General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Can you survive one month without any outside support? Then you are a prepper says this article [View all]meadowlander
(4,413 posts)After all, any farmer or gardener who did some canning or freezing produce to get them through the winter would be a prepper by that definition.
There's a difference between planning for basic resilience to reasonably foreseeable natural or economic disasters (for me, earthquakes, floods, maybe unemployment/inflation) where you have enough in the house to shelter in place through the initial shock before continuing to adapt as part of society and being a prepper where the focus is on self-sufficiency in the face of societal collapse.
I have enough food in the house so I don't need to go to the grocery store if there's another 40 day quarantine. But I haven't built a Farraday cage in my house so I can still use electronics after a nuclear strike. I don't have a room full of plastic buckets with a 10 year food supply or a closet full of guns. So I don't think I'm a prepper.
There's a lot of discussion on this in the permaculture community where there is some overlap in terms of growing food at home but permaculture focuses on food resilience as part of a cooperative network while preppers focus on self-sufficiency.