Prepping for the end of the world is a burgeoning global phenomenon. These people stockpile food and water and skill-up to survive disasters such as earthquakes, terrorist attacks, economic collapse or epidemics.
Sociologist Anna Maria Bounds says these urban preppers are not counting on the state for their safety. They are preparing for the worst, knowing the government won’t come to their aid.
What is Prepping?
Prepping is a term used to describe a person who has prepared for emergencies, including natural disasters and financial collapse. It is a growing movement that includes a diverse group of people with a wide variety of interests and beliefs.
Many preppers are self-taught, learning survival skills from books, online forums, and real life experiences. Others are taught by their families, teachers, or the military.
A small percentage of preppers are religious, impelled by prophecies of the end times and the Rapture. Some of them prepare for nuclear attacks or a total collapse of society.
Other preppers are homesteaders, focused on building skills toward self-reliance. They practice growing and harvesting their own food, compost piles, animal husbandry, and home canning for survival.
Why Preppers Prepare?
Preppers prepare for a wide range of possible threats. This includes things like natural disasters, pandemics, and even terrorism.
Prepping can be a great way to learn about different risks and develop skills to cope with them. It can also help you feel more secure and stress-free during emergencies, which can help you to live longer and enjoy your life more fully.
People who prepare at this level focus on a long-term plan that allows them to survive without modern society for over a year. This includes stockpiling a vast amount of food, water, and supplies to last them through an extended period of time.
They consider bug-out locations (BOLs) as options during an emergency to allow them to escape dangers and live independently in a safe environment. Bunkers and top-end home security are also important considerations for preppers at this level of preparedness.
Many preppers prepare for a variety of reasons, including the potential for a financial collapse or other crisis, a desire to be more independent, and/or the fear of terrorism or a natural disaster. This has led to a resurgence of interest in prepping.
Prepping Skills
There are a variety of skills that preppers can learn. These can include gardening, food preservation, hunting, fishing, herbalism and more.
The skills that a prepper should learn are dependent on their personal interests and needs. For example, if you are interested in hunting and fishing, there are many different resources online that can teach you those skills.
However, if you are not interested in those things, there are still a variety of other skills that you can learn to improve your preparedness. Some of these skills are more difficult than others, but they can all be learned.
The best way to start learning these skills is to make a list of your current knowledge and skills in each area. This will help you determine which areas you are lacking in and where you can improve your skills. This will ensure that you are able to stay as prepared as possible in any situation. It will also allow you to avoid being paralyzed by your lack of knowledge in a disaster.
Prepping Resources
Across the globe, a growing community of preppers is girding for the worst. They’re stockpiling food, fuel and supplies, skills-up for disasters and preparing to survive climate emergencies, civil unrest or even a global pandemic that suddenly shuts down the world.
Despite the ubiquity of modern prepping, scholarly research on it has been scant. Rather than delving into the ideological underpinnings of prepping, studies often focus on the materiality of its practices, with researchers drawing on popular representations of the doomsday movement (Kelly, 2016).
This’second doom boom’, driven by right-wing shock-jocks in the United States and socially conservative preppers in Europe, has resulted in a’massive influx of prepper products and services’ – such as’survival food’, ‘bug out bags’ and ‘prepped vehicles’ (Mills, 2018). But it remains to be seen whether these ‘naively’-motivated activities are grounded in real fears about the future.
