Environmental Politics at the End of the World: Prepping as Environmental Practice

Abstract

This dissertation explores the practice of prepping, in which individuals and families prepare to respond to emergencies, disasters, or the collapse of society, without relying on social institutions such as the state or market. Based on ethnographic data, including interviews (n=20), participant observation, and analysis of online content (message boards, blogs, and social media), I argue that prepping is an environmental practice because it involves renegotiating the material flows of food, water, energy, waste, and other facets of material life to survive disaster or social collapse. This is related to the idea of risk society. By default, most households are reliant on collective public infrastructural systems such as municipal water provision, industrial food distribution, or the electric grid, a configuration I theorize as an environmental field. Preppers work to undo this default and minimize risk associated with it by emergency planning and becoming “self-sufficient”, in doing so modifying their ecological habitus to transpose elements of their cultural schema onto newly realized circumstances. I argue that self-sufficiency emerges as a culturally logical, embodied environmental response that serves as an emotion management strategy because it allows participants to reinforce valued cultural worldviews such as cultural individualism, ideas about human nature, gender, racial and class privilege, and the logic of liberalism, to which they are culturally attached. Emotions play a key role in motivating action, and in shaping which actions are deemed culturally appropriate by a given group. Even as preppers engage in a critique of current institutions, they fall back on dominant ideologies that reproduce logics of masculinity, whiteness, and class privilege. This has important implications for an environmental politics concerned with environmental privilege.