Solidarity Prepping: Preparing For Climate Change

Solidarity Prepping: Preparedness without the fascism.

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  • Collapse: An overused term that fails to describe the decline of great civilizations

    The Financial Times reported that heatwaves have impacted Europe’s potato crop: https://www.ft.com/content/8eda412f-caed-4b31-bdee-b76fc9f3ba82?syn-25a6b1a6=1 (Now a paywalled article)

    Iran: Drought & Over-Extraction of Water, Coupled with Accelerating Global Climate Heating, already written about on this blog. The riots were about shortages. They were ordinary people rioting about shortages of water and food. Climate change is increasingly becoming the main driver of rising food costs. Climateflation: How Climate Change Is Now the Primary Driver of Food Prices. According to economists, rising oil, diesel, and fertilizer prices are driving up costs. “Climateflation is the process by which society’s climate interface, including the causes of climate change, its consequences, and efforts to address it, influences prices.” We are no longer on the cusp of a global food crisis. We are in the midst of a climate change-driven agricultural collapse, but it isn’t driving a civilization or societal collapse yet, and it probably won’t.

    1600 year ago, the Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD; it wasn’t a sudden cliff where civilization vanished overnight. Instead, it was a long, messy, and complicated transformation. The term “collapse,” used to describe the disappearance of civilizations, is increasingly being recognized as inaccurate. Few civilizations go off a cliff edge due to despotism, corruption, over-complexity, and failing harvests. War, genocide, and catastrophic natural disasters (Earthquakes and Tsunamis) have historically pushed city-state civilizations off the cliff. But a large interconnected civilization like this one, like Rome, was?

    Large, interconnected, technologically advanced civilizations don’t collapse; they adjust. Countries on the peripheries, labeled as failed states, including Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti, have remittance economies that represent a resilient source of non-debt foreign capital. They consistently outpace the combined total of foreign direct investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA). In the world’s most severe Fragile and Conflict-Affected States (FCS), migrant and diaspora transfers have transcended their role as simple financial gifts. They form the literal macroeconomic foundation for recipients’ survival and engagement in the local economy. Not only do migrant, refugee, and diaspora populations benefit the countries from which they originate, but they also contribute to the countries that welcome them by taking on roles that the local population rejects and by paying taxes. Furthermore, the engagement of migrant, refugee, and diaspora populations in Vocational Education acts as a powerful engine for upward mobility and integration. For many newcomers, traditional academic pathways are blocked by credential recognition issues, language barriers, or immediate economic pressures. Vocational education and training (VET) offers a practical, faster route to meaningful employment and financial independence.

    The notion of failed states, however, is not even. For example, the remittance economy is also dependent on mobile data, and mobile phone digital and mobile money transfers have made sending money across borders faster and cheaper, but this ties the entire process directly to stable internet and mobile data access. When mobile data fails or costs too much, families risk losing immediate access to vital funds. Countries like Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have widespread usage, intense provider competition, and relative stability. The shift away from line-based infrastructure has improved communications. Multiple operators have entered an empty market with low levels of regulatory structuring and state-controlled licensing.

    It would probably be a surprise to know that 1 GB of Mobile data is cheaper in many “failed states” than it is in industrialized countries:

    • Syria: 1 GB costs approximately $0.01 to $0.67 USD
    • Somalia: 1 GB costs approximately $0.50 USD
    • Sudan: 1 GB costs approximately $0.27 to $0.63 USD
    • Democratic Republic of the Congo: 1 GB costs approximately $0.52 to $2.00 USD
    • Rwanda: 1 GB costs approximately $0.55 USD

    War is the primary impact on cost due to the fragmentation of the cellular data infrastructure:

    • South Sudan: 1 GB costs approximately $23.70 USD
    • Yemen: 1 GB costs approximately $15.68 USD
    • Syria: 1 GB costs approximately $2.00 to $5.00 USD

    Compared with Industrialised countries:

    • United States: 1 GB costs approximately $6.00 USD
    • UK: 1 GB costs approximately £3.00 to £6.00
    • France: 1 GB costs approximately $0.15 to $0.20 USD
    • Apart from Israel: 1 GB costs approximately $0.02 USD

    Platforms like M-Pesa and carrier-integrated mobile wallets process massive transaction volumes, encouraging providers to keep base data costs affordable to keep users active on their networks. While the raw per-GB dollar cost is low, data can still consume a high percentage of local average monthly earnings, meaning it is “cheap” by international comparison but represents a meaningful expense for everyday citizens. Mobile data for internet use is not consumed in the same way as in the industrialized North. But the competitive pricing reflects lower levels of state regulation and laissez-faire economic conditions. Mass uptake is a direct response to the international remittance economy.

    Capitalism doesn’t collapse; it adjusts. It expands and contracts with the market or with the availability of a means to exchange goods and services for currency. For capitalism to flourish, a stable state is required. In the absence of a stable state, the primary driver is the need for a means of exchange for goods and services. The remittance economy’s reliance on mobile-based international money transfers is a novel financial market in which mobile data, taxes, commissions, and local taxation interact across digital/physical worlds. This phygital-financial interactivity is an example of how humans survive localized collapse in the 21st century.

    The fall of Rome wasn’t a catastrophic cliff that the entire empire plummeted off. It was a decline and shrinkage of the empire. In the Western Empire, on September 4, 476 AD, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Chieftain Odoacer did not want to destroy Rome; instead, he sought to preserve and emulate its political structure and culture. He did not declare himself emperor. Instead, he recognized the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople as the sole ruler of the empire and ruled Italy as a patrician and king. He preserved the Senate, maintaining its privileges, prestige, and administrative roles; he left the existing legal, judicial, and tax systems intact; he continued to appoint traditional Roman aristocrats to high government positions; his administration issued coins featuring his own image, styled strictly in the traditional imperial Roman fashion. With a little consolidation among 3 chieftains, the Empire remains Romanish in flavor but considerably poorer and in permanent decline.

    People often date the birth of capitalism to within the past 300 years, but I would suggest the signal for capitalism is far older. The Roman Empire was an example of how every aspect of trade was taxed, and these taxes made the empire wealthy. Taxation is profit or surplus; the foundations of capitalism are in a 2000 year old culture that killed its prisoners for entertainment, traded in millions of slaves daily, and pursued conquest through war followed by trade. This model is no different from the foundations of the Dutch and British East India Companies. What they produced was a civilization large enough not to collapse catastrophically, but to break down into a simpler human-scale economy.

    The simplification of the Roman Empire meant that key technologies were lost or became impossible to copy

    • Large-scale state with taxation wealth: The specific formula for ultra-durable, waterproof concrete—especially the kind that set underwater using specific volcanic ash—largely fell out of use in Western Europe for centuries because the trade networks to source the materials and fund massive marine structures vanished
    • Advanced Glassmaking: Masterpieces like the Portland Vase featured intricate layered cameo glass and precise colorants. These required long-distance trade for rare minerals and specialized workshops that the post-Roman economy couldn’t sustain
    • Hypocausts (Central Heating): The complex under-floor heating systems used in public baths and wealthy villas required precise architectural dimensions and constant supervision, making them impractical for smaller medieval lifestyles
    • Industrial-Scale Watermills: Sophisticated milling complexes (such as Barbegal in France) used intricate gear trains and vertical wheels to grind grain by the ton for massive urban populations and garrisons. With cities shrinking, local communities returned to smaller grinding methods
    • Water Infrastructure: Aqueducts, piped water, and water treatment.
    • Written records of the movement of goods: a written language based on trade, with ledgers recording goods and their value. While writing didn’t vanish, Germanic tribes did have runes, and Proto-Germanic and Proto-Norse were written languages. Latin almost vanished, but not for the church.
    • Mining and smelting metals at scale, and feeding them into an industrial production system, ceased.

    The simplification took over 1,500 years to recover from and required organizations capable of generating and holding wealth. The Templars developed an advanced banking system and letters of credit that used a secret cipher to prevent fraud. The heavily armed order of warrior monks, charged with protecting pilgrims, soon began protecting pilgrims’ wealth and later kings’. Their wealth allowed for technological advancement. At one point, London’s grain and flour were milled and taxed by the Templars in their tide mills moored along the Thames Wharf near Blackfriars Bridge.

    When writer Sarah Wilson argues that we’re hurtling toward the same end as ancient Rome and the Mayan civilization — but that there’s plenty to fight for — I am trying to understand what she means. Oh yes, the Hollywood version of collapse. You know what I mean, Channel 4 Apocalypse. We wake up, and it’s…

    Just like that, capitalism ended. You gotta go and fend for yourselves, and it looks like a scene from The Road. I Eat The Stars. “This is not just about the climate, but civilization buckling under the weight of its own complexity. Given worsening inequality, political polarisation, falling fertility, resource shortages and global conflicts, Wilson argues that we are hurtling towards the same end as ancient Rome.” The Guardian. The case for Rome’s collapse being a simplification, and for the transfer of power away from Rome and into the hands of petty Germanic chieftains who admired Rome and sought to emulate the power they perceived without its complex technology, is increasingly the view of most historians.

    “What I do is feel what people are thinking and wrangling with internally, but hasn’t yet been expressed as a public narrative. My dad says: “If there’s an elephant in the room, Sarah will just scream it out.” I’m not claiming to be the expert – I’m just bringing the complex science into the public realm.” The Guardian: This is definitely a public narrative, and “collapse” has become the most overused term, while its mechanisms in complex societies are poorly understood. “A civilization is a complex system of complex systems. Eventually all complex systems, without exception throughout history, have collapsed under the weight of their complexity.” The Guardian. This is untrue; it’s simplistic, and it is easy to see why many historians and thinkers—like Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies—argue that excessive complexity, bureaucracy, and diminishing returns doom civilizations. However, looking closer at historical “collapses” reveals that societies rarely vanish; instead, they undergo simplification, followed by the shedding of bureaucratic structures that no longer serve a purpose. The evidence shows that the Roman Empire not only simplified but also underwent a series of transformations and fragmentations, rather than ending in a single moment of catastrophic non-existence.

    “I think we are in a liminal moment: we know the present setup can’t hold, but we don’t know what’s going to come next.” The Guardian

    I listened to Sarah Wilson on Nate Hagens’s podcast, The Great Simplification. I’m not sure she is as sure about the future as she claims: “We are between an old world and a new world which is yet to be born. So the opportunity is to get the better ideas, the more life-generating ideas.“Sarah Wilson & Nate Hagens: At no point do Hagens or Wilson discuss how 1.5C represents the loss of the Goldilocks climate niche for Agriculture. “That liminal moment” is the loss of 12,000 years of climate in which agriculture flourished.

    There is a desperation to be optimistic. It’s far easier to rearrange the deckchairs on a sinking ship and pretend everything is fine than to face the fact that we are severely underskilled for the world we face post 1.5C. Post-1.5C is both a simplification and a depopulation on an unprecedented scale, as the global elites emigrate to Mars or New Zealand to die in bunkers of rocket ships; it doesn’t matter which. The rest of us are left with economies addicted to oil and a system rigged to protect it with armed force if necessary. The one thing I can say has been forever useful is the foundations of Marxism to inform my anarcho-primativist view of the world we are up against. I say this because it is missing from Green Party rhetoric about the future: Imagine thinking the old system is just going to die, and we can build a new world in the shell of the old. When 1% are gone, they will leave their loyal middle managers, armies, navies, and air forces to protect the wealth-generating machine that eats the earth.

  • Honoring Fear or Facing Our Fear? Darkness, Nature, Survivalism, & Survival Skills

    Initiation into fear and our responses to it is the great personal work we need to do.

    Episode 1 of Channel 4 Apocalypse, which I reviewed, offers a great example of how people bully others when their insecurities are threatened. “It brings out the first real character combination: a frightened bully who has already admitted to being afraid of the dark and calls themselves an alpha woman (I stand 6 feet tall without heels). Basically a frightened bully.” Solidarity Prepping.

    I would suggest the same is true of some fiction writers and podcasters who need to convince their followers, fans, and members of their “cult” that their method of connecting to nature is the only way. So it’s the fear of a different way of connecting to nature (the web of life), one that involves survival skills and building relationships with non-food plants, that triggers an outburst worthy of Channel 4’s Apocalypse contestants. “Survival skills matter because they foster resilience and individual resourcefulness. During natural disasters like Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, residents equipped with practical survival, self-sufficiency, and traditional skills—such as off-grid communication, chainsaw operation, foraging, and timber processing—fared much better during extended utility and supply disruptions.” https://solidarityprepping.co.uk/2026/08/25/solidarity-prepping-why-i-will-keep-explaining-what-solidarity-prepping-is/

    Fear of the Dark is Very Real and Primal

    If you think you can convince yourself that whatever it is in the dark you fear isn’t there, your amygdala has already overridden that decision. Did you notice any other things? Dilated pupils, tunnel vision, increased heart rate, tight chest, hair on the back of your neck standing up (or feeling like it does), increased breathing? Your amygdala is running in survival mode, based on your imagination. This over 1,000,000-year-old survival response is prompted by the dark and genetic history of predation on us at night. Modern humans have replaced fear of predation with every minor trauma (Not Complex Trauma or SA) that happened during childhood/teenager/young-adult (pre-25), and because we don’t initiate through a variety of skills that can be objectively judged and seen to act on the individual’s engagement with the natural world.

    There are some things we should fear in the dark, but the chances of encountering dangerous predators in the UK, including big cats, are very low. Human predators — dubious people who just want to frighten you when you are camping in woods they think are theirs?

    If we honored fear of the darkness, we wouldn’t get anything done. We learn to use the amygdala to our advantage without letting it override common sense. This is a low-level initiation. There’s even a story about the Buddha before his enlightenment, when he lived in the forest among ascetics. He wanted to overcome his fear of the Tiger in the forest. The fear of death and the fear of being eaten alive: big cats kill their prey 1st, Bears eat you alive, though. He gave up: Fear of predation and the pain of it occurring is a primal fear we cannot overcome, but we can use the fear to survive, rather than to rule us and our responses.

    Initiation cultures need people who can observe from the fire into the darkness without seeing danger that isn’t there, without a torch. That means a process of learning to harness the eyes and look at the dark world using certain parts of our vision. This has to be done deep in nature, and it’s part of connecting to nature. As a former outdoor therapist, I agree that exposure therapy is for people who are defensively aggressive about their fears. ““The gold standard treatment for phobias is exposure therapy, Norberg tells IFLScience. “It has been shown to work better than waitlist control conditions, placebo control treatments, and active treatment control conditions.”

    In other words, you have to face your fear. “Exposure therapy involves confronting feared stimuli in a non-dangerous manner and learning first-hand that the stimulus doesn’t need to be feared,” she explains. “So for being afraid of the dark, this means going into dark rooms and being alone at night, in the absence of monsters, ghosts, criminals, and dangerous animals. You would do this over and over again until you convincingly believe the dark is not dangerous.”

    Maybe that’s too terrifying for you right now – that’s okay, Norberg says. In that case, a graded approach can be used: “As a therapist, I would ask you to go into a dim, but not fully dark room,” she explains. https://www.iflscience.com/why-we-fear-the-dark-and-how-to-overcome-it-76070

    Darkness in a real survival situation/game is still darkness. In Episode 1, Channel 4, Apocalypse, however awful it is, I can’t help but wonder if all these people are being watched (by psychologists) — another primal fear. We find a lot to build our monsters out of; they live under the bed and in our shadow. Skills-based initiations in nature practiced by indigenous people have been shown to prepare them for nature. Rather than being mere symbolic rituals, these rites of passage serve as rigorous, practical training frameworks that deeply connect an individual to their local ecosystem. Ecological knowledge and connection to the land and nature require presence, learning survival skills, and wood husbandry skills such as coppicing and hedge-laying. This doesn’t happen through visualization.

    Polychronic Time is Related to Season, Place, Soil, and Plants

    • Ecological Literacy: Initiates must memorize vast taxonomies of local plants, animal behaviors, weather patterns, and water sources. This goes beyond academic knowledge; it is a life-or-death understanding of how the ecosystem functions.
    • Practical Survival Skills: Rites often require mastering hard skills such as tracking, toolmaking, shelter building, fire-friction techniques, and foraging under extreme stress or isolation.
    • Risk Management: Facing hunger, cold, and wild animals during isolation periods teaches initiates to manage fear, regulate their nervous systems, and make rational decisions in a crisis.

    The Three-Stage Initiation Framework Hypothesis

    Anthropologists note that most indigenous initiations follow a specific structural pattern that rewires how a person interacts with the natural world:

    StagePurposeAction in Nature
    1. SeparationDetachment from childhood comfortsThe youth is removed from the village and stripped of everyday safety nets.
    2. LiminalityThe transition and testing phaseThe initiate survives alone or in a small group in the wilderness, facing trials of endurance and skill.
    3. IncorporationReturn as a contributing adultThe individual returns to the tribe, now trusted to hunt, protect, and pass down ecological knowledge.


    Indigenous knowledge and sustainability are closely related. Around the world, Indigenous people live in almost every country and region. They practice their beliefs and traditional knowledge. This knowledge fully promotes sustainability and sustainable practices. Indigenous knowledge represents a dynamic and invaluable resource rooted in cultural traditions, local practices, and situational wisdom. Indigenous Knowledge (IK) plays a vital role in pursuing sustainable practices.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395220451_Indigenous_Knowledge_helps_to_develop_Sustainable_Lifestyle_Practices

    Industrialism and today’s technology are not sustainable on a finite planet.

    Preparedness reduces fear; when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Remember the influencers who denied COVID and then died from the virus? When influencers suggest ignoring governmental advice, are they offering something better and will you have to pay for it?

    These are basic skills.

    Or you could be super-skilled.

  • Survival skills: Cordage from Lime Bark

    Lime or linden bast (inner bark) Cordage. To extract the fiber, it needs to be retted in water, ideally river or pond water. I used some river water and rainwater. Chemically treated water damages the fibers. Someone told me to soak it for 6 weeks. 3 months actually gave me better-quality rope.

    Lime, or Linden bark, into cordage; it’s very strong. Getting to the making process requires a lot of pre-processing. After stripping the bark from the freshly cut boughs 2-4 years old, it is retted in water.

    Extracting the fiber starts with removing the bark from the wood. The fresher the wood, the easier it is to strip. Once the bark is removed, it needs to be soaked in water. Retting is an ancient process of controlled rotting to extract fiber.

    After the 1st change of water, I noted that it was full of rat-tailed maggots, the larvae of hoverflies. They thrive in heavily polluted water. The water was black and stank!

    2 more soaks, and 3 months later, the bark is rotting off the fiber.

    Making the rope. A meditative process combining skill, patience, and learned muscle memory.

    Then, stripped down to the inner bark (bast), this is pure fiber and can be turned into thread, string, or rope.

    The process is a combination of knowledge and muscle memory. This is why you can’t learn survival skills from videos when you will need them; you need the experience of failure to keep trying to get the process right. Also, making cordage from rough fibers requires your fingers to develop the appropriate calluses.

    A few strands make the 1st Twist (above), but what we want is a 2-strand twist.

    The 1st 2-strand twist makes a Flemish Twist. It’s brutal on your fingers at 1st. And the muscle memory takes a while to imprint.

    You can make multiple thicknesses, and your fingers sense the thickness.

    Lime Bast rope is extremely strong and durable.

  • Apocalypse, Channel 4: “Impenetrable individualism that means no one is willing to concede to an expert.” This is what will kill most people during collapse

    Farmer left in an abandoned, freezing town without food and water for a TV show

    Here is the Preview: The Show: Apocalypse, Channel 4

    ‘I wanted to thrive.’

    However, the farmer said his job gave him some valuable skills. He said he was used to managing people. Having six staff working on the farm, he naturally took on a role of looking after others. Humphreys also claimed he was confident in starting and maintaining fires and in being resourceful. “I thought a lot of it was common sense, but apparently not,” he said. “I wanted to thrive more than survive.” He said the initial adrenaline of arriving eventually wore off, and the group had to concentrate on staying warm, keeping dry, and finding food and water. Temperatures dropped as low as -12C one night; he said, “As a practical person, I was trying to prioritize comfort and warmth, mitigating hunger as much as possible. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgyq4j0q4qo

    That should read 2 Farmers.

    I’m watching Apocalypse on catch-up. The 2 things that came to the fore were “impenetrable individualism that means no one is willing to concede to an expert, prioritize sensibly, or follow orders”, and, out of fear, being prepared to lie over a battery torch.

    The Preview

    The immediate things I note here, just from the preview, are the group dynamics & the collective lack of experience. However, a few people are making statements that could help create the “glue” that binds the community. “Let’s do the shit jobs first, like sort out our base and sleeping arrangements,” or it upsets the people driven by their own needs over those of the collective. Members of the group think he’s bossy.

    In my experience: A warm, safe, comfortable base is the foundation of a good survival base of operations.

    This is Dystopian Survivalism, and it’s awful; if this weren’t a game, with clean water provided, these people would mostly be dead within a week.

    Episode 1: Remember this is a game, and a study of humans under stress.

    No phone, no electricity, no internet: It’s getting dark, the temperature is falling, and as viewers, we don’t know when they last ate or drank. A group of people thrown together in a US Army military urban warfare and collapse-scenario range. It’s dark; They need to find somewhere to sleep, and they bed down in the railway station on dismantled seats. It’s a cold night with very little bedding. They find a battery-powered light, and an argument breaks out over it. One of the women has already admitted fear of the dark; she has taken possession of the light and isn’t prepared to share it. Another of the women wants to borrow it, so she can find a place for the call of nature, and an argument is developing over sharing it. “I have been asked to look after the light,” says the woman with the light. The other person asks, “By whom?” “By the team,” she retorts. It’s the woman who is scared of the dark

    It’s a lie. One of the other contestants asks, “How old are we, 7?”

    So far, this is terrible drama, and it brings out the first real character combination: a frightened bully who has already admitted to being afraid of the dark and calls themselves an alpha woman (I stand 6 feet tall without heels). Basically a frightened bully. They have also shown themselves to be a liability to the group’s cohesion and safety. Let’s see how this develops.

    It turns out there are two groups on opposite sides of an abandoned town, and they can’t leave. This is part Scrapyard Challenge, part Hunger Games, except in the Hunger Games the contestants have high levels of training. Among the opposing groups are farmers and others. Someone asks, “Who has survival skills?” and we know we have a cattle farmer. A cattle farmer in one group and a sheep farmer in the other. The other group seems more competent at identifying needs. They are asleep, and it’s cold. What’s interesting is that there is a mix of farmers who rub everyone the wrong way but know how to get stuff done and understand survival rationing.

    The Guardian has it just right

    “At least 13 of them seem to be pretty useless. Two of the women in the West team are immediately at each other’s throats, alternately scoffing and raging about “setting boundaries” and being “disrespected” instead of “gathering firewood” or “finding tins”. The next day, a pair of Westerners find the town’s massive supermarket. But it’s boarded up. Oh well. They go back to base, where the emergent leader – Welsh sheep farmer Ioan – suggests they tidy up the place rather than go back to the big building that likely contains plentiful supplies of food and other vital items and see if they can break in. For absolutely unfathomable reasons, the famished team complies.” Lucy Mangan, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/13/apocalypse-review-the-stupidity-will-make-you-scream-yourself-hoarse

    I agree; the narcissism, individualism, and stupid decisions are an indication that most people in grid down will be dead within the 1st and 2nd week from dysentery and other water-borne diseases. “But, fundamentally, the venality and impenetrable individualism that mean no one is willing to concede to an expert, prioritize sensibly or follow orders, and which thus hamper every endeavor, is depressing. I fear for the future – of programming mostly but, sure, humanity too.” Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

    Drinking Water: The show is unrealistic because of the drinking water that the contestants have.

    Contestants are seen with bottles of water, with no explanation of where they came from. Maintaining a safe intake of 2 L/person/day for more than 2 people is a major processing operation. I cover this in my posts about water:

    It would be extremely irresponsible for the game organizers to give contestants contaminated water to work with without any training. This immediately reveals that most people will be dead in any post-apocalyptic scenario. I was hoping for an educational fly-on-the-wall view of abdominal cramps and liquefied bowel movements. 3 days, everyone is airlifted out.

    Compared to the hype, it’s a bit anticlimactic: the Guardian headline: No food, no water, and a lone Abba record: my day out at Channel 4’s hellish new reality show from 10 September 2026. The Guardian journalist Michael Segelov says, “Darkness was approaching when the producers rescued me. I’d found no water, no source of heat, no tin of pilchards. There’d been talk of me spending the night on site – I’m not convinced I would have made it through.” I’m not sure whether this is over-dramatization or genuine fear? I am inclined to suggest it’s actually genuine fear. Fear of the dark is very real; fear of the dark outside in nature is even more common. Forests at night are places people fear the most.

    The girl with a sweat phobia is in an environment where personal hygiene is lacking, an environment where they are choosing to shit in a bucket and have found a convenient hole in which to put it. The crew who run the game are probably doing a lot in the background to make sure these people don’t inadvertently kill themselves with unpleasant diseases from poor sanitation.

    When the two groups become aware of each other, immediately there is more fear and paranoia than common sense. This immediately pits them against each other, whereas they are better off working together, pooling resources and skills. Of course, beating the game isn’t good drama. But then watching a group of self-interested, narcissistic idiots who privately tell the camera various personal details revealing their personalities (Big Brother style). This isn’t entertaining; this is frustrating and an education in who to avoid during collapse.

  • Survival Skills: The skills and knowledge that enable a deep connection to nature

    Rekindling your connection to nature may be the most rewarding thing you do in your lifetime; it offers lifelong learning in skills that bring you into close communication with plants and the land.

    Water Purification is not just about expensive filters. For long-term survival, you need knowledge too.

    I practice water-processing skills that are not based on the “Prepper” model: If you don’t have an expensive filter, can you improvise? Yes, of course you can

    Water harvesting and purification: Rainwater as a survival resource. Rainwater requires filtration, chemical treatment, and boiling. The same is true of harvested fog.

    Hydration in Heatwaves & Making Water Safe to Drink: Processing water is a skill requiring organization and planning.

    Watering the garden: I used to use rainwater as my primary dry-weather water source.

    I use greywater for deep-ground irrigation systems. But you also need to employ a reed-bed filtration system. My reedbed system is in the water container. Also, this system is only fed by the shower, and the soap is biodegradable.

    Food: Can we forage during ecological collapse?

    The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes, but we need to rewild on a grand scale and transform agricultural systems to harness winter floodwater. We can also learn ancestral skills.

    I only teach foraging in person because there is nuance and sometimes specialized skill involved. You can’t learn a highly nuanced skill online.

    Shelter: Your home (house) and a variety of shelter-building skills based on what is available in the environment.

    My ideal camping setup is a hammock:

    @solidarityprepper

    Nothing needs to be said.

    ♬ A Light in the Cold (Acoustic) – Viktor Evander Locke & Selene Lyra & Faint Maps

    A hammock and a tarp: But it doesn’t suit everyone.

    A shelter that can contain a fire

    @solidarityprepper

    #CapCut A person who stands alone is nit always lonely.

    ♬ original sound – CrowTribe

    Shelters like this take 3-4 hours to construct. These were made with no tools. I only wore gloves. No string; the entire structure is woven together.

    Shelter can be improvised quickly with some basic skills, tarps, blankets, and cardboard.

    Firecraft

    Fire-making skills: Knowing when it’s safe to have fires and when it isn’t. Knowing how to improvise and what plants make good tinder.

    Tinder and accelerants come in all varieties, some natural and some made in advance:

    The image below is a piece of fatwood harvested from a pine log.

    Tinder boxes are a common item in the wilderness practitioner’s pack. The tinder box, coupled with knowledge of where the dry materials are found, even after weeks of rain. The tinder box can contain a variety of processed materials, and is often made from materials which could be used as tinder at a push.

    Iron-Age fire: the Flint & Steel is how our Iron-Age Ancestors (Celts) made fire. It’s a highly skilled endeavor, but with a bit of practice and the right tinder materials, it’s learnable for most people.

    Teach your children when they are young: He’s now 24 and an accomplished outdoorsman & Civil Engineer.

    Firecraft is an exploration of plants as tinder and the means to process them to that end.

    Sacred firekeeping: It can take years to learn this skill and all the associated skills, including foraging for the materials we need.

    Sacred firekeeping isn’t just about “holding space”. It’s the firekeeper’s fire; ask before you add anything. Never assume it’s your fire to change.

    Extended skills beyond fire craft: manufacture of glues and tinder boxes:

    Some bushcrafters will tell you: any dry plant material that rubs into fibers works well as tinder. That’s not strictly true. The bark of the Sequoia (Giant Redwood) is gloriously fibrous but doesn’t burn at all. The Sequoia has evolved with bushfires. The bark is a natural fire retardant. We don’t imagine that trees could evolve to resist forest fires, let alone develop bark that doesn’t burn and insulates the tree’s sapwood from brush-fire heat. The exploration of plants as tinder is part of the process of joyful curiosity. The processing is human-level technology: breaking, grinding, drying. The time spans are hours. Your limbic system reaps the rewards.

    Cultivating a deep connection to nature through skills

    “Many people, especially men, find a deep connection to nature and each other by learning wilderness survival skills together in small groups. In fact, this learning process taps into the human brain’s natural connection to nature at a fundamental level and occurs subconsciously.” SolidatityPrepping.co.uk

    The structure of the brain changes when we learn outdoor skills in the right environment and prosocially.

  • The Horned God: An Invitation into Deep Connection With Nature.

    Updated September 2026.

    I write this piece from an intuitive spiritual point of view. I do not intend to infer any scientific or archaeological explanations.

    Celtic Shamanism is a Middle-Class, largely white practice, a New Age tub-thumping cult that involves minimal contact with nature and overdosing on hope in the belief that climate change is transcendable by switching timelines (A door), energy work, and directed intention. In other words, psychotic magical thinking dressed up as radical feminism because of Boudica, QUEEN Boudica no less. Just because Boudica led a rebellion against Rome doesn’t make her a revolutionary. Nothing about rebellions against colonization led by the bourgeoisie is radical.

    The antlered god of ancient Celtic tradition has no Roman equivalent. Here is a conceptual deity that appears only in Celtic iconography: relaxed in nature, with a torc in one hand (symbol of power & wealth) and, in the other, a curly, horned, goat-headed serpent. Cernunos may be his name, but what he represents is far more complex, for he is depicted as an embodiment of opposites: predator and prey; humans and nature, and yet he is a horned (antlered) human. This is perhaps the most powerful symbol: part man (hunter), part nature (hunted). This is primarily a male initiation deity, inviting the observer to become immersed in nature.

    He is among predator and prey, and they are not in conflict: “The Lamb shall dwell with the wolf” is not a new concept

    I have seen posts on social media claiming that Cernunnos was Lord Shiva and an attempt to claim that the Celts were an Indus or Aryan race.

    Public Domain Image: Cernunnos, depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron c. 200 B.C.E. to 300 C.E.

    From a contemplative perspective, the horned god appears not so much for appeasement and worship but to be emulated. Part man, part wild, grasping the symbol of life and death (goat-headed serpent), does he represent the transitions betweenSpirit and nature?

    In life, death, and regeneration? The torc symbolizes wealth, magical power, and divine protection. Is the horned god’s wealth his connection to nature? Does the torc represent spiritual power while the purse open on his belt represents material wealth? Perhaps this wealth is the knowledge of nature, given generously by the spirit teachers of the wilderness.

    Boudica was a mortal, a rebel, but not a deity. New-Age Celtic Shamanism ignores the Horned God because he is too close to nature; he is too raw and powerful, too complicated, requiring contemplation in his domain, which is nature. Whatever he is named, he is both nature and male, human and horned. He exists between life and death. He has been humbled by nature. This is the difference between Shamanic Practitioners and those people who spend long periods in nature. Boudica is easily accessible, but she is only mortal. The antlered deity is like the mystery of the dodecahedron; it is not Roman, and the Romans wrote nothing about it. It is a mystery.

    What was so dangerous about the Antlered Man-God deity that the Romans didn’t even acknowledge his existence, wrote nothing about him, and yet he is depicted on expensive “ritual” artifacts and a pillar of the boatmen under Notre Dame Cathedral? But what do these motifs mean?

    The Wild Hunt

    The wild hunt, a common motif across Medieval Europe. Folklore held that a group of spectral riders went forth at night on the hunt. The Wild Hunt was believed to be a portent of catastrophe and could bring death to those unlucky enough to witness it.

    “Many men both saw and heard a great number of huntsmen hunting. The huntsmen were black, huge, and hideous, and rode on black horses and on black he-goats, and their hounds were jet black, with eyes like saucers.”

    Anglo-Saxon Chronicles [Laud], 1127

    People feared the wild hunt, as it came from the realms of the Faerie and other spectral magical beings. The wild hunt was believed not to be a hunt for prey, but a brawl between spectral entities and mortals; those caught up in it rarely survived.

    The Wild Hunt in Britain began to absorb Christian values, with hell hounds and black dogs hunting down sinners and the unbaptized.

    Superstition about night and darkness, violent storms, thunder and lightning, and other natural phenomena likely contributed to the belief that spectral entities were brawling abroad. Violent storms are dangerous, so staying safe indoors was far better than being caught in the storm. The wild hunt, however, seems more like a distraction from what Cernunnos represents. 

    I am troubled by the assumptions around Cernunnos. We are told he is passively seated among the animals, yet he could also be dancing? 

    Passively seated, seated, or animatedly dancing in harmony with nature?

    The deity is surrounded by animals; even the serpent grasped in his hand is animated, its tail coiled? No it is looped

    Ganesh dancing; look at the leg and foot positions

     Shiva Dancing; again, look at the leg positions

    However, more interesting than whether he is dancing is this 4,000-year-old seal depicting the Pashupati, described in the Veda as the guardian of cattle. These animals have been domesticated, while the Pashupati seal from Harappa depicts a man or woman surrounded by wild animals, including a tiger and a rhino.

    This image is remarkably similar to the Gundestrup cauldron image of the horned god seated among the animals. A similar image of the Buddha seated in the wilderness, under the Bodhi (Bo) tree. But the horns do not look like those of the cow or deer. The Water Buffalo, however, is native to South Asia and semi-wild. While these powerful animals are domesticable, they, like the hippopotamus, are as comfortable on land as in water; they are powerful symbols of the wilderness, and much like the deer in Europe, they held that majesty; it seems fitting that there is a Vedic deity for the wilderness. 

    Assumptions of Primitiveness and Isolation in Pre-Metal & Writing Cultures and What That Means For Today. The Stone Age is a series of assumptions, based on little evidence. Nomadic, ragged, unwashed, roamers, subsisting on whatever was available. Wandering from place to place, etc, etc.
    Let’s, for a moment, view Europe, Africa & Asia as one continuous unnamed continent, visible and accessible by boat and beast of burden. With a constantly changing coastline as the sea levels fluctuated across a million years.
    The 1st assumption is isolation, which doesn’t explain how obsidian tools are found in the Middle East, or among English prehistoric remains. In fact, the entire descriptive language of the pre- metal, pre-writing

    ng world is dismissive and weighted with assumptions, prejudice, and Victorian superiority values which served the interests of colonialism and plunder.

    Isolation is a myth: trade via rivers and pack animals such as domesticated Yaks, goats, camels, and other domesticable wild animals. We need to abandon the assumption of linearity in history, especially if we are to understand how complex pre-metal societies lived, and appreciate what we might learn about ourselves and our capacity to find closeness with nature, each other,r and the land.

    The assumption that the horned deity on the Gundestrup cauldron is sitting is not based on anything written. It is another assumption. The Celts were a stratified people; they left no written records, but they had a complex society and traded and worked metal. They too had arrived from Europe during the Bronze Age collapse.

    Almost everything we know about them comes from the writings of the conquerors and the assumptions of early “archaeologists” and antiquarians who connected Stonehenge with the Celts and blood rites.

    When the food crisis really bites, they will denude nature of all edible plants, and some people will make fatal mistakes. The woods will be full of dead people like the Vance family. 

    An Invitation To Know Nature

    Is the horned god an invitation to sit passively in nature or to join the dance of life with nature? The dance is not that of lutes, whistles, and drums; it is that of knowledge and the wisdom of wilderness. Not an invitation to be some kind of plucky survivor or dystopian survivalist: To know nature is to know oneself and the limitations of humans. Nature humbles us in ways only the skilled outdoor practitioner can know. If your closest encounter with nature is to only passively sit under trees or to lie in a hole in the ground, then the horned god is not for you, and dismissing survival skills is a mistake you only make once in a crisis.

    A true shaman knows nature intimately and would embrace the skills to be there. The horned deity on the Gundestrup cauldron expresses divine ecstasy in nature: “come and join the dance.” While I didn’t use this as a source, I like Ronald Hutton’s approach.

    Ronald Hutton: Resurgence Of The Horned God.

  • A Cautionary Note About Messages of Hope: Good Climate News and Magical Thinking are the same kind of hope.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378016300450

    Who remembers Proff Michael E Mann? “Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?
    Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.

    What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponize environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed, and they fall into despair. But “too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science. Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on Earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/27/climatologist-michael-e-mann-doomism-climate-crisis-interview

    “The podcast where we still believe that another world is possible, and that if we all pull together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations.” Accidental Gods Podcast

    Alaina M Wood, Saccharine Good Climate News

    “Doomism equals inaction” was her mantra, parroting Proff Michael Mann. She publicly condemned disruptive actions, NVDA, Tire Extinguishers, JSO, and Extinction Rebellion. She called her output “lessons” and treats it like evangelizing. Then she called criticism “hate” and went on a rant about climate anxiety.

    It’s a lot of work to debunk these idiot hopium grifters.

    Some of her “Good Climate News” is utter BS and has been debunked by the physicist YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@Thunderf00t. Some of those companies are selling BS Science. Thunderf00t’s main target is Musk & his fawning fans.

    You can make money from hope. This is why the sincerity of those not making money from climate change is more trustworthy. I could write volumes about Proff Michael E. Mann’s unscientific assumptions about doomers’ inaction. I don’t need to. We only have to look at his fawning fans. As for New Age colonialism against indigenous people? It’s all about theft and money—nothing radical or new in reinforcing old capitalist structures of exploitation and neocolonialism, especially when people are paying you for it.

  • UK Government Says to Stockpile Food and Water Because of the Super El Niño

    72 Hours’ Worth of Food and Water is inadequate for the crisis ahead.

    This is where we are now:

    Food banks are irrelevant when there is no surplus food to distribute

    The Starmer government suppressed and heavily redacted parts of a joint intelligence assessment warning that global nature loss and ecosystem collapse pose severe, catastrophic threats to national security. The primary redacted areas covered in the report that have been subsequently leaked:

    Leaked extracts and investigative reports revealed that the censored and abridged portions warned of extreme systemic risks:

    • Nuclear War: The unredacted assessment warned that shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas could cause severe water scarcity, escalating geopolitical tensions between India, China, and Pakistan to the point of potential nuclear exchanges.
    • Mass Migration and UK Politics: Omitted sections detailed how climate-induced global migration would place heavy pressure on British infrastructure and drive a rise in polarised, populist politics domestically.
    • Disease Outbreaks: The suppressed text warned that melting permafrost in boreal forests could release dormant pathogens—specifically noting anthrax—capable of triggering mass mortality events.
    • Ecosystem Tipping Points: The report highlighted that a sixth mass extinction is underway and that critical global ecosystems (including the Amazon, Congo Basin, Himalayas, and Russian/Canadian boreal forests) are on a fast pathway to collapse.
    • Food Security: It emphasised that the UK is dangerously over-dependent on food imports and lacks the domestic land mass required to feed its population and sustain current levels of animal farming.

    The Government is urging households to prepare for Floods, heatwaves, power outages, wildfires, and shortages.

    They are claiming that these issues are caused by El Niño, but the reality is that they are driven by accelerating anthropogenic climate change and our government’s inaction on emissions and climate change. The Emergency plans the government has put forward are inadequate, given the climate risks we face and the levels of denial from both the government and the mainstream prepping community.

    “Emergency supplies“

    Consider what supplies you and your household might need during an emergency lasting a few days. You could consider keeping the following items at home:

    • Battery or wind-up torch
    • Portable power bank for charging your mobile phone
    • Battery or wind-up radio to get updates during a power cut
    • Spare batteries for torch or radio
    • First aid kit
    • Wet wipes and hand sanitiser
    • Bottled water
    • Non-perishable food that does not require cooking (e.g. tinned meat, fruit or vegetables) and a tin opener
    • Baby supplies (e.g. nappies and formula). (obviously not if you are childless)

    All the above can be downloaded from here and are part of the household emergency plan: https://prepare.campaign.gov.uk/get-prepared-for-emergencies/

    Some aspects of the government’s plans are useful for elderly and disabled people.

    The larger majority of what they are suggesting is inadequate because it isn’t just the super El Niño which is impacting agriculture

    Gather important documents into 1 easily grab-able folder in the event that you need to leave your home

    • Passports
    • Birth certificates
    • Marriage Certificates
    • Other essential documents: House deeds; Insurance documents; mortgage documents
    • Written prescriptions

    It’s important to understand the risks in your area:

    • Brush fires
    • Flooding
    • Coastal erosion
    • Sea level rise
    • Large trees

    Go/Grab Bags: If you are ordered to leave your home, a Go/Grab bag is a bag pre-packed with the supplies you will need. This is not a bug-out bag; no one is suggesting that you are going to the wilderness for safety. In fact, if you are being evacuated due to brush fires, the countryside is not safe. If you are on life-saving medication, ensure you have enough with you while you are away. Each family member should have a Go/Grab Bag containing:

    • 2 Power banks (1 family member only)
    • Assorted USB cables (1 family member only)
    • USB rechargeable torch/wind-up torch/
    • Radio/ SDR (1 adult family member only)
    • First Aid Kit (to the standard of your qualification)(1 adult family member only)
    • Soap, hand sanitiser/ toilet roll
    • Bottled water- 3 litres each (3kilos!)
    • Puritabs (water purification tablets) (1 adult family member only)
    • Non-perishable foods: packet rice, dahl and vegetable curry, chocolate, cereal bars, (electrolyte salts: 1 adult family member only), dry fruit in vacuum-packed.
    • Sharpie marker (in the event of a situation in which you may become separated, write Name, DOB, Telephone No on each limb and body of each person.)
    • Premade, laminated name labels: Name, DOB, Telephone No
    • Blanket, sleeping bag, foam mat (cuddly toy for children)
    • Wash kit, small microfibre towel
    • Medication and prescriptions if appropriate
    • Feminine hygiene products- even if you don’t need them
    • Cutlery, Cup & bowl
    • Book, pack of cards or other small packable games
    • UK legal penknife (under 3.5 inches, non-locking)

    Preparing Your Community, Home & Larder

    • Improve home Insulation
    • Long-term storage of water: Use opaque, food-grade MDPE jerrycans and learn how to process dirty water at scale; I cover this in this post.
    • Rainwater harvesting: I can store 2000 L; I am expanding this to 4000 L. Rainwater must be processed for drinking: Puritab and boiled at the very least.
    • Food: Dry goods: Beans, rice, and lentils: 50 kg of each in airtight food-grade buckets; flour; tinned dry yeast, nuts, seeds. dry fruite.
    • Tinned foods: Tinned whole tomatoes, beans, soup, hummus, Baba ganoush, tinned stuffed vine leaves. Buy and store what you like to eat. Ensure there is variety. Flavourings: salt and pepper, herbs & spices. Chocolate and treats are essential
    • If you can afford a solar set-up designed for camping
    • Buy a Dutch oven and learn how to use it; buy/build a pizza oven.
    • Grow a Famine Garden. Silver weed does better in semi-shade
    • In 2025, I experimented with growing corn following the Hopi method. I bought Heirloom Aztec Blue, White, and Red Corn. Change the way you garden.
    • You can either watch your neighbours starve to death, or you can work with them
    • Foraging in an ecological crisis? Be aware of where and what you forage and who is watching.
    • You don’t need a ton of survival gear that preppers tell you you need.
    • DO NOT IMAGINE YOU CAN LIVE OFF THE LAND IN NATURE: Unless you know exactly what you are doing and have done it several times before successfully.

    The National Emergency Briefing does not include how we plan as communities for a food crisis.

    The people who led XR are no longer relevant to the crisis: The ceremonialists don’t think that having some extra food is useful, and their woo is unscientific BS.

    Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Personal Journey Exploring My Own Cognitive Dysfunction and the Stupid Things New Age Practitioners Have Said to Me Since Therapy

    Information You Can Safely Ignore

    Spirituality Grifters and Survival and Preparedness Amateurs Give Stupid and Dangerous Advice

    Good Luck and Good Night!

  • The Crows Know More About You, Your Daily Habits & Whether You Notice Them Than You Could Ever Imagine

    Crows are a hyper-intelligent species with a complex language and an intergenerational storytelling culture that passes information from one generation to the next; it’s all about survival and who they can trust. I once rescued a crow from a cat, and we became great friends; in fact, it wasn’t just the crow who became my friend, but the entire murder. At the time, I was working on a farm as a woodsman, and the farm cat was a bit of a thug. It was holding down this crow, and when I rescued it, I thought the crow was dead. Separating them, I noticed the crow seemed to be in shock, so, talking softly to it, I took it to my workshop and accommodated it in an old toolbox with straw and some scraps of sheep’s wool left over from shearing. I put out some dog food, water, and milk and shut the door for the night.

    In the morning, it sat in the nest I had made, and as I worked on the chairs I was making, it flew up into the rafters, watching everything I did. Satisfied that it was ok I opened the stable top door and went home, leaving it with more food.

    The following day it was gone. I was a little sad; I had enjoyed its chatter, and I had talked to it, telling it what I was doing as I made things in the workshop. It was, in its own Crow way, sociable. The next day there were 3 acorns on the workbench which hadn’t been there the night before. I had always left the workshop upper stable door open, and here was something bringing me acorns. The farmer later said a crow had been flying in and out of the workshop. This was astonishing. A crow was bringing me 3 acorns each day; was it the same crow?

    As the year moved into winter, coppicing resumed, and I was cutting overstood hazel stools and processing the wood. I would stop for lunch, sit on a log and eat sandwiches and eat sandwiches. That’s when I started to acquire a black-feathered companion who would land near me, take food from my hand, and chatter in low, barely audible tones; sometimes 4 or 5 would come. One day, over 20 arrived and hung out with me in the clearing for several hours, quietly chattering among themselves. I fed them shelled sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I did note that their favorite food was bacon rinds and pieces of cooked sausage. This was over 25 years ago.

    I suspect that humans and crows have a long history of co-evolution; we may have cultivated transactional and non-transactional relationships with crows before we moved from living in nature to living under industrial capitalism. Crows and Ravens rank among the most intelligent of birds. “Once disregarded in the world of animal intelligence studies, many crow and raven species are now ranked near primates in terms of cognitive abilities. Wildlife experts John Marzluff and Tony Angell expose crow intelligence in their 2012 book, Gifts of the Crows, writing, “Corvids assume characteristics that were once ascribed only to humans, including self-recognition, insight, revenge, tool use, mental time travel, deceit, murder, language, play, calculated risk-taking, social learning, and traditions. We are different, but by a degree.” Marzluff also led research showing that crows can recognize human faces. https://hraf.yale.edu/the-intelligent-crow-exploring-human-animal-relationships-cross-culturally/

    Crow Vocalizations and Language

    “Crows – there are perhaps as many as 40 species worldwide, including the American crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos – are highly intelligent. Some not only use tools, but create them out of straw, wood, or wire to access food. They also play. Recent research has shown that they employ analogical reasoning and recognize faces of individual people. They have a complex social structure and their nuanced communications reflect that”

    Understanding The Language Of Crows

    Crow Human Communication

    Many people describe situations where they feel they have experienced “conversations” with crows, meaning a back-and-forth exchange of sounds. Do you think crows notice when we vocalize at them and attempt to vocalize back?
    If a person and a crow regularly interact (usually because the person reliably feeds the crows), then it’s fairly common for ritualistic behavior to develop, especially if the behavior is rewarded with food. https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-part-ii-qa/

    Crow Toolmakers

    Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when social traditions accumulate improvements over time. In humans cumulative cultural evolution is thought to depend on a unique suite of cognitive abilities, including teaching, language and imitation. Tool-making New Caledonian crows show some hallmarks of cumulative culture; but this claim is contentious, in part because these birds do not appear to imitate. One alternative hypothesis is that crows’ tool designs could be culturally transmitted through a process of mental template matching. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-27405-1?error=cookies_not_supported&code=12764609-3f04-4535-9107-8e7c92092c61

    The ‘crafting’ of tools involves (i) selection of appropriate raw material, (ii) preparatory trimming and (iii) fine, three-dimensional sculpting. Its evolution is technologically important because it allows the open-ended development of tools. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1809970/

    My Experiences of Crow-Human Communications

    When I say nature is my natural home, It’s where I feel most comfortable. Since the interaction with the crow on the farm, I have continued to have interactions with crows, including observing the death of a Crow and what appeared to be the “paying of respects to the dead and a wake”. I am of the opinion that crows have a complex culture on a par with humans and primates, and the science seems to support that idea. Crows are regarded as magical birds and guardians of the underworld; people are superstitious of them and, without understanding them, have been known to get into difficulties with them. They can be vindictive toward those people who disrespect them, and it may be very difficult to make amends, because once you have upset one crow, they tell their mates and their offspring. The rule of thumb is probably: unless you want a lifetime of trouble, leave them be.

    Building relationships with animals in nature and in the urban environment is deeply rewarding. I have non-transactional friendships with most of the urban foxes in my locality. Non-transactional means that they don’t associate me with food, but when I talk to the foxes, it’s always in a soft, sing-songy voice, greeting them, “Hello, foxy, how are you? And I am rewarded with a moment of eye contact, head cocked to one side and then the other.

    The Birds are the Alarm Call in the Forest, But This Communication Is Also More Complex Than That

    The birds can tell us who is in the woods, where they are, and whether you are in danger. Birdsong is the background chatter during the day, with occasional alarm calls, or the song ceases and the forest falls silent. If the birds know you well in an environment you visit regularly, when you enter, there will be no change in the chatter. When the birds fall silent, it can indicate imminent danger. Sometimes you can enter a wood, and there is no birdsong at all; often that’s an indicator that you shouldn’t be there. Before I knew better, I entered a wood where the birds were not singing; it was silent, eerie. I am glad ~I was with a friend because we discovered a human body, and it hadn’t died naturally. I remember mentioning in my statement to the Police that the forest felt somehow wrong, and the detective interviewing me said he had heard people say that before. It was a lesson to listen to nature.

    I was filming and recording birdsong a couple of years ago in some semi-urban woods. The place was alive with sound, and I was getting the most amazing recording; suddenly, it ceased. I packed up my camera and recording equipment and made ready to leave as I zipped my pack shut. A man in his 30s or 40s, with a dog, walked through the clearing; he didn’t approach me, he acknowledged me, and kept walking. As he passed me, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I started to experience a state of primal fear. I left the area quickly. The last time I had experienced that sensation was while working in psychiatric healthcare in the presence of a diagnosed psychopath. It’s the presence of a human predator that induces fear like that (never ignore those instinctual cues).

    People who reject spending long periods in nature, especially those who profess themselves to be shamans and ceremonialists and constantly talk about the function of their own brains, deprive those who follow them of the richness of what lessons nature and wild animals have to offer. Especially the neuroscience of the connection to nature and its positive effect on mood.

  • Are You a Cli-Fi Thrutopian Climate Fiction Writer or Climate/ Environmental acrivist

    I am offering writers and activists the opportunity to learn skills that connect us to nature. But this offering is more than just another course; it’s an opportunity to understand what it means to receive a teaching that isn’t sold as a product. It is a teaching that is given, and if you find it useful and it inspires you and re-energizes your activism, then I ask that you make a donation in return.

    How can I afford to do this? I have a well-paid job and work a 3-out-of-4-week rotation, so I can offer this on that basis.

    The philosophy behind this offering is simple. Climate action is not about selling a product dressed up as anti-capitalism.

    The concept of Dana (Buddhist giving) is central to organizations like Vipassana Trust. Except I won’t be teaching meditation, though there will be an element of mindfulness. I will be teaching a form of Bushcraft therapy that is accessible and easy to learn. What I will be teaching is evidence-based and has been proven to be a necessary part of adaptation and resilience skills for climate-driven disasters. Preparedness might not necessarily be what inspires authors to write Cli-fi, but it might be something they want to include in their stories.

    I AM NOT TEACHING A FREE SURVIVAL COURSE; THIS IS AIMED AT AUTHORS WRITING INSPIRATIONAL FICTION BASED ON FACTUAL INFORMATION

    & ACTIVISTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION. IT’S FOR CLIMATE ACTIVISTS WHO DON’T WANT TO DO CULTURALLY APPROPRIATED NEOSHAMANIC WOO.

    Preparedness skills are a proven asset to respond during and in the aftermath of climate-driven catastrophe

    The devastation caused by Hurricane Helene left entire communities cut off from services for weeks. Local preparedness and survival practitioners, through mutual aid, were able to mount Search and Rescue operations independent of government organizations. People with experience in wood processing, water purification, and medical and first-aid skills were included in the mutual aid Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). Starlink and Meshtastic Networks were used to ensure survivors could inform relatives that they were okay via email or SMS.

    “Interoperability, Communications, and Data: A complete communications blackout revealed significant vulnerabilities in backup systems and highlighted insufficient integration of satellite-based alternatives. System interoperability challenges and unprecedented levels of disinformation further complicated response efforts.

    Logistics and Resource Allocation: Fragmented tracking systems and technology failures hindered efficient resource management, while inadequate pre-positioning of supplies and limited vendor agreements impacted timely resource deployment, particularly in the western region. https://www.ncdps.gov/division/emergency-management/ts-helene-after-action-review/open

    Hurricane Katrina seems like a long time ago. Yet another grassroots organization, the Cajun Navy, began as an informal network of private boat owners, fishermen, and volunteers in Louisiana who mobilized their own vessels to rescue residents trapped by floodwaters. It consisted of sport fishermen who used their boats to coordinate rescues and distribute food and water.

    Readiness For Any Future

    Readiness for any future is based on mutual aid and community solidarity.

    Breaking the capitalist model of climate education: “The story of the Children’s Fire was passed to our Founder Mac Macartney by his indigenous mentors on a moonlit night in the winter of 1984 and is a central principle of Embercombe’s work in the world. The story goes that the elders of a long-gone people came to understand that human institutions needed to reflect the balance and wisdom observable in nature. They made a pledge to the young of all species: No law, no decision, no action of any kind shall be taken that will harm the children, now or ever.” But somehow capitalism remains central to Embercombe‘s operations. https://www.embercombe.org/founding-principles

    Courses at Embercombe are extremely expensive, and this reinforces the commercialization of indigenous wisdom, apparently given freely by Indigenous Elders. It’s irrelevant that the project is a Charity. I am not suggesting a donation amount; I am simply offering a learning process that I hope will inspire future Cl-fi authors to view preparedness realistically rather than ritualizing it as pseudo-spirituality, and to see it applied in real-life scenarios and climate-driven disasters, such as the examples given. I have Search and Rescue (SAR), First Aid, and Mental Health First Aid Training and have been directly involved in SAR operations in the UK.

    Decommercialisation Breaks the Capitalist Model

    Nature Connection can’t be sold as a product because its benefits aren’t immediately evident to the learner. Following the example of the Vipassana Trust. The Dana model is meant to decommercialize the basic learning process; instead of the learner being fixated on whether this is value for money, they are free of that preconception, allowing them to open themselves to nature and learn in a prosocial environment. Prosocial, cooperative learning in nature has been shown to trigger the release of oxytocin, the hormone associated with creating community and social bonding. In nature, the brain naturally produces serotonin, and learning practical, hands-on skills in nature produces dopamine.

    While this is not a full survival course, you may learn some of these skills on your 1-day session:

    This is a hands-on 1-day session taking place on the Edge of Oxford. Participants would be advised to bring/wear waterproofs, clothing for warm and cold weather, and good shoes for walking/outdoor work. Bring a packed lunch and suitable snacks to last the day. I will provide tea, coffee, and herbal teas as well as other snacks (Biscuits) and fruit. Parking options are limited; Oxford has an excellent park-and-ride service.

    Course Dates: Courses are taught in the winter to avoid extreme heat. You can email me at info [@] solidarityprepping.co.uk

    The response will come from a ProtonMail email address

    October 14th 2026

    November 12th 2026

    December 9th 2026

    January 6th 2026

  • While Neo-Shamans Pilfer the Ceremonies of Indigenous People, I Ask: What Could We Learn From Indigenous People without being Neocolonial?

    The Indigenous people of North America, Canada, Australia, Amazonia, and the Arctic have requested that New Agers and Shamanic Practitioners cease appropriating their ceremonies, rituals, and symbolic paraphernalia. There is good reason for this request, which I will go into in detail later on in this post so that there is a detailed analysis and understanding of what appropriation is and what is acceptable to cultures, especially those which have been subject to colonialism and genocide.[1]

    What if we were to stop for a moment and ask:

    What Could We Learn From Indigenous people without being neocolonially appropriated, and perhaps we could share it back with them without being patronizing

    The answer would probably surprise most people. This is because they have a preconceived idea that most indigenous people live in the Stone Age, and that they might lose the luxury advantage that fossil fuel-based industrial capitalism gives them. But at the same time, industrial capitalism and conspicuous consumption leave us spiritually impoverished and in search of meaning in an increasingly isolating and meaningless world of work, consume, and die.

    The Deep Ecology Movement and Earth First Appropriation of Indigenous wisdom without attribution is neocolonialism: “Gary Snyder is considered an ‘elder’ within the Deep Ecology movement. His Pulitzer Prize-winning book Turtle Island borrowed its title from a Native American name for North America. Snyder hoped to promote what he took to be native wisdom regarding the sacrality of the landscape, believing that ultimately all people are capable of becoming psychologically and spiritually Native American. During his most formative years, a Native American path was inaccessible to him, so he went to Japan to study Zen Buddhism, eventually calling himself ‘a practicing Buddhist, or Buddhist-shamanist’.”[2], If that sounds familiar: Celtic Shamanism is deeply influenced by Plum Village Zen Buddhism. I covered this topic here: Civilization Collapse: Do We Need to Evolve Before We Adapt? Or Will A Land-Based Spirituality Emerge As We Adapt?

    “Snyder was subsequently criticized for ‘cultural imperialism in the adoption of the persona of a white shaman/healer’. He responded that shamanism is a universal cultural experience, is not ‘proprietary . . . to any one culture’, and is found everywhere throughout most of pre-history, not only among Native Americans.” [2] This should also sound familiar. This is exactly what anthropologist Michael Harner advocated in his book Core Shamanism.

    “He (Snyder) argues that many Native American stories, like the trickster and the woman who married the Bear… are found all over the world. Nobody owns them. It’s only a lack of [a global] perspective that would make people think such things are their own property.”[2]

    “I have previously labeled Earth First!’s religious orientation ‘primal spirituality’ because many within this subculture venerate and seek to learn from and emulate the world’s remaining indigenous cultures, especially those cultures unassimilated into the global market economy. They generally consider such cultures to be spiritually and ecologically wise. The desire of many deep ecologists to learn from indigenous cultures produces an impulse to borrow ritual practices.”[2]

    “Everyone is Indigenous from somewhere.”

    “In Germany, I encountered another example of how activists may lay performative claim on indigeneity—an example that both blurs and challenges the more puritanical ideas about cultural appropriation that one can find among activists, and questions the limits of self-determination in auto-identification processes.”[2] English Fascists think they are indigenous English and regularly petition the UN for recognition.

    I am acutely aware of my part in talking about what we can learn from indigenous peoples in the context of “projected anti-civilizational sentiments onto the life-making projects of indigenous peoples, who came to serve as a model for a life beyond capitalist civilization. Hence, activists’ interest in indigenous peoples’ resource struggles not only reflected their supposed promise of successful resistance to extractivism, but also—increasingly—entailed an imaginary of indigenous peoples as closer to nature, and an imitation of their life skills as the promise for surviving the climate catastrophe.”[2] Hence the cliche’d trope of “plucky humans roaming the post collapse landscape” “Some German activists were even laying performative claim on indigeneity.” [2] Not unlike those who promote Celts as Britain’s original indigenous people, when in actual fact they too were immigrants who arrived from Southern Europe during the Bronze Age collapse. Instead of shying away from these moments, upholding a false authority by shielding ourselves from these uncomfortable translations, we could instead consider them as productive forms of “ontological anarchy”

    Corn!

    Mexico’s lower house has constitutionally banned the planting of genetically modified (GM) corn. This move follows a prior ruling against Mexico’s GM corn restrictions, which were deemed scientifically unsubstantiated. The reform solidifies previous measures that protect native corn and traditional agriculture. This constitutional mandate aims to ensure biosafety and preserve Mexico’s biocultural heritage. https://www.agroberichtenbuitenland.nl/actueel/nieuws/2025/03/21/mexico-approves-constitutional-ban-on-planting-genetically-modified-corn

    In 2025, I experimented with growing corn following the Hopi method. I bought Heirloom Aztec Blue, White, and Red Corn and planted them in 2 lines:

    • One line was planted like agricultural corn at a depth of 1-2 inches. It grew to about 6 feet tall, produced leggy roots at the base, and yielded only a few ears of corn.
    • The other line was planted following the Hopi Method in 12-16-inch-deep holes in groups of 7-10 corn kernels. I dug down into the soil of my garden until I hit the damp, heavy clay. These corn plants were 8-10 feet tall and highly productive.
    • I followed the Native Trio Method: Corn, Beans, and Squash (pumpkin) with the addition of the existing clover.

    I noted with some surprise that the roots of the clover I plant and allow to colonize my vegetable plot have a vast root system with nodules that “fix” Nitrogen into the soil.

    I had spent several years building a deep humus layer with wood chips, homemade compost, and certain wild weeds I collect just before they flower to mulch into my soil, importing trace elements into the soil from deep-rooted wild weed plants which draw up trace elements from the deep soil: Copper, selenium, zinc, and other micronutrients. I also ferment urea in straw to make a nitrogen-fast feed compost. This is a simple, accessible regenerative practice for most gardeners. Most tree surgeons are happy to give away woodchip. Also, Ramiel wood, and I have found that the fastest-to-decompose material in the garden is coppiced spring growth from Elder trees because those shoots are not woody and break down quickly. As soon as the corn was harvested, the stalks were cut directly onto the garden.

    The deep purple Aztec corn was the only one to maintain a single colour on the ear. The Rhite Red and Yellow corns produced multicolored cobs, but the quality was consistent throughout, producing plump kernels I was able to grind into meal and flour. I added some of the flour to the bread flour and made an acceptable loaf. I made polenta and thickened a stew with it.

    The by-product was this wand made from a Black Corn cob after the kernels were extracted. I was also able to make cordage from the husk. The Corn Silk has various medicinal properties: “Corn silk (Stigma maydis) is an important herb used traditionally by the Chinese and Native Americans to treat many diseases. It is also used as traditional medicine in many parts of the world such as Turkey, the United States, and France. Its potential antioxidant and healthcare applications as a diuretic agent, for reducing hyperglycemia, as an antidepressant, and for anti-fatigue use have been reported in several studies. Other uses of corn silk include teas and supplements to treat urinary-related problems. The potential use is very much related to the properties and mechanism of action of its plant’s bioactive constituents, such as flavonoids and terpenoids. As such, this review will cover research findings on the potential applications of corn silk in healthcare, including its phytochemical and pharmacological activities. In addition, the botanical description and its toxicological studies are also included.” Caution: It should be used under the direction of a qualified medical herbalist and avoided if pregnant. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6268265/

    Permaculturists have promoted the Native Trio planting method for at least 30 years, with attribution.

    The Native Wisdom Grift

    Indigenous Perspectives on the New Age

    “Hopi elders have repeatedly stated that outsider doomsday predictions misrepresent their teachings, which focus on living in balance (qatsi) rather than predicting exact cosmic calendar dates or destructive finales. What is clear is that the Hopi have remained loyal to their original covenant (their traditional teachings and their contract with the land). The Red and Blue Kachinas are white fabrications, exploitative and not rooted in any Hopi Traditions and teachings.  “Robert Morning Sky, along with David Icke, Zecharia Sitchin, and Erich Von Däniken, are the creators of the world’s biggest money-grabbing fraud within ufology. They are all really wealthy men, and they have made millions off lying to people and brainwashing them with lies. This is the sad reality of ufology.” https://ufologyexposed.blogspot.com/2013/03/debunking-terra-papers-by-robert.html

    “The indigenous experience of white exploitation continues today. The New Age has morphed into a whole new era of exploitation and theft: The Neoshaman, or Urban Shaman, will claim lineage, tradition, and permission, irrespective of whether any is given or not. They lay claim to prophecy while viewing it through a monolithic Judeo-Christian lens. Few realize that the Literary and Academic works by Mircea Eliade and the highly influential (though later controversial) books of Carlos Castaneda popularised the archetype of the shaman as a figure of ultimate wisdom, as did Michael Harner. Castaneda later admitted Don Juan was a fabrication. Harner invited Castaneda to speak at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, starting a tradition that continues today of fraud shamans promoting other fraud shamans.” Koyaanisqatsi: Compound Hopi word meaning “life out of balance”

    “Indigenous communities across the globe have been impacted by cultural appropriation. Sun dances from Native America are now ‘Self-exploration’ Workshops; Native Taiwanese tribal dances are performed for tourists rather than during their relevant spiritual festivals; and the Uluru Trek — a sacred site — has been stripped of its significance for tourists’ enjoyment. While some of this is done by the native populations, many of the cultures do not have a choice: it is either profit from cultural appropriation or let those outside your culture profit from the appropriation.” https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/sustainability/when-culture-becomes-commodity-explaining-cultural-appropriation/

    Embercombe, The Children’s Fire: Another For-Profit Appropriation: Primarily for Well-Heeled White People

    There is no conversation around Embercombe and the appropriation of indigenous wisdom for profit centers on a systemic critique of Western eco-retreats that commercialize traditional ecological and spiritual teachings. Critics and indigenous advocates argue that when non-indigenous organizations utilize indigenous narratives—such as Embercombe’s foundational “Children’s Fire” concept, which founder Mac Macartney credits to indigenous mentors—as core marketing and operational philosophies for high-priced personal growth programs, it doesn’t risk crossing the line from appreciation into exploitative cultural commodification. It has already crossed that line, and everyone trained at Embercomb will cross it too, because that is the model they have been subconsciously taught under.

    It’s Only A Whistle, No, It’s Laziness and Cultural Appropriation

    My wife told me that a friend was doing a Sundance as part of her training as a Shamanic Practitioner-healer and needed to make a whistle. It’s not something I have really ever done; whistle-making is one of those things, like spoon-making, that bushcraft trainers offer as part of a bushcraft/survival course. I often think it’s because they lack the actual experience to teach a proper survival course. I felt a bit put out. I made a few whistles as an example from Elder. I also looked into the cultural appropriation of Sundance. She came over for tea and seemed in a hurry; she wasn’t interested in learning anything. I asked if they would be piercing her flesh with sharpened sticks; she looked horrified. I questioned her about whether it was cultural appropriation; she gaslit me, trying to sow doubt about whether it was or wasn’t, and it felt disingenuous. Then said she didn’t have time to learn how to make a whistle. The whole thing makes me feel quite sick. I posted on FB about Plastic Shaman, and my wife said some of our friends might find it offensive. I told her how I felt about the whistle, and how her friend tried to gaslight me about the cultural appropriation. At that point, my wife said she agreed with me. She then said she understood why I wouldn’t talk about the EMDR Therapy I had had for PTSD when asked.

    References

  • Solidarity Prepping Is Positopian Preparedness

    So what is Solidarity Prepping?

    From the Collapse Club Library: https://publish.obsidian.md/collapseclub/Prepping/Solidarity+Prepping+-+An+Introduction#Examples

    “Being prepared is an antidote to fear. If we are prepared, we have the “ability to act” during a crisis. We are not helpless, at the mercy of circumstances and other people’s actions. We reclaim our agency and our independence. And when we have managed our fear, we can resist the forces of domination and division that threaten to take control of our societies.

    Solidarity Prepping is not about an imaginary future when things will “return to normal.” It’s about the present, when our society is collapsing and when crises are appearing with ever-increasing frequency. Being prepared lets us live better today, because we have put our fear to rest. And if a crisis does happen, we can respond better in that moment.”

    “The organizers of Kollapscamp, Tadzio Müller and Scully (Cindy Peter), advocate self-education and social organizing among leftists to respond to disasters and political repression. Their program includes skills such as growing food, advanced first aid, off-grid power, radio communications, and self-defense. Most important are the relationships formed while learning these skills. Also, having fun is central to the concept: Kollapscamp included a workshop called ‘Having sex while the world burns.’ See blogs from Tadzio and Scully. [German]”

    Solidarity Prepping: Why I Will Keep Explaining What Solidarity Prepping Is.

    “Solidarity Prepping is founded on NVDA, Survivalism, Collapse Club, Just Collapse, Sufi philosophy, and Radical Acceptance.”

    Core Principles of Solidarity Prepping

    Solidarity prepping (or positopian prepping) is a community-focused approach to disaster readiness that emphasizes mutual aid, resource sharing, and long-term sustainability, rather than isolation and self-defense.

    Traditional “survivalism” often focuses on individual hoarding and fortifying a bunker against others. In contrast, solidarity prepping operates on the belief that humanity’s greatest asset for survival is cooperation.

    • 👥 Mutual Aid: Building strong local networks to ensure no one is left behind during a crisis.
    • 🌱 Regenerative Practices: Sharing knowledge on community gardening, seed saving, and water harvesting.
    • 🛠️ Skill Sharing: Teaching neighbors medical first aid, amateur radio operation, and mechanical repair.
    • 🏗️ Dual-Use Infrastructure: Developing resources that improve daily life today while building resilience for tomorrow.
    • 🌍 Inclusivity: Ensuring preparation plans actively include vulnerable, elderly, or disabled community members.

    Key Differences in Approach Between Traditional Prepping and Solidarity/Positopian Prepping

    FeatureTraditional PreppingSolidarity / Positopian Prepping
    Primary FocusIndividual / Family survivalHousehold/ Neighbourhood / Community resilience
    Security StrategyFortification and weaponrySocial cohesion and trust, coupled with community-based defense
    Resource ModelStockpiling and hoardingDistributed networks and skill-sharing as well as stockpiling
    View of FutureSudden Dystopian collapseSlow deteriorating climate & ecology requiring achievable adaptation

    The key difference between Solidarity/Post-Apocalyptic Preparedness and Mainstream Prepping (with notable exceptions) lies in politics and beliefs. The majority of doomsday mainstream preppers have a preconceived idea that collapse will be sudden and dystopian. They struggle to conceive a slow decline. They largely ignore or dismiss climate change or think it’s BS.

    Where to Start

    • Meet your neighbors & do a skills audit: Know who has medical skills, tools, and other skills: survival skills, food growing, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, chainsaw operators.
    • Map local resources: Identify nearby freshwater sources, community gardens, solar power installations, boreholes.
    • Organize tool libraries: Share expensive equipment such as power tools & generators. (NOT Chainsaws).
    • Host skill-share days: Identify those who can teach: Survival skills and strategies, Food Growing, food preservation, basic sewing, bike repair. Use public spaces for this.
    • Centralize Drinking Water Production: Safe water processing is safer if done centrally based on the Solidarity Prepping Model and by skilled practitioners.
    • Learn to Scavenge Resources: I have been scavenging from skips all my life; even now I get food from a Hipster shop skip.
    • Identify People with Survival & Search and Rescue Skills: People with survival and search-and-rescue skills in your community group are an asset because they bring a rare level of resilience and resourcefulness.
    • Everyone Should Learn First Aid: The entire community should have basic 1st aid qualification

    Positopian Preparedness

    Everything that Solidarity Prepping Is NOT: “Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet “preppers,” a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7319408/

    Solidarity Prepping is the opposite of everything the Far-Right Prepper is. The Solidarity Prepper isn’t just looking for an alternative “to the neoliberal security state”; we live it daily. Mainstream prepping is a consumer pastime, often dependent on gadgets and products that can help them survive a short-term collapse, in the hope that a stronger, more authoritarian state takes control. There is often a disconnect between what they fantasize about and what they can realistically achieve in the paradigm they inhabit. For example: Wanting to live in community off the grid, but being unable to sort out personal differences in the way that hippies seem able to without resorting to violence. They are aware that survival in community is necessary but seem unable to achieve it. They despise wokeness, without seeing that tolerance, diversity, and inclusion help build bridges between people.

    Solidarity Prepping: Why I Will Keep Explaining What Solidarity Prepping Is, because it’s important that people ignore the assumptions: “Plucky humans roaming the post-collapse landscape.” (another projection) Not something I have ever advocated, even though I have written posts about it: Post-Agricultural Collapse: Human Survival Is Dependent On Nature Survival, But Will Humans Hunt and Gather?

    “While the idea that humans might hunt and gather, in the wake of civilization collapse, might seem romantic, I find this unlikely due to the lack of skill, knowledge, and the resistance to change from diverse corners of society, including those who claim to want radical change but really only want to reform capitalism. Reformed Capitalism, is still Capitalism, whether it is run based on Celtic, Roman, neoliberal, or Marxist Ideas of Capitalist ethics or not. It is more likely that the final days of this civilization’s collapse present any opportunity for human survival; it will be luck whether anyone with the skills to survive will be there to help, and survival will be more a matter of luck than skill.”

    As for the speculative science: Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization. “Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-term extremes of climate change, aggressive population-reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507

    I suspect this notion terrifies some people, especially those lacking the most basic skills, like growing food, and now we have to adjust to a new way of growing food to suit the post-Anthropocene climate. A global climate beyond 1.5°C will be characterized by heatwaves every summer, droughts, and an ever-increasing probability of AMOC collapse. AMOC collapse will destroy agriculture in Northern Europe. Any food we grow in Britain post-AMOC collapse will be at a micro scale.

    “Being prepared is an antidote to fear. If we are prepared, we have the “ability to act”

  • The Realities and Rewards of Skip Diving Before It Was A Literary Genre in Cli-Fi

    In mid-April 1996, I was finishing a degree in Human Geography at Middlesex University. I was asked by a friend to attend an “action” planning meeting for TLIO (The Land Is Ours) at the Battlebridge Ecology Center in King’s Cross, London. The Battlebridge Ecology Center in King’s Cross was a pioneering environmental hub built in 1992, but it no longer exists. Constructed on Battlebridge Road by the Community Creation Trust, it was the largest ecology center in Europe at the time. It featured eco-housing for homeless youth, gardens, ponds, and the Last Platform Café, but was later demolished to make way for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link redevelopment. When I arrived, the warehouse was a hive of activity. Yurts were being constructed, and wood construction materials collected from London’s skips were being denailed. I was ushered into a small room where Simon Fairlie, Bill Knight, George Monbiot and a few others were gathered to talk logistics for the upcoming action on the 5th of May 1996. This was going to be my 2nd foray into NVDA and land-based actions, which highlighted the importance of the dispossessed in the environmental movement.

    My background prior to university was hospitality. I am a trained chef with 10 years’ experience in high-end establishments serving gourmet cuisine. They needed a quartermaster to organize the pallet of donated food and vegetables and to organize vegetarian meals for the 1st week. There was approximately £1000 worth of food donated by a whole-foods wholesaler moving to Bristol, and it was end-of-line, discontinued wastage. There was also about 30 kg of donated vegetables. I was ushered into the kitchen store and shown the food. My guide said I was the only person who had looked at the pile of food and seemed undaunted by it; everyone else had changed their mind at the last minute, backing out of volunteering. The 1st thing I said we needed was a lockable metal trunk which would be rat-proof, and I knew exactly where one was, but it required a trip to my parents’ house in Kent. A lockable trunk meant I could ensure the high-value foods like chocolate, halva, and almond butter would last the week as well.

    I also had plans to attend a secret tribal gathering for Beltane at Thieves’ Copse in Sherwood Forest. With the scantest information as to the location of the copse on National Trust land, I was let off the lorry I had hitched a ride on from London at the edge of the forest. I used my tracking skills to search for the telltale signs of a camp. Looking for high ground to let me see over the trees, I looked for smoke. It was a windless day, which meant that a column of smoke would rise straight up and not be blown into the dense pines and dissipate among the trees. I had been trained in advanced wilderness search and rescue; now the skills I used to help lost people became my navigation tools to a Beltane gathering like no other I would ever attend again. I set a compass bearing and headed toward the smoke, pretty much “as the crow flies”. After the Beltane celebrations, we cleared the camp, including hiding the firepit so it was indistinguishable from the surrounding grass; I was bundled into a hippie van and off to London.

    May 4th, 1996: Day zero, the kitchens of the Battle Bridge Center in Kings Cross were a hive of activity. The organization of the food pallet into 2 galvanized metal trunks fitted with locks, and the cooking of 100 portions of vegetable stew for delivery to the Pure Genius, Wandsworth Eco-Village. By day 2, the vegetables were used up, and we started going skip diving. Within a kilometer of the Eco-Village were several large supermarkets.

    At one point, someone asked me why the boxes were locked — because it’s everyone’s food. I agreed; it was everyone’s food, but to make it last and distribute it fairly, locking the boxes was necessary. I also said I was happy to open the boxes at any time as long as people didn’t just take all the nice things. I left after the 1st week of the occupation. The site was invaded by London’s drug users, and they raided all the easy food from the boxes, like biscuits, chocolate and halva, and left a mess. Those still living on the site eventually threw them out: The term Camp-Fascist became synonymous with those of us who didn’t tolerate the alcoholics and heroin users and spongers who turned up at these protest camps, ate the food, and did nothing to contribute.

    Skip Diving (Dumpster Diving)

    Food waste is nothing new; large Supermarkets throw vast quantities of good food away simply to make room for new stock, and they don’t want anyone to know this, let alone go freebie shopping in their skips. Some supermarkets have compactor skips which compact the food into an area inaccessible to people. Compactor skips can crush people who climb into them and should be avoided, even if they contain rich pickings. The compactor is not predictable.

    Skipped food was a staple of the 1990s environmental campaigner; occasionally we would arrive to see the manager pouring bleach or other noxious substances all over the food. This, on the odd occasion, could lead to a disruptive action leading to negotiated access. At the Wandsworth Eco-village, we were sometimes feeding families from the estate across the road.

    On the Newbury Bypass Protest, many of the town’s shop skips were left unlocked, and we never left a mess. My favorite was Thorntons’ skip! Chocolate with that tell-tale white blush of leaching fats, perfectly edible and delicious. I suspect many of those shops feared the hippies in the trees might turn up and ruin their business for a day. I never imagined that skip diving would become a literary genre.

    It’s now September 2026. My 24-year-old civil engineer son turns aluminum foil food containers into beautiful embossed pictures, which he stitches onto card and presents to us for birthdays. The cameras I use to make the films on my ~ YouTube channel, including the video below, are retrieved from a charity shop skip and repaired by me. I built a greenhouse in my garden to grow strawberries, and all the wood and polycarbonate multiwall sheets came from a skip, which I carried home on my bike trolley (I don’t even own a car). The Trolley is also made from reclaimed waste. Most of my bicycles are 2nd hand.

    The wood for the greenhouse came from a building site up the road, and the builder was intrigued to see me load it onto my bicycle with some home-made modifications.

    I still get food from skips, but I am a discerning skip-diver. I never get into the skip. There is a high risk of injury, especially from unseen broken glass and nails. I avoid bread because even if it looks ok and isn’t visibly moldy, it’s already growing the mold mycelium. Soft fruits like strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries are also avoided because they are often near-rotten. My favorite local spot is the hipster shop; they sell organic fruit and vegetables and seem to throw vast amounts in their compost bin. I occasionally empty their entire bin into one of my trolley boxes to add to my own compost heap!

    Skipped Electronics

    Most of this blog is written on a computer retrieved from a skip, with the hard drive reformatted and the operating system set to Debian Linux. The same is true of my Laptop.

    Skip Diving as a Cli Fi

    The writing of this blog was inspired by a blog post by Author Joanne O’Connell on the Climate Fiction Writers League Blog about her debut novel, Beauty and the Bin. It was this excerpt from the novel that caught my eye:

    ‘Can I get into the actual bin?’ asked Fern, jumping up and down on the spot. Her bracelets, home-made from bottle tops, jangled loudly. ‘Like properly inside it? And throw things over to you?’

    Handling waste, building materials, and polycarbonate sheets comes with risks. I have cut-resistant Kevlar gloves for exactly this. I have already mentioned the dangers of getting into skips, especially compactors. Aside from this, I largely agree with the author about supermarkets.

    “I have ethical qualms about shopping in a supermarket, and it’s not even cheap – so for a year I’m buying in bulk and going local” https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2012/may/21/giving-up-supermarket-shop

    But for most working-class people, including myself, there is little choice, and today shops like Home Bargains offer a variety of cut-price basics which tie people to the out-of-town supermarket. Today, very few people forage nettles, have access to land, and have the time to grow vegetables. In a cost-of-living crisis, many families not only live paycheck to paycheck but also work 2 jobs just to cover the cost of living and are using food banks.

    Where I live, allotments are in high demand and waiting lists are long, and it can take years before you get anywhere near the land.

    I Don’t Own a Car

    By not owning a car, I save between £3,500 and £8,000 per year and don’t have to account for the car’s emissions from manufacturing and use. As a family, we have never owned a car. How do we do it? The bike and trolley are our main mode of moving stuff, whether it is pilfered veg waste for compost or the monthly shop. Larger things? We are part of a community of friends who really do help each other and do favors, including moving large items by car or van. Even being carless is a challenge for many people; cars are ubiquitous, and not having one is weird, and people have said this to me. I don’t care.

    The reality of living well without a car, while eating locally produced food, some of which I produce myself, like Shii Take (Japanese Forest) Mushrooms, takes some logistical juggling. All 12 1-m-long logs were transported by trolley out of the woods to my home, where they were inoculated with spawn.

    Repurposing Rubbish and Obsolete Technology

    The author butchers an old boiler to provide hot water to a camp kitchen at an arts camp.

    The shower’s boiler system at that same arts camp: Built from a combination of reused and new parts. These types of backwoods engineering skills are part of DIY culture, which emerged in the 1990s protest movement. This boiler system operates entirely without electric pumping. Next year, it will be a radical off-grid solar thermal setup.

    Skip Diving is About Way More than Just Food.

    Skip diving and waste repurposing are important climate-friendly skills. It’s not just food, as this blog post and my lifestyle attest. I live this every day. I don’t pass a skip without glancing over to see what is in it. Here is a list of things I have retrieved from skips:

    • Photovoltaic Panels: 1 Solar Century 40Wp 6V roof tile. 2 Thin-film trickle chargers. A 70Wp Shell Solar unframed experimental sprayed-on thin-film photovoltaic (Shell Mothballed the Factory).
    • Multiple computer cooling fans
    • 3 computers, screens, and other computing peripherals
    • Sony Camcorder
    • Digital SLR
    • Enough Wood to build a house
    • Antique bathroom sinks
    • Belfast sinks
    • Radio-controlled car (working)
    • Organic fruit and vegetables, especially garlic
    • Push-fit plumbing pipe and connectors
    • copper pipe
    • Assorted tools and tool bags
    • Metal shelving
    • DAB Radio
    • CB Radio
    • Walkie-talkies (working)
    • Telescope
    • Binoculars
    • Bronze Desk Light
    • Brass Gladiator figurine on a brass base — in my garden by the pond
    • See-saw (that came floating down the canal)
    • Assorted unwanted decorative plants
    • Gas Boiler (see above)
    • Hot water cylinder (see the showers)
    • Meters and meters of wire
    • Garden Compost bin
    • Garden Water Butt
    • Bricks

  • Solidarity Prepping: We Are Preparing For A Civilisation Terminal Collapse

    Core Skills: Survivalism is NOT hunting and gathering; survivalism is adaptation to climate change.

    Water Collection, storage & purification for human consumption.

    This subject is covered in my post on Water Collection and Purification.

    Shelter construction/ adapting your home for extreme climate

    Insulate your home. If you can afford external wall insulation, it’s a huge advantage. Insulate Britain were correct; their tactics were suspect.

    Food: What will we eat when agriculture collapses

  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Personal Journey Exploring My Own Cognitive Dysfunction and the Stupid Things New Age Practitioners Have Said to me Since Therapy

    I used to be a nurse. I am one of many who were assaulted at work. This happens daily across the NHS and private sector, and assailants cannot always be prosecuted. I was in mental health nursing.

    “Violence toward mental health staff has been receiving national attention in the face of diminishing resources to treat what appears to be an increasingly violent patient population. Assaults by psychiatric patients against mental health care providers are both a reality and a concern, as the effects of violence can be devastating to the victim. Some staff rationalize that violence is an occupational hazard and believe that they are equipped to cope with it.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3074201/

    “Any harmful act, physical, sexual, or psychological, committed against nurses in the workplace by a patient or visitor is called workplace violence (WPV) against nurses. WPV is directly related to decreasing job satisfaction, burnout, humiliation, guilt, emotional stress, intention to quit a job, and increased staff turnover.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9536186/

    “More than nine in ten nurses and midwives have experienced physical violence while doing their jobs, according to data released by UNISON and Nursing Times today (Tuesday). 90%

    The abuse includes NHS staff being punched, bitten, spat at, choked, headbutted and even stabbed – with the violence occurring daily for one in eleven (9%).

    Around one in six (17%) nurses or midwives said they’d experienced violence in the previous week. More than six in ten (63%) had been attacked within the preceding 12 months.

    The findings are based on a joint survey by UNISON and Nursing Times of more than 1,000 nursing and midwifery staff and students across the UK.

    The vast majority (93%) said they had experienced physical violence in the workplace. Almost nine in ten (89%) of these reported that the incidents involved patients, while almost a fifth (19%) had been victims of attacks by patients’ families or other visitors.” https://unison.org.uk/press/2025/03/nurses-and-midwives-subjected-violence-work-daily-basis

    I believed that I could “rationalize that violence” as an occupational hazard until it made me ill. I was assaulted a few months before the pandemic, took six weeks off, and returned to work and into lockdown — the perfect storm. Slowly deteriorating mental health, increased frustration and aggression from patients. The wards were locked down too.

    Violence was not something I hadn’t experienced before; it was a commonplace occurrence to be threatened, abused, spat at, things thrown, including bodily fluids and faeces. We recorded these, updated patient risk profiles, and got on with the business of care. Few people I know, especially my now-non-healthcare colleagues in my new role, grasp what my job was like and what we did under extremis. I have had to work in a caring role with sex offenders and people whom I would rather never run into on the street. I’m not going to say that I was unlucky; the statistics do not agree: “More than nine in ten nurses and midwives have experienced physical violence”, UNISON. That’s 90% of frontline healthcare staff! But some senior colleagues had a different opinion. “You were just unlucky” became one of the most annoying, dismissive, commonplace comments; I even believed them.

    PTSD isn’t always as straightforward as people suggest. On psychiatric wards, we carry alarms. I was already in a situation where a patient was squaring up to me. He had been behaving erratically all day, and the Agency nurses didn’t want to move him to the de-escalation area because it would be too much work. The intermittent alarm was going off. I had set it off, and as the situation escalated, I set off the full alarm and watched my colleagues do nothing:

    This is what is known as the freeze response.

    I don’t really remember much of what happened next. But I do remember the colleagues lying about what happened in the aftermath. I was rescued by other patients, not colleagues. I wasn’t very pleasant to some of those colleagues, and I think they deserved to be called liars.

    When I returned to work after counseling (?), it was straight into the pandemic.

    After the pandemic, I was off sick for about a year; then I had CBT therapy, which did not work. I was redeployed to a new role, and that was when I discovered I had what seemed like a brain injury and real difficulty getting a diagnosis, but I was also on the staff psychology waiting list again.

    You can self-diagnose PTSD, but it won’t be on your medical record; you can’t get therapy for it. PTSD is a disability, but you don’t get much support apart from priority interviews. If you use it to get a priority interview and your new employer asks for a medical report

    Could I Draw A Clock?

    Mine looked like “e”, I struggled to learn anything new. I was off work for another year. Then I was treated by a psychologist, and we did EMDR, and I won’t be describing any aspect of this treatment.

    I did have a mild brain injury: It gave me a hypersensitive sense of smell.

    “PTSD is what happens when traumatic stress doesn’t go away, when it festers and expands and eventually stabilizes into a more enduring state of distress,” Bonanno writes in his book, The End of Trauma. But events themselves are poor predictors of their emotional aftermath. Both trauma and PTSD are “dynamic states with fuzzy boundaries that unfold and change over time”. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/14/trauma-mental-health

    The PTSD brain is totally busy and running survival mode, interrupted by flashbacks, loud noises, and sudden movement in your vicinity. Someone shouting in the street can trigger a change in awareness from relaxed to vigilant. Hyper-vigilance is exhausting. The nightmares are exhausting.

    My mother developed a dementia related psychosis while I was ill. A failing psychiatric NHS service that is trying to shirk responsibility does not like people who understand 1983 mental health inside out, and that my mother was detainable and it was in her best interest to be assessed. In fact, at Pembury Hospital, a neurologist saw my mother and requested a Mental Health Act Assessment; she was seen by a mental health nurse who discharged her from the service and then rapidly exited through a locked door. Sometimes I understand why relatives become aggressive towards healthcare staff.

    Remember, the service’s failures are not the patient’s fault.

    The Kent Mental Health services seemed to think it was ok for an NHS member of staff who was mentally ill to look after a psychotic elderly woman in her 90s. We met some real jobsworths in that service. I’m glad to say my mother is now in a nursing home away from Kent.

    We have Climate Science and New Age Bullshit

    New-Age Neo-Shaman & Self-Styled Healers Say Really Stupid Stuff.

    Dr Gail Bradbrook, in an interview with Climate Emergency Centers, suggests “we need the Ceremonialists who tend to climate grief“: She’s Wrong, and Her Opinion is not Supported By Science.

    New Age healing methods generally fail to resolve climate anxiety because they treat a systemic, planetary emergency as an individual, psychological malfunction. While practices like crystal healing, manifestation, or energetic cleansing can temporarily lower acute stress, they are fundamentally mismatched with the nature of climate dread. Climate anxiety is not a personal pathology or a “limiting belief” to be meditated away; it is a rational, emotionally healthy response to a real and present danger.

    1 New Age healing operates on the premise of self-optimization—the idea that you can curate your own peace of mind regardless of outer conditions.

    • The Reality: Climate change is a hyperobject that requires massive, coordinated political and industrial shifts.
    • The Mismatch: Trying to cure climate anxiety through solitary self-care isolates you from the collective. It leaves the individual carrying the crushing weight of global distress on their own shoulders

    2. Pathologizing a Rational Response

    Many wellness and New Age modalities treat anxiety as a flaw in a person’s mindset or a low vibrational state that needs to be “cleared.”

    • The Reality: Climate psychologists emphasize that feeling grief and fear over environmental destruction is a sign of high emotional intelligence and deep connection to the Earth.
    • The Mismatch: Attempting to transcend or suppress these emotions through forced positivity labels a perfectly healthy, empathetic reaction as a personal problem that needs fixing

    3. The Illusion of Consumer Control

    New Age spirituality is heavily entangled with modern wellness consumerism—encouraging people to purchase “sustainable” lifestyle items, essential oils, or spiritual tools to find alignment.

    • The Reality: Individual consumer choices (like choosing the right eco-friendly brand) account for a fraction of global emissions and do not solve systemic apathy.
    • The Mismatch: This shifts the narrative to “micro-actions,” which can trigger intense guilt and hyper-fixation on one’s own carbon footprint rather than channeling energy toward institutional accountability

    4. Spiritual Bypassing vs. Active Hope

    “Spiritual bypassing” is a common critique of New Age spaces, where individuals use spiritual concepts to avoid facing harsh, distressing real-world problems.

    • The Reality: Coping with climate anxiety requires acknowledging the tragedy and converting that grief into agency.
    • The Mismatch: Believing that “the universe will handle it” or that a problem can be fixed purely through mental manifestation promotes passive detachment. True resilience comes from “radical hope”—staring directly into the crisis and taking collective action anyway

    New Age healing cannot treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because it lacks the clinical mechanisms required to rewire a traumatized nervous system and often relies on concepts that promote spiritual bypassing or victim-blaming: I’d love to know which bit of the Assault was my fault.

    Why New Age Practices Fall Short

    • Biological Impact: PTSD is a physiological and neurological injury affecting brain structures like the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. Energy healing, crystals, and manifestation techniques cannot alter these entrenched neural pathways or regulate a chronically hyperactivated nervous system.
    • Spiritual Bypassing: New Age frameworks often encourage positive thinking, “high vibrations,” or reframing reality to avoid painful emotions. This prevents individuals from processing core traumatic memories and staying present in their bodies.
    • Victim Blaming and Toxic Positivity: Concepts like karma, “choosing your life,” or the idea that everything happens for a spiritual lesson can lead survivors to internalize blame for their abuse or trauma.
    • Encouraging Dissociation: Certain ungrounded spiritual practices can worsen dissociation, pulling a person further out of their physical body rather than fostering the somatic safety required to heal trauma

    “People have their trauma story which they will repeat over and over again to anyone who they think is listening, and frankly it’s boring. I don’t need to know your story to heal you; you don’t even need to be in the room with me.” Frankly, anyone who thinks like this is not worth talking to and isn’t a therapist; they are a grifter. They will take your money and just retraumatize you.

    Soul Retrieval: An expedition into the psyche and subconscious of the victim by a tinkerer with a drum and some pheasant feathers.

    Trauma is stored in the body. [Sigh…] “Trauma isn’t stored in the body — not in the muscles, the fascia, or the nervous system. That might sound pedantic, but it matters, because how we think about trauma shapes how we meet it.

    Trauma can be understood as an experience that overwhelms our capacity to respond — when what happens feels too much for the resources we have at the time. The causes vary widely: the death of someone close, a physical assault, or the loss of a home. Whatever the event, it brings a wave of distress, fear, or helplessness. Later, situations that echo the original experience can reawaken similar feelings. Because these sensations seem to rise up from the body itself, it can feel as though the trauma has been “stored” there, waiting to be released. But something subtler is taking place.” https://www.peterblackaby.co.uk/trauma-is-not-stored-in-the-body/

    For nearly a decade, the idea that “the body keeps the score” has shaped public and clinical understanding of trauma (van der Kolk, 2014). It is an enticing metaphor—implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh, that the body bears the scars of what the mind cannot face. Yet recent advances in computational and systems neuroscience reveal that this image, while emotionally compelling, is biologically inaccurate. The body proper does not store trauma; the brain dynamically reenacts it through maladaptive inference. What endures after trauma is not a memory lodged in non-innervated tissue but a collapse of flexibility—a loss of metastability, the brain’s ability to fluidly switch among semi-stable network states. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957/full

    I used to find that flashbacks left me nauseous and exhausted. Before I was treated with EMDR, I had daily, sometimes several, flashbacks. Since treatment and a period of recovery, I can talk about the incident comfortably, but I find myself increasingly not wanting to, because it is uninteresting.

    Why Flashbacks Cause Nausea and Exhaustion

    • False alarm: Your brain reacts as if the past trauma is happening right now.
    • Stress chemicals: Your body floods with survival hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
    • Digestion shutdown: Stress diverts blood away from your stomach, leading to nausea and an upset belly.
    • The physical crash: Fighting an invisible danger uses a massive amount of energy, leaving you deeply exhausted when it passes.

    Things which helped me recover

    • Leaving the NHS and doing something different
    • Nature
    • EMDR
    • More Nature
    • Avoiding idiots
    • Even More Nature: My psychologist said that I should use my own nature therapy experience on myself and she was right.

    The PTSD Brain on Serotonin

    Gardening and spending time in nature are powerful, science-backed ways to reduce anxiety and calm the mind.

    Why Nature Reduces Anxiety

    • Lowers Stress Hormones: Being around trees and plants lowers cortisol levels, the primary stress hormone.
    • Brain Reset: Focusing on the colors and textures of a garden gives your busy brain a break from racing thoughts.
    • Soil Contact: Touching soil exposes you to a harmless bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae. This bacterium triggers the brain to release serotonin, which lifts your mood.
    • Gentle Movement: Digging, weeding, and watering are light exercises that release feel-good chemicals in your body.

  • How can you be so ridiculous as to confuse cli-fi with Climate Preparedness?

    I thought the XReadiness survival document was awful and dangerous. But the idea that this blog is “dystopic” cli-fi is worse.

    The “AI Shamanic Eldering Tool” prompted me to write possibly the only piece of fiction I have ever written in all seriousness, but it was the only way I could put across my worry about a spirituality that is primarily in the realm of indigenous people, which has been misappropriated, sanitized, and is now sold to anyone idiotic enough to part with their money to these grifters.

    The Indigenous sacred clowns, or Heyoka, are powerful individuals who bring balance to a community. They risk serious assault and abuse to bring balance to a community; they ridicule the conceited, liars, and ego-shaman.

    When I started writing about how the climate/environmental movement was being infiltrated and used as a grifting vehicle by various dubious self-styled neo-shamans, an old friend and filmmaker messaged me on FB saying they thought I shouldn’t be questioning other people’s activism. That was shortly followed by her deleting it, and that’s when I became aware of an online attack about “Dystopian Survivalism” and the psychological projection ‘small groups of plucky humans roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape’, something neither I nor this blog, nor any of my writing has ever put forward as a concept, because as a wilderness practitioner, it’s an impossibility during ecological collapse. (It’s a projection).

    40 years ago I chose to become as expert as was possible in wilderness survival because I love being in nature. I have spent more than 1/2 my life doing this. I am a veteran of the 1990s road protests, and I was arrested several times for trying to stop roads from being built.

    We didn’t stop the road, but we forced the Tories to secretly shelve the road-building program, costing over 10,000 trees cut and burned. Leaderless, non-violent direct action. I have been grabbed by a mounted policeman and thrown under his horse. I am also the archivist for some of my former comrades’ injunction photos: Newbury Bypass Archive

    No one ran courses on how to “digger dive”. New-Agers and druids of dubious backgrounds periodically turned up at our bender camp. David John Townsend transformed into Kreb Dragonrider and drifted off into the deep end. We watched him stitch his Druidic gown from old bed sheets in the communal bender before he started lording it around camp, spiritually bypassing his edicts about what the Goddess wanted until someone told him to fuck off.

    Neoshamen will tell you that they are making Core Shamanism “safe” (it was never unsafe) and will tell you that learning survival skills is pointless because “no one is going to live in a mud hut on a Welsh hillside or go back to the Stone Age”. These ideas are cliché.

    “We need to stop reacting to our triggers.” Indeed.

    I had this with an Aboriginal friend; we talked about blocking on social media: “On social media, fragile people, who you disagree with, or are just plain wrong, just block you or attack you or both”. He’s right. “But in the bush you can’t do that; you can’t just stop talking to someone because community survival depends on compromise and live and let live.” Besides, if things get that bad, the Elders step in.

    I am no influencer, thought leader, or shaman. I don’t expect to convert anyone to my way of thinking or counter climate denial or soothe climate anxiety

    This blog isn’t about surviving the 6th mass extinction, but if we can, it would be amazing; the people who survive will be super-skilled, and the food they eat will be very different to what we eat now. I can’t “explore a way out of the current mess, a “thrutopia”, to use the term coined by Rupert Read”. I have already written: Thrutopia: The Art of Saying We Don’t Know How We Might Survive Climate-Driven Collapse, So Instead of Asking Survivalists, Let’s Ask Artists & Writers.

    I maintain anonymous authorship of this blog. I am not a believer in the cult of Me, something I have also written about when discussing the toxicity of Western spirituality. Anonymity of ideas is an 18th-century Enlightenment idea: “Most eighteenth-century texts appeared without the author’s proper name on the title page. This absence could signal a writer’s modesty or scurrility, or the absence could result from various forms of suppression that modern attribution studies have done much to reverse. However, anonymity and pseudonymity were also deliberate gestures prompting readers to distance authorship from biography or to differentiate fiction as a conceptual category from truth and lies. Authors including Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, and Frances Burney deliberately omitted their names to complicate issues of textual ownership and copyright, manipulate market conditions, or raise ethical questions. Famous authors like Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne made their anonymity public, collapsing the apparent need to sign a name to make a name. When the authorial name becomes a counter rather than the simple solution to a puzzle, even signing a proper name—“onymity”—is revealed as a strategic authorial subject position.” https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/43514/chapter/364251253

    Most of what I post is either my opinion or open-source FACTUAL survival information, with my own insights and experience added.

    “Dystopian Survivalism” is another genre of fiction. Irrelevant to what I write about.

    Big Green Gathering Speakers: Climate preparedness and skilled practitioners are being sought; my question is this: Do we have to deal with a bunch of self-interested grifters who are concentrating on their wallets as the world burns?

  • Switzerland Hailstorm: Phone Alert Warns People to Take Cover. ALL ARTICLES IGNORE CLIMATE CHANGE AS THE CAUSE.

    Massive hailstones, some as large as Tennis balls, cause damage estimated at up to CHF200 million: NO ATTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE

    There is nothing normal about these storms.

    28th August Switzerland: Extreme Weather

    A Swiss woman takes cover under a Bridge as massive hailstones, some as large as golf balls, start to pelt the ground

    “A severe hailstorm that hit the Swiss city of Winterthur caused damage, particularly in the Wülflingen district, with large hailstones reportedly breaking windows of homes and damaging vehicles and outdoor property.

    The storm struck Winterthur in the canton of Zurich along with heavy thunderstorms. Residents reported that hailstones several centimeters in diameter fell in some areas, leaving piles of ice on balconies and outdoor spaces.

    Images shared by local residents showed large hailstones covering balconies and streets, while some homes and vehicles were damaged by the intensity of the storm.”

    https://ilkha.com/english/world/severe-hailstorm-hits-switzerland-s-winterthur-damaging-windows-and-vehicles-558126

    NO ATTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE

    “Severe hailstorms on Friday caused significant damage in German-speaking Switzerland. Allianz Suisse anticipates more than 10,000 claims for its insurance portfolio alone. The cantons of Aargau, Solothurn, and Zurich are particularly affected. An initial assessment by Gebäudeversicherung Zürich already indicates damages in the millions.

    The storm front moved across parts of western and northwestern Switzerland on Friday morning, continuing towards the northeast. It brought large hailstones, fierce gales, and heavy rainfall. Locally, hailstones reached a diameter of up to six centimeters. SRF Meteo recorded approximately 46,000 lightning strikes. A storm cell that moved from Seeland across Aargau and the Zurich Unterland to Lake Constance was particularly affected.”

    https://journalplus.ch/en/artikel/hailstorms-cause-millions-in-damage-in-german-speaking-switzerland-en-mtda7mkv

    NO ATTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE

    “Vaudoise Assurances mobilises rapid response to CHF 10 million hail losses

    Swiss insurer Vaudoise Assurances is mobilising rapid claims support after a severe hailstorm on 28 August 2026 damaged vehicles across the Aarau, Olten, Solothurn and Zurich regions. The group has already logged more than 650 cases and anticipates over 2,000 vehicle claims in total, implying a loss of around CHF 10 million.”

    https://www.tipranks.com/news/company-announcements/vaudoise-assurances-mobilises-rapid-response-to-chf-10-million-hail-losses

    NO ATTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE

    Dozens of children left with head injuries after massive hail hits during recess as storm batters Switzerland and Italy

    Around 40 people in Switzerland, mostly children, were rushed to hospital amid the chaos which unfolded during breaktime on Friday.

    Locals in Zurich and Winterthur told how violent hail started to pummel the region – affecting airports and causing public facilities to close.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/40212819/hail-storm-hits-switzerland-france-children-injured

    UNSURPRISINGLY NO ATTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE

    How Exceptional Was the Severe Weather?

    Hailstones with a diameter of up to six centimeters are unusually large for Switzerland. SRF Meteo describes such hail events as relatively rare. However, a conclusive historical classification of the event is only possible once all measurement data has been fully evaluated.

    Furthermore, a long-term climate trend cannot be derived from a single extreme event. Whether and how severe thunderstorms and hail events in Switzerland will change in the future can only be assessed based on long-term measurement series and scientific evaluations.

    One thing is already clear: the severe weather of August 28, 2026, due to the combination of large hail, severe gale-force winds, heavy rain, and numerous damages, ranks among the more significant thunderstorm events of this summer in Switzerland.

    https://journalplus.ch/en/artikel/friday-hailstorm-how-exceptional-was-the-severe-weather-en-mtd7dzad

    “Furthermore, you can’t derive a long-term climate trend from a single extreme event”, but it isn’t a single extreme event. The media gaslights us because they think we are stupid.

    Hailstorms of 2024

    Posted on  by Tomas Pucik

    Compared to 2023, 2024 hasn’t featured record-breaking hailstorms or situations that matched the ferocity of 19 and 24 July 2023 or 26 August 2023. However, it was still a very active year, resulting in the most hail reports ever reported into the ESWD: 10 092, as well as days with large (≥ 2cm) and very large (≥ 5cm) hail days: 243 and 101 respectively. In terms of the sheer number of the most damaging hail events, 2024 pales in comparison with 2023 with a decrease in very large hail reports from 1946 to 1086 and giant hail (≥ 10 cm) reports from 97 to 19. These numbers represent the European Severe Weather Database state as of 04 January 2025.

    August 2022

    The derecho and hailstorms of 18 August 2022

    Posted on  by Tomas Pucik

    On 18 August, severe storms occurred in a swath from Menorca through Corsica, northern Italy, Slovenia, Austria, and southern Czechia. The event featured giant hail up to 11 cm in diameter and extremely severe wind gusts up to 62.2 m/s. In total, 12 people died and 106 people were injured by wind and hail. All fatalities, and most of the injuries, were caused by a long-lived convective system that produced a swath of severe to extremely severe wind gusts. The windstorm event can easily be classified as a derecho, a particularly long-lived and severe convective windstorm as the official criteria for a derecho were clearly met: its damage path exceeded 1000 km in length and wind gusts > 32 m/s were measured in Corsica, Italy, and Austria along the path of the storm.

    Frequency rise of future European thunderstorm hazards

    Posted on  by Pieter Groenemeijer

    Researchers at the European Severe Storms Laboratory (ESSL), Munich Re, the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (LMU) and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) could show that damaging convective weather events including lightning, hail and severe wind gusts are likely to become more common across Europe until the end of this century. An increase in convective instability as a result of rising humidity near the earth’s surface was identified as main reason for the increase in hazard frequency.

    They applied a set of additive logistic regression models (AR-CHaMo) to an ensemble of 14 regional climate simulations to predict the frequency of severe thunderstorms and its associated hazards in Europe under projected anthropogenic climate conditions.

    They projected a slight decrease in thunderstorm occurrence in southwestern and southeastern Europe, but an increase in the probability of severe weather. Large hail (≥ 2 cm) is projected to become 40%-80% more likely across central Europe in the RCP8.5 scenario by the end of the 21st century (Figure c ) while very large hail is projected to become more likely across most of Europe, with a doubling possible in parts of central and northeastern Europe (Figure i). As a consequence of the rising hazard probabilities, risk models will need to be adapted and public warnings and precautionary measures should be issued as storms approach.

    August 2016

    RAIN Project projections of severe-weather until 2100: More hail, lightning and floods

    Posted on  by Pieter Groenemeijer

    Within the RAIN project, ESSL researchers Tomáš Púčik and Pieter Groenemeijer have produced projections of severe weather changes according to the EuroCordex regional climate model ensemble.

    The ESSL researchers found that the consensus of the model projections suggested a 10 – 30% increase of severe convective weather events across much of Europe and 30 – 60 % in south-central Europe in the business-as-usual rcp8.5 scenario by the end of the century. These increases would be about half as large in the rcp4.5 scenario that assumes moderate climate change mitigation efforts.

    RAIN project partners of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Freie Universität Berlin and the Technical University Delft have investigated other hazards, such as wind storms, floods, forest fire and winter weather.

    For more information on the RAIN project, projections of other hazards, and a link to the full report: Click here

    European Severe Storms Laboratory

    Automated Severe Weather Guidance For Europe

  • Nepal Disaster Appeal

    The Climate Crisis impacts those least responsible. If you want to help?

    https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/relief-mission-to-rasuwa-nepal-outburst-flood#

  • Civilization Collapse: Do We Need to Evolve Before We Adapt? Or Will A Land-Based Spirituality Emerge As We Adapt?

    It all depends on who you ask and how much money they make from it.

    Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, generally translated as “community and society”, are categories that were used by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in order to categorise social relationships into two types. Gesellschaft is associated with modern society and rational self-interest, which weakens the traditional bonds of family and local community that typify Gemeinschaft. 

    The traditional bonds of family and local community that typify Gemeinschaft and how we attempt to survive climate- and overshoot-driven collapse. Overshoot, climate chaos, rising temperatures, and agricultural failure are the primary drivers of this civilisation’s collapse. These collective macro-crises drive societal breakdown.

    Fascism and the spread of fascist ideas among the working classes who have been abandoned by the Left and feel alienated by the intellectual, science-driven climate change theories are weaponised by the Oligarchs. The Oligarch press has always been used to manipulate the masses. They have manipulated them to target one group or another. In 1930s Germany, it was Jews, Asians, Blacks, Gypsies, anarchists, the disabled, the autistic, and anyone the Nazis didn’t like.  Today’s fascism is not much different. Fascism today, however, is more obviously the realm of grifters; internal conflicts are played out publicly on social media. This is the world of publicly asking “who agrees with me?” While repeating that everyone has the right to an opinion. Mainly because people with offensive ideas seem to constantly need to say it’s freedom of speech while telling us the angry Lefty women with blue hair are the problem.

    Prepping and the Far-Right. “Far-Right? Far-Right? What’s Far-Right? I hear some urban preparedness YouTuber crowing like one of so many cocks on their own dung heap. If you think Patriotism, the Union flag, racism, and white supremacy are the same thing? That is Far-Right. If you think Polish food is exotic when you live in Manchester, where there is exotic food from every country. Lol, that’s funny. But I know you weren’t joking, and anyway, these people will proudly tell you they vote for the party of billionaires with no policies and justify why the Human Rights Act needs to be abolished.

    The prepper genre on YouTube used to be skills-based; now it’s the alternative news desk, conspiracy theories, fake news, AI slop, small children presenting foraging content, and their dads’ toxic, misogynistic comments to people who think they are exploiting nature and their children. Prepping is comical infotainment as this civilisation collapses due to anthropogenic climate change, and they are still talking about EMPs and surviving MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Because for the larger Survivalism, bushcraft, and prepping community, talking about anthropogenic climate change would mean breaking rank and facing ridicule.

    There are very few survivalists tackling the climate change death machine or the Capitalist Death Cult

    Climate-oriented Survivalism

    Some skills you can’t learn online. This isn’t dystopian survivalism; we already live in a dystopia, and it’s getting worse. Most of us don’t have small holdings, horses, or land in Wales. How does the urban population survive the climate change death machine and the Capitalism Death Cult?

    • Oppose fascism
    • #SolidarityPrepping #teamcollapse
    • Community Organising
    • #mutualaid
    • Start Planning Now
    • Learn Survival Skills
    • Learn to repurpose
    • Learn Plumbing skills
    • Learn DIY Building Skills
    • Get a sewing machine and learn stitching
    • Learn basic 12volt electrics
    • Start cycling & fixing your bike(s)
    • Learn about LoRa Meshtastic communications
    • Build a skills-based community of operators connected to nature through land skills.

    Few Preppers want to talk about the collapse of civilisation and industrial capitalism. “The potential for societal collapse has become a pressing concern as the impacts of climate change intensify, threatening global stability.” Mainstream Preppers talk about societal collapse, citing mass human migration as a likely cause. But this has never been the case. Civilisations collapse because of environmental factors and the resulting wars, as they weaken from droughts and food shortages. The US attack on Iran and the attempted seizure of its oil facility on Karg Island in the Straits of Hormuz was an underestimation of the cultural organisation and the perceived weakness of the country based on anti-IRG propaganda published by pro-Shah exiles in the West.

    “The 2024 State of the Climate report paints a grim picture of escalating environmental disasters, with record-breaking temperatures, extreme weather events, and a critical disruption of planetary systems.” We are there: Britain’s 2026 drought and catastrophically poor arable and dairy harvests were entirely driven by anthropogenic climate change. 2024 was a warning; our governments are failing to act. The comparison between 2024 and 2026 is stark: the wildfires have been more widespread, and the heatwaves more deadly.

    How could we survive in a post-collapse world?

    “Societal collapses, both historical and contemporary, often follow a pattern of long-term vulnerabilities compounded by sudden crises.  The fall of the Roman Empire, the decline of the Maya civilisation, and the Soviet Union’s dissolution all illustrate how economic, environmental, and political stressors interact over time.” This global civilisation is in decline due to catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. The question is: can we survive in an ecological future, putting the biosphere 1st? According to Dr Stephanie Rost, that might be possible.

    “Building adaptive community networks

    Community networks and mutual aid are critical in the historical and modern examples, but they must be reimagined to meet the demands of an unstable world. Networks need to be adaptive and malleable—capable of responding quickly to emerging threats like food shortages, disease outbreaks, or displacement due to climate events”

    Expanding skills for survival

    Because they originated in a stable climatic environment, skills such as farming, hunting, and foraging will need to adapt to the unpredictable challenges of the Anthropocene. Seasons will no longer be predictable, and the ability to grow crops or raise animals for food will be in doubt.

    For survival, communities could focus on disaster-response skills such as first aid, search-and-rescue techniques, and emergency shelter construction, as well as psychological first aid to address trauma and stress. If traditional healthcare systems break down, community health networks focused on preventive care and identifying vulnerable individuals could save lives, given the critical importance of healthcare.

     Preparing for psychological challenges

    Mindfulness and stress management techniques can help individuals and groups stay present and focused, and are deemed a key feature of Climate adaptation. Developing a mindset that can move through the ecological grief process towards acceptance quickly, in order to reach an activated state, may be the most essential skill for navigating a world where environmental shocks can arrive with little warning.

    Additional requirements of climate-induced collapse

    Adaptability has always been a crucial survival skill, but in an era of increasingly volatile climate patterns, it must now include embracing uncertainty. This involves flexible approaches to resource management, such as shifting from traditional crop cycles to more diverse and climate-resilient agricultural practices.

    Survival in the Anthropocene may require bold innovation and new social experiments. This could include establishing climate refuges—areas where communities can relocate when climate conditions in their original homes become too extreme. It might also involve creating new social contracts that prioritise the equitable distribution of remaining resources, ensuring that no one is left without access to food, water, or safety.

    Survival in the Anthropocene is not simply about enduring; it is about finding ways to live meaningfully in a world reshaped by climate change. This is the challenge of our time.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44282-025-00160-1

    Do We Have Time to Do the Inner Work to Evolve Before We Adapt & Do We Need to? Or Will A New Spirituality Evolve As We Adapt?

    A profound historical truth: New religions almost never emerge from times of comfort and abundance. Instead, they are born from crisis, social upheaval, and intense suffering. When a society is prosperous, its people generally accept the status quo and the existing religious or political systems that brought them that wealth.

    Historically, new religious movements act as a coping mechanism or a revolutionary response to profound distress.

    Crisis Breeds Faith Due To The Need For Hope

    • The collapse of old answers: Times of plenty reinforce existing traditions, while crises make old gods and systems seem powerless.
    • The need for existential comfort: Severe suffering drives a psychological need for hope, promises of an afterlife, and divine justice.
    • Social displacement: Plagues, famines, ecological collapse, and wars displace populations, break old social ties, and make people receptive to new community structures.

    “Yet we are constantly being told that for humanity to advance, we need to evolve our consciousness: “Interbecoming reimagines the concept of interbeing, emphasising the dynamic, evolving interconnection and interdependence of all existence. Rooted in Zen Buddhism and expanded by thinkers like Indy Johar, it highlights our collective journey of growth, bound by the mutual well-being of all. Unlike the static notion of ‘being,’ interbecoming stresses that we are ongoing processes, engaged in a cosmic dance of growth, where every individual’s development is crucial for the collective advancement of the cosmos.

    Interbecoming, an evolution of Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing, represents a dynamic understanding of existence. It acknowledges our perpetual transformation within the interconnected web of life. My journey into the heart of Interbecoming began with a profound experience at Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village Monastery, where the essence of interbeing unfolded before me.

    Retreats at the Plum Village Monastery in France are not for everyone, least of all for those on a low income: A retreat at the main Plum Village centre in France costs roughly €55 to €90+ per day, depending on your choice of accommodation and selected contributions:

    • Accommodation: €18 to €50 per day (options range from tents and dorms to private or shared rooms).
    • Full Board & Refreshments: Approximately €12 per day.
    • Facility & Site Contribution: From approximately €25 per day.
    • Administrative Fee: About 5% for registration and payment processing.
    • Monastic Support (“Dana”): From approximately €100 per week to support the teachings and the monastic community.

    Much like Embercombe, these retreats are expensive: Transformational experiences, interbecoming and interbeing, emphasising the dynamic, evolving interconnection and interdependence of all existence, it would seem, are not for those on a low income.

    Compared with the mindfulness-based teachings of the Vipassana Trust, which are entirely free, participants in the 10-day courses may give Dana (charity), serve in the gardens and kitchen for other meditators, or do neither if they can’t afford the money or time.

    Vipassana meditation courses are completely free of charge, with no fees for teaching, food, or lodging, because they operate entirely on a voluntary donation model known as dana. This practice preserves the purity of the teachings and ensures equal access for everyone. The Core reasoning behind offering the courses for free is:

    • The Tradition of Dana (Generosity): The practice is rooted in dana, an ancient tradition of selfless giving. Donations from past students who completed a course and want to give others the same opportunity cover current students’ expenses.
    • Universal Accessibility: Keeping courses free ensures anyone can learn the technique, regardless of financial background or wealth.
    • Removing Commercial Motives: Offering free courses removes money and profit from the teacher-student relationship. Teachers are unpaid volunteers who do not profit from the courses.
    • Maintaining Integrity: Without a commercial price tag, the practice avoids consumer expectations, financial pressures, or the feeling of being sold a product.
    • Donations from Past Students Only: You cannot donate until you have completed your first 10-day course.
    • Voluntary Amounts: Contributions are completely optional. You give only what you can comfortably afford, whether that is a large amount or nothing at all.

    The Legacy of Paid-For Spirituality

    • Disappointed Customers: People have expectations about products; if the course doesn’t work for them, then they become dissatisfied customers.
    • Commercialisation: When you have paid for a course and then start teaching your own version, you may feel entitled to profit from the product.
    • Loss of Integrity: Commercialisation of a new product from a different teacher and a different version.

    If Climate Stabilisation Below 5°C Is Possible and Humans Can Somehow Restore the Biosphere, then a New Spirituality is Likely to Emerge.

    Survival and land husbandry skills, taught in a prosocial manner with a basic philosophy of land stewardship, habitat creation, and conservation, are the foundational skills of Solidarity Prepping.

    Solidarity Prepping isn’t just what is available on this blog. But at its core is an anti-money, anti-capital agenda. No grift, no membership, no special privileges, and no psychobabble.