Be the Ground
Sexy Life Skills for the Apocalypse
Disaster and Resilience Training for Real People.
(Sexy Life Skills for the Apocalypse)
Practical, place-based and playful, Be the Ground is designed to prepare you for a world coming apart at the seams.
Because Door Dash doesn’t offer a premium disaster subscription!
Because nobody’s coming to save you with a reaction video when crisis strikes!
Because systems awareness without real-world capability is just sophisticated helplessness.
Be the Ground builds both the hands-on competencies and the relational infrastructure – the sexy life skills - required to respond intelligently, compassionately, and effectively to unforeseen disaster and disruption.
It integrates emergency preparation and response skills with direct community building, wilderness and urban survival training, psychological resilience practices and ecological connection. It develops the ability to read and respond more skilfully to any situation. And it does it in a way that will remain online even when your nervous system is on fire.
Because it’s one thing to know about the metacrisis.
It’s another to be the ground that holds when its emissaries arrive in your neighbourhood.
Be the Ground is:
Foundational
The essential preparation that must be done before systems unravel. We’re laying the groundwork and establishing the foundational networks and capabilities that enable true resilience in the face of uncertainty.
Fundamental
Training and practicing the basic ground-level skills, practical knowledge and footwork needed to move well and respond skillfully and with confidence under duress (and in everyday life!).
Familiar
Knowing our ground – building greater kinship with the landscape and social ecology we're part of. And keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground - knowing where we stand, who we stand with and what we stand for.
The Challenge
Across communities, we are witnessing a widening gap between the complexity and intensity of emerging crises and the average citizen’s ability to respond.
Natural disasters, infrastructure failure, hazardous scenarios, and social instability - every one of these things has affected communities in the Pacific Northwest (Cascadia) in recent years.
Most of us assume that someone else will respond, yet emergency services in most places are already stretched. Too many of us are conditioned for dependency and learned helplessness. In the face of crisis, we can quickly become non-player characters.
At the same time, our communities are increasingly socially fragmented. Many of us experience a lack of belonging, confidence, and agency in the face of rapid change. Our greatest challenge is not equipment or funding - it is that most of us don’t know our neighbours well enough to coordinate when it matters.
Be the Ground is an opportunity to root down, skill up, and not be completely useless when crisis hits.
A Resilience Ethos
Rooted in Relationship
You cannot be resilient alone. What makes Be the Ground distinct is that it’s not designed to produce heroic individual preppers but competent, calm, communally-oriented citizens who understand that resilience is a property of networks, not individuals.
You won’t just learn skills; you’ll strengthen the actual relational systems that make your skills effective. In the end, the most prepared person in an isolated household is less resilient than a moderately prepared person in a strong network with shared values.
What This Is:
Community-oriented, not survivalist
Relational resilience as infrastructure
Practical wisdom for complexity
Embodied learning that creates lasting competence
Humor as pedagogy, not deflection
Deep play grounded in real skills
Connection to the land under our feet
What This Isn’t:
Prepper paranoia or apocalypse fetishism
Macho tactical cosplay
Disaster porn or fear-mongering
Individual survivalism at community’s expense
Theoretical knowledge without embodied practice
Skills without the social fabric to use them effectively
Boring
What You’ll Gain
Real Competence
You will gain foundational competence across emergency response, basic survival, water safety, fire behavior, navigation, communication, psychological resilience, and improvisational problem-solving. These are not theoretical lessons - they are embodied and assessed through hands-on scenarios.
Staying Alive: Personal Safety and Crisis Awareness
Preparing for the Worst: Reality-Based Disaster Preparedness
You’re It: Decision-Making and Taking Action Under Duress
The Ambulance Isn’t Coming: First Aid for Systems Failure
Mutual Aid: Community Connections and Neighbourhood Networks
Fieldcraft: Wilderness Survival Skills
Urban Savvy: Tactical Life Skills For Chaotic Times
Elemental: Earthquakes, Floods, Fires, Storms and Whatever…
What the Ground Knows: Ecosystem Awareness and Connection
Who You Gonna Call? Communications Systems and Strategies
Keeping it Together: Psychological Resilience & Self-Regulation
Dressing Sharp for the Apocalypse: Everyday Carry & Preparedness
Actual Community Connection.
Across the program, you will complete a multi-stage relational development process that includes mapping your neighborhood, meeting neighbors, initiating conversations about preparedness, hosting micro-gatherings, building contact trees and creating shared resource maps and plans.
Not just theory. Actual real-world connection!
Be the Ground will help to strengthen connectivity and resilience within your actual community.
A Shift in Perspective.
Underneath the humour and the badass skills is applied relational systems thinking. Our resilience is inseparable from not only our human communities but the resilience of the land, waters, weather patterns, and ecological communities that hold us. Crisis response is always ecological. Fires move with wind, fuel, and terrain. Flooding follows gravity, absorption, and storm timing. Heat domes interact with asphalt, shade, and tree cover. Landslides depend on slope, roots, and water flow.
We invite a practical, grounded ecocentric orientation: learning to notice, interpret, and collaborate with the more-than-human world in ways that increase our capacity to respond wisely to crisis.
Read weather, terrain, and landscape as active sources of information
Understand how ecosystems signal stress before crisis becomes visible
Know the land you're on - its water sources, fire history, flood patterns and fault lines
Recognize how human infrastructure interacts with natural systems under stress
See patterns and interdependencies across human and ecological systems
Think in systems, not just events
Recognize cascading failures before they cascade
Attune to the more-than-human world as a source of intelligence, not just backdrop
Belonging to Each Other and to Place.
The practical ecocentric awareness running across Be the Ground offers something we often don't realize we were missing: a felt sense of belonging - not just to a cohort or neighborhood, but to place. When people feel connected to the land they live on, they make wiser decisions, act with more responsibility, care for the places that sustain them, and build community with more sincerity.
This subtle shift reflects the deeper aim of the entire program: developing adaptive citizens who can hold complexity, respond relationally, and become stewards of living systems - human and more-than-human alike.
And here is the unexpected gift: by preparing honestly for the worst, we find ourselves living more fully in the present. We become more connected, more capable, more awake to what actually matters. The work of preparing for collapse turns out to be, at its heart, the work of coming alive and actively building the kind of communities and world we most want to live in.
Program Structure
One Body.
Five Elements.
Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void.
Be the Ground is organized around five elements - Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void. Each offers a particular doorway into resilience, while keeping us close to the elemental forces that shape the world we're preparing for. The five elements are distinct but not separate; each gathers its own conditions, skills and practices, while the same underlying grammar of awareness and action runs through all of them. What you learn from the water, the fire will ask you to remember.
These are not merely archetypal metaphors. Each element also maps directly onto the real disaster scenarios we prepare for - earthquakes and landslides, floods and tsunamis, wildfires and firestorms, storms and cascading system failures. The elements are both a framework for understanding and a practical guide for response.
Together, this elemental structure is designed to develop the full range of capabilities - practical, relational, ecological, and psychological - from which genuine resilience emerges.
Earth
Foundations, Stability, and the Ground of Competence.
Earth is where we begin: feet on the ground, eyes open, knowing where we stand.
Not certainty about the future, but a reliable foundation of competence, clarity, and calm from which to act - centered, steady, and relaxed in the way that only genuine capability produces.
Earth gathers the foundational skills that make everything else possible: first aid and emergency response, survival fundamentals, situational awareness, and the beginnings of neighborhood mapping. These are the ground-level competencies that apply whether you're responding to an earthquake, a medical emergency, or a neighbor in crisis - the same grammar of awareness and action, practiced first in its most concrete form. The awareness cultivated here is grounded and specific - learning to see what is actually present rather than what we fear or assume. Confidence under pressure doesn't come from having all the answers. It comes from the steadfastness of knowing the ground beneath your feet.
Water
Adaptation, Flow, and Embodied Intelligence in Chaos.
Water teaches us to move with conditions rather than against them.
Where Earth builds a stable foundation, Water develops fluid adaptation - receptive, emotionally intelligent, and attuned to what is moving beneath the surface before it becomes visible. The capacity to stay open and responsive rather than rigid and reactive.
Water gathers the skills and practices that emerge when the ground moves and flows - floods, tsunamis, storm surge, submerged vehicles, cold water shock. Through embodied practice with one of nature's most powerful and unpredictable forces, participants learn to manage fear and shock while steadying others, to move with conditions rather than hardening against them. The awareness here is felt rather than cognitive - pre-conceptual, somatic, deeply relational. What Water asks of us in a flood it also asks of us in every relationship under pressure: to stay receptive, to flow around obstacles, to trust that responsiveness is not weakness but one of the most sophisticated capacities we can develop.
Fire
Decision, Transformation, and Acting Under Pressure.
Fire is the element of decisive commitment. Willful, intentional, and fearless - not reckless, but concentrated.
The capacity to concentrate energy precisely where it's needed and act without division when the moment demands it.
Fire gathers the skills and scenarios that demand decisive commitment under pressure - wildfire behavior and evacuation, urban conflagration, the moment when preparation must give way to movement. Awareness without action is paralysis; feeling without decision is just sensation. Through hands-on fire response training and high-pressure scenarios, participants practice the clear, focused action that crisis demands. The awareness here is kinetic - learning to read the consequences of your actions as you take them, feeling how your decisions are landing in real time and adjusting without losing momentum. Fire doesn't scatter its energy. It focuses it. The deeper work is learning to recognize the moment when you must choose - with passion and precision - what to protect and what to release.
Wind
Communication, Coordination, and Moving Wisely Through Complexity.
Wind works the invisible threads that connect us across distance and difference.
It is about cultivating openness – remaining open-minded, open-hearted, cognitively flexible, and genuinely curious about what is moving between people and across the field.
Wind gathers the skills of coordination and communication - decentralized networks, navigation without technology, de-escalation, supporting others in acute distress - the invisible infrastructure that determines whether a community holds together or scatters when systems fail. Where Water develops the felt, inward quality of connection, Wind reaches outward, carrying meaning and mutual support across the wider network we belong to.
The deeper practice is learning to sense what is moving between people under pressure, to read the field beyond the immediate moment, and to stay connected when everything wants to scatter. Wind asks us to listen for what is not yet being said - and to trust that the network, tended well before crisis arrives, will hold when it matters most.
Void
Improvisation, Presence, Integration, and the Art of Emergence.
Void is spacious, non-attached, and open in a way that doesn't depend on conditions being manageable.
It is about cultivating presence in its fullest sense: the capacity to release attachment to how things should be, rest in uncertainty, and respond from genuine clarity rather than from fear. The still point at the eye of the hurricane.
Void gathers everything the other elements cannot fully prepare you for - the cascading scenario, the compounding failure, the moment when the plan runs out and something else is required. Each of the previous elements develops a particular dimension of the grammar we've been practicing - grounded, felt, kinetic, expansive. Void asks what remains when all of those are pushed to their limits. When the earthquake triggers the fire triggers the flood, when exhaustion and uncertainty make all previous strategies feel inadequate - what quality of perception stays available? Not a technique or a protocol, but something closer to a ground state: the open, uncluttered awareness from which genuinely intelligent and spontaneous response can arise, whatever the conditions.
A 21st-century citizen isn't a prepper, or survivalist. They're simply someone who:
Keeps a few essential supplies on hand
Knows basic first aid and can stabilize injuries and respond to overdoses
Understands local risks (incl. compound scenarios) and has thought through responses
Stays calm under pressure and helps others do the same
Can start a fire, purify water, build shelter, and navigate without GPS
Communicates clearly when systems fail including complete digital blackout
Makes good decisions with incomplete information and under extreme pressure
Knows their neighbors by name
Has practiced coordination before crisis demands it
Shows up for community when things get weird
Coordinates rather than isolating
Navigates civil unrest safely
Maintains ethical boundaries when resources are scarce
Improvises intelligently when plans fail
Trusts and is trusted by the people around them
Stays human when inhumanity is easier
They're not paranoid. They're not naive. They're not alone. They're not unprepared for complexity. They're just capable, resilient, connected, ethical, and not completely useless.
“Find the Others. Be the Ground.”
— Douglas Rushkoff