Why Progressives Should Become ‘Preppers’

The prepper subculture has long been associated with the right but, with climate disasters on the rise, shouldn’t we all be thinking about how to better prepare ourselves and our communities?

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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.

With regular climate change-induced disasters, I realized that my family needed emergency plans.

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. 

Research from Juli Gittinger, an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Georgia College, confirms as much. While participants in conservative social media groups vastly outnumber those in liberal groups—we’re talking in the hundreds of thousands versus no more than 14,000 in the largest liberal groups as Gittinger tells The Progressive—she found that the latter are growing, especially in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. 

Trump motivated Laura Wagoner, who runs the “Sustainable Prepping” YouTube channel, to get deeper into prepping. She was always interested in homesteading, but with Trump’s election, she worried he’d withhold disaster aid from places and people that didn’t jibe with his politics or expectations of “true Americans” (which turned out to be prescient as Trump did exactly that after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017). She eventually had a realization similar to mine: that progressives aren’t doing themselves any favors by not preparing. 

“I realized a lot of climate change activists and homesteading people who are coming from a progressive standpoint." - Laura Wagoner

“I realized a lot of climate change activists and homesteading people who are coming from a progressive standpoint, you know, low waste gurus, they actually have a lot in common with preppers,” Wagoner tells The Progressive. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, she discovered that a lot of her friends weren’t prepared and saw an opportunity to connect the dots. “Sustainable Prepping,” she says, “is wanting to bridge the gap between the climate change activists, low waste, and sustainability movements.”

Gittinger’s research also found that many liberals cite climate change as a reason for prepping, which also connected to the homesteading skills Wagoner was tapping into such as gardening, canning, sewing, and baking. In her study, Gittinger observed there was an “overarching emphasis of ‘living off the land’ . . . found across liberal prepper boards.”

This homesteading, self-sufficiency focus has some similarities to the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and 1970s in the United States where groups of leftists broke off from urban centers to live on communes as a way to protest capitalism and political upheaval.

Yet many of those young people, often raised in privileged settings, the experiment was cut short as they had very few skills to actually survive on self-sufficiency.  While inspiring in many ways, to me that earlier back-to-the-land movement felt somewhat exclusive when there were—and still are—so many people that don’t have the ability to access land or space, nor do they have the time or money to build the needed skills. Jonathan A. Bowdler touches upon this in his doctoral dissertation about the history of the movement for the University of Washington. "Though the countercultural back-to-the-land movement offered individual personal transformation and influenced the Organic movement, the environmental movement, and the personal computing movement, it failed to attract a more diverse coalition and could not offer a radical alternative to Cold War society and culture," he writes in the dissertation abstract. As such, I wondered whether we could take lessons from that movement and reframe prepping through a lens that doesn’t require escape and is more inclusive and diverse. 

“For me, the definition of prepping is building a network.” - Daniel Aldrich

“For me, the definition of prepping is building a network,” Daniel Aldrich, professor of political science and director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University tells The Progressive. His research consistently finds that social capital is the key to surviving a disaster—and this is at the core of his definition of prepping, or rather, what he’d call “community resilience building.”

“I can’t emphasize enough the idea of networks and a bottom-up resilience that’s based in the community, as opposed to [a movement] based in household behavior,” Aldrich says. By household behavior, he means food storage and skill-building often associated with prepping. And by building a network, he means getting to know your neighbors, cultivating and creating a community, and knowing who might need what in a disaster. 

“The progressive, leftist, anarchist way, the community-minded way, is just a more effective and more ethical strategy,” Margaret Killjoy, host of the Live Like the World is Dying podcast, explains. “Everything I’m learning is reinforcing that.” Through her interviews with people having skills like sourdough-making and community organizing, she knows there’s stability in these cumulative gifts. Combining them is also a more inclusive approach.

But for most people prepping doesn’t usually connote inclusivity. Gittinger’s research observes that both liberal and conservative preppers are mostly white and economically stable, while marginalized people (e.g., low-income folks, communities of color, people with disabilities, and houseless people) have been doing what they can to survive in a society that overlooks them and have built support through means such as mutual aid networks. These involve bottom-up efforts to pool funds, resources, and skills in order to support one’s own community through collective efforts. There are mutual aid groups preparing for disaster differently than one might at a household scale. One such example is the national organization Mutual Aid Disaster Relief.

“[The organization is] a Swiss army knife for the larger [and local] mutual aid and disaster response movements,” Jimmy Dunson, a leading volunteer from the organization, tells The Progressive. They help mobilize community-led disaster relief, such as food kitchens and supply distribution, in a way that maintains the dignity that can often be stripped from people in a “charity” model. Preparedness in their view is about maintaining connections and relationships across mutual aid networks.

For other organizations like Outgrowing Hunger in Portland, preparedness looks like building relationships to secure land for refugees to be able to grow their own food. “This is really about the well-being and stability of the entire community,” says executive director Adam Kohl, “Because in the event of any sort of disruption . . . it’s always those on the margins that are hurt the most.” 

“One of my favorite sayings is that the difference between preparedness and sustainability is simply timeframe,” he adds. 

As climate change-induced disasters rise, there’s an urgency to being prepared, and we can’t let the terminology separate us.

Kohl hits on something that is perhaps at the root of my prepping question: terminology. Margaret Killjoy tells The Progressive that many of her guests wouldn’t call themselves preppers, and “that’s a shame.” There’s an opportunity to claim prepping to be something more inclusive and holistic. Whether it’s called “mutual aid,” or “community resilience building,” or “emergency preparedness,” or “sustainability,” it’s all the same thing.

And as climate change-induced disasters rise, there’s an urgency to being prepared, and we can’t let the terminology separate us. I think one way we can bring all of these disparate preparedness groups together is to reclaim the term for what it is: Prepping is about people and communities surviving in a changing world together.