“What are we going to do when the Supermarket Shelves are empty, & people are rioting in the streets?” Asks Dr. Gail Bradbrook. Interviewed on YouTube by Phoenix Rainbow on the Climate Emergency Centers YT Channel: So Now What? On Movement Ecology Strategy in the Face of Collapse and Fascism: Climate Emergency Centers
This isn’t a distribution issue; it’s about disrupted seasons, precipitation, and climate. Dr Gail Bradbrook identifies mutual aid and food banks as community forces for good, and I agree with her; however, Food Banks are not ideal in a massive food shortage crisis. Bradbrook goes on: “Just supposing you turn up at the food bank and you are the only one there, now you are in charge of a food bank.” This just sounds like someone who loves the sound of their own voice; it’s irrelevant to the subject at hand; it’s conversational infill. But no one contradicts them. We spend too much time revering these self-appointed leaders, hanging on their every word, and when they talk nonsense, no one challenges them for fear of being accused of negativity. Bradbrook’s suggestions about food banks during a low-food-availability crisis are nonsense as well. The food banks are a response to food poverty and food wastage. They redistribute food surplus and usable food waste. Empty supermarket shelves are symptoms of either supply chain or food supply issues. There are very few food surpluses during a food shortage crisis, aside from ingredients with no calorific value, such as dried herbs, spices and other flavorings.
We spend too much time revering these self-appointed leaders, hanging on their every word, and when they talk nonsense, no one challenges them for fear of being accused of negativity. Dr Gail Bradbrook’s suggestions about food banks during a low-food-availability crisis are nonsense. Who wants to be in charge of a mostly empty food bank facing a starving angry mob?
The world beyond 1.5°C is already very different from the world we leave behind. We enter the post-Anthropocene, leaving behind the Goldilocks climate niche for most agriculture and entering a world of uncertainty, changed seasons, and precipitation patterns. The UK drought, heatwaves, and precipitation changes, which were a hint in the summer of 2025. Precipitation ceased for most of Britain in April 2026 and resumed at the end of August. 2026 has been so catastrophic for arable and dairy farming that Jeremy Clarkson has changed his stance on climate denial.
The above video was posted on YouTube in May 2025. Already a year in, with a spring drought that started in April but eased through the year. I would suggest that 35°C is closer to an SHTF (Shit Hitting The Fan) declaration than 40 °C.
40 °C represents an extreme risk to all life
In 2025, farmers observed early rust, and wheat emerged stressed or failed to emerge at all. Many farmers also had to wait until their waterlogged fields were dry enough to plant the grain, to avoid the seeds rotting before they germinated. Winter flooding, summer droughts, and heatwaves are becoming a deadly combination that is driving the decline of agriculture and shortening the growing season.
The mainstream preparedness community in the UK and US has barely touched the climate-driven collapse of agriculture. Climate change is a contentious issue and is mostly denied, with science dismissed in favor of a variety of colorful conspiracy theories about weather modification, including the rejection of the idea that the climate has been modified by the burning of fossil fuels.
Another theory being pushed is that the current heatwaves and drought are solely driven by the Super El Niño. There is a culture of climate denial on many preparedness and bushcraft forums which is enforced through ridicule, abuse, nit-picking, bullying, and shadow banning.
Far-right ideologies are notably strong in the mainstream preparedness field, along with extreme selfishness. Some of these people are literally preparing themselves to watch their neighbors starve to death. Many preparedness practitioners’ YouTube channels also feature videos about the racist views on human migration and all the other old, tired tropes they push out.
The alternative preparedness community action is led by long-term environmental activists who have experience living off-grid, living in community in road protest camps, and spending decades learning and perfecting survival skills. Unlike mainstream “prepping,” it is skills- and knowledge-led rather than focused on consuming expensive, unsuitable equipment.
For Solidarity Preppers, Indigenous/ancestral knowledge is seen as an important aspect of neuro-decolonization.
Within the climate and environmental activism community, there is an inertia of inaction. The National Emergency Briefing is an excellent means of communicating the emergency to communities, especially through local screenings that bring communities together to discuss the issues, but it lacks information on how local communities can prepare at the street and household level. This keeps climate preparedness within the policymaker’s domain and disempowers households. Solidarity Prepping aims to counter the stereotyped far-right (they do like to deny this), tinfoil-hatter preparing for nuclear war, and the impossible EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapons, zombie (fantasy) apocalypse, and white supremacy. Solidarity Prepping is the counterculture, in prepared mode: anti-fascist, community-enabling, nature-based skills, and cooperative, prosocial learning. Solidarity Prepping is a movement with success stories in Europe already:
On the 6th January 2026, sabotage against industry in Berlin caused a winter blackout. “According to reports, a power outage, now in its fourth day, was triggered by the burning of cables at a power plant in one of Berlin’s districts. In a move that surprised residents, members of the city’s Ukrainian community quickly organized assistance for those affected.
According to the publication, Ukrainian refugees opened an improvised “point of invincibility” for district residents on the premises of the Ukrainian-German center AdlerA e.V., which operates in Steglitz–Zehlendorf. The center’s building was connected to another power line, so power was maintained there.
The assistance was initiated by Oksana Orel, a representative of the Ukrainian community on the committee on migration and integration at the district administration. Together with her daughter, she moved to Berlin after the start of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation. Oksana, together with other Ukrainian refugees, founded the Ukrainian-German center AdlerA e.V., which helps migrants from Ukraine adapt. https://rubryka.com/en/2026/01/06/blekaut-u-berlini/
Berliners living in flats with electric heating and cookers could heat up a meal, fill flasks, and fill hot water bottles.
“We’ve… managed in recent months to finally wrench the concept of ‘prepping’ from the stranglehold of that incredibly unproductive framing whereby you must be a right-wing crazy person if you’re thinking about practically preparing yourself for catastrophes and system collapses.” But since the blackout, the debate about catastrophe preparation has really arrived in the mainstream, and it was probably to be expected that the trigger would be a severe catastrophe that deeply encroached upon the everyday normality of people who are, on a global scale, rather spoilt for stability, one that for several days demonstrated this simple truth: regardless of which major catastrophe hits us, we’re probably not adequately prepared for it, and a lack of preparation for catastrophes means concrete suffering. (This statement holds true on average at every level, from the state level right down to the individual one.)” Yours truly, Tadzio.
“Our aim is to remove prepping from the right-wing discourse and combine it with solidarity-based, practical and political action. Because crisis preparedness can be done differently – collectively, inclusively and fairly.” https://www.cadus.org/en/news/events/congress-soliprepping
As the UK version of solidarityprepping.co.uk, it isn’t about writing “dystopian” literature; it’s about practical solutions to the climate disaster. While my critic (there is only one) continues to push the message about creating a “future we would be proud to leave the next generation,” we mostly remain the least skilled or prepared communities for drought, heatwaves, and the looming food crisis.
What Dr Gail Bradbrook fails to do, and this is important, is reinforce the “we are all crew during civilizational collapse” idea, because if we were all crew during the initial XR “warm-up”, as she describes it, then being crew during collapse means learning a whole new set of skills, and everyone needs to learn them otherewise we simply reinforce the patriarchy and the division of labour creating a hierarchy of facilitators and doers. I am not suggesting that everyone learns to be a midwife, but preparedness requires basic first aid and survival skills, which teach resilience and resourcefulness and help manage climate grief by bringing practitioners into closer connection with nature.
“We need the guys who know how to build stuff.” Exclaims Bradbrook in the video. We know you do; what we need is the ceremonialists to stop spreading BS about antifascist preparedness, and to actually learn some land skills instead of pontificating, treating us like business competitors who are stealing the revenue they make through grifting off the climate emergency by pushing fraudulent hope. The people who build stuff don’t need hangers-on. We need people who can afford small investments, like a 2000 L rainwater storage system, and learn the accompanying water-processing skills. To learn resilience skills and to grow food as well as store food for longer-term use, and ignore Neoshaman wellness podcasters who claim that putting some food by for hard times is unhelpful while venerating indigenous wisdom, but ignoring the fact that indigenous people smoked fish, dried meat, and had complex relationships with hundreds of wild plants.
Bradbrook claims, “We need the ceremonialists who tend to climate grief”; she means the unqualified New Age healers.
Solidarityprepping.co.uk and anyone else who is practicing antifascist climate preparedness is under assault by a ceremonialist who believes the cliche’d idea that learning survivalism is about returning to the Stone Age and is dystopian, or because you are not going to live in a mud hut on a Welsh hillside. We don’t need ceremonialists with their psychobabble, obstructing people from easing the slide down, learning skills which alleviate anxiety and connect us to nature.
I will even teach these skills for donation-based costs to groups who want to learn them. I don’t need to grift; I have a well-paid job which gives me plenty of free time.
This is no longer a time for discussion; we need to act, even if some of us won’t survive. We need to act for the next generation, not so they can be proud of us, but so they too might have the chance to survive alongside the biosphere.
By regularly taking temperature and humidity measurements during heatwaves, I can manage my safety outdoors through understanding wet-bulb temperatures. “If this feels like another National Emergency Briefing” (Accidental Gods), I’m taking that as a compliment. Then think of it as an emergency briefing with updates and hot tips, and it’s free, though donations help keep the domain registered and some of the lights on.
Solidarity Prepping Research: Forage Plant Staples
Through research on climate-resilient food plants that can withstand extreme heat and humidity, it is interesting that Typha Latifolia is coming out ahead. It has been a survival staple for our indigenous hunter-gatherer ancestors for over 100,000 years; it evolved 69 to 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. It is inconceivable that our distant ancestors didn’t seek out and process carbohydrates from rhizomes, use the pollen, eat the flower spikes and the plant’s heart, and collect the clear gel the plant exudes for use as an analgesic.
The Famine Garden combines permaculture and foraging.
Transplanting staples our hunter-gatherer ancestors prized into our gardens. Along with pre-industrial farming favorites of the Elizabethan garden like Skirrets. Some native starch plants are considered poisonous, and for decades, children have been warned about their “deadly” toxicity and to keep away from them.
There is an esoteric aspect of survivalism that involves processing plants considered toxic as food. There is nothing unusual about this: cassava (Manioc), a tropical root vegetable and staple found in South Asia and South America, is toxic because it contains cyanogenic glycosides that release deadly hydrogen cyanide when consumed if the plant is not processed properly.
The Speakers Forum at the Big Green Gathering 2026 was calling for people with skills. We are here, skilled and already working within communities to help build resilience, but we are not here to serve others’ needs; we are here to train YOU. I expect people to come forward to learn a variety of skills for collapse, including wilderness skills, because they teach a level of resilience that is skills- and knowledge-based. One of the best recent examples of this is western North Carolina, post-Helene: Climate disasters have shown us that when we work together with our neighbors, we are stronger and more resilient. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/survival-skills-hurricane/
The climate and environmental movement has a lot to learn in a very short period of time. Now is the time to start.
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