Begins a new series on “prepping” – a worldwide movement of people who are taking mostly practical, sometimes extreme steps to prepare for global catastrophe.
Steve Braunias
New year, new resolve to protect my family against the chaos and disaster which could spell the end of civilisation as we know it. On January 8, I made my first plodding steps of 2018 to add to my modest store of supplies that might provide vital protection against whatever apocalypse is coming our way. I caught the 132 bus from Te Atatu to Henderson, and went shopping at the Warehouse and Pak N Save for items such as lentils, noodles, teabags, batteries, duct tape and three aluminumcoated emergency blankets.
All over New Zealand, likeminded survivalists were engaged on the same kind of mission. Prep NZ, a lively, mostly good-natured online board devoted to the subject of preparing for end days, featured comments from members who told of their New Year’s preparations. “I learned Morse code.” And: “Did some firearms training with my Crossman pistol in the back yard to teach my
10-yr-old son.” Also: “The Warehouse has 20L plastic water containers, buy
1, get 1 half-price. So bought 10. Got some very strange looks from the sheeple wandering around with their coke, junk food and xbox games.”
Cheer up, it might never happen. Doomsday has been on the cards since Nostradamus was in short pants. We’ve always lived in an age of anxiety but there’s a growing sense that things are spiralling out of control and that some kind of epic disaster — military, financial, the ground and the ocean gone berserk — is imminent.
When was it, exactly, that my thoughts started turning towards the sudden need to stock up for Armageddon? I think it was just the gradual accumulated anxieties about the state of the planet, the sense that it was being crushed, pulverised, sucked dry, with the general looming threat of climate change and the specific actual threat of “weather events” — when was it, exactly, that term entered the language? As well, there was the devastation and tragedy of Christchurch. And then there was Kaikoura; I was cowering under a table in a hotel room in Wellington when that earthquake struck in late 2016, and the hotel swayed from side to side, as though it were wanting to liberate itself from its foundations and launch into space. A month later, something else happened, which seemed to rattle the whole world from side to side: Trump.
Trump, Kim Jong-un. Earthquakes, tsunamis. Financial collapse, bits and pieces of terrorism. And, last week, news of “an alarming heatwave in the sunless winter Arctic . . .which is forcing scientists to reconsider even their most pessimistic forecasts of climate change.” As environmental writer George Monbiot put it, “This is more than just a temperature anomaly. It is an off-the-scale event.”
Global warming, nuclear attack, a pandemic . . . “Preppers”, that is, people who wish to be prepared for the worst that could happen, have an acronym that works as a one-size-fitsall term for whatever constitutes the worst that could happen: SHTF. Shit hits the fan, what do you do? What can you do? The drab and reassuring services of everyday life are whisked out beneath our feet in no time flat — power, water, and roading were all taken out last month in areas hit by Cyclone Gita. TV showed pictures of a supermarket in Collingwood, in Golden Bay. The shelves were empty. Bread, milk, water, baked beans, toilet paper — all gone.
A post on the Prep NZ board lists “11 bad prepper strategies”; they include the notion of hunkering down in a city, and scavenging: “This is a terrible idea on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start.” It started by pointing out
that there’d be nothing left to scavenge. A city would be cleaned out as quickly as a supermarket in Collingwood, pop. 21,793.
The TV pictures of shelves stripped bare provided a little glimpse of life after the apocalypse, and that was just due to a passing cyclone. What would things look like on the ground if it were something far, far worse — the real thing, so to speak, of a nuclear attack? Bedlam and despair, going by the response to the false emergency alert in Hawaii in January that a nuclear strike was about to hit the island. According to the New York Times, “Within moments of the announcement, people crowded highways in scenes of terror and helplessness. Emergency sirens wailed in parts of the state, adding to the panic. ‘I was running through all the scenarios in my head, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to pull over to,’ said Mike Staskow, a retired military captain.” Matt LoPresti, a state representative, told CNN he and his family headed for a bathroom: “I was sitting in the bathtub with my children, saying our prayers.”
Meanwhile, Auckland novelist Charlotte Grimshaw, vacationing with her family, slept through it. The cellphone alert was raised before they woke up. They eventually got out of bed and realised they were abandoned. “Our hotel staff left us to die — lol — and ran off without warning us,” she emailed at the time.
“All the local cafe staff ran away. I talked to a waiter who said he and his mates sat on their balcony, cracked a beer and watched the sky, waiting for the end.”
Still, pointless to worry about a nuclear missile aimed at New Zealand. Death is elsewhere. Mostly. John Pilger’s recent documentary The War on China warned of the likelihood of nuclear attack and retaliation between the US and China; Pilger asked Steven Starr, an expert on the environmental damage
caused by nuclear Red Cross disaster management officer Andrew McKie is prepared for many eventualities.
war, “In one nuclear exchange between the US and China, what could be the consequences?” Starr’s face was on camera as he began describing the likely devastation. His voice continued over the graphic of a world map. “When you combine all the smoke from these nuclear weapon detonations, millions of tonnes of smoke would rise into the stratosphere, heated by the sun, and that smoke will stay there for 10 years or longer,” he said.
The picture showed hick, black smoke falling over the southern hemisphere beneath China. “And it would become so cold that within just a couple of weeks the temperature would fall below freezing every day for one-three years, and it would be too cold to grow food crops for at least 10 years.” The smoke tumbled in an inky menace over Australia, and then engulfed — always good to see we’ve been put on the map — New Zealand.
two gross stereotypes of
preppers, and both have a passing resemblance to reality. There’s the idea of the angry gun-nut with a head full of conspiracies and a dislike of immigrants, tax collectors, and news media; there’s also the vision of the wealthy, paranoid American whackjob with a bunker in Queenstown and a vault stocked with bitcoins.
The latter character was popularised by a famous article in the New Yorker last January, which claimed to identify “hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway”. A similar investigation, published last month in the Guardian, found the rich were indeed eyeing up New Zealand property, but that “apocalyptically motivated buyers represented a small proportion of the market
. . . the end of the world
tended not to be a particular factor in their purchasing decisions.”
As for local preppers, it’s true the NZ Prep board has a current of violence and general distrust. There is talk of arms, and talk of ways and means of self-defence. “Bought a new combat helmet.” And: “Placing ammo into ammo tins for long-term storage.” There was also a spirited, self-mocking but reasonably serious discussion about the merits of wearing medieval armour.
Some of the chat about guns is to do with hunting — killing live meat is always a favoured option for outdoor survivalists — but more to do with the concept that a post-apocalyptic society will quickly and inevitably descend into something lawless, feral, dangerous. The argument follows that the best way to counter such a threat is to be armed to the teeth with dangerous weapons . . . I don’t know