Cooperation and kindness are key qualities necessary for surviving disasters, as demonstrated by the volunteers who

distributed donated supplies after Superstorm Sandy hit New York City.
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

EXCERPT

You Won’t Survive the

Apocalypse Alone
In times of societal collapse—including pandemics—past societies persevered not by
running away but by banding together.

By Chris Begley
14 DEC 2021

Excerpted from The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival. © 2021
by Chris Begley. Published by Basic Books. All rights reserved.

“
So, what is your escape plan?”
We were eating dinner when my friend asked me this. She had taken an urban
survival course with me and was worried that climate change and the current
political situation could precipitate a crisis.

“Where are you going to go when

it all goes wrong?” Her question
sounded offhand and
spontaneous, but I knew this was
what we were meeting to discuss.
Her question was serious, and she
was worried about the near
future. She wanted some advice,
and some hope.

I know where she imagined the

conversation would lead. I must
have a plan, she reasoned, that
would allow me to utilize the
wilderness survival skills I teach
to flee the city and make a life in
the hills. Or maybe, because I am
an anthropologist, I knew which Basic Books

part of the world would be spared

the worst of it.

I told her my plan was not to escape; there was no escape. My plan was to stay
and help. If it all falls apart, there will be great need, and I will try to find a
place I can contribute. There won’t be a way out. There are too many people,
and the only future worth living requires us all to stick around and solve the
problems together.
Media depictions of the apocalypse are very different: Disaster comes swiftly,
everyone panics and runs, and a lone hero saves the day. These fantasies can
hamper our ability to plan for and react to a more realistic scenario.

Looking to the past, we see how many of our ideas about societal “collapse”
are wrong. In the past, consistently, we see people reorganizing, regrouping,
and creating structures and systems that allow the new community to persevere.
That was not the quick solution my friend was hoping to hear, perhaps, but she
smiled, and I could see in her eyes that she already knew this was the answer.

I am an archaeologist, but I also teach wilderness survival courses.

This interest grew out of my archaeological research in remote areas
of Central America. I learned many of the skills I teach during the years I lived
and worked with people from the Pech Indigenous group in Honduras. Skills
like making fires were daily tasks in the village.

In fact, many of the “survival” skills I teach were everyday activities, especially
when we were camping in the rainforest during our many trips documenting
archaeological sites. In my survival courses, we discuss disasters, emergencies,
and the unexpected. People want to know how to prepare, and how to survive.

Although I inhabit the world of academics, the world of preppers and

survivalists is only a step away.

In the last few years, there has been an increased interest in my wilderness
survival courses. Originally, I’d envisioned these courses as preparation for
unexpected, short stays in the outdoors, such as getting lost while hiking.

What I find, however, is that people want to learn these skills in order to be
prepared for a large-scale disaster. They want to get ready for pandemics,
economic collapse, or the rise of authoritarianism. The disasters they imagine
reflect increasing fears of an unstable world. Until recently, climate change
drove these fears. Now, the fears include pandemics or political unrest.
Read more about the prepper movement: “For Preppers, the Apocalypse Is Just
Another Disaster”

The bushcraft skills I teach are important, perhaps most valuable in the first
days of dramatic change, but they are not the most important factor in societal
survival.

Instead, how people react to a crisis will determine what comes next. Working
cooperatively, identifying and listening to competent leaders with real
expertise, learning from one another, and adapting to new circumstances will
yield one outcome. Entrenching ourselves in the inequities of the present, and
acting out of fear, will lead down a different path.

There are no natural disasters, the saying goes, only natural phenomena. The
“disaster” results from our reactions, our decisions. If we are not careful, we
envision societal collapse as something that happens to a group, as if an external
force like a drought or pandemic determines the outcome of the crisis, and the
people are passive or ineffectual in their response.

It is clear, however, that the societal response to an external force or crisis can
shape the trajectory of a society as much or more than the external force itself.

T ake, for example, the history of Kentucky—where I grew up.

A number of diseases devastated Indigenous populations in the

Americas when Europeans arrived, but archaeologists and historians continue
to refine our understanding of how this happened. We know that ultimately, a
century or so after European arrival, the population of Native Americans
declined by more than 90 percent. Much of this was a direct result of mortality
from a number of diseases they had never before encountered, and for which
they had developed no immunity.
Popular imagination has smallpox as the principal pathogen, but there were
many others, including measles, influenza, typhus, and chickenpox. Not only
did the diseases kill people directly, but also the large number of sick people
made it hard to provide basic necessities for the rest of the population. These
ancillary effects of the disease exacerbated the deadliness of these epidemics.

It was not just the diseases, however, that created this disaster. These were
outbreaks taking place during a campaign of settler colonialism, and this reality
shaped the way in which outbreaks unfolded. The response of Native American
groups to this crisis also shaped the outcome.

Accounts of this catastrophic encounter often present Native American groups

as passive recipients of a tragic circumstance, without recourse or remedy.
While it is true that the pathogens were unknown among Native American
populations and had devastating effects on their communities, it was not true
that they were passive victims, or that they had no treatment or strategy to
mitigate the effects of the diseases.

Paul Kelton of the University of

Most Kansas has written extensively about

the ways in which Native Americans,
archaeologists particularly the Cherokee, were able

now look at to respond, “retarding mortality rates

and curtailing the spread of
situations of contagions.” Certain strategies, such

“collapse” and as avoiding interactions and

quarantining, mirror our
see flexibility contemporary responses to the

and
COVID-19 pandemic.

adaptability.
The most important element of this reaction, however, might have been the
conviction that maintaining their traditional religious and social practices
would ward off disease. From practicing seclusion of sick people to cleanliness
rituals, actions taken by the Cherokee determined their future, and preserved
their past.

In what is today Kentucky, trading patterns and alliances changed with the
foreign influence beginning in the 16th century. Some groups may have left the
area, while others re-formed or persisted. For this key period, from the late 17th
to the early 18th century, there is a lack of eyewitness accounts and
archaeological data, so it is not clear how closely the post-epidemic world
resembled the previous one.

We do know that in the heavily fractured time in the mid-17th century and
beyond, multi-tribal villages were common as survivors banded together.
Thousands of Indigenous people still live in Kentucky today, of course.

M
ost archaeologists now look at situations of “collapse” like these and
see flexibility and adaptability. While some things end, other things
persist. This continuity can be more impressive and important than the
disappearance of certain elements from the archaeological record.

Examining the past from a different angle, focusing on the resilience of ancient
people rather than the collapse of a certain segment of the ruling group, gives
us a blueprint for understanding what we will need in the future: flexibility and
adaptability.

In a recent study looking at relief efforts after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico,
information technology professor Fatima Espinoza Vásquez found that
community leaders and activists did not try to re-create the structures that had
been in place before the hurricane. Rather, mindful of the inequalities and
failures of that system, and being experts in their own communities, they
configured old and new technologies to improvise a functioning infrastructure.
For instance, a landline connected to Skype and then broadcast on Facebook
served to coordinate relief efforts, bypassing inefficient official channels.

After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, volunteers cooked food for a
volunteer medical relief team helping people with health problems. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Civilizations do not last forever. What I am concerned about is how fast

change will come, and how dramatic will it be. Judging from historic examples
of apocalyptic events, the whole process could take a very long time, be
multicausal, and be unevenly felt among populations and across space and
time.

I do not know exactly what the end of our civilization will look like, and I
wonder about whether it will be understood as a catastrophe. From our data
about the past, I imagine the process of collapse has already started.
Environmental problems are one cause, and political and social issues—
particularly inequities in wealth and power exacerbated by neoliberal policies
over the last half century—are the other.

How quickly the unraveling will proceed, and how long until we realize that the
process is going on, are harder to divine.

Apocalypses happen, all the time, on varying scales. Surviving them, like
surviving most things, is a community effort, not an individual effort. You will
need other people, and they will need you. The skills you bring, and the ones
you learn along the way, will help the group. Ultimately, that community-
mindedness and altruism will generate strong collectives. That is the only way
we can persevere. That is what survival looks like.

This excerpt has been edited for style and length.