James Wesley, Rawles is a internationally recognized authority on family disaster preparedness and survivalism. He has been described by journalists as the "conscience of survivalism." Formerly a U.S. Army intelligence officer, Rawles is now a fiction and nonfiction author, as well as a rancher. His books have been translated into seven languages. He is also a lecturer and the founder and Senior Editor of http://www.SurvivalBlog.com, the Internet's first blogs on preparedness that has enjoyed perennial popularity and now receives more than 320,000 unique visits per week. He and his family live at a remote self-sufficient ranch surrounded by National Forest lands that is is cryptically identified as located "somewhere west of the Rockies.