Hard times have some flirting with survivalism

Kari Huus Reporter • Profile • E-mail

SEATTLE - Atash Hagmahani is not waiting for the stock market to recover. The former high-tech professional turned urban survivalist has already moved his money into safer investments: Rice and beans, for starters.

“I hoard food,” says Hagmahani, 44, estimating that he has enough to last his family a year or two. “I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

“People keep asking when this (economic crisis) is going to clear up,” says Hagmahani, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that he be identified only by this pseudonym, which he uses for his survivalist blog, or by his first name, Rob.

The answer, he predicts, is that the country is entering what he calls a “Greater Depression.” “Maybe they jolly well better get used to the change in lifestyle.”

Hagmahani is not alone in concluding that desperate times call for serious preparations.

With foreclosure rates running rampant, financial institutions teetering and falling, prices for many goods and services climbing, and jobs being slashed, many Americans are making preparations for worse times ahead. For some, that means cutting spending and saving more. For others, it means taking a step into survivalism, once regarded solely as the province of religious End-of-Timers, sci-fi fans and extremists.

That often manifests itself as a desire to secure basic emergency resources — what survival guru Jim Wesley Rawles describes as “beans, bullets and Band-Aids.”

Rawles, speaking by phone from an “undisclosed location” somewhere between the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains, said he has seen traffic on his Web site, SurvivalBlog.com, explode in the last year.

Getting ready for ‘TEOTWAWKI’
“There are a lot more people — a lot more eager people — who are trying to get themselves squared away logistically,” said Rawles, who lectures and writes books on preparing for and surviving “TEOTWAWKI” — The End Of The World As We Know It.

Rawles, a self-described Christian conservative, said most of his readers had similar backgrounds when he started his blog in 2005. But he said that as the financial crisis has unfolded — particularly when oil prices began to soar — he started hearing from a much broader segment of the population.

“Now it’s the entire political spectrum — far right, far left and everything in between,” said Rawles. “I’m getting over 200 e-mails from readers a day. Now it is quite apparent how many more liberals are writing. Same concerns, different outlook. Greens, for instance, put less emphasis on self-defense and guns.”

Buoyed by an industry that flourishes when others languish, his site also is attracting record advertising revenue. The offerings include “secure, off-grid” mountain retreats, firearms training, home schooling aids, gold, freeze-dried food and water filtration systems.

Long-lasting food in demand
Others more directly embedded in the survival industry say they, too, are seeing the biggest surge of orders since the run-up to Y2K, when angst surged over whether computers would survive the dawn of a new millennium.

“I’m getting slammed with big orders,” said Kurt Wilson, a distributor of freeze-dried foods and other provisions with decades-long shelf life, like canned meat, cheese and butter.

“I have customers who were spending 200 bucks a month now spending $5,000 to $8,000,” Wilson said from his warehouse in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “I get little old ladies calling up, stocking up for their grandchildren.”

Wilson, who also has an online radio show called the Armchair Survivalist, said one of his new clients is a New York interior designer who specializes in outfitting cramped Manhattan apartments with hidden food storage units that double as tasteful furnishings.

Richard Mankemyer, general manager of the Survival Center, in McKenna, Wash. said he too is swamped.

“There are a lot more people interested in being prepared, stocking up and being on their own for extended periods of time, as we’ve been advising,” he said. Among them are businesses, he said, including a major Northwest corporation that recently spent “tens of thousands of dollars” to stock up on shelf-stable foods for its executives. He would not identify the company, but he said he urged the officials to stock up for its other employees as well.

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