Backwoods Home Magazine, by Thomas Christianson

A couple of years ago, I ran across an online ad for a magazine called Backwoods Home. The magazine looked interesting, so I added it to my Christmas and birthday wish lists for a couple of years. My family decided to buy me other gifts instead, so I decided to take the bull by the horns. I contacted the Editorial and Advertising Coordinator for Backwoods Home Magazine, and asked if they would be willing to provide me with some back issues for review. They were kind enough to provide me with all four quarterly issues from 2021 (January/February/March, April/May/June, July/August/September, and October/November/December 2021: Issues 183 through 186).

I found the magazine to be interesting, informative, attractively illustrated, and filled with useful and practical information for those in the preparedness community. I would characterize it as good Sunday afternoon reading. I plan to keep it on my birthday and Christmas wish lists until further notice.

General Description

Each issue of Backwoods Home Magazine is 118 pages long, including the front and back covers. The cover price is $7.99 per issue, but it is available on the Backwoods Home website for $26 a year ( https://www.backwoodshome.com/shop/subscription-options/ ). I have occasionally seen it advertised for first-time subscribers for less.

Each issue features attractive cover art by Don Childers, who has been their artist-in-residence for the past 31 years. Many of the articles are by highly regarded authors like Patrice Lewis or Massad Ayoob. In 2021, the articles included interesting topics such as “Lessons for New Gun Owners”, “Garden Pollinators”, Improving Soil”, “Flea Market Strategies”, and “Curing a Ham”.

The magazine describes itself as follows: “Backwoods Home Magazine is written for people who have a desire to pursue personal independence, self-sufficiency, and their dreams. We offer ‘how-to’ articles on owner-built housing, independent energy, gardening, health, self-employment, country living, and other topics related to an independent and self-reliant lifestyle.”

The publisher also offers a similar magazine Self-Reliance that offers comparable content except that it avoids articles on firearms and politics. Both magazines are published in Philomath, Oregon.

The articles in Backwoods Home Magazine are filled with a lot of practical wisdom from folks who are actually living self-reliant lifestyles, whether the topic is ice fishing; ebikes; wind-powered, geothermal HVAC systems; rescue dogs; or splitting rails for a fence. They also have a joke page in each issue that I thoroughly enjoyed, though my kids would probably call them “Dad jokes” and groan if I repeated them.

One article that I did not appreciate uncritically accepted theory as fact while speculating about the “evolution” of the human brain. Even that article had some extremely interesting information in it. For example, is it fascinating that the human brain consists of only 2% of body weight, yet it accounts for 20% of the oxygen and calories consumed by the human body.

The “Ask Jackie” advice column gives very good, practical counsel, and the editorials are very well balanced, which is difficult to achieve in this age of polarization.

My Favorite Article

My favorite article was an extremely well-written piece on vitamins D and K in the April/May/June 2021 issue by Backwoods Home Magazine Senior Editor John Silveira. It was well-researched, comprehensive, and practical. He gives good examples of some of the current research on the subject, with helpful sidebars explaining things like the differences between observational studies, controlled random studies, and meta-analysis.

Reading an article more than six months old gives the opportunity to go back and analyze it in the light of 20/20 hindsight. In a follow-up editorial in the July/August/September 2021 issue, Founding Editor Dave Duffy noted that Finland began making vitamin D3 available to its citizens for free in 2003. This gave the opportunity to reevaluate how Finland stands in the per capita Covid 19 death rate by country. An examination of this data revealed that the country in Europe with the lowest per capita death rate due to Covid 19 at the time of this writing was Norway, followed by Finland. This may lead one to suspect that there is some common factor in the nordic countries that contributes to this low Covid death rate. One such factor is probably the general fitness of the population, with a very low incidence of obesity. Another factor may be consumption of suitable amounts of vitamin D3. The use of cod liver oil is widespread in Norway. Cod liver oil is rich in vitamin D3.

The observational connection between the use of cod liver oil and good Covid outcomes is so pronounced that Oslo University Hospital, the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health are engaged in a “A randomized, parallel-group treatment, quadruple masked, two-arm study to assess the effectiveness of cod liver oil compared to placebo in the prevention of Covid-19 and airway infections in healthy adults”. The study involves 70,000 participants, and is expected to be completed by May of 2023. I wish that the results would be available sooner. Since Covid may be endemic for the rest of our lives, the results of this study may be useful for many years to come.

Like many other articles in Backwoods Home, the article on vitamins D and K is now available on their website. If you want a good sample of some of their fine writing, you may wish to check it out.

My Favorite Editorial

My favorite editorial also appeared in the April/May/June 2021 issue. It was by Founding Editor Dave Duffy. The editorial was on the topic, “Vaccines and the distrust of government.” Mr. Duffy takes an irenic and balanced approach that acknowledges the differences of perspective within his own family, as well as the losses that they have experienced during the course of the pandemic.

The History of Magazines

When Gutenberg invented the printing press utilizing movable type in 1440, he made the rapid distribution of written information possible for the first time. Words no longer had to be laboriously copied by hand. Instead they could be rapidly reproduced by the dozens or the hundreds or the thousands for distribution. Broadsheets, pamphlets, and books soon became widely available. Some of these publications adopted a periodical format, in which a publication was released on a regular basis with new information in each new edition. In the 1600s and 1700s some of these publications were similar to modern magazines, although the word had not been invented yet.

In 1731, The Gentleman’s Magazine began to be published, using the word “magazine” in reference to a printed periodical for the first time. The word “magazine” was taken from the Arabic word makhazin, meaning “storehouses”. Now there was a name for a format with more pages than a newspaper but published less frequently.

With increasing literacy and prosperity, magazines became increasingly popular among broader and broader segments of the population. Eventually, there were thousands of print magazines published each month in the United States.

There was a time when my family subscribed to a number of magazines each month. We would eagerly wait for the latest issues, so we could read articles by our favorite authors on topics of interest to us. I especially enjoyed Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, National Geographic, Readers Digest, and Popular Mechanics. Although some of these magazines remain in print, I don’t subscribe to any of them any more.

This made me wonder if we might be coming to the twilight period of print periodicals. With so much content available on the internet for free with instant access on our screens, I thought that there might be less motivation to pay a subscription for ink on paper content.

An examination of the actual data reveals that the number of monthly print magazines increased in the US from 2002 to 2022. I don’t know whether or not the actual total combined circulation of all those magazines has increased or decreased. There could be a growing number of smaller niche magazines (like Backwoods Home Magazine), while the average circulation of the largest magazines could be decreasing. If SurvivalBlog readers have any insight into this matter, they can share it with me at: ThomasKChristianson at gmail dot com.

There is definitely something to be said for sitting in a comfortable chair on a quiet evening with an actual physical book, magazine, or newspaper in your hand. It just feels more comfortable than sitting in front of a screen. So I very much enjoyed the opportunity to peruse these issues of Backwoods Home Magazine.

Conclusion

Backwoods Home Magazine provides a wealth of information valuable to the preparedness community in an attractive format. If you enjoy receiving helpful information through ink on paper, you may enjoy a subscription to this magazine.

Disclaimer

Backwoods Home Magazine was kind enough to provide me with their four quarterly 2021 issues for review. I tried not to let their kindness influence my evaluation of the magazine, and believe that I have succeeded in remaining objective. I did not receive any other financial or other inducements to mention any vendor, product, or service in this article.