How to prepare for the end of the world
The coronavirus pandemic means that “preppers” – people who have readied themselves for doomsday – are in their element.
Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson meet the expert who has spent years studying them
“How’s your apocalypse going?” Bradley Garrett says when we connect to him in Los Angeles via video link from our separate homes. The coronavirus pandemic has come as a shock to most people, who have found themselves suddenly forced into self-isolation, facing empty supermarket shelves and required to home-school their children. But Garrett, an acclaimed anthropologist and cultural geographer, has been expecting some kind of global cataclysm. “For three or four years now I’ve been thinking through an event like this unfolding, so I can’t say I was surprised,” he says.
This baseball-cap-wearing academic is the world’s leading expert on survivalists – those who have gone to extreme lengths to prepare for doomsday-style social and environmental collapse. He has spent the past three years at the University of Sydney in Australia researching the “preppers” who have been stockpiling food and weapons in desert bunkers and eco-fortresses. His new book, Bunker, based on his research, will be published this year, but he never expected it to be so topical. “When I started the project, it was speculative,” he says. “As an ethnographer, I thought that this is just a great opportunity to spend time with a funky culture and write a fun story about it – but obviously what we’re experiencing is anything but fun. This is precisely what they’ve been telling me about.”
None of the survivalists he has met is “smug about the situation” the world now finds itself in, he says. But they are definitely ready. “The preppers have given themselves relief by controlling the parameters of their situation. They have taken that boundless anxiety and formed it into a more manageable sense of fear.”
Tech billionaires and hedge-fund managers have snapped up land in New Zealand with an airstrip for their private jets. In Silicon Valley in California it is described as “apocalypse insurance”, and there are specialist property developers who hustle safe spaces to the super-rich. Garrett calls them the “dread merchants”, but he is more worried about the rest of the population who cannot afford to buy their way out of Armageddon. “I couldn’t give a damn if a couple of dozen people are able to get on their private jet and escape the disaster. It’s more frustrating to me that governments have not been making provisions to protect the citizens that are here. It feels criminal to me that we weren’t prepared for these things. We knew they were going to happen. They’re inevitable.”
Garrett, 39, has always liked to push the boundaries – he says he was expelled from school for organising a sit-in. “I started a riot, apparently – the principal got hit with an egg.” Instead, he taught himself and went to college when he was 16. In 2003, he received a BS in anthropology and BA in history from the University of California, Riverside, then moved to Australia to undertake an MSc in maritime archaeology at James Cook University. After a few years working as an archaeologist in California and Hawaii, he ended up in London in 2008, doing a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, in social and cultural geography. His dissertation on a group of urban explorers in the city who broke into abandoned Tube stations, bomb shelters and nuclear bunkers – a practice he called “place hacking” – sealed his scholarly reputation and also brought him notoriety.
He was invited to discuss his research at the Google Zeitgeist festival of ideas, where he shared a session with former US president Bill Clinton. But critics said that Garrett had become too close to his subjects. In 2012, he was arrested at Heathrow and accused of criminal trespass and property destruction, although the police officer who interrogated him told him privately: “I love the work that you do.”
“It’s frustrating that governments have not been making provisions to protect citizens. It feels criminal that we weren’t prepared”
Garrett’s interest in survivalism was sparked by the discovery of a giant (35-acre) bunker, 120 feet under the ground, built during the Cold War as the UK’s emergency government war headquarters at the Ministry of Defence site at Corsham in Wiltshire. “We went down there with crowbars and prised the doors open. We found these electric buggies, stuck a screwdriver in and hotwired them and drove them around,” he says. “It has 97km of roads, connecting radio broadcasting stations, beds and an underground reservoir. It’s an underground city.”
He thought about how the complex could be turned into a Cold War amusement park; a Californian doomsday prepper put in a bid to buy it. “His idea was that he was going to build a private refuge that would function in exactly the way that the government bunker would have done – people would escape into it, weather the crisis, then come out into a post-apocalyptic world. I got so fascinated by what was going through their minds.”
What started as an anthropological research project has turned into a personal mission for Garrett. “I study cultures and if I
don’t become a part of the culture, I can’t see it properly,” he says. At home, he is ready for catastrophe whenever it strikes. “The camping gear that many people have in the garage or stuffed under a bed I keep in a backpack, with some food, in the car. And I keep the car [filled with fuel] and backed into the garage all the time.”
He even has his own concrete bunker in a community in South Dakota. The first night he slept there, he says, “I swept it out and popped my tent in the middle of it because I had no furniture. I closed the blast door and there was this amazing reverberation inside the place, and a complete absence of light. I had the best night’s sleep of my life. It does give you an amazing sense of peace.”
There are now 40 people living in the South Dakota community, where each bunker costs $35,000. “They have all got their American flags. Some of them have put fences around theirs, so it looks like a cul-de-sac in a suburban area,” Garrett says. “Some of the bunkers are really elaborate and beautiful. They’ve got stainless appliances and wind turbines and solar panels, and others are a little more spartan. It’s kind of like a ship. What you’ve stocked, and the time it allows you, defines the space: can you make it through three weeks, three months or a year?”
He argues that the survivalist instinct runs deep and that gated communities are another version of the “bunker mentality” going into effect. “This is a distinctly human attribute to prepare for the future. Most animals don’t live with this sense of dread and anxiety,” he says. The yearning for safety goes back to the cavemen – but he thinks that modern-day neurosis grew out of the Cold War. “The explosion of the first nuclear weapon was the beginning of this age of prepping. People realised that there was an existential threat that has the capacity to wipe out our species... they built nuclear fallout shelters in the backyard.”
Now the fear is deeper and broader because there are multiple threats that include climate change and virus pandemics as well as nuclear war. “When you are prepping for the unknown, then you are building across disasters. You are anticipating a range of things that could go wrong.”
Often the survivalists will have a “pet project”, Garrett says. Drew Miller, who runs Fortitude Ranch, a chain of isolated and secure locations in the US, has been particularly focused on pandemics. “The guy has a PhD from Harvard, he’s incredibly intelligent. I enjoyed spending time with him, but he’s definitely paranoid... He suggests there could be 39 million deaths [from the coronavirus outbreak] worldwide.” Currently operating out of three sites in Colorado and West Virginia, Miller plans to create 12 ranches dotted around the US. “You get a Fortitude Ranch token if you buy into the ranch – it’s $1,000 a year plus membe rship dues. The idea is that wherever you happen to be, you can retreat into the ranch with your token.” There will be isolation facilities and testing kits to make sure that everyone who enters the compound is virus-free. “He was quite clear to me when I
Even without body-burning pits, Garrett fears that the Covid-19 pandemic could yet take a much darker turn. “One of the possible outcomes of a situation like this is social breakdown. We saw this in London in 2011 – it took far less for people to be rioting in the streets... If the paramedics, the grocery store workers or the truck drivers stop showing up, and the infrastructure and supply lines go down, this could get very messy very fast... We are at the beginning of the coronavirus. What does it look like in two weeks or a month or two months? We don’t know.”
There is something biblical about the war, pestilence, floods and famine sweeping the Earth. “That’s the history of humanity,” Garrett says. “We’ve experienced disasters again and again, [but] because of population density and the climate crisis they are continuing to escalate in frequency and severity.” He is not religious, but he says that some of the preppers “have a sense that it stems from sin and wickedness, that we’re being punished”.
Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, gave humanity only a 50% chance of surviving the 21st century. “The planet is indifferent as to whether we exist here – really we are at war against ourselves,” Garrett argues. “We are creating a lot of these viruses. We created the climate crisis. We created atomic weapons. We are responsible for this situation that we’ve put ourselves in. What it’s creating is a sense of dread.”
The pandemic should, he suggests, be a breathing space, a time to do jigsaw puzzles, watch films and play games, instead of racing from one meeting to the next. “It’s slowing us all down and it should be a moment of reflection for all of us, a moment to reassess our priorities. Isn’t it kind of relieving to have all the flights cancelled and just be at home with your family? I hope that some people see this as an opportunity.”
For the preppers, it is a vindication of all their fears. “People are retreating all over the country right now to their bunkers. A lot of them started going four or five days ago, some of them are just leaving now because they had to wrap up their affairs. I’m getting a barrage of emails from people saying, ‘We’re going.’It’s so weird because I’ve been talking to them for years about how bad does it have to get before you pack up your house and go to the bunker? And this is it. We are in the time when all the doomsday preppers are pulling the ripcord.”
Bunker: Building for the End
Times will be published by Allen Lane in August. A version of this article appeared in The Times. © Times Newspapers 2020/News Licensing.