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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
LONGMONT, Colo. — Brook Morgan surveyed booths at the “Survival & Prepper Show” in Colorado that were stocked with boxes of ammunition, mounds of trauma medical kits, and every type of knife imaginable.
A self-described “30-year-old lesbian from Indiana,” Morgan is one of a new breed of Americans getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists since the 1980s.
Much of that growth is from minorities and people considered left-of-center politically, whose sense of insecurity was heightened by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the pandemic, more frequent extreme weather and the 2020 racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd.
Chris Ellis is a colonel in the U.S. Army who works on disaster preparedness and recovery and is a leading researcher into the prepper movement who has tracked its growth to 20 million people based on household resiliency data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
For John Ramey, a former innovation adviser to the Obama administration and creator of the prepper website The Prepared, the community has grown to reflect American society at large in terms of political beliefs and demographic categories.
Back at the prepper show at the Boulder County fairgrounds, Jennifer Council strummed her thumb against the edge of an ax, balanced it in her hand and said it was perfect for both cutting down small trees and doing the delicate shaving work needed to create tinder.
The original article contains 804 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!