Society is always at risk of experiencing substantial disruption from external factors, as COVID-19 demonstrated. There are several ways in which disruption could come about:
• Economic collapse, with a recent relatively mild example being the 2007–2008 financial crisis.
• Environmental collapse from the breaching of some of the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s nine planetary boundaries, one of which is climate change.
• A localised natural disaster such as a hurricane, earthquake, flood or bushfire.
• High-tech threats such as cyber attacks.
• Less obviously, the breaching of a tipping point through ever-increasing inequality, technological over-complexity or diminishing energy return on investment (the “net energy cliff”).
Disruption, or less confrontingly “change”, is inevitable. The question is how we cope with it, and community-based approaches can be both palatable and effective.
The mainstream approach to prepping
In recent decades, forces acting on society have gently deterred people from getting together in real life. The nuclear family is valued as a core social unit, and social atomisation is increasingly resulting in single-person households and isolated people. Collective forms of activity, of whatever stripe, are hampered by time scarcity, a strong tendency towards online interaction and spare time that is often spent indoors. Negative
