“The farcical nature of some prepping activities can make for rather dark comedy. Let’s face it, not many of us are suited to archery or skinning a rabbit! That’s why the movie “We’re All Going To Die” is such an engaging watch (view at the end). At the movie premiere in Berlin, I mentioned that anyone who seriously engages in personal prepping for either disasters or broader societal collapse soon realizes they can’t do it alone.”[JB} Yawn. How unoriginal of Bendell to once again pick on what essentially are far-right tin-foil-hat nutters who are preparing for a zombie apocalypse, alone. Yes, alone. Do you really want to hang out with these people, with their paranoia and hatred of anything not as white as they are? I thought not, so why bother?
Who is Jessica Wildfire? It seems that much of what she writes is behind Medium’s paywall. Yawns more. At least she and JB concede that prepping is an ongoing aspect of modern life. As always with JB, this post is all about him and what he is doing: “Now I realize there could be more discussion of positive approaches to prepping within the Deep Adaptation movement. That is why prepping will be the topic of the next salon of the Metacrisis Initiative[JB}, or his Salon, and there will be a cost to join.
“To help discussions and initiatives around prepping to be more generative, I’ve developed a list of action areas for real preparedness for societal disruption and collapse.”[JB} This is what he calls Rainbow Prepping, using the metaphor of the rainbow: “when we see a rainbow after a period of rain, it is not only an impressive sight, but indicates a brighter time is coming after a storm.” I can’t help but look at this post and think it looks like every wannabe preparedness practitioner who is all talk and no skills. JB is clearly fishing for experts for his paid membership Salons, and I say “fishing” because the Rainbow Prepping post shows he hasn’t got a clue and desperately needs help, but in the process of wanting to make money out of this venture, this is one more poorly baited hook that is going to be ignored by solidarityprepping.co.uk
On the subject of food and water: “engage the relevant organizations that provide food and water at scale.”[JB} That will be the privatized water companies and farms. So, bearing in mind that 2026 has seen the worst grain and potato harvests across Europe, what exactly is he thinking? As for providing water at scale? If the rivers and reservoirs are dry, the people who have been diligently storing rainwater, recycling greywater into the garden, and have the means and skills to process water at scale will always be ahead of the game.
Practical Skills:
I have already put my head in my hands. This just reminds me of Dr Gail Bradbrook’s exclamation: “We need the guys who build stuff!” Or Manda Scott’s longer tantrum about “dystopian survivalism,” and then a great, long diatribe about what we’ll do when the sewage freezes when the AMOC collapses. “Practical skills become as valuable as possessions or money.” If that’s the case, why the resistance to learn them? Why is JB’s post devoid of the skill to even organize the paragraph on what practical skills are? Why are water and food not listed as practical skills? “Know local edibles.”[JB} I presume he means foraging rather than sizing up the neighbors for the table. What JB is doing is rehashing an impoverished version of Dr. Stephanie Rost’s How We Could Survive in a Post-Collapse World. In spite of all the apparent permaculture he has been doing in Indonesia, JB’s understanding of water management skills is pedestrian: “Communities could need to innovate with water recycling systems, desalination technologies, and rainwater capture to maintain a stable water supply in the face of increasingly erratic rainfall patterns,” Rost. Food and water procurement in a crisis, when farmers’ ability to produce is curtailed by heatwaves, is a highly specialized skill: “Know local edibles” is so inadequate. Most foragers don’t know which plants were staples for our ancestors, let alone how to process them. “Are you someone others will want on their team?” [JB] Do I want to be on a team with people who have been cashing in on “collapse” and the climate crisis, and want to cherry-pick what they learn?
Why Survival Skills Taught In A Pro-Social Environment Are So Important
Anyone who is serious about having highly skilled survival practitioners on their team will be expected to learn the most basic skills, and then develop them under the worst conditions. Consider that Jem Bendell claims Deep Adaptation was written in the hope that people would be kinder to each other in preparation for, and during, collapse. Shamanic Practitioners like Manda Scott reject survival skills for fear that we might be suggesting we go back to the Stone Age or want to live in a mud hut on a Welsh hillside. I can almost feel the panic from here. Her thinking that “dystopian survivalism” is some kind of insult, followed by a challenge about frozen sewage post-AMOC collapse, is just evidence of the lack of skills and the survival thought process that an experienced survival practitioner would already have
Learning survival skills in a pro-social environment in nature is important because they teach levels of resourcefulness and resilience that nothing a shamanic practitioner can teach can do:
“While wilderness programs are recognized as a feasible intervention to promote psychological independence in adolescence, little is known about physiological changes.
The present study focused on oxytocin, a key hormone for social cognition and behavior, and investigated changes in OT concentrations during a wilderness program among adolescents. Twenty-one 4th–7th graders were separated from their parents and immersed in adventures and challenges in the woodlands of Motegi, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, for 31 days, and we analyzed a dataset of 20 boys aged 9–13 years. OT concentrations in early morning saliva samples on days 2, 5, 8, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22 and 30 were determined using ELIZA. We used multilevel regression to compare OT concentrations before and after solo and team-based survival challenges and across the nine observational points, adjusting for potential covariates.
We found that adolescents increased their OT level when they needed others’ cooperation and support for survival (coefficient: 2.86, SE: 1.34, p = 0.033).
Further, we found that adolescents gradually decreased their basal OT levels during prolonged separation from their parents (coefficient: −0.083, SE: 0.034, p = 0.016).
A combination of these findings suggests the OT level may be a marker for psychological independence”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9737778“
Most people who think we are going to survive a collapse also reject learning proper survival skills, yet unlike Bendell, Rost is clear: Because of “their origins in a stable climatic environment, skills such as farming, hunting, and foraging will need to adapt to the unpredictable challenges of the Anthropocene. No longer will the seasons be predictable, and the ability to grow crops or raise animals for food is in doubt.”
Bendell’s approach to the psychological ravages of the climate crisis is as wishy-washy as Dr. Gail Bradbrook’s “We need the ceremonialists who tend to climate grief. She’s talking about the shamanic practitioners who are primarily interested in making money from neocolonially pilfering indigenous people’s culture, never spending any time in nature, and doing remote healing woo.
“Psychological wholeness
Anticipating and living through societal disruptions and losses can trigger difficult emotions. We want to avoid making matters worse with our reactions and, better still, express ourselves positively given the circumstances. Some ideas about life, as well as specific practices, can help you become more comfortable with uncertainty, change, and loss. Consider meditation, prayer, singing, time in nature, journaling, and community service. Make time to consider your values, and any meaning(s) and purpose(s) for your life. Also, make time to cultivate your own relationship with infinitude, which may or may not involve your sense of the divine and the spiritual. Look for relevant groups, or set one up, to support such wholeness within a community.” [JB] These things might work for Bendell, but they are not based on any actual peer-reviewed psychological treatment apart from meditation.
Rost, on the other hand, seeks to use proven psychological methods: “The psychological impact of collapse will be immense, especially in a world where familiar landmarks and ways of life are disappearing. Emotional resilience will need to go beyond maintaining hope; it will involve developing a deep connection to nature, finding purpose in community service, and embracing new identities as protectors of the environment and each other. Collective mourning practices can help communities cope with the loss of their environments and ways of life, turning grief into a source of solidarity.
Survival in the Anthropocene will also mean embracing uncertainty as a constant companion, as cascading climate disasters are likely to cause ongoing psychological trauma even in the calm between them. Mindfulness and stress management techniques can help individuals and groups stay present and focused, and are deemed a key feature of Climate adaptation. Developing a mindset that can move through the ecological grief process towards acceptance quickly, in order to reach an activated state, may be the most essential skill for navigating a world where environmental shocks can arrive with little warning.”
Rainbow Prepping does not mention human waste treatment at all, which is shocking when you think that our rivers and seas are full of sewage: The Post-AMOC Collapse Toilet: It will be deep into the unsurvivable collapse of this civilization when the national wastewater and sewage infrastructure collapses
If all else fails, you can always buy a set of Jem Bendell’s Oracles “Resilient Life” oracle cards for challenging times. Unlike other oracle cards, they don’t assume or pretend that our situations are stable and that everything is possible. Instead, they help us find a realistic positivity, whatever the situation. These “Resilient Life” cards integrate some ideas from the frameworks of “Deep Adaptation” and “The Work that Reconnects”.[JB]
Survival skills learned pro-socially in nature are the work that reconnects us to nature. Nothing in the rainbow prepping article suggests any connection to nature. “Right living” is when we seek wellness by cooperating with nature rather than fighting it”[JB] and “time in nature”[JB]. Is like Dr. Gail Bradbrook describing Nature as the place where she recharges her batteries. None of these notions are the same as finding a deep connection to nature through skills. Nature is mentioned twice in the article. Our civilization is at war with nature; it rubs off on all of us unless we fight it.
Leave a Reply