Like it or not, disaster is coming. There will be a hurricane, earthquake, fire, flood, pandemic, storm, or maybe even war, perhaps sooner rather than later. How should you prepare? Some Americans, across the political spectrum, are buying guns and practicing military tactics that they expect to need if society collapses.
But civilization doesn’t have to end for help to arrive dangerously slowly.
In the United States, cuts to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds are leaving states scrambling. New York alone lost hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent floods in areas affected by Hurricanes Sandy and Ida.
Meanwhile, the European Union recently urged its citizens to stockpile 72 hours’ worth of food, water, medications, and other essential supplies to ensure “self-sufficiency” after a crisis.
But the best thing you can do to prepare for disaster doesn’t require any special training or purchases. It doesn’t even require thinking about disaster.
The best thing you can do is to get to know your neighbors. Collaboration and cooperation, not isolation and exclusion, are the skills we need to make it through the days, months, or years after a world-altering catastrophe.
Decades of post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows have scared us into thinking that no one can be trusted during an apocalypse. The end of the world is full of violence, and every person or family must be ready to defend themselves against strangers and outsiders.
But equating disaster preparedness merely with arming yourself makes us believe survival is a zero-sum game and encourages us to act accordingly — and adversarially.
That inevitably introduces unnecessary levels of fear, danger, and death to an already challenging situation.
In reality, the community is the best defense against the apocalypse. What’s more, disasters can actually help create the community we need to rebuild and recover.
Humans have known that community is the key to survival for thousands of years. Archaeology is helping us unearth that lost wisdom, right when we need it most.
For example, 5,800 years ago, the north coast of Peru suddenly became dangerous when the climatic phenomenon of El Niño was born. Every few decades, a warm ocean current would drive away the coast’s typically cold water. Devastating storms, flash floods, and mudslides followed.
At that time, the local people lived in small groups that survived by hunting, gathering, and fishing. Today, we would expect recurring, unpredictable cataclysms to drive people apart as they compete for limited resources and secure territory.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, archaeologists have discovered that El Niño brought the people of Peru’s north coast together. They formed larger groups than they had before and transformed the El Niño mud into an adobe pyramid, the first of its kind in the Americas. Perhaps it was built as a post-disaster gathering place, or a monument to the power of El Niño itself.
The pyramid marked a new phase in how people cooperated to organize their work and resources. Soon, these once scattered bands of hunter-gatherers transformed into some of the most complex societies in the ancient world.
I saw the power of the post-disaster community after the 7.1-magnitude earthquake in Mexico City on Sept. 19, 2017. Instead of running away from collapsed buildings, people ran toward them. They passed buckets of rubble, trying to find the people trapped underneath. People’s natural instinct to help was so much stronger than our urge to run, hide, and defend ourselves.
The evening after the quake, as we awaited aftershocks, neighbors gathered on our apartment steps. They were scared to go back inside, but they also brought stories, jokes, and beer to share.
Many of these neighbors had lived through Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake, which was even more devastating.
At the time, the country was a dictatorship led by one all-powerful political party. When the 8.1-magnitude quake struck, hundreds of buildings collapsed, including high-rise apartments, hospitals, factories, and schools.
People realized the state couldn’t — or wouldn’t — respond quickly enough. They also realized that government corruption had led to the construction of so many vulnerable buildings in the first place.
And so the people of Mexico City didn’t wait. They came to each other’s rescue.
Volunteers, learning on the job, dug into rubble to pull out survivors and bodies. Survivors waiting for news next to the ruins of their homes made sure everyone had enough water and food. Some of these volunteer rescue groups still exist today, and they travel to other countries to help after earthquakes, too.
Others turned their pain and betrayal into political demands. Two years after the 1985 quake, Mexico City won the right to elect its own local government for the first time.
Building community before and after a disaster doesn’t just help us survive the immediate crisis. It also helps us build new worlds after the apocalypse — worlds that are better prepared, better adapted, and more responsive to what people need to survive long into the future.
Lizzie Wade is a science writer and the author of “Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures,” on sale on May 6 from Harper.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
