Planning for the Apocalypse Now

"Survivalists" spark a boom in doom and the profits follow

Some are more likely to tote shotguns than hand-held placards reading THE END IS NEAR, and they scrutinize the Dow Jones average more carefully than the Good Book. But just as surely as the doomsayers of old, perhaps a million or more Americans foresee the imminent collapse of Western civilization. Clustered mostly in California, Utah and the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, they are busily preparing to face the apocalypse and, above all, to survive it by providing themselves with sufficient food, fuel, shelter and weapons. Their efforts have given rise to a flourishing survival industry, specializing in everything from newsletters and real estate to two-year food packs containing instant applesauce, dried bacon tidbits and margarine powder.

Today's survivalists may give some passing thought to the possibility of a natural disaster or a nuclear holocaust, but their gloomiest forebodings are fiscal. Says former Aerospace Worker Bill Kerbaugh, 50, who now operates a survivalist nutrition center in Sonora, Calif.: "I believe there is going to be a total collapse of the economy in this country, and it will provoke a worldwide depression." According to the survivalist scenario, those feckless optimists who are trapped in the nation's blighted cities will perish. The sage few who have gone back to the land--or at least to wholesome small towns--and have laid in provisions, firewood, kerosene lanterns, Q-Tips and radio batteries will survive.

To protect themselves and their families against the onslaught of starving urbanites who manage to escape the cities, many survivalists have turned their homes into virtual arsenals. As a guide, they can use Kurt Saxon's The Poor Man's James Bond, a handbook of "improvised weaponry and do-it-yourself mayhem," with simple instructions for making firearms, tear gas, explosives, zip guns and even flamethrowers. Saxon, 48, is an Ozarks-based writer and publisher. Like many survivalists, he is inspired by romantic notions of frontier self-reliance. He has six guns of his own, and come Armageddon, he plans to support himself by hunting, making everything he needs and cultivating his quarter-acre garden of peppers, sunflowers and watermelons. Says Saxon: "I'm telling people to get out of the cities and move to small towns, because civilization all through the world is doomed. Take a trade with you. Don't go there looking for work."

The movement has also produced a variant sect of soft-core survivalists. They share the more moderate belief, long held by Mormons, that it is only prudent to have a year's store of food on hand in case of pestilence or famine. Their grand sachem is Howard Ruff, 49, devout Mormon, professional pessimist and author of How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years (2.5 minion copies sold). Ruff is the economic evangelist behind Ruff Hou$e, a half-hour syndicated television show that preaches to 2 million viewers every week the benefits of investing in hard goods, gold, silver coins and small-town real estate. Acting on his own forecasts of "major social and political disruptions in the country's urban areas" and "the most difficult times since the Civil War," Ruff recently moved his wife and eight of his twelve children to a new brick house in Mapleton, Utah, equipped with a wood-burning stove, solar water heater, storage tanks for diesel fuel and gas and two acres of corn and alfalfa.

Ruff, whose combined enterprises will gross $25 million this year, is not the only one to realize the profits of bleak prophecy. An advertisement in Mother Earth News, the North Carolina-based, back-to-the-land bimonthly, pitches $64,000 building lots in Park City, Utah, geared directly to the survivalist market. The properties are touted as "excellent for passive solar home/earth shelter with food-producing greenhouse." Saxon predicts a threefold increase in sales for his survival-book business which grossed $100,000 last year, carrying such titles as Granddad's Wonder Book of Chemistry, Root Rot and The Complete Book of Midwifery. Neo-Life Co. of America, a major producer based in Hayward, claims a similar increase in sales, are now topping $1 million a Survival Inc., a mail-order survival-food and -equipment outlet in Carson, boasts 5,000 customers-- a 400% from a year ago.

For the most zealous survivalists, the and money required to prepare for collapse are such that there is little time left for anything else. Contends "The hard-core survivalist has given up and is no longer trying to bring effective change." Indeed, says he, survivalists now actually have a interest in catastrophe: "If Western civilization doesn't fail, they will be disappointed."

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