How did I come up with survival skills?

Hi Steve,
I’m trying to write a blog post everyday for this assignment until I feel that I have addressed your question substantially, or, until the due date. Today, I was thinking: where do I start?

There is no better place to start than the beginning so I went back to your comments on assignment 1. I suggested that environmental education should teach survival skills- to which you responded: “very interesting.” To me, as a student, there is no better response than that from a professor.

Why did I even mention survival skills in the first place? How did this idea pop into my head?

Now I remember: Neil Strauss.

Neil Strauss is best known for his book “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists”, an autobiographical story of how he immerses himself in the “seduction community” to pick up women. Check this out:

http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20050905_111485_111485

Before school started, I read Strauss’ most recent book “Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life”. This book was another autobiography of how he learned survival skills (i.e. search and rescue, firearm use, how to kill a goat etc.) for potential crisis due to incompetency by the American government, or, in survivalist lingo, “When the shit hits the fan”. Although Strauss does not mention James Lovelock or the Gaia theory, a world exposed to intense solar radiation where only small areas of currently inhabitable and biologically productive land will be inhabitable and biologically productive (Lovelock, 2009), is not unlike the apocalyptic world that Strauss is preparing for.

Here are a few news articles on “Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life” that you may want to check out:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/10/entertainment/et-neil-strauss10

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/03/26/macleans-interview-neil-strauss/#more-43711

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/03/21/infiltrating_the_survivalists/

I’ll come back to Neil Strauss, survival skills and how this relates to what I learned in your class at a later date. Stay tuned.
-Jessica