Rainbow Prepping: Insult and Distance Yourselves from the People with the Skills to Help, Then Ask Them for Help

September 26, 2026

Cli-fi, climate change, Dystopian Survival, Nature Connection, prepping, stupidity, Uncategorized

The adaptation emergency: 1.5C is a phase change in the global climate. Seasons have changed, precipitation patterns have changed; our global agriculture is in crisis.

The famine garden is a climate-resilient garden watered with household greywater.

The stupidest thing you can do during a crisis is to alienate and “other” the people with the skills to help you.

“Solidarity Prepping is a co-operative, decentralized, leaderless, federated, skills-, knowledge-, and mutual aid-based response to the bunker-dwelling far-right food-hoarding prepper who will hide and watch their neighbors’ children starve to death as they eat their way to malnutrition on MREs. Because MREs were never meant for long-term survival. Long-term survival post-agricultural collapse requires the ability to process and cook food from scratch; failing to recognize or ignore the phase change in climate change is an evolutionary disadvantage. Climate denial and magical thinking are as bad as each other and maladaptive.” Thrutopia: The Art of Saying We Don’t Know How We Might Survive Climate-Driven Collapse, So Instead of Asking Survivalists, Let’s Ask Artists & Writers.

Dr. Jem Bendell is not the first person from Extinction Rebellion UK to insult survivalists and then ask them for help and support.

These quotes below in bold are from Jem Bendell’s Blog Post: Rainbow Prepping – a brighter way to get ready for collapse, August 4, 2026

“A good way to maintain and grow one’s own gumption is to try to help others with theirs. The impact is obvious: someone who trains ten people may contribute more than someone who stores ten months of food.” Rainbow Prepping. Since the end of the 1990s, I have trained people in survival skills, foraging, coppicing & hedge laying. I have become one of the leading members of an Arts, Music and Dance annual camp and community, providing plumbing and heating engineering skills to provide hot water using wood-fired showers and repurposing an old gas water heater.

Rainwater Harvesting: Notably missing from “Rain”bow Prepping. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a common trait among people who have just discovered Preparedness. You’d imagine the clue in the title to be a dead giveaway. Water is often a blind spot for new preparedness practitioners. They perceive filtration and purification to be complicated, requiring expensive filters. Yet the reality of knowledge-based purification is remarkably simple and cost-effective

The ability to reuse and repurpose, identified by Dr. Stephanie Rost in her paper “How We Could Survive In a Post-Collapse World.”

Off-grid innovation: A basic understanding of physics, convection, pipe bores, and plumbing can provide hot showers for an arts-and-music family camp.

Sanitation without water: Most preppers assume that societal collapse is not terminal civilization collapse. What happens when the sewage system fails? Most preppers will be shitting in plastic bags and storing it for later disposal. Dry sanitation using composting is far more effective and hygienic.

“In rapidly changing situations where we don’t have a standard answer or routine to follow, we will benefit from people around us being able to decide what the best thing to do is in a particular situation, and then do it with capacity and determination.” Rainbow Prepping. People who have spent years learning, developing, and practicing survival skills and initiatory challenges develop a low-panic, polychronic mindset, which differs from that of those who haven’t. While I might write about it a lot, I’m not the 1st person to volunteer help; I observe what is going on, other people’s capacity and determination. There’s nothing more annoying than the know-it-all survivalist taking control, unless, of course, people are putting the group in danger because their response is maladaptive to any given situation.

Rainbow Prepping, to justify its thought process, needs to start from an outdated straw man argument: “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. 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.”Rainbow Prepping

“Discussions and initiatives have evolved in some parts of the world towards ‘solidarity prepping’ in communities and even ‘insurgent planning’ to prepare for disasters. That arises from a more collaborative mindset, but it can involve some of the same underlying emotions. In my experience, whether focused on individual or collective prepping, a rather grim defensiveness can pervade discussion. That also applies to some national-level conversations about adaptation.” Rainbow Prepping

Are you someone others will want on their team?

I suspect that I may have a higher level of skills and knowledge than most people; I am also aware of my limitations. While I might be that “someone others will want on their team,” I might also want to decline help. It’s exhausting dealing with people who want to be constantly relevant, perpetually positive, and leaders, even in fields they know nothing about. Preparedness needs to be cooperative, decentralized, leaderless, federated, and skills-, knowledge-, and mutual-aid-based. A non-hierarchical culture has the potential for everyone to shine sometimes.

Mutual Aid: Do not insult the people who might have the skills to help you.
Leaderless: means that sometimes people do need to take the lead, but those with the ambition to lead based on no skills are irrelevant
Cooperative: means responding to orders from people who know what they are doing in a given situation
Federated means diverse groups united by an ethos and mutual cooperation
Skills- and Knowledge-Based: Skills and knowledge are the foundation of a survival-community meritocracy.
Non-hierarchical culture: No one is superior to anyone else. Insulting people you don’t understand, using a straw man argument, is an act of hierarchical passive aggression and an attempt to assert your superiority based on lies.
Anarcho-primitivism: Civilization is the heat engine. The assertion that the future is generative and shamanic with today’s technology is a series of complex contradictions that fail to recognize that heavy industry, mining, and extractivism required by today’s technology are the driving forces behind ecological collapse. 21st Century Anarcho-Primitivism does not advocate a return to hunting and gathering, but it does recognize that, before the agricultural revolution, humans lived sustainably for over 100,000 years, and we have much to learn from this.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect In Preparedness

Dr. Jem Bendell’s Rainbow Prepping Idea, like many ideas around how we prepare for collapse, shows little promise and plenty of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Jem is not the only person associated with Extinction Rebellion who has identified the need to learn skills for collapse. XReadiness, Extinction Rebellion Global, produced a deeply flawed Survival Leaflet: