getting independent.
so, I have been thinking: preppers often learn how to live independent of industrial production. Maybe the solarpunk movement can learn something from them?
The diversification of prepping was clear last weekend at the Survival & Prepper show at the fairgrounds in Boulder County, a liberal district which President Joe Biden won in 2020 by nearly 57 percentage points over Trump. Over 2,700 people paid $10 each to attend the show, organizers said, and attendees were varied.
Bearded white men with closely cropped hair and heavily tattooed arms were there. But so were hippy moms carrying babies in rainbow colored slings and chatting about canning methods, Latino families looking over greenhouses and water filtration systems, and members of the local Mountain View Fire Rescue team, who in 2021 battled a devastating fire in the region, giving CPR demonstrations and encouraging citizens to be more prepared for extreme events.
“People want to regain their agency, their sense of control, and do something to match their fears to their actions,” said Ellis, who underscored that he did not speak on behalf of the Department of Defense.
People motivated by climate change, Ellis said, tend to be homesteaders who grow their own food and move to more “climate proof” locations, such as the mild summer haven of Duluth, Minnesota.
There’s absolutely a bunch of left-wing preppers out there whose version of ‘prepping’ is more like community disaster preparedness, escalating up to nearly independent communes. There’s a ‘redpreppers’ reddit sub, although it doesn’t seem terribly active. Those people probably gel with solarpunk ideals pretty well. There’s going to be some overlap in ideology there when it comes to things like community-owned gardens or farms, solar panels, creating community plans in case of disaster, etc. Do be warned, however, that they will inherently include self-defense, including firearms, in their plans, quite possibly for use against state oppression. Make peace with that or don’t interact.