S1E91 - Elizabeth on Preparedness as a Family

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Elizabeth talks to Margaret about coming into preparedness as an urban PTA mom, building family preparedness, teaching kids about disasters, and flipping the prepping narrative to focus on building inclusive communities and resiliency.

Guest Info

Elizabeth Doerr (she/her) is a writer and parent. You can find her work at https://www.elizabethdoerr.com or her newsletter on Substack at https://crammingfortheapocalypse.substack.com or on Instagram @crammingfortheapocalypse or on Twitter @ElizabethDoerr

Host Info

Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Elizabeth Doerr on Family Preparedness

**Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host this week, Margaret Killjoy. And this week, I have Elizabeth Doerr on to talk about her journey into preparedness. And, I think y'all are gonna get a lot out of this conversation. I'm really excited to have it. I first talked to--I guess I'll get to that later during the actual interview. But first, here's a jingle from another show on the network Channel Zero Network, which is a network of anarchist podcasts. So here's another one. Dah dah duh dah duh dah [singing the words like a simple melody]

**Margaret ** 01:31 Okay, and we're back. Okay. So if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then maybe like, how you got started on your preparedness journey?

**Elizabeth Doerr ** 01:40 Sure. Um, Hi there, my name is Elizabeth Doerr, and my pronouns are she/her. And, I got started on my preparedness journey mainly because we moved to Portland, Oregon in 2016 where there is going to be a huge earthquake that can devastate the city. And, then subsequently had my son and became--and had already been concerned about climate change, but then that fear of climate change really kind of ratcheted up a lot more with having a kid. And so, over the last few years, I've really been trying to do more to prepare, not just for the earthquake but really for climate change in general, and trying to figure out what that means just in terms of society, in terms of the way we can--not just in personal action--but how we can really just change the entire system altogether. And, so that has turned into a Substack called Cramming for the Apocalypse, which is also going to be a book eventually, as well. But, for the last year, it's been in newsletter form.

**Margaret ** 02:54 Do you ever have this thing where you're like, "But you have to hurry up and make it a book because what if the apocalypse happens before you get the book out?"

**Elizabeth Doerr ** 03:01 Well, it's funny because my agent was kind of...she's like, "It's an evergreen topic." But she's like, "It always feels so urgent. I want to get it out as soon as possible." But then also at the same time it's like ... yeah, I know. Yeah, exactly. I do have that pretty much every day. But, also it takes forever to write a book. So it's...yeah. But, it's amazing even just in traditional publishing how long it takes to get a book out into the world, and it's like, "Well, in three years, what could the world be like?" So, yeah.

**Margaret ** 03:34 I think about this all the time. I actually--because of the 2016 election and stuff--I, for a while, stopped writing books and started focusing more on music because everything felt so immediate in crisis that I was like, "I don't have time to finish this book, take a year for my agent to find a publisher, take a year for them to publish it, take a year for people to read it and care about it." Like, I just need to make music that people hear tomorrow because, otherwise, what am I doing? And then it turns out, we had more than three years, so it's fine. [Laughing]

**Elizabeth Doerr ** 04:10 And I love that. I wish I had that skill and ability because that would be so...And I actually think that with like, I wish I was a really good artist too because friends who are excellent at, you know, drawing and art--or at least visual art, that is--I'm jealous because it's like, that's something you can see now. I mean, you can do with writing too but it's just a little more visceral immediately. But yes, totally.

**Margaret ** 04:37 No, that makes sense. Okay, so one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, one, is that you were working on an article that we might talk about later, and reached out to me, but one of the things that I'm really excited to talk to you about and that I think that people might get a lot out of hearing from is you're like...you are not the stereotypical prepper in the traditional sense, and you're also not necessarily the stereotypical, like, what people might imagine when they imagine the leftist prepper, right? Which might look more like me. I don't know. I don't know what people have in their minds. And, you know, when I asked you how to how to describe this, you were like, "Well, you're a white middle aged urban mom who has progressive values, who is learning...is getting more and more interested in anarchism and more radical values beyond that, but you exist within the mainstream culture. And then also you're a PTA mom, for example," right? I'm really excited to talk to you about all this shit. It's like, this is the stuff that like...like people who like...I really love that you found--Well, I guess I want to ask you more about how you found your way into radical politics from this, like you mentioned that like your study of preparedness has like led you to being like, "Oh, what if we, what if we need to structure society differently?" Like, what has that journey been like for you?

**Elizabeth Doerr ** 05:53 Yeah, I mean, I guess the question is how far back to go? I mean, so I, you know, it really...I mean, I'll give you a little bit of a snapshot kind of like before this whole journey, but I, you know, it started as, I was a Peace Corps volunteer after I graduated from college. And, so I lived in Malawi, in southeastern Africa. And I had gotten in with a very, like traditional, like, I guess, liberal views about what international development being good for, you know, developing countries and then came out of it with a vast nastily different perspective, that actually, you know, that's a part of imperialism and we're doing harm. And it's, you know, it's just a, you know, it's just a holdover from colonialism, and that I still, you know, a belief that I still hold. But I had a really hard time, I guess, articulating what that was until I went to graduate school for International Education Policy at University of Maryland. And it's pretty radical...I didn't know this going in