THE RADICAL STEP

BUILDING A COMMUNITY FOR SURVIVAL

Climate news this week is bleak. More floods, more wildfires, more death, more nature lost. The climate change warning bell is tolling hard. It's time to take the most radical step you've ever taken in your life. It's time to build the community you need to survive.

An exclusive Guardian survey of hundreds of the world’s leading clvimate experts has found that:

• 77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a devastating degree of heating;

• almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C;

• only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.

As The Guardian reports:

‘Jonathan Cullen, at the University of Cambridge, was particularly blunt: “1.5C is a political game – we were never going to reach this target.”

The climate emergency is already here. Even just 1C of heating has supercharged the planet’s extreme weather, delivering searing heatwaves from the US to Europe to China that would have been otherwise impossible. Millions of people have very likely died early as a result already. At just 2C, the brutal heatwave that struck the Pacific north-west of America in 2021 will be 100-200 times more likely.’

… “I am scared mightily – I don’t see how we are able to get out of this mess,” said Tim Benton, an expert on food security and food systems at the Chatham House thinktank. He said the cost of protecting people and recovering from climate disasters will be huge, with yet more discord and delay over who pays the bills. Numerous experts were worried over food production: “We’ve barely started to see the impacts,” said one.’

It's time to build the community you need to survive the climate chaos future unfolding in real-time.

Community! Ugh!

I can feel many of you groaning with that word. ‘Community’ sounds so doughy, so feeble; the antithesis of activism. I know most of you are pretty hard core activists. But hear me out. Building community is hard, hard, hard. Much tougher than protesting with placards, throwing paint at a wall, or chaining yourself to a tree. It takes sustained consistency and commitment, a rhino thick skin, and an unwavering preparedness to accept difference and seek similarities.

Let me explain.

The phrase ‘community’ is often thrown around but frequently misunderstood. On social media, it is the vast echo-chamber of people who follow a page or a group. It might be knitting nanas protesting about fracking, new mothers feeling isolated from society, or four-wheel-drive off-roaders who hate the government. The media, often describe ‘community’ as groups who share a common identity. Perhaps they are refugees, or LGBTQIA+, or First Nations, or far-right neo-Nazi idiots. ‘Building community’ in all these cases is about building a support system of agreement against the onslaughts of the world.

Neither definition is wrong, but both fall short of understanding what community is when faced with the existential threat of climate chaos—of apocalyptic wildfires, killer heat domes, catastrophic rain bombs, lethal floods and mudslides, deadly droughts, and violent sandstorms.

I’ve written about Who is Your Community? before. Now, I am doing a deep dive into building the community you need to face the future.

You are human. You need people … but only some

Humans crave connections. It's basic biology. Not all our relationships need to be close, but we need to be around people who are familiar to keep our brains healthy. We don’t have to consider them friends. We might not even know their names, but we need to recognise them when we see their faces. If these individuals return our smile, that’s even better.

If you are thinking about facing a world of extreme climate threatening your survival, your most crucial community is the few hundred people within your local geography—the ones you'd nod to on the street when times are good. Beyond that, it gets messy, and building relationships becomes a hell of a lot harder than it sounds.

Why so small? Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has suggested that humans can maintain around 150 stable social relationships (so-called ‘Dunbar’s number’) because of the way our neocortical processing works. You may not know that many people (I sure don’t), but you recognise them and would be prepared to talk to them if they approached you. Other researchers have suggested slightly bigger and smaller groups. But in essence, you are looking at a hard limit on the number of people you can expect to recognise and trust they will behave in a way that you understand.

When you think about what your community faces and what you need to do together—growing food for survival, building water infrastructure for survival, keeping cool for survival, fighting wildfires for survival … you get my gist—the group you choose to work with needs to be manageable. Beyond a certain number of people, maintaining stable relationships requires the imposition of stricter rules and norms and someone to govern them. That means relying on government to coordinate things for you. Please don’t. When the chips are down they will abandon you.

I know that others online are promoting bigger regional plans, and city-wide connections, but the community building research—and my own personal experience—suggests the bigger the group the harder the task, and the less relevant it will be to your climate chaos journey.

Old skills for dangerous times

Building a community takes time and skills that our industrialised, electronically-connected society discourages.

We no longer invest in shared ground in our physical world because we can more easily find it online. We are clumsy when we approach hard discussions face-to-face because we are taught to strive to win, rather than collaborate. We’ve forgotten the art of deep listening to decipher the myriad ways people express the same things.

But we need to foster these skills again because building community is about forging connections in tough, rough, and challenging terrain. In essence, it is the most deeply radical action you will ever take. It demands profound patience, listening without judgement, and a commitment to work with people we might not initially like. Because, guess what? They showed up, too.

Don’t look to any level of government for help. The system of governance is reductive and divisive and designed to convince communities to abrogate responsibility to the bureaucratic maze. And, don’t go looking for people who only reflect your beliefs. You need everyone's skills and everyone's knowledge. You need to be brave and unwavering about fostering connection based on geography.

How you do this will depend on where and who you are. It might mean you move into and work within an existing community structure strengthening and building the connections already started. Or you might need to foster something from the ground up, like I’ve had to do.

Building community for survival

Understanding your most important community is not online, and not somewhere else, and not about shared beliefs, how then do you start building it?

For every community building journey will be different, so I can’t give you a road map for your community. All I can do is explain my journey.

I live in an isolated place, on an island that amplifies our isolation. In the far-flung highlands of my island home, our land parcels are designed around farming and forestry. This means we are scattered across a big landscape with a lot of space between us. The township with the hospital and shops is 75 km (close to 50 miles) away with nothing but farms and forests between. It would take me an hour to walk to my nearest neighbour. In a 40 km (close to 25 mile) radius of my farm, I estimate there are probably 120 people living here. This is the group of people I left my previous work and social media profile to grow food for; the group that now have my day-to-day radical focus—this is my community.

Oh man, do we face some challenges, too. Our power and telecommunications grid are breaking down, and our population is too small for the corporates that own these grids to be bothered to fix either. We’ve never had municipal water piped to our homes. All of us have been responsible for our water from the start, and many of us are moving wholly off-grid for everything else as well. Many of us live well below the poverty line. More than half of us lost our homes or farms in the Black Summer wildfires. We have practical, rural-living skills and big machinery, and we know how to look after our physical needs of food, shelter, and water—but we are separated from each other by a lot of space. And, we are divided into two camps of deep-rooted belief or rejection of nature conservation and climate change.

Since the wildfires destroyed our landscape, I have been working through how, in this fractured, isolated space, can I draw people together so we can survive.

I’ve tried a few thing, but landed on something that’s let me focus on creating neutral ground. For my community, this is around food security. I began hosting a ‘Harvest Exchange’ where locals gather to share the excess of our grown fruit, vegetables, and herbs with each other. No money changes hands. We meet at a regular time, in a neutral space, and for a defined time (two hours). The conversations are organic and impromptu, and mostly cheerful. Everyone is welcome. No one, no matter their beliefs, is turned away.

Now 18 months into the project, a group from a regular base of 50 or so people—spanning left, right, climate doomers, and QAnon devotees—gathers with smiles on our faces. We talk about our gardens. We talk about the neutral things we share—the condition of our roads, the power outages, when the rain will fall, and about ever present wildfires. We are learning about each other and the wellspring of knowledge and skills we embody. I know it sounds like a ‘kumbaya’ moment, but between the de-charged discussion we are especially learning to hear each other, and quietly, the climate chaos discussion has begun—one-on-one—and within the safety of neutral words.

I fully understand why you might initially dismiss this investment of time as a waste of your effort. Right now you are thinking you are too busy. Your community is just too different. You are in a city (spoiler: that makes your task easier, in so many ways). You are shy (spoiler: so am I). But, let me explain why this 18 months has been worth more than anything I have done before.

I now have the phone numbers of every farmer in the 40 km radius of our farm, and when wildfire events happen I can txt or call them … and they answer. I am known to them. They trust we share a goal to protect our community.

I am regularly asked by the formal firefighting agency to communicate information to this group when wildfires are active ... we are recognised and heard.

I am often contacted by people from beyond my community seeking my help in communicating information and funding into my community. Later this year we'll be bringing in experts to teach us particular skills we lack, like meteorologists to help us work through the future of lightning strikes, or market gardeners to help us ramp up our food production.

And, it’s not all on me. Smaller groups have formed under the Harvest Exchange to foster old-world skill building, all with the goal of getting us ready for future hardships. Together all this activity has extended the group to maybe 75 people in regular, neutral contact with each other. In time, I am confident we'll connect with almost everyone.

All this takes time. I’ve been at it for 18 months and still feel we have another six months of trust building before the next step.

Moving towards preparation

Sometime soon, when I am confident the time is right, I’ll start the next stage—bringing people together to consciously and openly assess our climate-driven risks (for us that is extreme fire and heat and a shortage of food), to assess our skills and our strengths, and to plan how we survive the next clusterfuck bearing down on us.

For us, these will include highly practical and often illegal measures. Nestled in a high-fire-risk region, our needs are for more fire tracks and earth breaks, cool controlled burning of fuel loads, a community-controlled radio communication network, and permanent water filling stations for firefighting. Great chunks of this we are prohibited from doing, but I know we’ll do it none-the-less. We’ll make sure we have food stores and spare communications parts. We will stockpile fuel. We’ll build what we need, because we have no illusions that our governments will do anything.

Getting this done is what I dedicate two chapters to in FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe and am happy to share the book as an eBook for anyone who wants to read the detail (send me a comment or email if you are interested). I’ll elaborate this further in a coming post, but this snapshot gives you a taste for what you need to be prepared to consider, and the time it will take. This is why I am urging you to start now.

Your community will be different from mine. Your risks—water shortage, food shortage, wildfires, heat domes, rain bombs, floods and mudslides, droughts, and sandstorms—will be different to what we face. But, you'll never get to the hard-core discussions if you don't have trust. The path to that is neutrality.

Embrace rugged, unfiltered humanity

Don’t go looking for a community of friends. Nor for an echo-chamber of beliefs. You need to be radical and fearless, and commit to talking to everyone in your geography; to learning to listen and actually hear what they are saying. Remember, we are all scared. We all love our children. We all want whatever we love around us to survive. We have far, far more in common than the few ideological beliefs that divide us—even the ones that feel so extreme it’s difficult to countenance their company.

George Monbiot offers a brilliant perspective in this excerpt from his forthcoming book:

'… Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, “but often get the feelings right”. … I see conspiracy fictions as a form of reassurance. This might sound odd: they purport to reveal “the terrifying truth”. But look at what they’re actually saying. Climate breakdown? It’s a hoax. Covid? All fake. Power? Just a tiny cabal of Jews. In other words, our deepest fears are unfounded.

… Conspiracy fictions also tell us we don’t have to act. If the problem is a remote and highly unlikely Other – rather than a system in which we’re deeply embedded, which demands a democratic campaign of resistance and reconstruction – you can wash your hands of it and get on with your life. They free us from civic responsibility. This may be why those who take an interest in conspiracy fictions are so seldom interested in genuine conspiracies.'

We don’t have time to re-educate everyone. Honestly, climate chaos is slamming our world so hard now, we have to find ways to step past the division very quickly.

The government is not coming. Look for the similarities. Seize the neutral ground. Embrace the realm of rugged, unfiltered humanity.

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