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.
Instead of hoarding MREs and ammo, people should be building relationships and more self-sustainable communities. You really want to “survive” huffing your own farts in the basement, guarding your canned beans with a gun?
I will never be convinced by arguments claiming that, at a given level of social and economic collapse, it’s better to not prepare for it and just die.
Nobody actually rolls over and dies. That’s where you get looters and gangs, because when things get bad enough unprepared people compromise their morals for the sake of survival and start stealing from other people.
And frankly, when you look at recent events, the “MREs and ammo” crew have more of a point every day.
Community relationships, community-based preparation for disaster and economic hardship, sustainable communities of every sort, are all very good things.
But in March 2020 when everything locked down and people literally could not leave their houses to get food or toilet paper, having some MREs or a deep pantry or some other form of individual food prep helped a lot of people until we were allowed to leave our houses and get food deliveries and so on. And frankly, if the next pandemic is more lethal and more dangerous and a 100% quarantine becomes necessary, that kind of individual food prep will be even more vital.
Because as wonderful as community is, just a few years ago the world went through an event where community members could not help one another because everybody was quarantined. Individual and household prep was what helped there.
And if you were a Palestinian living in Gaza on October 7, 2023, having a sustainable community wouldn’t mean shit.
What would have protected you and your family was food, water, a plan to get to the border with Egypt, cash or gold to bribe your way through, and weapons to protect yourself and your family on the way there.
Which is exactly what the right wing “collapse of America” doomsday preppers are prepping for - a collapse so violent and so extensive that your community will not survive and your only hope is to flee far from the chaos and hole up in the hope things get better.
And I really can’t criticize anybody who plans for that anymore.
And if you were a Palestinian living in Gaza on October 7, 2023, having a sustainable community wouldn’t mean shit.
You say that, but what about Hamas itself? If your community can dig tunnels too deep to be bombed, stockpile food and weapons and gear, and build goodwill with the community so people will hide you then you’ll survive a lot better than the people scrambling to escape.
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.
