Preppers History And The Cultural Phenomenon

The word ‘prepper’ seems to have burst onto the scene within the last 10 years, and has increasingly become associated with “fringe” extremists. They have been labeled by some as “domestic terrorists.” But is prepping a new phenomenon? Or is it a manifestation of a growing collective psyche that has learned, from traumatic events throughout our history, that preparedness is critical to human survival? For new preppers who think the worst is yet to come, this book offers a walk through history that shows the worst has been here before. For those who wonder why so many people are concerned about being prepared, this book will show that when the worst has made an appearance, those who weathered it best were those who were prepared. For those already familiar with history’s worst who think, “THAT will never happen again!”—this book offers a reminder of the Wall Street adage: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” For those who wonder what a prepper is, this book offers a look at what they used to be—and what they are today.

How does prepping mesh with the Christian faith? Is prepping actually a sign of a lack of faith in God? The Faithful Prepper seeks to not only answer such questions, but also takes a look at a number of other post-disaster scenarios and some of the things a Christian will have to think about in each of them. Such scenarios include: •How do you incorporate charity into post-disaster life without compromising your family’s safety? •How do you live with others in confined circumstances in a very dangerous environment? •What is the role of the church post-disaster, if any? •Who do you let stay at your retreat post-disaster, and who do you turn away? •How do you live a prepared lifestyle, yet not one dominated by fear? •When bad stuff happens post-disaster, how do you cope? •How do you care for those who have special needs post-disaster? •And much more… Aden Tate is a Christian writer who lives in The Beautiful South. To keep up to date with his most recent works, visit adentate.weebly.com.

It seems like people are always talking about the end of the world, doesn't it? Y2K, the Mayan Apocalypse, Blood Moon Prophecies, nuclear war, killer robots, you name it. In Apocalypse Any Day Now, journalist Tea Krulos travels the country to try to puzzle out America's obsession with the end of days. Along the way he meets doomsday preppers—people who stockpile supplies and learn survival skills—as well as religious prognosticators and climate scientists. He camps out with the Zombie Squad (who use a zombie apocalypse as a survival metaphor); tours the Survival Condos, a luxurious bunker built in an old Atlas missile silo; and attends Wasteland Weekend, where people party like the world has already ended. Frightening and funny, the ideas Krulos explores range from ridiculously outlandish to alarmingly near and present dangers.

The culture of twenty-first century America revolves around narcissistic death, violence, and visions of doom. Foster explores this culture of the apocalypse, from hoarding and gluttony to visions of the post-apocalyptic world.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.

Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears- from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere. In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now, an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus. The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us, in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.

In an era of abundance, at least part of humanity has stopped thinking about the future provision of basic vital resources such water, energy and food. Storage actions, with all their variants whether real or imagined, are sources of innovation in the provision and treatment of crucial resources. This book deals with cases of water, food, energy and biodiversity storage as a response to a new era of scarcity. Examining multilevel storage policies, consumers’ practices and local organisations, author Giorgio Osti explores a variety of examples such as the need to stock agriculture produce, the industry and practices of food conservation, the role of artificial water basins in controlling floods and droughts and the development of batteries able to compensate for the intermittence of renewable energy sources. Storage and self-sufficiency can be achieved in many technical ways, at different territorial levels and according to different policies or philosophies. Being more a grasshopper or an ant - the two extreme positions - depends not only on the technologies available but also on different analyses of the environment and different attitudes to the future. This book offers an environmentalist perspective that uncovers hidden or absent activities of ultramodern societies that will be useful to students of environmental sociology as well as those researching and studying at the interface of environmental studies and geography.