Propping, Prepping, Planting

In the throes of collapse there are three broad responses that are being taken. It is important to note from the outset that although each of us may prefer, or gravitate towards, one of these responses, we can all respond from all three of these ways, sometimes at the same time.

Propping

Propping involves taking part in the current system of Business As Usual (BAU) whereby we carry on as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary is happening. Propping continues to prop up the current industrial-growth system, even if we recognise that collapse is occurring.

Propping continues to extract, exploit, and destroy natural systems and bioregional spaces. Propping continues to pollute and spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Propping keeps buying and consuming. Propping is not just buying the merchandise of consumer society, it is also buying into the myths, stories, and worldviews that prop up the paradigms upon which the current system rests.

Even so-called “green” solutions continue to prop up BAU and help to continue plunging deeper and deeper into collapse. We have known for some time that the minerals and ores required for a greening of energy supply are insufficient to undertake that transition.¹ We have also known for some time that the extraction of the minerals and ores are damaging local ecosystems and exploiting, often indigenous, communities.²

The grieving process suggests that propping can be seen as denial and/or anger. Collapse can be, and is, denied by many. Denial allows, and enables, propping to continue unabated. Anger is a propping approach that says, ‘damn you all, I’m gonna…’ (fill in the blanks.)

Prepping

Prepping – a.k.a survivalism – has its roots in the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Cold War (and associated nuclear threat) of the post WW2 decades. More recently prepping has been associated with preparing for environmental (especially climate) collapse. There are many varieties of prepping with most of them entailing some form of hoarding and storing supplies of food, water, medicines, guns (in some places), and becoming self-sufficient in energy (mostly solar panels.) The covid pandemic introduced a novel take on prepping – stockpiling toilet paper!

Prepping seeks to preserve comfort, convenience, and certainty, albeit in a much-diminished sense. In the vocabulary of the grief process, prepping is a form of bargaining. ‘If I do this, then I will survive,’ a prepper supposes.

Prepping is an individualistic response to collapse. Hence, prepping is unable to be sustained and certainly not for a long period of time. Social, environmental, systemic collapse is not a short-lived event. Collapse is likely to play out over several generations.

The ultimate form of prepping is the building of spaceships designed to transport individuals to Mars and then survive on that planet. This form of prepping is literally pie in the sky thinking.

Planting

There is a famous quotation from the Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore who advised that, ‘The one who plants trees, knowing that he or she will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.’ The quotation is highly relevant in this time of collapse.

Planting trees knowing that one will not sit in their shade is the action of someone with a view toward the future and towards caring for generations to come. Planting trees at this time is also an allegory for how one approaches collapse from the acceptance phase of the grieving process. Planting trees that go on to bear fruits of kindness, compassion, appreciation of beauty, empathy, joy, equanimity, forgiveness, love, and other healthy values is a worthy thing to be doing as we experience the collapse of all we have known. Such fruits, hopefully, will be of use to those humans who do emerge from the other side of collapse.

Planting (whether trees, vegetables, fruits, or values and ethics) then is an act of unselfish wisdom. It is planning for (at least) seven generations into the future.

We are entering a bottleneck in the project that has been the human journey. Our human population could be halved within the next forty years and keep decreasing thereafter.³ A previous bottleneck in our human evolutionary journey saw our ancestral human population decrease by almost 98% from about 100,000 hominins to around 1,000.⁴ If humans today face a similar sized bottleneck, then the population could reduce to just 160 million.  

In the meantime we can plant ideas into our own lives now; becoming comfortable with less, simplifying, recognising when enough is enough, and frugality. It means planting worldviews that diverge from those of BAU and unlimited growth. We can plant the paradigms of diversity and unity (the two are not opposites, but complimentary.) We can plant the concepts of ubuntu and interbeing. Ubuntu is a Xhosa word loosely translated as I am because we are. Interbeing is a word coined by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, meaning ‘the many in the one and the one containing the many.’

Finally, it is worth repeating that these three broad responses to collapse are not discrete behaviors. Each of us can, and often do, vacillate from one to the other and back again.

Notes:

1. e.g. William Grace, Critical minerals and the energy transition, Energy Strategy Reviews, 9 January 2026.

2. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/23/un-indigenous-peoples-forum-climate-strategy-warning

3. Alessio Zaccone & Kostya Trachenko, Global population crisis scenarios predicted by a general nonlinear dynamical model, Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, 22 May 2026. I would advise reading just the Abstract of this paper unless you are highly versed in differential equations and other high-level mathematics.

4. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fau.search.yahoo.com%2F  sourced 13 October 2026