Spiritualized Preparedness will be devoid of calories if we keep listening to the grifters
“The Guardian has seen part of the report and has spoken to a large number of people familiar with its contents, which warn of food shortages, conflicts, mass migration and other threats to the UK’s national security, including going as far as the risk of nuclear war or the breakdown of society. These threats are not regarded as some far-off or remote contingency: disastrous impacts, for instance on the UK’s food supply, could be expected as soon as 2030, it warns.“
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/24/explainer-uk-climate-crisis-national-security-report-suppressed?CMP=Share_iOSAp
Storing food and water for hard times is as old as hunting and gathering. Every human culture has put by surplus for hard times, even if those hard times are the predictable gaps between planting and harvest. So why are so many people associated with Extinction Rebellion myopic about the impending food crisis when the canary is almost dead? Despite climateflation, water bankruptcy, and agricultural collapse in Industrialized countries in the Global South. 2026 was Britain, Europe, and the US’s worst harvest ever. Considering we are going from a period of food surplus to one of shortages, they don’t think storing food helps. Solidarity Prepping is a community response to the climate crisis that believes resilience is built with calories, community networks, and structural foresight. Plan for the worst, hope for the best: Real Preparedness for this civilization’s collapse requires communities to organize, learn skills, and store food and water, while we work out which plants can survive the heat, restore nature, and maintain a decent, tolerant, multicultural society.
“Are you someone others will want on their team?” Then steer clear of these grifters:
They want to make preparedness more generative and spiritual. They refuse to learn the skills required to understand the discipline; they reject storing food for the looming crisis and will place obstacles in their own path to reject learning anything new. Yet they want to use AI to teach and mentor Plastic Shamanism. This seems like a lazy response to the crisis.
Manda Scott advocates Rehumanizing Education and Skills: Instead of conventional or purely technical training, Scott advocates for teaching younger generations critical thinking, emotional literacy, conflict resolution, and deep engagement with the natural world. Survival skills, however, are rejected as deep engagement with the natural world, while she bangs on about how indigenous children make close relationships with the natural world as they are socialized into hunting and gathering. But she says all you need to do to connect with nature is sit under a tree, ask it what it wants, and visualize your connection.
“Another world is still possible, and if we all work together, there is time to create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.” Accidental Gods.
NOT WITHOUT CALORIES:
Storing Food is the Same as Storing and Processing Water in a Crisis.
My own rainwater harvesting system has a capacity of 2,200 liters, and during the 2026 drought, I was able to keep my garden watered with a combination of rainwater and greywater from the shower. Preparedness isn’t just about food storage, stacking cans; it’s a combination of skills. Solidarity prepping isn’t what Scott thinks it is as the stereotype; it’s a community-based, collective approach. There are a lot of us. I really find it hard to believe that people pay these people money.
Solidarity Prepping takes a radical, non-consumptive, sustainable, plant-based approach to water purification. In the event of a prolonged grid outage, we have the capacity to purify water at scale for the entire street/neighbourhood and distribute it in less than a few hours.
Solidarity Prepping teaches survival skills in a pro-social way, in nature. These skills teach us to assess our environment like a Scout (Indigenous Tracker). Some of my training was from Aboriginal people. Solidarity Prepping is about climate adaptation and a realistic view of how the climate is impacting our current food systems.
A spiritual path in nature can be achieved by learning skills together in nature.
Dr Gail Bradbrook fails to recognize that when the Supermarkets are empty the Food Banks are too.
Manda Scott: “I am really not advocating that everybody start stockpiling beans or anything of that order; I don’t think that works.”
Community Over Isolation: In her writings, including the Any Human Power Manifesto, Scott emphasizes that true resilience lies in community-led intergenerational knowledge, cooperation, and systemic change rather than in isolated survivalist tactics. She advocates for communities coming together to co-create sustainable food, shelter, and energy systems.
By creating these obstacles to her own personal development, Scott fails to imagine the team players who have trained together prosocially. Who understand most situations in front of them: “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 is the best thing to do in a particular situation, and then do it with capacity and determination. (Dr Jem Bendell, Rainbow Prepping)
The looming food crisis
Moving Beyond Dystopian Fear: Scott actively speaks against the “prepper” mindset that relies on fear and individual insulation. Through her concept of “Thrutopian” fiction (as seen in her novel Any Human Power), she aims to write stories that chart a conscious, realistic, and collaborative pathway through global systemic collapse toward a functional future, rather than focusing on fragmented post-apocalyptic survival.
Scott’s assumptions about prepping, especially those preppers who have a long history of NVDA that pre-dates the climate and UK anti-fracking campaigns, have no foundation in reality. She has never spoken to any of us; how could she know what we think?
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. This ignores real-world Solidarity Preppers like those people who helped set up communication networks during Hurricane Helene. Or the Cajun Navy — sport fishermen who used their boats to rescue people during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
The New-Age spiritual propaganda is out of date.
The New-Age approach is all very well in a stable climate, but not in the post-Anthropocene, where the climate makes agriculture nearly impossible at the scale that industrial capitalism achieved. “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.” Solidarity Prepping
George Monbiot writes:
Pro-Social Hoarding
“I hope the chances of having to use our stockpile are small. But if we no longer need this insurance, we can eat it. Strange as it may sound, I see this hoarding as pro-social. Building a reserve while food is abundant reduces demand in a crisis. Community stockpiling and resilience planning would be better still. But I’m not waiting.” https://www.monbiot.com/2025/03/20/pro-social-hoarding/
Somehow Nothing Any of Us Do Towards Climate Preparedness is Good Enough Unless it is Conveyed by the People Who Know Nothing About it
Solidarity Prepping: The Bonhoeffer-Dunning-Kruger Effect in Living Kindly, Prepping, and Survivalism
Dr. Jem Bendell: “The impact is obvious: someone who trains ten people may contribute more than someone who stores ten months of food.” The “false equivalence argument” ignores the context-dependent utility of each action. Myopic and stupid.
Neither Dr. Jem Bendell nor Manda Scott has demonstrated any aptitude for understanding the crisis and the character of people needed. In fact, Manda Scott has repeatedly rejected learning survival skills because she believes that it means we are going to regress to living like ancient Celts in mud huts (I thought thatwas her fantasy). Like Bendell, however, I have no doubt that when the food crisis bites and Scott realizes that storing food wasn’t such a bad idea she too will be thinking: “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 is the best thing to do in a particular situation, and then do it with capacity and determination.”
Foraging isn’t just about food
Or fire
Indigenous people have been storing food for hard times for over 100,000 years.
Stored food is nothing new; it’s not dystopian; it’s common sense. Indigenous people across the world preserve surplus food for hard times. Indigenous people don’t have jobs: They hunt and gather and process non-food and food; sometimes the 2 are related, sometimes they are not
- Pemmican has traditionally been made from whatever meat is available: large game such as bison, deer, elk, or moose; fish such as salmon and cod; and smaller game such as duck, while contemporary pemmican may also include beef. The meat is dried and chopped before being mixed with rendered animal fat (tallow). Dried fruit and roasted nuts may be added: cranberries, saskatoon berries (Cree misâskwatômina), and even blueberries, cherries, chokeberries, and currants—though in some regions these are used almost exclusively for ceremonial and wedding pemmican—and European fur traders also noted the addition of sugar. Pemican is the original energy bar.
- Salted, cured, fermented, dried, and smoked Fish
- Stored Grains (Granaries)– Found across the mountains and mesas of Mesoamerica.
- Biltong & Jerky are forms of air-dried, cured meat that originated in Southern Africa. Various types of meat are used to produce it, ranging from beef to game meats such as ostrich or kudu. The cut may also vary, either fillets of meat cut into strips along the grain of the muscle or flat pieces sliced across the grain. It is related to beef jerky, as both are spiced, dried meats; however, the typical ingredients, taste, and production processes may differ. Biltong is air-dried, which gives it a unique texture and flavor, whereas jerky is heated to at least 71°C (160°F). Kangaroo Jerky is very nice.
- Home Bottling, Drying, and Canning: Where I put my surplus courgettes and tomatoes.
- Fermentation: Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Miso, and Tempeh
- Dried fruits and fruit leathers
- Frozen Whale Blubber
Solidarity Prepping does not agree with both Jem Bendell and Manda Scott on making Solidarity Prepping more generative or spiritual. Survival skills are not so much about holding space as about creating the space that can be held and not just for a day.
Part 2
We’re Not Pretending We Are Shamans: Well, You Are, You’re Just in Denial- The public rarely understands the difference
Magical thinking is unscientific, and Many of the people who call themselves shamans have little understanding that what they practice is neocolonial and partly rooted in fascist ideology
“For me, Celtic Shamanism can be practiced by going to Stonehenge on the winter solstice, working with lunar energies, or by sitting in a circle – where there is no priest or hierarchy – and connecting with each other, and really listening to one another, giving another person in my circle that time. My ancestors would have done these things; I can trace my lineage back to all these traditions and not appropriate other cultures.” [1]
However, there is little evidence of such ancient European practices, according to both Professor Cox and Dr Crockford. “People will call themselves Celtic Shamans,” says Crockford. “But it is very sketchy archaeologically and historically. We do not know whether Druids existed, let alone what their spiritual beliefs were. So, reconstructing this as an ancient religion is an imaginative process. A lot of the practices that you will find in Celtic Shaman circles are strikingly like those detailed in Eliade and Harner’s books.”[1]
The history and dubious practices of those who call themselves Shamanic Practitioners but deny being Shamans:
Most people do not know the difference: Even the Fake Shamans
And in the shamanic world, one of the roles of a contemporary shamanic practitioner — and we’re not pretending we are shamans because we’re in a Western society. It’s not a thing. But we can still use the tools of shamanic practice. And one of the key roles is as a psychopomp, which is to help those who have newly stepped over the threshold of life into death to head where they need to go, instead of hanging around and, frankly, becoming quite problematic for the living. Because our culture is not taught how to die. [2] Accidental Gods
Which means I got to indulge two of my absolute obsessions: living, shamanic spirituality, where the act of psychopomping the newly dead is one of the functions of the tribal shaman—and World of Warcraft. It may seem as if these two are incompatible, and from my current position, where I’ve given up the game for the fifth successive time in 20 years, I might agree with you. But when I was writing, they were entirely congruent. And that’s one of the other truly grand things about writing: we get to build the worlds that feel real to us. [3] Accidental Gods
The question is, what is the difference between a computer game like World of Warcraft and its Psychopomp character and real life, or is this the phygital crossover between metaphysical fantasy and neo-shamanic spirituality: only possible in the 21st century?
Pseudohistory Is Central to White Shamanism
Hancock’s anti-intellectual mythology of an unnamed (Hancockis?) superior, lost advanced global civilization of the Ice Age (Eliade’s “in illo tempore”), whose knowledge and practices (including Eliadean mystical “hierophany”) should become a charter for contemporary society, smacks of fascist ideological strategies.
Astrology: Unscientific bollocks
Gods, Accidental or otherwise: DIY paid-for cult
Passive Aggressive Crypto Buddhism
Sanitizing Core Shamanism: Making it safe; it was already harmless. (Accidental Gods)
I’d strongly recommend you walk away from anyone telling you they’re a western shaman.
OK. I’ll do it. But I’ll do everything I can to make it safe. Because the thing about being the tribal shaman, in whatever culture you’re in, is that it’s not easy, it’s not trivial: people die training to be a shaman. Some people choose to die to avoid becoming the tribal shaman. It’s a position of enormous responsibility and my own solid belief is that we in the west, although we can (and do) petition the old gods for help…[4]
[1] https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/scroll-down-for-spiritual-enlightenment/
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