getting independent.
so, I have been thinking: preppers often learn how to live independent of industrial production. Maybe the solarpunk movement can learn something from them?
The diversification of prepping was clear last weekend at the Survival & Prepper show at the fairgrounds in Boulder County, a liberal district which President Joe Biden won in 2020 by nearly 57 percentage points over Trump. Over 2,700 people paid $10 each to attend the show, organizers said, and attendees were varied.
Bearded white men with closely cropped hair and heavily tattooed arms were there. But so were hippy moms carrying babies in rainbow colored slings and chatting about canning methods, Latino families looking over greenhouses and water filtration systems, and members of the local Mountain View Fire Rescue team, who in 2021 battled a devastating fire in the region, giving CPR demonstrations and encouraging citizens to be more prepared for extreme events.
“People want to regain their agency, their sense of control, and do something to match their fears to their actions,” said Ellis, who underscored that he did not speak on behalf of the Department of Defense.
People motivated by climate change, Ellis said, tend to be homesteaders who grow their own food and move to more “climate proof” locations, such as the mild summer haven of Duluth, Minnesota.
Committing atrocities and then using your neighbors as human shields isn’t exactly good prepper etiquette.
But that aside, Hamas is not a community. It’s an armed group. It is parasitic on the Palestinian people. Its tunnels and supplies can only support a tiny fraction of the community and are funded by extorting the community and making the community less safe. What Hamas does is neither individual prepping nor community prepping - in prepper terms, Hamas are quite literally the people who stockpile ammo in order to rob their neighbors after law and order collapses, and it has, and they are.
Hamas is embedded in the community. As with all guerillas they move amongst the people like fish swim in the sea, as Mao would say. It’s an armed community resistance front, not a parasite, because they have the support of the community itself. Hamas is what community prepping actually looks like in practice because they prep for the survival of the community, rather than for any individual.
Not that Hamas are literally preppers, obviously, but they prove a good framework for preppers in terms of preparing for disaster. Dig tunnels that the government doesn’t know about, stockpile food and weapons and fuel in the tunnels, be prepared to fight and die as a collective, build good relations with the community above the tunnels, etc.