Across France and Spain, nearly 500,000 internal climate refugees are fleeing wildfires. These unprecedented human migrations are inherently destabilising and require fast-acting localised management and the encouragement of state-supported mutual aid.
Can we learn about collapse preparedness by looking at the collapse of previous civilisations? Despite what Rupert Read, inventor of Thrutopia, and Jem Bendell, Author of Deep Adaptation, think, I am inclined to suggest that neither considers that from 1.5-2C the climate and planet go through phase change, which will drive the collapse of agriculture and, in turn, famines. This is an internationally interdependent global civilisation. The populations of this global civilisation have never been more disconnected from nature and, therefore, each other.
There is little comparison between the Global Boiling-driven collapse of this global civilisation and that of historical civilisation collapses. Read seems very keen to talk about the collapse of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity. Climate change or catastrophic agricultural loss did not drive the collapse of the Roman Empire. People kept eating and farming, and the climate was stable. The Goldilocks climate niche for human flourishing was going to remain intact for at least the next 1500 years.
We Are Not Learning Anything While We Think We Can Continue Agriculture As Usual
No one suggests that agriculture will collapse. They raise the subject of Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that Agriculture went back further, or that it was older, or that it was taken up and then abandoned. At this point, I should draw your attention to the pinned post on this blog about solidarity prepping; it’s not the Solidarity Prepping I want you to look at, but the section on polychronic time. To understand our ancestral Neolithic farmers, we need to understand that they, like North American Indigenous people, hunted, gathered, and farmed. While we still think Monochronically, we cannot grasp that places like Göbekli Tepe show megalithic cultures did not need to be sedentary. The Gobekli Tepe discovery overturns the assumption that megalithic peoples had to be sedentary to build megalithic structures.
Will Self completely grasps that AI is evil, while Helena Norberg-Hodge is taken in by AI, and here is another pundit happy to use planet-boiling tech.
Jem Bendel addresses that environmentalists don’t really talk about collapse. Rupert Read has found a variety of ways of not talking about collapse by talking about things like “human flourishing”, “Flourishing Future” and “Thrutopia” and skirting around the issue by saying things like “this civilisation is finished” and going on to suggest that perhaps we can “avoid collapse”.
Climate Activists Don’t #TalkCollapse Enough, Damn Right!
They talk briefly about mass casualties and somehow manage to avoid the subject of losing the Goldilocks climate niche for agriculture and Wet-Bulb Temperatures, soon to be the biggest climate-related killer. Our Agriculture is already in decline due to climate and fertiliser shortages.
“The June 2026 heat wave was the most extreme heat event ever experienced in Europe. Using previously developed heat-mortality response functions, I calculate that June 22-28 saw 20,390 heat-related deaths across Europe. This result highlights the accelerating threat of mass heat mortality events in Europe despite previous adaptations to heat.” Leon Simons, Linked In, https://zenodo.org/records/21083733
Transformative and Strategic Adaptation are for business as usual, not ordinary people.
The one thing which is clear is that not only do these “climate thought-leaders” refuse to #talkcollapse, they will also find ways of excluding and ridiculing those who do and who have more idea about individual and community adaptation than they do. We are going to go extinct from heat, water scarcity and starvation, but preparedness can make the slide down easier and more equitable.
The title of this Post is a direct quote from here: https://bsky.app/profile/endoftheworldparty.bsky.social/post/3mrpqi3lkns2f
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