Ready for Disaster? 'Preparedness Movement' Members Say They Are

SEWARD, Alaska, Aug. 12, 2008 — -- Let's face it: The news these days can be a little depressing.

People can't drive because gas is too expensive, the price of food is skyrocketing, families are losing their homes, the stock market is tanking and the Arctic ice caps might be melting, plunging the planet into serious trouble.

A lot of people take in all this news, shrug it off and just push on with life.

But not everyone.

At the Tom Brown Tracking, Nature and Wilderness Survival School in Waretown, N.J., they're preparing for the worst. The school attracts people from every corner of the nation who want to learn how to build a fire, make stone tools and absorb an American Indian lifestyle and philosophy.

Brown said the word "survivalist" conjures "images of a bunker stocked with food and ammunition, or a soldier, or some dirtbag suffering on a glacier."

But he says that couldn't be further from the truth.

"Survival is like the garden of Eden. It's like going home," he said.

People have been preparing for the end of the world since the beginning of time.

The first big survivalist movement of recent time came during the Cold War and the looming threat of nuclear holocaust.

More recently there was the near disaster that was called "Y2K." That's when many thought society would come to a screeching halt because of a computer malfunction tied to New Year's Day in the year 2000.

"People were coming in here, they were panic stricken. ... What if the computer shuts down, what if NYC doesn't get running water. The water system, God forbid, could shut off," Brown sad.

Brown says people today see a new threat on the horizon.

"There is an overall apprehension that I feel," he said. "A fear that I can see it and feel it in people. I can feel it in the streets when I have to go out and get something from a store. And I watch people very carefully and there is a rhythm and a cadence that is developing that I noticed back as we approached Y2K and it's happening again. But, as I say, this one isn't going away fast."

It's the reason people come to his school: to learn how to survive if the government isn't there for them -- if things get really, really bad.

Dennis Souza of Seward, Alaska, for one, isn't optimistic about the future.