Bunker Thinking

I got mine in the era of the Climate Crisis.

Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

I often get bummed out at how piss poor those in the climate space are at telling stories, marketing, and shaping inspiring narratives. Unfortunately, many of the most mainstream “solutions” that are well marketed, designed, or executed seem to too often miss the point entirely. By “point” I mean the proper orientation or thrust behind their intervention. They reinforce the Bunker Mentality which does more to divide us than unite us and promotes virtue signaling over systemic solutions.

I first heard the phrase “Bunker Mentality” from Margret Killjoy, who among other things is the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Live Like The World Is Dying. The Bunker Mentality is a way of describing some folks in the preparedness community who take an “I’ve got mine, so kick rocks” approach to instability or uncertainty. These are folks who, quite literally, build bunkers, hoard food, and supplies, and take a Jason Bourne - I’m a super soldier - approach to the end times. What is missing here is… a lot but what I think is more innocuous are the everyday items that exemplify this way of thinking in more subtle ways than an actual bunker. Take these examples as a case study:

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Lomi

Lomi: a food dehydrator

The Lomi brands itself as a countertop composter for all your household food waste. Putting aside the science of how composting actually takes place for a moment, what this $500 dehydrator does actually is undermined the ability for a community-based and developed solution to food waste to take root. It removes what is best done communally from the public eye, it puts it in your house, in your bunker, and deprives you from connecting with and building a networked approach to a systemic problem. It’s a bunker solution. The Lomi signals to the world that you are virtuous, that you care about the planet and are committed to eradicating food waste but it only ensures that you can. The Lomi’s dehydrated media can then be sprinkled on your plants in your backyard, and grow herbs for your family.

Imagine the opposite for a moment. Instead, using your discarded food scraps to contribute toward a community-based enterprise that collectively and collaboratively develops new uses for this material and ensures that the material is put toward uses that advacne food security, and build soil health - which in turn sequesters carbon and shares lessons of land stewardship through workshops and access where you can learn from and with elders and young folks. Your food scraps can be part of a wider solution that does not place you at the center but instead an invaluable contributor to an emergent strategy of food security and climate resilience.

These lessons are made impossible with solutions like the Lomi and to that end, I feel like these kinds of interventions are not just benign but actively harmful toward achieving a just transition and toward meaningfully combating the climate crisis.

Beyond Meat

Is there an overabundance of animal suffering? Yes. Can the planet support the current levels of animal-based meat consumption? No. Do Western Diets need more plant-based options to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis? Yes. Do I actually enjoy the taste of Beyond Meat? Yes. Multiple things can be true at the same time and yet, solutions like Beyond Meat, in my view anyhow, gatekeep and reinforce the same tools and approaches to food production that have gotten us to this point in the first place. I’m less concerned with the fact that Beyond Meat uses GMO’s or that it is not trying to get folks to abandon the idea of eating meat altogether, what I am more concerned by is that it’s shrouded in IP, patents and that it is guarding a solution while at the same time claiming its product must also be ubiquitous. If the latter were true, make it open source. If the heading or orientation of this company’s aims were as pure as they’d lead you to believe surely I could get a kit and whip this up in my kitchen, yet it isn’t.

“Join the Movement” their website proclaims. “By shifting from animal to plant-based meat, we can positively affect the planet, the environment, the climate, and even ourselves. After all, the positive choices we make every day – no matter how small – can have a great impact on our world.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that there is a more accessible, enjoyable, and palatable protein alternative than Tofurkey but this intervention is not one that will free us or our food systems of its ills.

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Unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of business or organizational models that exist that can show us the way out of the bunker. Mutual aid, open-sourced tech, the creative commons, and employee ownership are tools that point us in the correct direction. We need, in more ways than I think we currently understand, to more properly center and explore these interventions if we want a future that is more inspiring, and less oppressive, than the one currently taking shape around us. Let’s dream big, and not use common wisdom in approaching the problems we all grapple with, it has been bunker thinking that has led us to many of these bunker solutions. Let’s escape the bunker, then destroy the bunkers in our life then start a food forest with houses in a land trust powered by community-owned solar and blimp-powered public transit… or something.