As you may know, I consider emergency preparedness to be a spiritual value. We owe the people around us our ability to take care of ourselves and take care of them, too, in times of need. It is a subset of what I categorize here as “sustainable living.” It is a category that has been sorely underrepresented here. I have only one article so far in that category and it is about honey. (It is an extremely valuable one, though. I have had a few testimonials since writing it about honey’s incredible effectiveness in wound treatment.)

Lately, I’ve been researching heavily and I have found some very useful resources which I will be telling you about over the next few weeks. The first of these is a wonderful little site that focuses on survival equipment called Equipped to Survive. It features reviews of equipment and, probably its most valuable asset, a very active forum frequented by extremely knowledgeable and experienced people. I highly recommend perusing this forum for its many nuggets of survival wisdom. The forum members use a variety of specialized acronyms, and no explanation of what they mean, so, as a resource to those who might want to visit, I’ve compiled a little glossary of the ones I’ve figured out:

ETS - Equipped to Survive. That’s the name of the website / organization.

EDC - Every Day Carry. One who is equipped for emergencies usually carries some minimal equipment everywhere they go and at all times. THis is often the stuff in a wallet or on a key chain.

PSK - Personal Survival Kit. This is a small kit that one carries when in the wilderness and has on them at all times. It is an EDC when one is in the outdoors.

SAK - Swiss Army Knife. A very common component of EDC’s.

BOB - Bug Out (or Bail Out) Bag. This is a bag of stuff you need to support yourself for 72 hours in an emergency situation, such as an emergency evacuation. Some Emergency Preparedness sources call it a “72-Hour Kit.”

FAK - First Aid Kit.

RSK - A small folding knife designed by the website’s founder Doug Ritter.

SAR - Search and Rescue. A lot of the folks on this site are first responders or rescue workers. There are basically two kinds of SAR kits - a “24 hour kit” for work on an SAR mission, and a 72-hour kit that is for a base camp and is almost identical to a BOB. Many BOB’s also function as an SAR kit.

The website is, I admit, mostly a bunch of guys talking about their favorite toys. Many of them take pictures of their PSK’s and post them, for example. But, I fit right in as I love to talk about my toys, too, and the things you can learn from these folks is priceless.