbered hopes. We were never just scrolling doom for its own sake. We were looking for information. We were looking for like minds and souls. We were looking for friends and allies.

Yes, it was comforting to scroll through doom—but not because we were addicted to bad news. We were relieved and soothed to find other people who felt the same way, who weren’t scared to express their emotions.

Over time, that emotional venting evolved into tangible solutions. It’s where we learned about HOCl steam, a “promising respiratory antiseptic” that changed our lives and helped us reclaim a little bit of the “normal” in a world where almost nobody takes the threat of airborne diseases seriously, unless they’re briefly freaking out over headlines about Ebola or Hantavirus.

In other words, we were looking for answers.

We started finding them.

We found real answers, not the “touch grass” nonsense that got served to us during the Barbenheimer summers of yore.

The doomscrolling was a step on a path, a means to an end. The end was understanding science and public health. It was developing tools and mindsets. It was making connections. We have those now, so we don’t need to scroll for the doom as much. The bad news is there, right in front of us.

We’re done dooming.

Now we’re doing.

Feels good.