Building Community Trust and Resilience

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That's fetchpet dot com slash save I started doing some prep work after the pandemic. I feel very under prerepared for disasters that are always seeming to be working around the corner. I did go so far as to even sit fire arm just for protection and safety in case the world went absolutely numutbs You guys It's almost summer. The flowers are in bloom. We're now just a week away from the Eastern Pacific Basin, Hurricane season starting. It Time to treat yourself Pl a vacation. And inflation rose about three point eight percent in April, according to new numbers. Life is great. Ukraine has become a testing ground for robotic warfare. Okay, I consider myself a glass half full kind of person But even I'm not that naive. That said, I'm woefully unprepared if things go left You on the other hand, if there ever is something like a nuclear strike or war or whatever, we are right down the road from the interstate so we can get oututside of Massachusetts to a more rural area. I do have a go bag ready for hurricanes. I got an old school paper map. satellite communicator, a power bank with every adapter on cord you can imagine. It doesn't matter about guns, how many guns you have or how many MRE's you have stored. If you don't have strong communities, you're not going to get very far Living on high alert can be absolutely exhausting. But if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. I'm John Wne Hill, and this week on Explain it to Me from Vox, we're prepping without the panic T start I talk to someone who's a prepping expert And that's putting it mildly. My name iss Dr. Chris Ellis. I am a disaster resilient civil defense homeome defense expert I got my PhD from Cornell University, I have four master's degrees and' been doing this work for about the last seven years for the military for those skills that I just listed. What made you want to start going down that path in the first place So A few things. One, as I was growing up, I was told this is back in the eighties that the only time that I would see polar bears would be in zoos because we had global warming at the time, the ice caps were going to melt and you know, climate apocalypse was coming And then from my father's side, he was an evangelical Christian and he told me that we needed to be ready for the Antichrist and to get ready for, you know kind of the end of days As I went through my life, I joined the military and I kind of saw man's inhumanity to man. So all of those various things, economic collapse, the Y two K threat, et cceter, I really started looking at preparedness more and more and found that it was exceptionally rational. And I wanted to kind of bust some of the myths that involved in it, and you can only do that if you kind of get really into the practition of the thing When most of us think of prepper, we might think of a man, probably white with a lot of guns in a bunker somewhere in the woods. I have enough food stock to last twenty people for three months. I'm preparing my family for the imminent collapse of the United States economy. I'm prepping for a terrorist attack on our electrical grid that will send our society into chaos Are we getting this wrong? What we're finding right now and this is one of the myths that I wanted to debunk based on hard statistics So what I found is that back when the data was being released by FEMA, they did this national household survey of between five and seven thousand Americans for several years and released the raw data So when I looked through that, I actually saw that the number of white men was about seventy five percent of preppers back when they first started releasing the data. and now's only about fifty five percent. We're actually finding that other ethnicities actually prepare more on average than whites do. For example, those that are isolated. So Native Hawaiians, speacific islanders, Alaskan natives, et cetera And so we're seeing a very large ecumenical portrayal now of preppers both in the reality and then also their coverage as well. So it is no longer the stereotype that is true What are these people preparing for? what are the most relevant disasters that are likely to come our way? So what I've found is that there are five main heuristics of individuals that kind of do these things. I've been them into five groups and it's not just America, it's actually across the world So one group I call the homesteaders, theseese individuals are concerned with just food security. Mbe they're afraid of genetically modified organisms or just want to be able to eat on a regular basis because they've seen famines in the past. Certain foods are pretty high in price. The supply chain still hasn't recovered in many cases. Right now, sixty three percent of America is in a drought. There's a fear from the Strait of Hormz about fertilizer. and so they're food preppp Well, we just finished harvesting all of our storage crops from the season. I keep about ten pigs year round, so I have about four hundred pounds of meat. In the freezer at any given time. Another group of the sentinels, these are kind of the more stereotyped group. These are the gun group. They're afraid of either a without rule of law scenario, lots of crime. W H people is opening up a drawer and there's your protection. O government overreach and, you know, an tyrity. I'm not gonna depend on the place toend me. I'm going to spend on my three hundred eight, my three hundred fifty seven My forty five Ct, my AK, my AR. Another group are the independent. Th are like you your friendly neighborhoods fidermen, kind of folks. Don't worry man, everything's going to be okay. They want to help other individuals very much in their preparedness skills and they are very widely based as far as what their threats are The fourth group are the NoAs. These are usually exceptionally well off individuals and what distinguishes them is that they have a bunker. This is the fat boy. This is the largest bunker we make. And then the fifth group is the faithful. The faithful and the Noahas are a bit different. The Noahas are concerned about saving their skin The faithful are concerned about saving their souls. They're the more religiously oriented. Jesus, of course, has repeatedly told us throughout the New Testament To be prepared, to be watchful for his coming. So it really kind of depends about what prepper you're talking about. There's no one size fits all and many people fit into multiple groups. There's not just one, but these are not like hardcore solid bins in which someone is in. Is there a group that sort of gets it, right? I don't know. Like you said, people can go into multiple bins, but Maybe I hang out with some interdpendents. They sound pretty Like likeike a winning team to me What I will say is this is the more kind of facets that you have, the better you are off One of the great things about the interdependent is that The American style of prepping has been very individualized since basically the fifties and sixties and that's been kind of push. We're very efficient economy and it's kind of, you know, this a western way of doing things, which is why prepping in America is more expensive. But the interependent have looked back and said pre World War two, how were we as societies? And we as societies we were very community resilient So the independents are really reaching out to that community based preparedness mindset and that is the next evolution. People are slowly moving back to that. I'm seeing a lot of individuals that are getting into the prepping movement saying, hey, I can't do all of this alone. I need to have a community of individuals that really kind of fits the things that I'm weak at What are the different ways we can prepare So The three main areas are really locational wise, the preparedness you have at your home and that's for staying So the power gets knocked out because of winter storm or tornado, whatever it is How can I be resilient within my house without publicly provided water power or transportation And that's usually your largest prep. I encourage folks at home to have at least thirty one days if they can after they've really gotten into this and a multiple set of factors. The next place is in your car when you're traveling. That is your really your car accident bag. And if you were to run out of gas, if you were to get T bone, whatever you're out of cell phone service What would you need to be able to walk home or hail at Uber or something along those lines And then the third place is at work At work, you may have to shelter in place for twenty four, maybe even forty eight hours. So a change of clothes, a few protein bars, things along those lines, things that don't need any cooking skills or cooking energy, I should say. So the priority is just what I said homeome first then your bugout bag, your car bag and then the office is a bugout bag iff for every person. so there's a thousand examples out there. Some people like to have a whole bunch of guns and ammunition because they think they're going to have to go out and shoot deer, bears or fend off the looters, et cetera. I'm not too martial in my bugout bag. I would say that the basic bugout bag, you should keep it in your mudroom or right by your garage. So if there' a disaster, to right now you can grab it. So the things that would be in that would be three days of water and food for everyone in your family, pets included. I would have probably five hundred to one thousand dollars in cash just in case you go to a hotel and the system is down, but they're still allowing boos. O again, you just need need the cash on hand I would have where your emergency documents, let's say you're at the threat of a big flood or a mudslide or something along those lines. yourour emergency documents, your birth certificate, your marriage certificate, the kids birth certificate, et cetera, very quickly accessible. And in one single foldage, you can just open up that fireproof safe, grab it, stuff in your bug up bag and go. Also some sort of emergency communication device, an emergency radio can be found very cheaply. There's a lot of them out there as well, but those kinds of things when you're covering all the bases is what is in the normal bug out bag medical supplies as well Everyone should prress. But here's what I tell folks You can't do it fear based. If you do it fear based, that's that's your limbic system, that's your lizard brain, you know, firing off. and it keeps you in a state of fear rather than a state of agency and hope. And you know the saying is we're not preparing for doomsday, We're preparing for Tuesday So doing things that make you feel like you can have more agency over your life, that you can have more actions, that you can, you know take positive steps to better yourself and better your community is a good thing. If that increases your agency and decreases your fear, that's the way to prep for sure Cppbing can look different depending on who you are and where you live next, preb in the City Support for the show comes from Quintince In the summer, everything changes. 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Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quins dot com slash explain it for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too That's QuincE dot com slash explain it for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quince d. com slash explain it We all do it You have a night for yourself but don't like the sound of the silence, so you turn on the TV just for the ambiance It's a little trick that helps you feel like you've got company and aren't alone And other insurers well, they may make you feel alone But when you switch to GaIico, you've got clas reps available around the clock So whenever you need, you'll have people around to help And let's turn on the washing machine. just for good measure Isn't that soothing? It feels good to have support. It feels good to Gaica. I'm Joonqu Lin Hill, back with more E explain it to Me. Anna Maria Bounds is a sociology professor at Queen's College in New York. For me, the most fascinating thing as a sociologist is taking a look at how regular people manage to prep in very small apartments, you know, trying to maximize space, trying to think of creative ways to better protect their families. I think during the pandemic We all kind of became preppers, right? We had to figure out how to protect ourselves with limited means and limited resources How different is beinging in an urban environment from prepping in say the suburbs or out in the country I would argue that the with all due respect to suburban and rural preppers, urban preppers, particularly in the city of New York, are dealing with reality. So in other words, they've been through terrorist attacks, you know, they've been through natural disasters, they've been through technological failures, and they've been through near economic collapse with the Great Recession So New Yorkers are used to being very street savvy. you know they're used to having street smarts. Now they're developing what I call survival smarts You know, I am talking with you from my apartment. I actually refer to it as the babe cave, My little bachelore That's where it's a bab cave. But I admit You know, I have all these comforts, I love my house plants, I love all my little day to day snacks, but I am zero percent prepared for a disaster. Where should I start? What do I need to do? One of the things with, you know the city is we're used to having what we want when we want it. But the idea of prepping though and with especially during the pandemic Things slowed down. People realized that they had to rely on themselves. So if you're interested in prepping, one of the first things that you need to do is you need to take a look at how you eat and how you can store it in your apartment. And I'm saying this because unfortunately, during a disaster, door dash doesn't deliver. And we're all used to that. So for New Yorkers, the idea of just having a completed pantry with canned goods and, you know, rice and flour and salt and, you know, tinned meats, all of that, That's very foreign to us. Prepping makes you realize, well, what happens if I don't have any water? What can I do? Well, maybe I should store a little water. You know, mayaybe I need to take a look at some, make some extra space underneath my bed, under my couch. You know, there are all sorts of creative things, you know that preppers do that I've seen. Okay, I understand you've become a bit of a prepper yourself Can you walk me through your setup? Be from what I can see, you've been able to do this in a way that is very aesthetically pleasing I realize that's not the most important thing during a disaster. It is important. Listen, you live in a babe cave. You know it's important. Yeah. It is important. because the whole thing is there's another myth about prepping is that people think that You know, that means that you have to have a whole room dedicated to stacks of toilet paper and rice and you know spaghetti sauce. Absolutely not. You just need to think carefully about how you live in to learn how to manage your space. In the living room in the corner, I had a white freezer, which looked absolutely ridiculous. And I thought, you know what? I can do better than that. So I applied wallpaper to it and you know I think it looks really cute. It looks just a little box, like a little storage box. And the things that I keep in there are varied I keep several different types of meat. I have some uncooked and then I have some that are cooked and sliced and you know that are cooked and ready to go. and I've packaged them. We have vegetables, we have pasta, and we have soup pot pies and extra bottles of water because the idea is this is easy place to store water. and in the event of you know, a blackout, our freezer will stay, food will stay colder or longer because we have the frozen bottles of water in there. If we get an injury and I need to place something cold on our leg or on our back, we could use that. And I certainly do have actually relied on that more than, you know, one time So yeah, it's a real asset. You know, I'm pretty I try to go to the gym. Are there things I need to be prepared to do In a disaster If you're someone who says, well, you know what? in the event of an emergency, I'm going to leave. I'm going to put together a bugout bag, Well, you need to be sure that you can actually carry that know that it isn't too heavy, that you edit what you have in there carefully and that you walk and that you practice with it. That was a really important part of as an ethnographer spending time with preppers is that they would do exercises where they would bug out. know, and you would spend you know, the weekend, you know, outdoors, which is unusual because for a lot of city people You know, they're not interested in camping. Whatever it is that you decide is going to be best for you in an emergency, Okaykay, don't try it out during the emergency. You need to practice it Okay, because you need to get over your fear of whatever it is you're doing because that's part of the game. You have to be confident You have to be calm. Will you be perfect? No. But the idea is that you'll have your bearings and this won't be something new to you What have you found to be the most important thing to have on hand My husband ser seriously, you know what? No, honestly, we you know, we went through the pandemic together and, you know, we've been through seepember eleventh, we've been through Blackout So I think it's not just, you know having supplies, it's about having a good system of support You know, having people that you can work with, peopleople you can depend on that you can learn from during easy times and difficult times Your writer dies comoming up. Pow to prep Your m. Fourth of July savings are happening now at the Home Depot with select appliances starting at three hundred and ninety eight dollars. Plus, get free delivery on appliance purchases of three hundred and ninety eight dollars or more, no membership required. Upgrade your kitchen with a modern and sleek GE profile refrigerator featuring hands free autofill for the perfect pour every time. 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This is exxplain it to me When we think of prepping, we often think of items, stuff like canned goods or clean water tablets Amanda Ripley says to survive a disaster, that's not all you need She wrote about it in her book The unthinkable Who survives when a disaster strikes? and why I learned from covering disasters as a reporter that survivors have these incredible insights into what it actually feels like physically, socially mentally to go through a disaster There's usually three phases that most of us go through. and sometimes we circle in and out of all three of them over and over again, but the first one is this very intense period of disbelief or denial. Did that just happen? That did not where your brain will work very creatively to convince you that everything is fine. I'm just imagining things. Everything is okay. Everything is fine. That is important to plan for. And the second one is deliberation. So after denial, you tend to get very social and you look to the people around you. Did y just hear that? The people in your circle? I'm not sure, but I think it's over there. Strangers on a train or a bus, wherever you happen to be, coworkers And you tend to move in groups and you will remain very loyal to that group, even if you didn't know them before. I think you're right. I'm seeing what you're seeing. I've got you. And that is a very normal reaction that we share with chimpanzees and other higher order mammals that we form groups and we tend to be very pro social, almost courteous to a fault After you, No, after you, No, please, after you. And we check with each other before doing anything. So this phase is really important On average, people check with five sources before they evacuate before a hurricane, for example So the wisdom of that group really matters. So after denial and deliberation, you have the decisive moment. Okay, I think it's really time to go. And that's where you take action or In many more cases than you might expect, you shut down and sort of freeze or stop moving or move very, very slowly, which is sometimes called negative panic And so that is much more common than what we tend to expect, which is, you, hysteria antiocial behavior or panic Brains are really these. Amazing machines how they protect us But sometimes, What they do doesn't always work in our favor What are some things we should be doing when disaster strikes How can we take control of our brains in that moment so we can do what we need to to survive I think there's three things that I have learned and still take with me in my everyday life. And the first one is to have a little more situational awareness of the places where I spend time, right So even in a hotel, right? I'll try to take the stairs down. I know that sounds crazy, but sometimes you end up in some weird places, like you end up in the kitchen, know. But it's really helpful to have some muscle memory for how to get out of the places that you're in, right? And so that includes if you work in a tall building or if you live in a tall building, just going down the stairs, having that muscle memory because it'll be really, really hard to find this stairwell for the first time under extreme stress So having a situational awareness then also really trying to build connection and rapport and relationship with the people that you see every day, right? I mean, I know that sounds veryer basic, but those are the people who are always going to be there in a disaster. It's not first responders, right? They just cannot get to you quickly enough Usually in big disasters, it's days or weeks if you ever come into contact with a first responder. So it is really important to know who on your block is elderly and might need someone to check on them in an extreme heat event. or who on your block is a nurse, right? In case you need help or someone else does. L just knowing that kind of thing and building those connections I love that advice because It serves you even if nothing terrible ever happens, right? Like it just makes life better to have connections in the place where you live and build those connections And then the third one in the immediate moment. So once you've maybe trying to push through denial, deliberation at a decisive moment. The most effective way under stress to access your nervous system on purpose and calm yourself down a little bit, which is what we need. We need to kind of calm ourselves down not all the way but a little is through Conscious, intental breathing So that is really the only way to do that in the moment One thing that I do is just as a normal everyday practice, when I start getting stressed out, you know, when I'm You know, trying to pay my taxes or dealing with traffic or whatever, I do box breathing, which is something that is taught to you know, everyone from Soldiers to peopleeople doing, you know, yoga, right? So it's in for four counts Hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four and it's a very effective way to get in the habit of lowering that nervous system response so that you can access your higher order thinking skills, so you don't get tunnel vision, right? So you don't lose eye hand coordination, all the kind of things that start to degrade under extreme stress You've given us a lot of good information and a lot of good tips here about what to do during a disaster, but what about preparing for one? How do you live day to day in this uncertainty Well,, the technical term for this kind of anxiety about Disasters is dread, which I think is a great term. Yeah. And there's an equation for dread. There are certain variables that dial up or down your dread level And one of them is unfamiliarity with the threat the less exotic and strange a threreat is To you, sometimes the less dreadful it is So one thing you can do is understand the threats that you're most likely to face and understand that while it is true that disisasters are very frequent now At the same time, and this is really important and I think often gets missed, the number of deaths has dropped by about two thirds over the past fifty years. So disasters have gotten less disastrous, even as they've gotten more frequent. And so Why is that? Well, it's because humans have gotten better at working together to predict disasters and get out of harm's way just in the nick of time So You know, as an example, in nineteen ninety, the National Hurricane Center could predict the path of a hurricane only twenty four hours in advance Now you get seventy two hours. So that's a very big deal But all of this progress and all the future progress we can make, which is huge, depends upon trust L we need to work on trusting each other as Americans and building institutions that we can trust So in the longer term, if you're thinking about preparing, for me I don't do a lot of stockpiling of resources and that kind of thing. For me, I try very hard to find opportunities to tryry to build human Trust and connection. The stronger your neighborhood or family or school is before a disaster strikes the better you will recover. And so that health of a community, how fair it is, how trustworthy it is