Stop demonizing preppers: there's more to this American subculture than you think.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

MY FRIEND Ceredwyn Alexander lives on a homestead in the mountains of Vermont. Her family raises a lot of their own food, from chickens to cabbage, and they heat their home with wood they chop themselves. They worry about peak oil. They try not to buy things on credit. They keep a great deal of food and water and other supplies on hand. If everything goes to hell tomorrow, they want to be prepared.

People who say and do such things are often called preppers, and Ceredwyn willingly applies the term to herself: It's a decent label, she says, for people who try to be prepared for sudden, disruptive emergencies. If you've been absorbing the recent portraits of preppers in the press, where they've been depicted as doomsday-fearing right-wing paranoiacs stock-hag up on guns and canned goods, you may think you know all there is to know about Ceredwyn. But before you use your stock of stereotypes to fill in those blanks, here are a few more facts about her.

Her politics are liberal and feminist. Her family's firearm collection consists of a single shotgun, which they own in case a four-legged predator passes through. She speaks disdainfully about survivalists who spend their time "waiting for the Mutant Zombie Bikers to come take their guns, drugs, and women away." Ask her about survival strategies, and she doesn't start spinning fantasies about a well-provisioned family fending off looters. "When the skit hit the fan during Irene" she says instead, "neighbors were everyone's best resource." Preparedness, she adds, requires "learning skills and community involvement ... not freeze dried food and razor wire." To those ends, she has joined the volunteer fire department and become the town service officer.

As far as the mass media are concerned, America's preeminent preppers are the Alabama kidnapper Jimmy Lee Dykes; Nancy Lanza, whose son raided her gun collection before he carried out the Sandy Hook massacre; and the people who appear on the National Geographic TV show Doomsday Preppers, who might charitably be described as "colorful." Dykes "is described by neighbors as 'very paranoid,' anti-government and possibly a 'Doomsday prepper,'" the NewYork Daily News reported. The London Independent called Lanza a "so-called 'prepper" a part of the survivalist movement which urges individuals to prepare for the breakdown of society by training with weapons and hoarding food and other supplies."

When the liberal historian Rick Perlstein wrote about...