How does someone escape the solitary fate of life in the bunker to instead meet collective problems together with their community? In Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States, coauthors Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray trace political and cultural antecedents of the contemporary doomsday prepping movement in the United States and develop a theory of bunkerization: not simply building physical bunkers but building a society symbolized by the bunker. In such a society, individual vigilance and survival become the organizing principles of everyday life. People opt out of collective projects and retreat into personal responsibility for preparedness, expressed through acts of consumption. In this Q&A Kirsch and Ray discuss the nuances of an ecological catastrophe and social apocalypse, “bunkerization,” and prepping.  

Q: It seems like every year there is some extreme weather record. Between that and the abysmal failure to meet even the minimum climate change goals for emissions, is it fair to say that ecological catastrophe is on the horizon? How should individuals react to that?

Emily Ray: I think it is reasonable to say ecological catastrophe is both here and on the horizon. We often imagine this as an event approaching us from somewhere else, moving in like a storm system. We are already living in the period of anthropogenic climate change, it is here. To borrow from Ira Allen’s work, this is a good time to panic, but how should we panic? In Be Prepared, we trace how Americans have been conditioned to react to threats, real and imagined, by accounting for themselves and their nuclear family units. Preparation for climate change entails fortifying themselves and their homes through the marketplace of prepping goods, and shoring up their ideological commitments to being “Americans.”

Being an American is an identity made and remade but with some foundational aspects, like being anticommunist and antisocialist, patriarchal, and in service to capital. The normative piece of this question, however, depends on a complex web of political, social, cultural, and economic systems shifting with ecological and geological systems, all bound together in feedback loops. This is obtuse, but to add some specificity, we ought to think about what collective exposure means and how to endure and even thrive together, bound to the planet (the planet still provides all of the resources we need to go off-planet). Thinking about fortification against the worst of climate change is still tied up with trying to rig the game of climate change winners and losers, where winning is simply hanging on to the conditions of survival for longer than others while even those conditions slip away. Instead of a zero-sum game played at the scale of humanity, what would cooperation and recognition of shared conditions of vulnerability entail and produce?

Q: How useful is it to distinguish ecological apocalypse from social collapse? If they’re intertwined, to what extent?

Ray: I think there are some ways to think about the valences of apocalypse, rather than types of apocalypses. We might focus on the ecological aspects of a world ending and at other times foreground the social and cultural aspects of collapse, but we should bear in mind these are bound up with one another. The social exists within the ecological, and vice versa. Many people have done excellent work deconstructing and reconstructing the relationships between social and ecological worlds.

There is some utility in foregrounding ecological and more-than-human dimensions of apocalypse in order to reckon with the human-centeredness of climate change discourses, and to think about what survival, preparation, and long-term conditions for life require in a multispecies/multisystem world. A way of maintaining separation from ecological and social collapse that may be harmful is thinking about preventing social collapse through geo-engineering and other techno-optimist fantasies of gaining control over planetary systems to re-create conditions these current generations of humans find most livable. Or, more likely, a small percentage of wealthy people find preferable.

Q: How does the theory of “bunkerization” fit into the new space race? Is getting off-planet a realistic or worthy goal?

Ray: We are already capable of leaving the planet, but we do not know if we are capable of living for long periods of time, or even full lifetimes, in outer space, whether in the void or on a celestial body. Living off-planet has been the stuff of dreams and fantasies since time immemorial, but the visions of the twenty-first century space entrepreneurs loom largest in our cultural imagination and draw a significant pool of private and public resources. We could make some good and bad cases for taking the human species multiplanetary, but we would still need to contend with the current political and economic environment in which those ideas are explored and brought to life. It may be realistic, and it may be worthy, but right now it is a dream led by the same people who have helped engineer the planetary ecological and social collapses we wish to escape.

One of the ways we can read the new space race is through bunkerization, which puts forward that Americans are a people who bunker, and bunkering is more than hiding out in an underground shelter. Bunkering is a way of thinking about our relationship to ourselves and others, as people who self-isolate from community during emergencies, think about ideological conservation in the face of harm, and anticipate the state will be unable and unwilling to care for its own citizens in times of emergency. Bunkerization leads us to create bunker-like conditions on Mars and on the moon, to think about international competition for space resources, to stoke the fires of the Cold War as an ideological race to establish colonies and commerical enterprises, and to imagine ourselves as being “prepared” for apocalyptic conditions in terms of harm avoidance, rather than care and shared vulnerability across species and ideologies. The bunkerized version of the space race reinforces much of what drives the collapses fueling the space race.

Q: How is prepping related to the United States as a postindustrial society?

Robert Kirsch: Industrialization was, obviously, highly disruptive to a great many facets of American society. The deindustrialization of the current moment is just as, if not more, jarring. To narrow that down, we focus on industrialization as it reshaped what it means to be an “American.” A lot of conceptions of being American were wrapped up in self-sufficiency, working the land and crafting the ends of life from start to finish. The extent to which that has ever fully been true is debatable, but this is a pretty fundamental habit of mind, how Americans are invited to view themselves. Industrialization—its division of labor and establishing concentrated pools of wage laborers—changed how Americans lived their lives.

Even so, the habits of mind of self-sufficiency persisted, so appealing to that myth continues to speak to how Americans see themselves, even if the complexities of industrial production mean that most Americans cannot, and do not know how to, make their own ends of life, start to finish. Even so, industrial production provides a consumption outlet for a prepared American. That is, at most wholesalers, Americans can buy shelf-stable meals ready to eat. These are the results of an industrial production process but also appeal to a mythos of self-sufficiency. This shows how powerful the myth is, that personal consumption of mass-produced goods to demonstrate self-sufficiency might not immediately appear as a contradiction.

Q: Prepping in the United States is a growing topic of interest. Why, despite decades if not centuries of prepping in US history, are we collectively talking about it so much right now?

Kirsch: One very clear answer is that this is a response, conscious or not, to global climate change. As environments degrade and extreme weather events become normal, there seems to be a clear sense that life will have to be lived differently. At the same time, there seems to be no civic or institutional appetite to live differently, so people get stuck between needing to adapt and having no collective mechanism to adapt together. Hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, winter storms, and the like all seem to speak to this. Even beyond that, however, we think this is a matter of life in a neoliberal world. For decades now, the United States has let public services degrade, discouraged collective action, and left people to their consumer savvy to see them through whatever crisis they face. As this becomes expected, discussing prepping takes on increased urgency because Americans are effectively left to their own devices as a matter of governmental (non)policy.

Q: Prepping seems to cross economic orientations: you can find preppers who identify as leftist anticapitalist, Silicon Valley CEOs, libertarians, and so forth. What makes prepping appealing to or work across different economic worldviews?

Kirsch: On the one hand, the existential threats for which one prepares are in some ways felt by everyone, even at varying intensities. Thus, regardless of one’s own ideological motivations, a question of prepping inevitably emerges. On the other hand, Americans are invited to bunkerize as a mode of domesticity, as we argue, so prepping becomes a lived experience of everyday life. Prepping also implies an ability to read the social/political/climatic landscape and in so doing, it offers a sense of clever knowing, which could feel empowering against the utter helplessness many people feel in the face of what drives the crises they prep for.