The myth of solo survival and self-sufficiency….

Today, read any of the modern books about wilderness skills and it will happily inform you that you need to do a small list of chores and your coming out of the situation is almost assured. This list of chores is quite small…
- Build fire
- Build shelter
- Find water
- Find and process food
- Make weapons and tools
- Create signals
- Maintain health

This is the basic outline of survival, the order of priorities may change depending on your environment, but that is for you to decide based on your situation.

In traditional cultures, each of these chores is completed by particular factions within the tribal collective.
-Men will hunt, create fire, make weapons & some tools and deal with wildlife.
-Women will gather, locate water, process foods, build shelters, and create clothing.
This is not a fixed list, some cultures will have different ideas of who does what, but this will illustrate my point.

Now back to our books and videos/DVDs, in these sources we always see individuals doing all of the tasks involved in maintaining a vertical state and getting home. If we were to try to do these tasks for a prolonged period as a solo survivor, we would soon find that our whole time is spent working on the problems of daily life.

For a fit and healthy individual to live in the woods they will need to be able to complete the list above on their own, now if the individual is sick or injured their ability to complete the basic tasks will be severely hindered. How many of you have had a bad cold, with fever and head spins and have had to go out and collect and cut wood, collect water from a stream and hunt & process game while looking out for a search plane?

My guess is not many…. When we are sick or injured our ability to keep ourselves alive is limited.

Back to our traditional village…

The men in the village all have the knowledge to make their own tools and weapons, however in the village some will be better at this than others, so if “Bob” is good at making bows, the others who are not so good will go to Bob and ask him to make them a bow… Bob will say “Sure…” and off he goes. Now Bob will expend his time and energy in making the bow, while he does this he won’t have time to hunt, fish, keep a look out for predators, tend his hearth or cook his own meals… it’s a bit extreme I know but it will illustrate what I’m saying. Bob has spent a couple of days making this bow, what is in it for him? The happy friendship of his neighbour? Perhaps… in the bushman culture of the Kalahari if someone makes a bow or arrows for another, the first animal taken with the item will belong to the one who made the bow, or arrows, then the new owner can go and hunt another for his own family.

While Bob has been working away industriously, his wife/mother/sister has been busy, they have found some water, gathered and cooked staple foods fixed his shelter and repaired or made him a clothing item if he needed it. They may have been processing some seeds they collected into flour for bread. They may have been processing the hide of the animal Bob got on his last hunt. All while tending to the fire and watching the children? No, the old members of the village have been minding the kids and educating them in the ways and stories of the tribe. Even primitive cultures still send their children to school; the younger adults are too busy doing what needs to be done to keep the village going.

In our modern society, we have the same specialist culture; each member of society has a role to play.

Now, self-sufficiency is something espoused by many in the wilderness and preparedness community, they will tell you that you need to gather all your resources together and be ready to, if not already, live relying only on yourself for all your needs… this I’m afraid isn’t going to happen… no matter how much you stockpile goods, you will never be self-sufficient…

How can I say this? Surely, we have a duty to strive for this noble goal?

I can say this with a clear conscience… because it is true.

To be self-sufficient we need to do all the tasks that maintain life. Even the best-prepared individual is reliant on others. Let us look at this for a second…

I know people who will proudly tell me they do not need anyone to help them in the woods, and to a point I will agree… but only for a short period. You see they have a whole range of items they carry that, and to be honest, they would be lost without; they have no idea, nor ability, to make the items they carry.

They cannot:
- Weave cloth to replace clothing
- Mine, process and work metal for tools and weapons
- Create the manmade materials they espouse as being the best for clothing and equipment
- None of them can make a rifle from raw materials and basic hand tools
- None can build a car or a generator from basic processed ore

This is just the tip of the iceberg, to be truly self-sufficient they would have to learn all of these skills and more… far too much knowledge than can be acquired in a single lifetime.

Rather than being self-sufficient, we should be aiming to be more self-reliant, this is because even the best woodsman needs assistance from his village, someone to make his weapons, someone to weave the cloth for his clothing, someone to process the chemicals needed for his powder and mine the ore for his shot & ball, or in the case of a modern weapon, make brass, propellant and projectiles. Most shooters these days reload, so the combination of elements into a projectile driven down range is not a major problem.

There is an old saying, “It takes a village to raise a child”, let us also say it takes a village to keep us alive in the woods for more than a couple of days.



Safe Trails…



Karl