[Raion]

For those in Europe or Australia there's a subculture in the US called "preppers". These range from people who stock hundreds of lbs of food, to people who just discuss strategies and keep a "bug out" bag.

This idea may seem pretty weird, and I can respect that. However I see it as important to prep within your means and be ready for whatever you see as important. 

What do you prepare for? Why? What is your advice to fellow users of the site? We are living in strange times, so I suppose this is a fair conversation to have. 

(For medicine, firearms and other controversial topics, I'll say this: We operate in the US. Please don't mention doing things that are illegal at a federal level. No ganja or scrip drug talk, no talking about title II weapons that could be improperly stamped, no improvised weapon/ghost gun talk. For those in other countries, use discretion and post at your own risk, and try to understand the culture and views of the people you respond to before you judge them.)

[weblacky]

I have family members that "brush up against" being preppers. I will say that there is a lot of misinformation regarding prepping and it has more to do with what people consider to be "prepping".

Some people consider it to just have a plan to exit an area and travel to another to meetup with groups of family somewhere else.

Others consider it to be basically homesteading (self sufficient). The vast majority I've seen aren't self sufficient and so fall between the two ideas.

I consider prepping to be more towards self sufficiency than anything else, which I why I cannot be classified as a prepper. as I'm far from self sufficient. Real self sufficiency takes both knowledge and homesteading (and or lots of money to outlay for the infrastructure ahead of time). I believe the best prepping really is knowledge of repair and making due with keeping things going.

With regards to what events are the topics of these prepper conversations, I've experienced discussing the following topics with people about prepping:

1. Riots (local home safety and supplies for a few days).
2. Tsunamis of various sizes and local flooding.
3. Major geological events causing outages and damage.
4. Mass riots leading to people going door to door to steal supplies and such (total loss of the rule of law).
5. Western piece of USA sinking into ocean during an catalistm (not much can be done there).
6. Confiscation of items/materials by US Government (think Executive Order 6102 in 1933).
7. Pandemic (yeah, really!).
8. Loss of infrastructure (no cell phones, no radio broadcasts, no power, sudden plunge into the 1800's) due to solar flares (e.g. Carrington Event in 1859), cyber attacks, EMP, war, etc...
9. Hyper inflation and loss of sound currency (buying gas, buying bread, fungible trade, etc...).

I cannot think of much else, most of the time these cover it.

Hope this helps!

[Shiunbird]

My family owns a small farm (around 50.000 m2) far enough from the city, but not too far, within a walking distance of a water source.
The area is enough to feed around 10 people if they are working full time on the land, extrapolating from our own ability to grow food there.

My brother and I are working to make it defensible and self sustainable. There's a water well already. We are installing solar panels and building underground food stores.

My only problem is to have enough time to move from Europe to Brazil there in case of need. Hardly ever you get proper warning that things are going south.

Our progress as follows:
- Two layers of fencing: In progress.
- Digging a pit: we are deciding whether to dig between the fences or behind the last one. Rain and erosion are taking care of at least one side.
- Livestock: we got already 50 chicken and we are working to get a few ducks, as not to rely on a single species.
- Defence: I guess weapons used for hunting can be used for defence.
- Fruits: year round supply already exists. We've got mangoes, avocados, oranges and different species of local berries.
- Crops: starting with corn. Trying to convince father to stop with the coffee. It takes a lot of water and it is nutritionally useless.
- We started regrowing the forest around the perimeter, so the main houses are not visible from the outside.
- Solar panels: still too expensive.

The area is immune to floods, but vulnerable to forest fires. We believe a wide enough pit should help with that, unless winds are too strong. I guess the next years will show up.

[02girl]

No disrespect to the USA, but you guys seem pretty down on the idea of mutual support. My experiences may be atypical, but... Earthquakes, nobody tried to kill anyone. Storms with long power cuts, ditto. You could still get fresh mango juice, hand blended. Revolution, great fun, we sat around fires on our street talking all night. And the curfew parties.... Foreign invasion, so many people took us in and cooked us good food, I was humbled. Bombings, people really look out for each other. Are you OK? Did you get shrapnel in your kitchen too? Come round ours.

But then I remembered Hurricane Katrina in the US, the scary footage of folks with guns, blocked freeways, total breakdown, and the distrust of blacks and whites. Maybe you guys do need to get prepared. It's a jungle out there.

[Raion]

No disrespect to the USA, but you guys seem pretty down on the idea of mutual support. My experiences may be atypical, but... Earthquakes, nobody tried to kill anyone. Storms with long power cuts, ditto. You could still get fresh mango juice, hand blended. Revolution, great fun, we sat around fires on our street talking all night. And the curfew parties.... Foreign invasion, so many people took us in and cooked us good food, I was humbled. Bombings, people really look out for each other. Are you OK? Did you get shrapnel in your kitchen too? Come round ours.

Katrina was 16 years ago, in the deep South, a region of the US that's very poor. The US is very huge. Larger than India, larger than Brasil, larger than all of Europe really... Hard to generalize us based on that, coupled with the fact there's no "American ethnicity" or culture really.

Sounds to me like you're from Latin America or something. The US is not what you've probably seen on mass media. While I wouldn't probably invite my neighbors into my house or anything like that (as I don't know them super well) there's no animosity or fear we have from our neighbors here. Just gangs and looters who pop out post-crisis to wreck havoc. That's why people have guns, and as much of the US violence is race/ethnicity based (not even so much into large categories like black vs white, even finer grained than that at times) you're gonna see it highlighted again and again. That's primarily because we have no shared identity really.

[jan-jaap]

The US is very huge. [...] larger than all of Europe really...

Google seems to disagree with that statement:

US: 9.834.000 km²
Europe: 10.180.000 km²

The US is the 4th largest country, behind Russia, China and Canada.

[Raion]

Depends on what you consider "europe" I guess. I was not including Russia or the Caucasus.

[Shiunbird]

Brazil OR the US > Europe without Russia
Brazil > US without Alaska, if not mistaken.

We live in a period of rare prosperity, fuelled by easy energy. Switch a few levels down closer to survival mode and mutual support goes to shit very fast. In many places, local crops are not enough to feed the population without imports. Cash crops and the gains of productivity per area that happened in the 20th century only came by because of said easy and cheap energy.

It won't be easy.

I think the idea of "prepperism" is more due to the consciousness that we may live in a era of absolute lack of resources than poor distribution. Americans, please correct me.

[weblacky]

I had like a whole huge thing, but I'll boil it down for those NOT in a USA city (or near one).
Most places in the USA aren't like villages (not being rude, I'll explain). Some small towns are but even most USA towns aren't as close/tight as a village would be.

Remember most regions in the USA have inhabitants that do not share:

religion
politics
ethnicity
family
educational backgrounds
Any single industry (farming, processing, manufacturing, etc). We have mostly service and knowledge workers with labors now. Yes have other industries but not in great quantities (that's my point here, people predominantly work in the above areas)

Those are things we often don't have in common due to the variety of people in every place. Now yes, there are some towns where a major/single influx of immigrants from a long time ago settled that region (germans, dutch, french, etc). But overall, migration between regions has mixed a lot of it, especially in/near large cities.

So our neighbors don't share our interests, history, or even morals. We are neighbors, but not related. In a small township or village, people are often related to one another, know each other's business, have a common religion (or dominant), and keep each other in order by the various social strings attached with all that.

In urban city settings (like mine) we don't have those ties, which also means we don't have those trusts. Yes I know my neighbors, and if they needed some help, I'd try...but I'd not open my home to them to "take" from me during a true time of disaster, I'd have to keep them at arms length and help them through a lens of not disclosing exactly what I have. Because they'd talk to others and I'd find myself looted before the week was out. I'm not saying they are bad people, but they have no incentive or relationship to protect me if it means their own survival and they gang up on me. I have to hold back what I have and give within my means (or assistance) to give back and trade.

Now as an entire community, we do have some needs that only a community would be able to handle (security in and out of our area), signaling, and some basic supply sharing for services.

I'll end by an example I've read in a few places that hopefully will explain the concern preppers have when it comes to others (story):

A local community center holds cooking classes regularly, a member of the community decides to teach a class on canning food in order to teach people how to prepare for emergency situations. The class goes well and people start talking, after the class, a student comes up to the instructor and says, "Wow, this was great, I never did canning before, my mother used to do it but I never found the interest or time". The instructors replies, "Well, now you have that knowledge and can do the preparation yourself". The student then replies (jokingly), "Oh yeah, that's OK, if there's ever an emergency I'll just come over to your house".

Point made.

Helping my neighbor is one thing, helping the entire neighborhood is another. The prepper mindset is more often defense from others, not surviving alone in a national forest.

[Shiunbird]

Pertinent to the topic is the first episode of Connections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection...ons_(1978)