Why Progressives Should Become ‘Preppers’

Acouple 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 online at The Progressive.