Shares deep insights into the world of “prepping” and reveals how prepping functions as an environmental practice expressed through right-wing ideology. 

Sensationalized in TV shows like Doomsday Preppers, ordinary people who prepare for the end of the world are a subject of fascination. While beginners might keep a few days’ worth of food and water on hand in case of a weather emergency, others truly push themselves to acquire the materials, skills, and knowledge they would need to survive complete societal collapse. Though we might think of them as on the fringe, some estimate that there are as many as 20 million preppers worldwide.

Sociologist Allison Ford’s Prepared: The Environmental Politics of the End of the World shares a behind-the-scenes look at preppers. Ford’s ethnography finds that prepping is a response to environmental risk that originates in right-wing political ideology. Instead of turning to collective action to find a solution, however, preppers approach emergency preparedness as an individual responsibility. Preparedness reasserts and confirms preppers’ self-identification as people who protect their families and maintain self-control, without depending upon others. She argues that preppers adopt the strategies that they do because they are culturally attached to their worldviews, specifically their commitments to liberalism and its unspoken gendered, racial, and class hierarchies, which are being challenged by the failures of modernity that preppers observe. Ultimately, Prepared gives critical insight into how people who do not necessarily identify as environmentalists respond to and deal with environmental risk.