Preppers Feature in the BBC March 2010

Americans Get Set for Disaster Day

By Madeleine Morris
BBC News

If there was ever a major disaster in northern Virginia, Chuck Izzo's house is where you would want to be. 
 
Tucked away in his pantry are enough tinned food and water to last for two months.

In the basement an inverter hums quietly, charging batteries that could easily power most of his three-storey home's lights and appliances for nine hours.

And for when that runs out, he has a wood-burning stove with a two-month supply of fuel pellets so he can cook and heat the whole house.

Mr Izzo is a "prepper", one of a growing number of Americans who are preparing their homes and families to survive a major disaster they believe could arrive at any time.

"We realize the frailty of infrastructure so if it fails, we're prepared to deal with a crisis like that," he explains.
"It could be electricity, it could be a medical emergency. It could be something caused by a man-made disaster or a natural disaster." 

“ I don't think it's paranoia. I think it's just a degree of readiness. ”
Chuck Izzo 

While there have always been people who have anticipated and prepared for disaster, "prepping" as a discernable movement has emerged only in the last 18 months, with the growth of online prepper networks and blogs. 

 

Since its inception just 15 months ago, the American Preppers Network and its associated state networks now get more than 5,000 hits a day.

Preppers debate issues like whether to "bug-in" or "bug-out" (to evacuate or stay when disaster strikes) and more mundane matters like gardening tips.

Blogs such as The Survival Mom and Suburban Prepper give tips on preserving and growing food, discuss the pros and cons of having a gun, and offer advice on ham radio.

“ I think it's something more people my age should think about ”
Matt Jarvis Prepper, 22

"There are a lot of people out there who feel the same way as I do, but don't know that there's others out there like them, so it's the prepper networks that provide that online community for people to come together online and talk with each other," says Matt Jarvis, the man behind The Prepper Podcast.

From his bedroom in rural Kentucky, Mr Jarvis records and posts his weekly conversations with other preppers and survival experts.

Mr Jarvis is 22 and still lives with his parents, yet he has put aside three months' worth of food and water, plus other supplies, in case disaster strikes.

He is most worried about hurricanes after one destroyed many of the houses on his street two years ago, but economic collapse and terrorism are also concerns.

He acknowledges it is unusual for someone of his age to be thinking so much about potential disasters, and putting hard-earned money into preparing for something that may never come. 

"But I think it's something more people my age should think about," he says.

Survivalists vs Preppers 
 
Preppers are keen not to be seen as survivalists - the stereotypically anti-government, wood-dwelling, gun-toting hermits of past decades.

Rather than isolating themselves in preparation for Armageddon, preppers tend to have normal jobs, mingle with their communities and take a more relaxed view about looming disasters.

Tom Martin, who began the American Preppers Network makes the distinction. "A survivalist is more a specific term," he says.

"For me, a survivalist is someone who can go into any type of situation and live off the land. Me, I'm not like that.

"People call themselves survivalists because they've got guns and MREs (military ready-to-eat meals). A prepper is a more generalised term. "

While most preppers tend to be politically to the right, or even libertarian in their views, their back-to-basics approach to food cultivation and preparation, as well as use of alternative energy sources, paradoxically means they have much in common with left-of-centre environmentalists.

But according to Professor Michael K Lindell, editor of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Centre at Texas A&M University, the recent growth in prepping is a sign of uncertain times.

"There is a general feeling of greater personal responsibility that we've seen in a number of different surveys," says Professor Lindell.

"Plus, people have the money and knowledge to invest in these different types of survival resources, as well as the feeling that they really are at risk.

"It's all these different trends that are coming together that are leading to this kind of behaviour."
Many preppers cite the American government's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as a key motivator behind their approach to survival. The economic crisis of the past two years is also frequently mentioned.

So are preppers paranoid? Chuck Izzo says not.

"Having a couple of months' worth of food, some first aid training, potentially if you can afford it having a back-up power system to maintain the electrical systems in your house… I don't think that's paranoia," he says.

"I think that's just a degree of readiness. I think it improves our confidence and our quality of life."

Video of the Preppers TV Spot on BBC World News America

Rise of the Preppers: American's New Survivalists

In case you missed this, we're famous! Jessica Bennett from Newsweek did an article on the rise of preppers and mentioned the American Preppers Network! It's great to finally get some positive media attention. The article was pretty fair and presented both sides. Lisa from The Survival Mom was interviewed for the article and she did a great job. (I also interviewed Lisa on The Prepper Podcast, check out the show here.) You can view the full article here, and make sure you watch the video!

Survivalism Lite

by: Jessica Bennett
Newsweek

They call themselves 'preppers.' They are regular people with homes and families. But like the survivalists that came before them, they're preparing for the worst.

Lisa Bedford is what you'd imagine of a stereotypical soccer mom. She drives a white Tahoe SUV. An American flag flies outside her suburban Phoenix home. She sells Pampered Chef kitchen tools and likes to bake. Bedford and her husband have two young children, four dogs, and go to church on Sunday.

But about a year ago, Bedford's homemaking skills went into overdrive. She began stockpiling canned food, and converted a spare bedroom into a giant storage facility. The trunk of each of her family's cars got its own 72-hour emergency kit—giant Tupperware containers full of iodine, beef jerky, emergency blankets, and even a blood-clotting agent designed for the battle-wounded. Bedford started thinking about an escape plan in case her family needed to leave in a hurry, and she and her husband set aside packed suitcases and cash. Then, for the first time in her life, Bedford went to a gun range and shot a .22 handgun. Now she regularly takes her two young children, 7 and 10, to target practice. "Over the last two years, I started feeling more and more unsettled about everything I was seeing, and I started thinking, 'What if we were in the same boat?'" says Bedford, 49.

Bedford is what you might call a modern-day survivalist—or, as she describes it, a "prepper." Far from the stereotype of survivalists past, she owns no camouflage, and she doesn't believe that 2012—the final year of the Mayan calendar—will be the end of the world. She likes modern luxuries (makeup, air conditioning, going out to eat), and she's no doomsayer. But like the rest of us, Bedford watched as the housing bubble burst and the economy collapsed. She has friends who've lost their homes, jobs, and 401(k)s. She remembers Hurricane Katrina, and wonders how the government might respond to the next big disaster, or a global pandemic. And though she hopes for the best—the last thing she wants is for something bad to happen—she's decided to prepare her family for the worst. "We never set out to go build a bunker to protect ourselves from nuclear fallout; I have no idea how to camp in the wild," Bedford says, laughing. "But as all of this stuff started hitting closer to home, we [wanted] to take some steps to safeguard ourselves."

In the past, survivalists and conspiracy theorists might go out into the woods, live out of a bunker, waiting (or sometimes hoping) for the apocalypse to hit. It was men, mostly; many of them antigovernment, often portrayed by the media as radicals of the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. In the late 1990s, Y2K fears brought survivalism to the mainstream, only to usher it back out again when disaster didn't strike. (Suddenly, unused survival gear began showing up in classifieds and on eBay.) A decade later, "preppers" are what you might call survivalism's Third Wave: regular people with jobs and homes whose are increasingly fearful about the future—their paranoia compounded by 24-hour cable news. "Between the media and the Internet, many people have built up a sense that there's this calamity out there that needs to be avoided," says Art Markman, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Texas who studies the way people think. And while they may not envision themselves as Kevin Costner in Waterworld—in fact, many preppers go out of their way to avoid the stereotypes that come along with the "survivalist" label—they've made a clear-eyed calculation about the risks at hand and aren't waiting around for anybody else to fix them. "I consider it more of a reaction than a movement," says Tom Martin, a 32-year-old Idaho truck driver who is the founder of the American Preppers Network, which receives some 5,000 visitors to its Web site each day. "There are so many variables and potential disasters out there, being a prepper is just a reaction to that potential."

That reaction, of course, means different things to different people. Some prep for economic disaster, while others prep to escape genetically modified foods. An organic farmer could be considered a prepper; so might an urban gardener. Some preppers fear putting their names out in public—they don't want every desperate soul knocking down their door in the event of a disaster—while others see it as a network they can rely upon were something horrible to happen. Some preppers fear the complete breakdown of society, while others simply want to stock up on extra granola bars and lighter fluid in case of a blackout or a storm. Hard-core survivalists might think of preppers as soft; "Eventually, the Chef Boyardee is going to run out," jokes Cody Lundin, the founder of the Aboriginal Living Skills School, a survival camp based out of his home in Prescott, Az. But prepping, says Martin, is just a new word for a very old way of life. "You don't have to have a survival retreat loaded with guns secluded in the wilderness to be a prepper," adds David Hill Sr., 54, a former jet mechanic who runs the Web site WhatisaPrepper from his home in rural West Virginia. "There are many people who live in urban and suburban areas who don't own guns who also identify themselves as preppers."

Researchers say that interest in survivalism can often be a barometer of social anxiety; and in many cases, says sociologist Richard Mitchell, it can be a response to modern stress. If that's true, it's no surprise we're seeing an uptick in it now: from climate change to the economy, swine flu to terrorism, the current state of the world is enough to make even the biggest cynic just a little bit worried. As U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano reminded us in a recent speech at the American Red Cross, 90 percent of Americans live in an area where there is moderate or high risk of natural disaster. "I think what we're experiencing is a kind of generational panic attack," says Neil Strauss, the former New York Times writer whose latest book, Emergency, is about how to survive in a disaster. "We were born in a good time. We experienced booming technology and rising stock prices. And then all of a sudden, 9/11 happened, Katrina happened, the economy plunged. And it's like the rug being pulled out from under our feet."

While there's no scientific data to track survivalism's recent growth, some preppers have speculated it's reached a level not matched in decades. Emergency-supply retailers say they're seeing business boom; the Red Cross has had a surge in volunteers over the past year (up some 160,000 over 2008), and there are networks of preppers—from Prepper.org to the Suburban Prepper, to Bedford's own blog, "The Survival Mom"—sprouting up all over the Web. FEMA's new head under Obama, Craig Fugate, has encouraged Americans to get in touch with their inner survivalist. "I encourage all Americans to take some simple steps to make their families more prepared, such as developing a family communications plan," he tells NEWSWEEK. His organization recently launched a "Resolve to be Ready" campaign suggesting that Americans to make preparedness part of their New Year's resolutions. "I think what people have come to realize is that [organizations like ours] can't always be everywhere we need to be as quickly as we need to be," says Jonathan Aiken, a spokesman for the American Red Cross. "So I think the messaging has changed, from FEMA on down, that in the event of an emergency, people need to be prepared to take care of themselves for a couple of days until the rest of us can come out and get to you."

Government has always played an active role in emergency preparedness. Nuclear-raid drills were part of everyday life for school children in the 1950s and '60s, and building bomb shelters was encouraged because of the nuclear threat. In 1999, the government set up a $50 million crisis center to deal with the computer threats posed by Y2K, and after 9/11, residents were pushed to stock up on plastic and duct tape to seal their homes in the event of a biological attack. But in 2010, as we enter the new year under an elevated threat level, the problems at hand can seem insurmountable and unknown, to the point that even Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley, warns in his 2008 book that we must "assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure." Where that leaves preppers is struggling to fill the void. "We want people to understand that preparedness is an individual's job, too," says Joseph Bruno, New York City’s commissioner of emergency management, where polling has shown that more than 50 percent of residents are thinking about preparedness—up from just 18 percent in 2004. "I'm a newsaholic, and that probably feeds some of this," says Bedford. "But I like to think that if we're prepared, it's one less family the government has to worry about."

In the end, what it all boils down to, at least for the preppers, is self-reliance—a concept as old as the human race itself. As survival blogger Joe Solomon pointed out in a recent column, during the Victory Gardens of WWII, Americans managed to grow 40 percent of all the vegetables they needed to survive. "My mother's parents had a 10-acre garden, and my grandfather worked at the dairy farm next door," says Hill, the former jet mechanic. "They worked by raising their own food, they had their own chickens, they canned vegetables, and my grandfather fed a family of 12 like that." But in the modern world, he says, many of those skills are easily forgotten. Today, our food comes from dozens of different sources. Most of us aren't quite sure how electricity gets from the wires to our stoves. We use debit cards to buy a can of tuna and we wouldn't have the slightest idea how to filter contaminated water. We are residents of the new millennium; we simply haven't needed to prepare.

So for the moment, people like Bedford are reteaching themselves lost skills—and in some cases, learning new ones. Bedford has read up on harvesting an urban garden, and is learning to use a solar oven to bake bread. She is ready with a pointed shot in the event she ever needs to hunt for her own food. And until then, she's got 61 cans of chili, 20 cans of Spam, 24 jars of peanut butter, and much more stocked in her pantry; she estimates she's spent about $4,000 on food supplies, an amount that should keep her family going for at least three months. Now, even if something simple goes wrong, like a paycheck doesn't go through, "we don't need to worry," she says.

Bedford knows it all might sound a little nuts—and she's careful about how much she reveals, and to whom. But she believes that in times of uncertainty, what she's doing is simply common sense. As for the rest of us, isn't it a little bit crazy not to prepare?

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to include comment from FEMA head Craig Fugate.

Celente Predicts Survivalism Will Go Mainstream in 2010

Gerald Celente is the founder of The Trends Research Institute and has been able to accurately forecast pretty much everything that has happened in the last 3-4 years. Hal F. recently posted on JWR's SurvivalBlog.com an article from the 4th quarter edition of The Trends Journal. In that edition Celente is predicting that survivalism will go mainstream next year as a result of the continuing economic downturn. Below is the text of that article:

"Back in the Cold War days, survivalism meant building a bomb shelter and stocking it with enough food to outlast nuclear fallout. In the late 1970’s, with inflation soaring, Iran raging, and gold and oil prices skyrocketing, survival meant cashing out of paper money and heading for the hills with enough ammunition and pork & beans to wait out the economic and political storms.

In 2000, the Y2K crowd – the most recent breed of survivalists – expecting computer clocks to crash, infrastructure to break down and the world to go dark, were armed and barricaded with enough food to feed an army and enough ammunition to hold one off.

In 2010, survivalism will go mainstream. Unemployed or fearing it, foreclosed or nearing it, pensions lost and savings gone, all sorts of folk who once believed in the system, having witnessed its battering, have lost their faith. The realities of failing financial institutions, degrading infrastructure, manipulated marketplaces, soaring energy costs, widening wars, and terror consequences have created a new breed of survivalist (preppers). Motivated not by worst-case scenario fears but by do-or-die necessity, the new non-believers, unwilling to go under or live on the streets, will devise ingenious stratagems to beat the system, get off the grid (as much as possible), and stay under the radar."

I added in the term preppers because that's exactly what he's talking about. Preppers are the new breed of survivalists spawned by fears of economic downturn. Preppers are the ones getting prepared for the possibility of job loss, currency devaluation, and a weakening infrastructure. Preppers are the ones who are willing to take their future into their own hands by storing up food, water, and all other supplies to go with it. It's because of our resilience and will to live that we're getting prepared for this type of scenario. Just as Celente points out, these new survivalists (preppers) are not motivated by 2012 scares or nuclear war, but feel we must do this out of necessity. I hope more and more people will heed the warning and start getting prepared.