No Abandonment, No Bunkers: Preparing for Disaster Together |
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As climate disasters intensify and authoritarian threats escalate, most of us are underprepared for moments when systems fail or are weaponized against us. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly talks with Chris Begley and Amy Edelman, authors of The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation, about how preparedness can move us away from fear, isolation and bunker fantasies, and toward community, care and collective survival. They discuss how practical planning, community relationships and collective care can help us face climate disasters, political unrest and everyday crises with more courage and less panic.
Music: Son Monarcas and Mizl
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes.
This week, we are talking about disaster preparedness. As climate catastrophes intensify, most of us are unprepared, as individuals and as movement groups, to mobilize strategically when the lights go out or floodwaters rise. While impressive mutual aid efforts often spring up in the wake of catastrophe, many of those efforts are built under extreme pressure, by people who are exhausted, afraid, and trying to invent systems of care in real time. What if we had existing plans for those moments? What if we had roles, communication strategies, and relationships that would allow us to respond more effectively?
Today, I’ll be in conversation with Chris Begley and Amy Edelman, authors of the forthcoming book The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation. This book is not a liberation text. It’s a practical resource. And I am very interested in how the checklists, how-tos, and insights that Chris and Amy offer can be adapted toward collective ends.
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Many people actively avoid thinking about climate change, preparing for climate disasters, or fighting for the natural world, because all of that can feel overwhelming. I believe that talking about how we can prepare together, and how we can take care of each other when disaster strikes, can make difficult subjects more approachable. I also think that being more prepared to show up for each other can reorient us, emotionally and politically, in relation to one another. It can help us build the relationships, trust, skills, and collective courage we’ll need to survive what’s coming — and to defeat fascism.
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Kelly Hayes: Chris, Amy, welcome to Movement Memos.
Amy Edelman: Thank you for having us.
Chris Begley: Yeah, thank you.
Kelly Hayes: So, how are each of you doing today?
Amy Edelman: Well, it’s a lovely, sunny day in New Jersey, and so for the moment I’m doing well. Thank you.
Chris Begley: Yeah, I’m doing fine too. I’m in Tennessee at the moment and considering everything, doing okay.
Kelly Hayes: Considering everything, oof, I feel that. So, what would you all like our listeners to know about who you are and what you do?
Chris Begley: Well, I’m Chris Begley. I’m an archeologist, I’m a wilderness survival instructor and a college professor, and I’m the author of a previous book called The Next Apocalypse where I talked about how things fall apart and how we think about them falling apart, and why that may not be what has ever actually happened in the past.
Amy Edelman: Hi, my name is Amy Edelman and I’m an entrepreneur and have spent most of my working career in public relations. About 10 or so years ago, I started reading things about the impending climate crisis that made me a little concerned, and I found that when I brought the conversation up with friends or family, they weren’t that interested and I really felt like I wanted to do something about it, so I started putting together this book. Around that time too I read Chris’s book, and he came at the issue of collapse from a historical standpoint, which I found both interesting and at the same time very hopeful, so I reached out to Chris to see if he would be interested in working on The Emergency Playbook with me and he said yes.
Chris Begley: And one thing that I think’s really important that Amy is part of this and as an author of this book is that she really is the audience that she envisioned, and I think that that’s really important. And I know in the course of writing it there were lots of things that I never would’ve thought to include or to present in a certain way, and so that really brought a lot to this project.
Kelly Hayes: A lot of people hear “preparedness” and picture right-wing bunker fantasies, hoarding, guns, or individualistic escape. What were you trying to rescue from that culture when you wrote this book?
Chris Begley: One of the problems with the sort of doomsday prepper presentation of these things is that it really does turn a lot of people off because the sorts of things that are being advocated are really just not part of a lot of people’s lives. And when we look historically and we see that the focus needs to be on community and that what really gets you through these problems include things like empathy and understanding and a sense of justice and generosity. And first of all, not only is that not the kinds of things that we typically celebrate in anything from the disaster narratives that we create for ourselves, but it’s also not something that’s commercial. What are you going to… You can’t sell empathy, you can’t sell generosity, you can’t market these things. I think that when so much is driven by that, those are the sorts of things that get lost. And that’s really what I would like to rescue from the more typical conversation about how to prepare for the future.
Kelly Hayes: Thanks for that. I feel like a lot of people know we are living in unstable times, but still don’t spend much time thinking about disaster planning, either because it feels overwhelming or because they assume that in a worst-case scenario, they would already be kind of screwed. So maybe it’s better not to think about it, but you argue that preparation can actually reduce fear and help people think more clearly. How do you approach preparedness in a way that is honest about danger without leaving people overwhelmed? And how do you hope people engage with this book?
Amy Edelman: So we basically outline the scenarios which are very scary in the back of the book, but we also tell people that just taking the first steps to preparedness will make them feel less stressed and more in control. We’re very real about the danger and we don’t suggest anywhere that it’s not going to be bad, but we do, Chris specifically cites how things have happened historically, which we hope will make people feel a little more confident about moving forward.
Chris Begley: I think one of the ways that we sort of deal realistically with the dangers is to actually deal realistically with the dangers, because that’s not what you’re getting often in these discussions. You’re getting these fantasies that relate to all sorts of other things, but don’t really represent the dangers. There’s many examples, for instance, electromagnetic pulse. That’s a real phenomenon and it would really cause problems, but there are very limited settings in which that’s going to be something to worry about. However, if you look at the doomsday prepper type of, well, everything, their suggestions, the narratives they create, this is a major player in how things go wrong. So what we do is really look at what is likely to happen, what has happened in the past, and how does that look for the average person? And, of course, preparing for something, and we all have experience with this, preparing for something really creates this sense that you have some control, some mastery, some plan, and that you’re in a better shape to get through this.
Kelly Hayes: Can you say a bit more about how you’re hoping people will engage with this material?
Chris Begley: Well, there’s a couple of things in terms of how people will engage with the book, it is written as sort of a handbook where it’s not necessarily the kind of narrative you might read all the way through. It’s divided up into sections that apply to certain situations, but there is a part of the book, the first part of the book, that talks about things that are much more general and widely applicable. And the sorts of situations that we described, these disasters are particular ones that we thought of or that might be common, but there’s really an infinite number of situations where preparing for the unexpected is important, and where it’s important, we both really felt to challenge these narratives that are out there. I mean, one of the things that I’ve discussed a lot with Amy is how, think about in childhood, you’re a kid, you’re out with your parents, you need something, a Kleenex, a bandaid. Who has it?
Well, it’s likely to be your mom in her purse. And if you look at the prepper literature that’s been co-opted and turned into this sort of masculine thing that is heroic and makes you tough to know about it. I mean, it’s the same with the wilderness survival literature. My wife, who is from Honduras and grew up in a rural area there, often would comment on the kinds of stuff I was teaching in my wilderness survival courses, that it was really everyday activities for her as a kid growing up in these communities. And that is the kind of thing that you see when you really start to look into this. A lot of things have been purposefully mystified so that you can claim some expertise or that you can perhaps market that. For instance, camping and hiking, that’s really sleeping and walking. And those sorts of things are, or the way in which that has been twisted into a specialized activity is indicative of what you see in a lot of the conversation around disaster preparation and dealing with emergencies.
Kelly Hayes: One thing I appreciate about the framing of this book is that preparedness isn’t approached as a consumer identity, or baked into fantasies about leaving other people behind. It’s a process that begins with some very ordinary questions that we should ask ourselves now, instead of grappling with them later, after a crisis has begun. Like, when the power goes out, who needs to be checked on first? If our phones stop working, where do people gather? If someone’s medication has to stay cold, who has a generator or access to refrigeration? If people have to leave quickly, do they know where they’re going, or what they’re bringing with them?
I know a lot of us have a mental block around this stuff, because it can be overwhelming. But as activists and organizers, this kind of planning is part of the work we need to be doing anyway. It’s about knowing our neighbors, assessing our capacities, looking for gaps, and lining up resources. It’s also part of mapping lines of care and defense, which is essential in this era, no matter what kind of threat we’re addressing. We don’t have to terrorize ourselves or others with visions of total collapse. We just have to be honest, with ourselves and others, about the disruptions people are already experiencing — extreme heat, bad air, power outages, floods, targeted repression — and prepare in ways that make us more useful to each other, rather than more isolated from each other.
And some of these practices can be really simple. One small thing I learned from you, Chris, was to carry cotton balls with me if I might need to start a fire. In The Next Apocalypse, which is a book I absolutely cherish, you talked about stretching cotton balls across wood when you’re trying to start a fire, and smearing a little petroleum jelly on them. Since then, I’ve never been in the woods without a mini Ziploc of cotton balls and some petroleum lip balm, and those things have come in handy.
The Emergency Playbook is packed with practical guidance and useful considerations, but the book is largely geared toward individuals and families. This podcast, on the other hand, is geared toward activists and organizers. So I’m interested in how people might put the information in the book to collective use. Let’s say a few people in a neighborhood, a friend group, or an organizing community are convinced they should be more prepared, but they’re starting from scratch. What are some practical first steps they could take together?
Chris Begley: One of the things we concentrate on in this book is community, and really, any group, whether it’s a group of activists that are planning some action or a friend group. All of these are microcosms of a larger community. And so in some ways the sorts of things we talk about work wherever you’re going, identifying your community, identifying the needs, figuring out what it is you need to do to prepare, whether that’s acquiring knowledge or skills or actual stuff. And so when I think about who might use this book, it could be truly in my mind, any group. I suppose it could also be an individual, although ultimately we’re all going to be working together to create something.
Now what we talk about in this book are dealing with and creating or recreating, rehabilitating these larger systems that might collapse for some reason, the power grid or an agricultural system, but it equally applies to the sorts of things that you need to do together to get something to work. So I’m hoping that there’ll be stuff here that would be applicable at a variety of scales.
I think one of the first steps that we all need to take is to understand and get to know your........