There was a time when Rupert Read, the late Tristan Sykes (Just Collapse) and I chatted on Twitter (X) about how householders might retrofit their homes, build a small personal stockpile of food, and organise at community level. We went to continue the conversation and found ourselves blocked. This was when I started blogging; this was when I thought you could say all sorts of interesting things in a conversation, and then it’s gone in the ether. The block button for some academics is actually the time theft button. Author and Plastic Shaman Manda Scott blocked me on Bluesky for something far more trivial. I think I said that the Celts were not indigenous.
It’s difficult to know whose Idea Thrutopia was, Manda Scott’s or Rupert Read’s. Read made a lot of speeches about it as an alternative concept for collapse. Tristan Sykes and other academics associated with Just Collapse were calling for a planned collapse, suggesting it could be equitable and advance ideas of social justice. Thrutopia, according to Read, is neither Dystopia nor Utopia. Thrutopianism is first and foremost: “The kind of thinking required to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth toward those of human adaptability and long-term survival involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift. This is thrutopianism” https://www.the-raft.uk/imagining-thrutopia
Survival and Adaptation imagined by writers and artists:
In my experiences, being involved with site crewing camps at management level, I haven’t met any artists and writers with the practical skills for “human adaptability and long-term survival“. Very few artists, writers, academics and spiritual types I have met can build compost toilets, wood-fired off-grid showers, water harvesting and purification or some of the most basic infrastructure that an individual, family, or community might require for long-term off-grid survival. Some of my experience comes from living among the poor in India’s slum communities, where the average daily wage is less than $1, but a community that had solved a major sanitation issue with composting.
After Author Amanda Scott’s recent tirade about “dystopian survivalism”, I can only conclude that some people within the “Thrutopian thinking” movement feel threatened by highly skilled individuals and feel a primal need to categorise them into a stereotype and then get it wrong. The 1st rule of picking a fight is to know what you are fighting. I suspect you are doing your reputation more harm by ranting about real survivalism, especially as the global climate undergoes a phase change as we transition from 1 °- 1.5 °C to 1.5 °- 3 °C. The climate becomes more unpredictable as we enter the post-anthropocene and the era of agricultural failure and collapse.
How is Thrutopian thinking addressing agricultural collapse? How will humans adapt, survive long-term, and what will we eat?
Solidarity Prepping is a co-operative, decentralised, leaderless, federated, skills, knowledge and mutual aid-based response to the bunker-dwelling far-right food-hoarding prepper who will hide and watch their neighbours’ children starve to death as they eat their way to malnutrition on MREs. Because MREs were never meant for long-term survival. Long-term survival post agricultural collapse requires the ability to process and cook food from scratch; failure to recognise or ignore the phase change in climate change is an evolutionary disadvantage. Climate denial and magical thinking are as bad as each other and mal-adaptive.
Thrutopianism has deep roots in misappropriated and sanitised indigenous wisdom & ceremony. The easy version of Vision Quests, the one which doesn’t require you to spend 4 days without food or water. Manda Scott, whose website describes her version of “safe” Shamanism and calls herself a Shamanic Practitioner, says, “We are not being shaman, we are using their tools” with barely a nod at nature. This theatre is only possible for the Shamanic Practitioner who says, “at the core of their actions and activism, a heartfelt connection to the All That Is, however we define it.” Ecospirituality
The survivalist-scout cannot get away with this fraud. We aren’t being survivalist-scouts; we are just using their tools. But the survivalist scout can’t fake it; well, you can for a while until nature kills you, or you need rescuing. Nature has a habit of killing the ill-prepared, unskilled and those who don’t take nature or indigenous wisdom about a region seriously. “The All That Is, however you define it” is the worst cop-out when the subject of the conversation is about developing a deep connection with Nature. I suspect no one has ever challenged the views of these “thought leaders”.
“There Won’t Be Plucky Humans Roaming the Post-Collapse Landscape”
The heat will kill us before we get to go hunting and gathering.
Thrutopian Thought believes we are going to survive with minimal skills and still have the benefits of industrial capitalism’s tech. Who is we, though? Increasingly, “we” looks white, middle-class, and well-heeled and unlikely to change much: “there is a spectrum of engagement, where individuals exist in varying stages of awareness while continuing to participate in a system that they intellectually understand is unsustainable and self-destructive AND is also essential to their livelihoods and immediate wellbeing.” Rob Harrison-Plastow, Climate Majority Project
Britain is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, and its impact on national security will be due to the collapse of agriculture and also the loss of nature and habitat. The Starmer government has suppressed the report from the security services about biodiversity loss. “Believed to have been compiled by the joint intelligence committee (on which the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ sit)”. Heavily redacted, primarily the information about agriculture.
Survivalists practising skills in nature have known for decades that there has been a biodiversity crisis. Many of my old anti-roads protestor colleagues from the 1990s saw how Britain’s ancient woodlands were in decline, and many have taken up the skills of the woodman, cutting and restoring coppices as part of a new regenerative culture. The problem with the “plucky human” trope is that it is part of a culture within the novelle green movement that only believes the far-right are interested in survivalism; the problem is that this pushes Greens and that “climate majority” who see that not only is this civilisation unsustainable and likely finished, but so also is its agriculture too: “Across Britain, a quiet transformation is happening. It’s not the stereotype of survivalist preppers hoarding beans in bunkers.” Rob Harrison-Plastow, Climate Majority Project. The problem with this stereotype is that the message it sends to the apparent climate majority who want to adapt to expected emergencies beyond insulating their homes, buying electric vehicles and installing energy-intensive technologies like heat pumps, which will stress the grid further, is that they have little option other than “survivalist preppers hoarding beans in bunkers“.
The problem that the Climate Majority has, and it makes them more fringe than the lefty survivalist preppers, is their insistence on pushing a wellness grift-based misappropriated, sanitised indigenous spirituality and connection to nature based on Shinrin-Yoku.
Thrutopia and nouveau-climate spirituality offer no opportunity for that apparent climate majority to self-organise, to build resilient communities, to do mutual aid, to collectively organise, grow climate-resilient food, talk openly about collapse and to learn skills which are both empowering and create the distraction which eases anxiety. As a former mental health worker and outdoor therapist, connection with the land is where anxiety is relieved, whether gardening or doing Bushcraft with experienced practitioners.
Imagine a climate cafe where talking-collapse and the misery of the climate emergency were empowering, because talking about our fears is empowering. I count Trystan Sykes as one of the Collapsologists I had the pleasure of talking to a lot before he died. One of the big Just Collapse campaigns was #talkcollapse.
“I wanted to meet people in real life who had the same willingness to talk about how miserable they felt,” she said.
Teresa added the meetings had given her more courage to raise the subject elsewhere.
“It’s surprisingly energising to be extremely miserable with other people,” she said.” BBC, The climate cafe where misery is ’empowering’
Talking Collapse is empowering because we start from the position of wanting human interaction. Thrutopianism and the Climate Majority project is predicated on pushing unrealistic stories, unrealistic ideas about change, AI, Green Party politics and business as usual.
“… post-anarchism is about living between worlds– between the dying, collapsing world of global capital and climate-ecological destruction and the unknown future worlds of disparate people and places created as collapse intensifies and unfolds. Many find themselves inhabiting two worlds at once – in one world oppressed by capitalism and imperialism and in another world sustained (even if marginally) by the very same processes.” Just Collapse & Post Anarchism
The most catastrophic aspect of the collapse of this civilisation isn’t just the heat. It’s the desperation of every tentacle of capitalism to dominate the story. Dysyopian Survivalism, is one of those tentacles
Is Thrutopia A Poor Imitation of Dark Mountain?
If I were to compare Thrutopia with Dark Mountain, because as ideas they are similar, except Dark Mountain was deeply honest about how capitalism had absorbed environmentalism: Green business, renewables, carbon taxation and sustainability. Whereas Thrutopia is already deeply embedded in capitalism, despite protestations. Scott thinks we are going to leave the next generation a world we can be proud of, yet most of Southern Europe is now on fire, and 20,000 people died in a week in June 2026 Heatwaves. As I write, the brush fire in the Cairngorms has expanded due to a change in weather conditions and increased wind.
The Difference between Dark Mountain and Thrutopia as a writing genre is that the founders of Dark Mountain first lost a few environmental battles, then watched Capitalism devour environmentalism (Paul Kingsnorth). Thrutopia is the consumer version of Dark Mountain. Rupert Read hopes we can avoid collapse as capitalism somehow just crumbles and surrenders to a greater, more ethical capitalism; as Scott says, we can keep our devices, Zoom, electric cars and everything industrial capitalism has raped the earth for thus far. Green Councillors have told me that “post-collapse we will build a new society in the shell of the old.” But they cannot tell me what we will eat when agriculture collapses.
I suspect that the reason Scott and Read don’t want survivalists, and especially survivalists who are looking realistically at heatwaves and have been talking about wetbulb temperatures as a risk since 2023, is that Solidarity Prepping is a genuine mutual-aid promoting idea, anarchist and not fascist, with real low-cost solutions for householders which apply to AMOC collapse.
