When Technology Fails

YOUR GUIDE TO EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS: Learn to live sustainably so you can survive today—and the disasters of tomorrow—with this comprehensive survival skills primer covering food, water, shelter, first-aid, energy, and more.

Prepare to embark on the path toward sustainability. Unlike any other emergency preparedness book, Matthew Stein not only shows you how to live green in seemingly stable times, but to live in the face of potential disasters—whether they last days or years, or come in the form of social upheaval, economic meltdown, or environmental catastrophe.

Inside, you’ll learn:
• The basics of installing a renewable energy system for your home or business
• How to find and sterilize water in the face of utility failure
• How to keep warm if you’ve been left temporarily homeless
• Practical information for dealing with water-quality issues
• Alternative health and first-aid techniques

Each chapter describes skills for self-reliance in good times and bad.
• A survey of the risks to the status quo
• Supplies and preparation for short- and long-term emergencies
• Emergency measures for survival
• Prepping water, food, shelter, and clothing
• First aid, low-tech medicine, and healing
• Securing energy, heat, and power
• Metalworking
• Utensils and storage
• Low-tech chemistry engineering, machines, and materials

Fully revised and expanded, When Technology Fails ends on a positive, proactive note with a chapter on “Making the Shift to Sustainability,” which offers practical suggestions for changing our world on personal, community and global levels.

“This book is an indispensable basic manual for the real-life issues that await us in the decades to come.” —James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere

Over the course of his life and career as an engineer and building contractor, Matthew Stein built hurricane-resistant, energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly homes and designed consumer water-filtration devices, commercial water-filtration systems, and automated assembly machinery among other things. His books include When Technology Fails and When Disaster Strikes. Matthew passed away in 2018.