Introduction

I click on the local online news, and the annoying advertisement popup is about toilet paper. Before, I would have muted the sound, but now I watch the advertisement. Charmin, the advertiser, shows a family of bears sitting together watching television. The voiceover claims that Charmin is working hard to ensure that we all have enough toilet paper to make it through the COVID-19 pandemic. And I find myself asking: do I have enough toilet paper?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental tipping points, global climate change, political instability, dwindling primary resources, the everwidening gap between wealthy and poor, mass migration and exponential capitalist growth – among other critical realities – were enough to furnish myriad imagined apocalyptic futures. Now that we are experiencing successive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, an apocalyptic future has mainstreamed to millions of people whose economic and political privilege has hitherto cocooned us from the lived experiences of environmental collapse. And while the international COVID-19 response by-line might be ‘We’re all in this together’, our daily news feed suggests otherwise.

As the World Health Organization urges a coordinated global effort to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 and the IPCC and other supragovernmental bodies remain focused on developing systems of resilience and adaptation for populations vulnerable to the effects of climate change, a disparate group of people self-defined as ‘preppers’ have already been mobilizing themselves and their loved ones for myriad imagined apocalyptic scenarios. Once represented by social media as individuals on the margins of mainstream society if not mental stability, the COVID-19 pandemic is positioning prepping – if not preppers themselves – as a rational and, indeed, responsible answer to the pandemic. Preppers distinguish themselves from ‘hoarders’ based on their purposeful stockpiling of things anticipated to be vital to surviving short-or long-term disaster. Whereas hoarding is characterized by the volume of disorganized clutter of a jumble of things with no direct survival value, preppers systematically purchase and organize things for survival under anticipated imminent and/or future conditions of extreme societal collapse. But nor are preppers part of a growing ‘preventer’ identity and movement: preppers aim to protect themselves and their loved ones after disaster strikes; preventers focus their actions on precluding disaster from taking place.