You don’t need to stress yourself out about emergency preparation. In fact, that kind of stress could put you in freeze mode where you’re unable to take action. It’s not possible to be completely prepared as every emergency is unique: One flood might be accompanied by high winds, another by COVID-19, a third by both. So, if we’re working toward readiness, a more realistic goal is to aim for being on the verge of prepared.
Something Is Better Than Nothing
My emergency prep colleague Dan Bacon likes to say, “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good” and “Even doing a little bit is better than doing nothing.” He’s so right. If you wait to gather emergency supplies until you have the bandwidth (and money) to get them all at once, you’ll probably never do it. It’s much better to spend one week simply building up a water supply, say, and another week buying a supply of batteries. Each time you take one step, you get closer to the brink of prepared.
A New Era
At A&P our philosophy is that emergency prep is not just for semiprofessional peppers or government agencies. Emergency prep should begin with a simple acknowledgment that we’re entering a new global era that requires a higher level of readiness—maybe more like that of early peoples or of pioneers. In this new era, everyone needs to be involved. Taking emergency readiness steps is as crucial as making sure your roof doesn’t leak or visiting the dentist once a year.
In this new era, climate change is making environmental disasters, like floods and tornadoes and wildfires, more likely. It’s also ensuring that our usual problems are harder to deal with. Take COVID-19 as an example. Pandemics make environmental disasters more challenging because they constrict the ways we can respond. Because we are so interconnected, we will now be facing the likelihood of more pandemics.
In this new era, we will also be more likely to experience increased migrations of large numbers of people, fleeing a disaster or dangerous situation. These migrations will also challenge our readiness, taxing resources that may already be thinned and introducing new variables into the situation.
In this new era, increased proximity means everything is just a short plane ride, a change in wind patterns away. What happens in one place will not be far enough to have no effect on every other place.
Going Solo or Together
Some preppers take the stance that these increased challenges mean that people need to go it solo, planning to take refuge in an underground shelter, armed to the teeth, with supplies to last for years. That is not how we see things at A&P, especially because that kind of survival is likely not sustainable and, frankly, not worth it. Instead, in recognition that this planet is a small, shared space, we understand that there’s no escaping one another. The only realistic and effective strategy for survival is cooperation. We need to choose to work together to address the problems that challenge our collective survival.
Number one among these, of course, is developing strategies to walk back climate change, to reduce the potential of its severity by acting fast and comprehensively. But secondary to this crucial step is collaborating with bigger and bigger regions—starting at the neighborhood level and gradually expanding out to the global level—to develop smart responses to the potentially imminent problems.
Preparedness for All
Indeed, emergency preparedness is for everyone, from your own self to your family to your neighborhood and schools, to your local government, to your State, and to your nation, hemisphere, and neighboring continents. Real life is not like the movies where there’s a giant ark ship ready to transport people to another planet where we can start all over to mess things up. Real life is looking at where you live right now and seeing how to plug the holes or divert the rushing water.
So join us on the road to readiness. It’s a never-ending journey, toward an unreachable destination, that will nevertheless take you closer and closer to that imaginary state of completely prepared.
It’s a philosophy that will help you sleep better at night.