Meet the folks who are preparing for the apocalypse

Doomsday Preppers. Photo by National Geographic Channel

Speaking of the end of the world, I’m sitting down to watch National Geographic’s “Doomsday Preppers.” I’m definitely not prepared—for the end of the world or for some of the apocalyptic scenarios I expect to encounter in this show. Supervolcano, anyone?

Who are the doomsday preppers? The Wall Street Journal reports:

The show looks at more than a dozen Americans who have turned building bullet-proof shelters, stocking up on several years’ worth of canned goods and mapping evacuation routes into a kind of pricey game of one-upmanship. Whoever wins may be the last man (or woman) standing – literally.

But in another sense, the preppers don’t think of what they do as a weekend pastime. They see an end coming – be it because of a depletion of all the world’s oil or a shifting of the planet’s axis or a meltdown of the stock market. As a result, they simply follow the old scouting motto: Be prepared.

“These are not just a handful of people living in the mountains. They’re everywhere,” says Michael Cascio, National Geographic Channel’s executive vice president of programming.

One line that I heard in the first five minutes of the show—and that I expect to hear again—was: “Some people think I’m crazy. I hope they’re right. I hope I am crazy. That would be the greatest thing in the world.”

I just hold out hope that I won’t have to worry about the end of the world. After all, I survived Y2K, Harold Camping and “2012”—not to mention the first six weeks of 2012.