Why Progressives Should Become ‘Preppers’

My arguments for why we should prepare for the climate apocalypse

When I told my mom about this book project, she was visibly horrified. When probed, she responded, “I don’t want people to think you’re, you know…one of those crazy doomsday preppers.” 

She wasn’t alone in this response. Especially in the early days when I was honing my elevator pitch about what this whole thing is all about. As someone raised in a pretty liberal bubble and continues to be surrounded by predominantly progressive folks, the term “prepper” probably made a number of my friends wonder whether their friend (or daughter) is potentially going down the conspiracy-theorist, the-world-is-ending-evangelist, get-your-guns-and-protect-your-family-survivalist road. Their image of a prepper was probably more likely one of a White, American survivalist hoarding guns and ammo in the backwoods and railing against the government. This NPR-listening, specialty coffee-sipping, mom in her 40s had very little resemblance to these preppers, save for my Whiteness.

That said, I wondered if we progressives might be missing out on something important by shunning the idea of “prepping.” 

So I wrote about it. I wanted to dig into this idea of progressive prepping–to think about how we might transform our idea of it because, well, we’re in the middle of a climate apocalypse and we can’t let prepper stereotypes keep us from preparing for a changing climate. If the news the morning I wrote this wasn’t any indication that we need to prepare, I don’t know what was: devastating flooding in the Northeast of the U.S.; near record-breaking temperatures in Death Valley; and record-breaking water temps off the Florida coast which could result in massive coral bleaching. Yet as The New York Times reported last week, so many of us are just accepting this as “the new normal.” I don’t take this to mean that people are preparing, they’re just not necessarily moved by the onslaught of frequent disasters in our newsfeeds. 

But perhaps prepping could be a way to move past that?

With that, I give you the story I wrote for The Progressive last week. Here’s a snapshot:

A couple of years ago, I decided to become a prepper.

The idea was first planted in 2016 when my family and I moved to Portland, Oregon, and I was made aware of the devastating threat from an inevitable, future Cascadia subduction zone earthquake or, as it’s known colloquially, the “Big One.” Then, amid this hypothetical fear, came a stream of disasters including the COVID-19 pandemic, two devastating wildfires (in 2017 and 2020) bringing toxic smoke to the region, and a historic “heat dome” event.

My takeaway? I desperately needed to prepare. With regular climate change-induced disasters, I realized that my family needed emergency plans, food for survival, and skills to withstand extended periods of recovery. I’m not talking about just surviving an immediate disaster, but a long-term apocalyptic-level catastrophe. 

But as a progressive, democratic-socialist-leaning, anarchism-curious person, I looked around and mostly saw the traditional narratives around prepping that Mark O’Connell, in Notes from an Apocalypse, describes as “a subculture made up, as far as I could see, pretty well exclusively of white American men who were convinced that the entire world was on the verge of a vast systemic rupture and were obsessively invested in making sufficient preparations (‘preps’) for such scenarios.” 

Unlike the stereotypical prepper, I don’t fantasize about the apocalypse or believe in a sudden collapse. I simply realized that, with climate change disasters on the rise, I am unprepared, and so are many other progressives, leading me to realize that O’Connell’s stock image of a prepper might be doing us all a disservice. I wondered if there’s a way we can bring our progressive values and ideas to prepping. And I wondered if there were others like me out there.

Turns out there are plenty.

Read the full story here!

And for more, related stories, check out one of my earlier posts on my experience of diving into the world of prepping.