Project title: “Environmental Politics at the End of the World – Prepping as Environmental Practice”

This project explores prepping, in which individuals and families prepare for emergencies, disasters, or the collapse of society without relying on social institutions such as the state or market. Its ethnographic approach describes prepping as an environmental practice that renegotiates the flows of food, water, energy, waste, and other facets of material life. Most U.S. households are connected to collective infrastructure such as municipal water systems and the electric grid. Preppers undo this by striving for self-sufficiency, an ideal that reinforces individualism, the naturalness of gender roles, racial and class privilege, and the logic of capitalism and settler colonialism. This has important implications for an environmental politics concerned with intersectional environmental justice.