Preparing for the unknown… unknowns: ‘doomsday’ prepping and disaster risk anxiety in the United States

Abstract

This article examines the collapse-based thinking energising ‘doomsday’ prepping: a growing American phenomenon centred on storing food, water and weapons for the purpose of surviving disasters. Existing understandings of prepping indicate that its practitioners are driven to prepare by peculiar and delusional certainty that apocalyptic collapse will occur in the near future. This view, however, has not yet been tested by empirical research. This article draws on ethnography with 39 preppers in 18 American states to present a new understanding of this phenomenon, as it shows prepping consistently being practiced in the absence of both apocalyptic predictions and certainty regarding the future occurrence of disaster. Demonstrating that preppers’ activities are undergirded by precautionary projections around numerous non-apocalyptic ‘threats’, the article argues that prepping principally responds to uncertain anxieties around disaster risks. Moreover, it establishes that these imprecise anxieties are regularly influenced by preppers’ consumption of disaster-based speculation in mainstream news media – showing that their concerns tend to emerge in response to numerous disaster risks that are widely reported and recognised in wider American culture, rather than marginal conceptions of ‘threats’. The article, therefore, contends that, rather than being a marginal apocalyptic practice, prepping is a phenomenon with clear, previously unacknowledged links to broader risk communications and concerns in the twenty-first century United States – one that must be understood as a reflection of the broader resonance of disaster-based speculation and uncertainty in this cultural context.

Keywords:

• Anxiety
• disaster
• precaution
• United States
• risk perception

Acknowledgements

The author thank all the participants for their valuable time, energy, and insights, and Adam Burgess and Keith Hayward for their perceptive and encouraging comments. I would also like to thank the reviewers of this article for their insightful and constructive comments.

Notes

1. As Durodié (2011, 512) notes, however, it is likewise important to consider the cumulative impact of prior events in any assessment of present day risk concerns, given that emergencies do not only concern ‘the events, actions and communications of that moment’, but also ‘draw together, in concentrated form, the legacies of past events, actions and communications’. In regards to disease, then, recent concerns about Ebola are likely to have also been affected somewhat by responses to prior risks – including the precautionary messaging adopted by the World Health Organisation around SARS and H1N1 viruses, which encouraged vigilance and action among global populations and arguably set the stage for fears later fears of possible pandemics (see Durodié 2011).