ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on my ethnographic observations of preppers, which I undertook between 2014 and 2018. I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 preppers. I also conducted in-person participant observation of social sites where preppers were visible, and a digital ethnography of online spaces where preppers exchanged information, ideas, and imagining disaster scenarios amongst “like-minded people.” Drawing on this ethnographic evidence and framing theory articulated by Erving Goffman and social movement theorists, I argue that prepping is a conservative cultural movement that allows Americans who are skeptical or uncertain about climate change to skirt the frame of climate change entirely while also talking about its effects. That is, the preppers who I researched focused directly on disasters, which they understand as real. But instead of framing such disasters in relation to climate change, they adopt a depoliticized response to environmental risk by focusing on what I call the constituent elements of climate change. The constituent elements of climate change refer to the effects of climate change that can be experienced, talked about, and understood without referring to climate change itself.
