Description

How to make water safe to drink is a solved problem, and the solution fits on an index card. What no book can teach is how forty people who did not choose each other will decide who gets the last of the antibiotics.

Starting Over is one reference that begins at the hour the lights go out and carries through to the day a community has a school again. Most books stop at the pantry. This one keeps going.

Forty chapters in four tiers: Survive (days: water, sanitation, warmth, wounds, food, security, the first ninety days); Sustain (seasons: soil, crops, seed saving, preserving, animals, herbal medicine); Rebuild (years: cloth, shelter, salvage, toolmaking, kilns and forges, power, printing); and Order (generations: how a group decides, settles disputes, protects the weak, teaches its children, and buries its dead).

Two hundred plates, drawn for this book. Every technique that can be shown is shown, and plant identification pages are built on nineteenth-century botanical plates rather than invention.

This is not a book about being afraid. It is work done in advance, in daylight, with a clear head. Start where you are. Do the dull things first.

538 pages. Instant PDF download: read on any device or print at home.