Outside of Houston in late August, the weather’s been doing that early-morning Texas thunderstorm thing for an hour: the sort of rain that feels like a Texan god has ripped a seam in the heavens. Cars are hydroplaning all over; even with the windshield wipers at the highest setting, the world outside is mottled mess. The Top 40 radio station plays Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer” for the fifth time; when it finishes, the morning shock jock comes on with a stern voice: "Flash flood warning, all surrounding counties."
At her house, in a location she’d prefer to keep vague, The Survival Mom — Lisa Bedford, who gives her age as “somewhere between 40 and 60” — is nonplussed. Sure, the floor-to-ceiling windows are all sweating, and her rescued white Pyrenees, massive as a dire wolf, is pacing the front hallway. But if a flash flood knocked out the power — or the sanitation system, or the road surrounding her house — she has enough supplies to last her and her family not just weeks, but years. She knows how to make a composting toilet, how to make semi-gourmet meals out of freeze-dried goods, how to harvest as much drinkable water as possible from the pipes before the pressure’s gone and how to make whatever water remains drinkable.
“You fill up all your tanks with water, but at some point there’s no water pressure left,” she explains. “But on commercial buildings, there are openings on the outside for a water release, and there’s a tool you can buy that works as a kind of tap,” she continues. “So I bought one for every member of my family, and now each time we look at a commercial building, we’ve started to think, OK, where is one of those things?”
Acquiring a tool is just one of dozens of simple, straightforward strategies that helps put Bedford’s mind at ease. “My tagline is that I help moms worry less and enjoy their families more,” she says. “And what I’ve found out is when you put things in place to help through difficult times, then you can worry less.” For example, if a mom is worried about a potential loss of income, Bedford has a straightforward first step: Buy a month’s worth of extra food. “Then you won’t have to ask, ‘Do I buy groceries or do I pay the electric bill?’”
Bedford has the soft, slightly wearied eyes of a fiftysomething mom and dresses in a way that’s familiar to anyone who’s spent time in the suburbs of arid Southwest climates. Think capris, slightly embellished flat sandals, flowy tops. Since 2009, she’s been building a modest digital empire out of helping others “put things in place.” There are tutorial blog posts on water purification, videos declaring “a vague sense of uneasiness is reason enough to prepare,” and five different Survival Mom Facebook groups totaling more than 150,000 members. “Preparedness runs the gamut from practical things all the way to the real, extreme, worst-case scenarios,” Bedford says. “The stuff that isn’t even that unthinkable anymore.”
Stuff like a massive electromagnetic pulse. Or an earthquake, or a tidal wave, or a complete unraveling of the fabric of society — stuff that would make for a second Great Depression. Not the end of the world, then, so much as the end of a relatively pleasant and convenient one.
Even as these scenarios become increasingly plausible, Bedford’s still reluctant to broadcast her plans to the neighbors. Until my trip there last August, no one outside of the family had visited Bedford’s storage bunker, currently filled with enough food for her family to live for several years. Her online identity, brand, and livelihood might be centered on her identity as a Survival Mom, “but I’m very careful talking about it,” she says. “Otherwise people think I’m nuts.”
Lisa Bedford, the Survival Mom, at work on her computer at her house near Houston, Dec. 4, 2015.
Scott Dalton for Buzzfeed News
Bedford’s what used to be called a survivalist, and what most of the internet — where she’s made a name for herself among hundreds of other sites, Facebook groups, and YouTube videos — now call “preppers.” And even though preppers remain regular objects of ridicule, an increasing number of people are adopting some form of Bedford’s mindset and practices. Ashton Kutcher’s a prepper; Carrie Underwood's a prepper. It's been reported that up to 3.7 million people in the United States identify as such in some capacity — an impressive number until you realize it’s still just over 1% of the American population.
Many preppers have been introduced to the movement by men like Jim Rawles, whose blog and books focus on the more militaristic, offense-oriented elements of survival. Bedford’s approach, by contrast, is distinctly defensive — what she calls “maternal.” Her site is filled with family-centered advice; her book, with its cheery, primary colors and clip art, hangs out in the family section of the bookstore. Undergirding all of her preparations is an ethos of conservation and thrift: how to reuse, how to make do, how to embrace the ideas that our Depression-raised ancestors accepted as a matter of course. In her willingness to debunk “accepted prepper wisdom,” as she puts it, and cater to “suburban” preppers like herself, she’s carved out a niche in both the subculture and the multibillion-dollar industry that’s grown out of it.
“There are plenty of blogs that revel in scare tactics and promoting one apocalyptic theory after another,” Bedford writes on her website's “Get to Know Lisa” section. “Me? I just want to have a plan to handle everyday emergencies and am prepared for worst case scenarios at the most practical level possible. That’s why my Costco runs always including picking up 2 or 3 cases of their toilet paper and multi-packages of ibuprofen!”
Forget the color-coded bunker, the carefully organized bug-out bags, and the piles of cash she keeps strategically stashed around the house. The most compelling thing about Bedford is how much sense her entire philosophy makes — and how it casts the rest of our utter unpreparedness into sharp relief. How little we save, how nonchalant we are given our children’s lack of basic of survival skills, how blasé we remain even as environmental and economic catastrophe devastates those around us.
And while this brand of willful ignorance is not unique to America, it is yoked to the particularly American culture of abundance — and an ideology of domination and invincibility that dates to the end of the second world war. Over the last 15 years, however, that ideology has been compromised: by 9/11, of course, but also by a series of natural disasters and the near-collapse of the global economy. Fears that were once the provenance of paranoids feels increasingly, persuasively, like logical. As Rawles tells me, “The whole base is growing. Conservatives do not corner the market on common sense.”
“Prepping is the way that people have always lived,” Bedford says. “At an archaeological site, they’ll find a big drum of wheat, or a huge thing of that held honey: Food storage basics go back for so long! So when did the shift happen? When did being completely unprepared for everything — and always flying by the seat of your pants — when did that become a virtue?”
“Mormon women have been doing this forever,” she continues. “Same for women who’ve always been rural or homesteading. This knowledge is very common for them. You know who doesn’t have this information? People like you.”
Lisa Bedford's website, The Survival Mom.
Bedford didn’t grow up deep in the woods or spend her childhood rereading a earmarked copy of Hatchet. Her father was a pastor and owned a contracting company in the Phoenix area; her mother stayed at home. “That was the era when the dollar was so secure,” Bedford recalls, “and you could count on your real estate going up in value every year. There was no reason for me to think of these things.” She narrates her past with the same tone she uses in her YouTube videos: just professional enough to invite trust, just amateur enough to be relatable.
Bedford calls herself un-tech-savvy, but she’s taught herself Wordpress; she uses Slack and loves Evernote. She homeschools her daughter, 16, and her son, 14, not out of some antipathy toward the American school system, but because, as she puts it with a knowing lift of the eyebrow, “I like to swim against the stream.”
When Bedford was young, she traveled the world, including several months in Israel; her husband grew up in the South Pacific, where his father worked for an airline. “We both have these backgrounds where we would feel very comfortable living outside of the U.S. And, you know, things here in the U.S. have been limping along for years,” she told me. “And they could keep limping along for years. And my kids are getting older, and I’d like to take them places that we’ve talked and read about as a family. But it could also all come crashing down in September.”
Her interest in prepping didn’t become acute until 2008, when the financial crisis unmoored her family and so many others in the Phoenix area — which is part of why many of her preparations, then and now, are intended as a way to ease families through monetary crisis. As she explains, “The whole preparedness thing is really just building as many margins as possible into your life.”
Earning money by sharing her own skills — that was its own sort of margin. Bedford started adapting some food-storage classes she’d been teaching into webinar form, and launched the blog, using a simple Wordpress format, in 2009. She built a Facebook page, and as her brand expanded, a New York agent approached her to transform the content of her blog into a book, which was then sold to HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins. Today, Bedford maintains the blog, which receives around 300,000 hits a month, and earns money through a combination of banner ads, referral links, and partnerships with various companies she endorses. (“My income is overtaking that of my husband, which he doesn’t mind at all,” she told me. “It would be enough for us to live on.”)
Bedford also has plans for a series of Survival Mom’s No Worries Guide e-books, the first of which, on emergency evacuation, went live in October. She employs a part-time assistant, pays a smattering of writers for periodic posts, and has an IT guy. Her daughter does all her art and illustration and taught Bedford the importance of Pinterest, where "prepping pins" flourish. She’s copyrighted her brand; she’s experimenting with Periscope.
Over the last year, Bedford’s spent far less time generating new content and far more time organizing her site: creating “Lists of Lists,” collecting “Most Popular Articles,” and expanding “My Story,” to make the site as welcoming and navigable as possible to those who arrive via scared Google search. People who read about a massive, overdue earthquake and realize their kids go to school in the direct path of the resultant tsunami. Or people who have an infant, or a disabled spouse, or an elderly parent for whom they’re responsible. That’s who’s doing the googling, and that — especially the moms and the caretakers and the families and the people who’ve never thought about prepping before — is who Bedford aims to reassure.
Those people are often ill-served by the majority of prepper blogs — Survival Blog, The Prepper Journal, Survivalist Blog, Graywolf Survival — that rise to the top of search results for “prepping.” Such blogs cater to existing, oftentimes advanced preppers; as a result, they can feel a lot like a gadget blog, overflowing with specs and insularity.
“All the websites are the same!” Bedford exclaims from the driver’s seat of her pickup, which she’s piloting with ease through the sea-like puddles of rain, the hum of talk radio droning in the background. “They’re all very, very male-oriented, and those men are much more into the idea of protection. They’ll spend hours debating firearms. But I read something like that, and I think, I know most of you have wives and girlfriends, so where do they come in? You’re sitting here debating the right kind of specific specialty tool for your bug-out bag, but what about your wife? Could she really haul a 45-pound carry? What about your kids? What are you going to do when your autistic son won’t eat anything but Cheerios and mac 'n' cheese three meals a day, and now you have to get out of the house?”
Calling out “conventional survival wisdom” is a favorite hobby of Bedford’s. We're seated on a covered deck of a local bar and grill, where the wind periodically swooshes in a gust of rain from outside. “I examine that conventional wisdom and then point out all of its flaws,” she says in a tone that’s almost conspiratorial. “I really like to do that. You know, because it’s all men! And I have nothing against men; I’m not anti-man. But here’s an example: Jim Rawles, the guy behind Survival Blog, says you need to find a town with about 800 people — what’s often called ‘a wide place in the road.’ But what kind of job opportunities are there in a town that small? In order for a town to be survivable, according to him and most experts, you need to be a good 50 to 100 miles away from the biggest city, and off the interstates. But what would we do?”
Bedford sighs, takes a sip of iced tea. “Now, Rawles, he’s not irresponsible. He’s been encouraging people for years to get that second source of income going so you can move to one of those spots. But I always keep one foot just really solidly planted in reality and the practical world. And only you know your circumstances. So what I try to do is be compassionate towards those people, because they’re afraid. When they start researching evacuations and different things that could happen, and their kids aren’t healthy, or they’re disabled in some way, it’s a terrible thing to realize: Well, we’ll just have to stay here and cope. I want to give people hope! I don’t want to tell them, ‘To survive, you have to have this acreage, and it has to be here, and you have to have this much food, and if you don’t have $10–20,000 to sink into all that, then you’ll be the first to die off.’ That’s so unfair to people, and I don’t want to participate in that.”
As Bedford points out, Rawles himself has been clear that his work is for “intermediate and advanced” preppers. It’s usually in the massive, sprawling forums — whether on Rawles’ blog or elsewhere — that accepted wisdom turns rigid and exclusionary.
And Rawles, for his part, appreciates the work Bedford’s done with “the soccer mom demo.” “Lisa is a fantastic lady,” he told me from an undisclosed location in North Idaho. “She’s incredibly level-headed, and has shown prepping as accessible to people with average incomes who live in the suburbs. Because let’s face it: Very few people have means to move to the hinters and the boonies. If you’re a beginner, something like Survival Blog feels like you’ve been hit with a firehose. But Lisa’s stuff is very nonthreatening, and she offers it in bite-size chunks that aren’t overwhelming.”
“She’s a great spokesperson, too,” Rawles continues. “I’m not willing to go on camera — you know, none of my neighbors even know what I do — but she’s gone on the Today show. She’s helped wake up millions. And you know, every prepared family is one less family rushing towards me. The people she reaches, now they’re part of the solution — instead of part of the problem.”
Bedford with her children, Andrew, 14 (left), and Olivia, 16, at their kitchen table.
Scott Dalton for BuzzFeed News
