WAKE WHILE YOU CAN

Today, the echoes of yesterday hang like poignant grief in the air—the undercurrent of our lives. Climate chaos is not around the corner. It’s already stormed through the door and made itself home. We want you to start building the life that will carry you through while there’s still time to protect what remains.

More than 1,000 local residents have been evacuated from parts of Crete. Greece, July 2025. Photographer: Alexandros Avramidis

The sun is streaming across Geoff’s shoulder. He kneads then shapes the sourdough loaves that have been proving and growing overnight. The room infuses with the quiet tang of rye and the sweetness of wheat as he works the smooth elastic dough. It’s a slow meditation he’s been doing for years. Not for social photos. For sustenance.

We had visitors yesterday. They came to talk with us about community climate adaptation and the conversation still vibrates through our home. For them it was a great discussion. Lively. Laughter. Stories that stopped time.

Today, the echoes of yesterday hang like poignant grief in the air—the undercurrent of our lives. Because climate chaos means something different to us. It’s not around the corner. It’s already stormed through the door and made itself home. It seeps with loss of security. Loss of confidence. Loss of beauty, and hope. I know these thoughts are rolling through Geoff’s mind, as he moves the shaped loaves to a warm spot to complete their final rise. They always are. I can see the simplicity of the grief resting in his soul and I envy him that sad singularity. My mind races after tendrils and the clawing need to scan news. Geoff rests with calm pathos. Mine is chaos and noise.

But I am armed with something new today. I’ve just finished reading an essay by Tom Joad, The Voice of Resistance. It’s my first of his pieces. Still reverberating.

‘I used to think there would be more wreckage. That when the world began to fall apart, we would hear it.

I imagined a cracking sound, the groan of steel under pressure, the unmistakable punctuation of things breaking: glass, trust, the sound a mother makes when she can't find her child. But the breaking didn't sound like that at all. It sounded like nothing. It sounded like a vibration in your pocket.’

And then:

‘We are not overwhelmed by tragedy. We are desensitised by design.

The platforms know exactly what they are doing. The engineers who built the infinite scroll studied addiction patterns in casinos. The executives who greenlit autoplay learned from the tobacco industry. The algorithms that surface content are optimized for engagement, not enlightenment. They have gamified empathy and monetized outrage.

A system that digests atrocity must first make it edible. It must soften it. Filter it. Crop it. Wrap it in commentary, surround it with links. It must give you context, and then take the context away. It must make the wound consumable. And it does.

You can scroll past the footage of a boy screaming for his mother and see an ad for weighted blankets before you blink.

This is not a glitch. This is the design.’ — Tom Joad, The Flattening, 2025

Geoff doesn’t participate in social media, and never has. He’s also lean with his news consumption. He scans his feed each day and reads content only if it meets one of two criteria. ‘Will this change my life?’ and ‘Can I do anything about it?’. In essence, he askes himself ‘Do I need to know this?’. As a consequence he saves himself the soul killing toil of chasing smoke from millions of angles. But, now I understand he’s also saved himself from the machine.

I thought I had, too. Back in September 2023 I walked away from my then-Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts (they are still functionally live, if you look. Closing them is a time investment I don’t care to spend), to focus on growing food for my community. I wrote it about here, too, in Doomscroll. Delete. Dig.

Yet, in reading Joad’s essay and watching Geoff quietly sitting inside the truth of our life, I recognise I still ‘consume’ a crazy amount of ‘content’. Once, I would listen to the morning radio news and I’d sink with bliss into The Guardian Weekly each weekend. I read for hours around this, absorbing the rich wisdom of thousands of nonfiction books over my career. Now, I consume on my cell phone seven days a week, with probably three times the reading time. Rarely do I pick up a nonfiction book. Out of old-worn habit I still collect them, but the unread pile towers at my bedside.

Three times the time investment, yet I am frayed, and distracted. Worn out. What’s more, I would struggle to articulate much about what I read each day. All of this is feeding my chaotic internal energy—the swarm of flies inside my head. Open phone tabs. Apps with incessant notifications. Mental noise.

But, I am not totally in. I lived through the trauma first. A landscape-wide shock that burned truth into my bones—grief too big for one life to hold. It stretched from one horizon to the next, emotional and physical, and it hasn’t let go. That kind of pain strips the world bare. So when the gamified information trap comes for me, I don’t fall all the way in. Some part of me already knows it is a house of mirrors. I feel the spell tugging, but I never forgot what is real.

Pulling against it, I write to break that spell for others. To get you ready. To spare you the grief Geoff and I will carry to the end.

Back in November 2024, I wrote:

‘I won’t lie. Over the past four years, I’ve questioned whether I could face another day. I’ve stood on the edge, more than once, since climate chaos roared into my world and destroyed everything. Believe me, you don’t want this trauma. I am saying this out loud, not for pity, but to demand your attention.

…

Because I’ve crossed a threshold, a line of awareness that most of the world unconsciously avoids. It’s a one-way ticket to understanding the harsh reality of climate chaos. The clarity is not a badge of honour; it’s a curse that came when a wildfire took my home, my community, and my belief in ‘normal’. The monstrous blaze scorched everything I was, everything I believed, leaving me with an unhealable wound that political neglect only deepens.

The grotesque heaps of incinerated animals along the roadside are seared into my memory. I flash, daily, to the bleak ashscape stretching across horizons, the wind empty, murmuring death—no buzz, no birdsong for months. My neighbours’ hollow eyes still haunt me, vacant with sorrow. I hear the echoes of gunshots as farmers shot thousands of animals, sparing them the agony of slow death. I see animals with skin scorched from their bodies, intestines exposed, feet burned to bone, udders boiled, joeys cooked alive in pouches. My words fall short of these monstrous realities. I’ve seen nature obliterated, and I’ve lived the slow-motion hell of rebuilding life from ruins—each step a cruel reminder of how deeply unprepared, how shockingly negligent, our governments are in the face of the nightmares closing in. These images are testament to the obscene indifference of our leaders.

Human security, stability, infrastructure—it’s all paper-thin. Food security teeters on a knife-edge, as does access to clean water and reliable power. Communication lines are weak. If you live far from a city, don’t delude yourself—emergency services won’t arrive in time. Government sympathy is a farce. They show up with flimsy support, stage photo ops, and retreat to self-preservation plans that exclude us all.

Know this: every individual who has survived the recent wildfires, floods, or storms is alive but gutted. We face mental collapse, financial ruin, and a shattered world. Our suffering goes unspoken, drowned out by the superficial rage of news cycles. And because the world isn’t listening, we stand before you in silence. We know this truth now: we’re on our own. Survival is up to us.’ — Science is Screaming, November 2024

Yesterday, during the compelling conversation with our visitors, when asked why no-one is preparing for climate chaos, Geoff replied: ‘Because most people don’t react to a slow threat. They are comfortable in their denial. Like the boiling frog, they’re sitting in slowly heating water. They don’t recognise the danger and will be cooked to death’ he said.

Why, I kept asking myself?

Then Joad, answered through his essay:

‘I am haunted by how ordinary it all feels. The juxtaposition of brutality and banality is no longer jarring. It is structural. Built into the timeline like scaffolding. An update about a man killed in a traffic stop. A tutorial on “glowy skin.” A tweet thread on fascism. A dog video. A GoFundMe for someone's funeral expenses.

We learn not to resist the rhythm. We learn to blend grief with contentment, horror with consumption. We learn that the system will not allow us to feel one thing at a time.’ — Tom Joad, The Flattening, 2025

I keep banging on with the same message, essay after essay. Act, now. Prepare, now. Once you’ve felt the flames. Once you’ve inhaled the ash. Once you’ve discovered how utterly alone you are. You understand the myth of security and safety. It’s brutally, brutally obvious and you cannot look away. But, this is not the experience of most.

Of my regular readers I know only a small fraction are taking action in their lives. Witnessing the steps of those I am contact with is awesome and inspiring. But, most of my regular readers are still consuming and numb, as Joad suggests.

So I am going to try and explain why I need you to break free. The sorrow Geoff and I carry is about what is gone and what is still going. Our history erased. Our security crushed. Our confidence shattered. The loss we live with is deep, depressing, and soul draining. Yet, we’ve learned to tune it. It compels us to the physical things we do: growing food; making most of what we eat every single day; managing our power and water and waste outside the system; fixing, mending, making, building; and never, ever taking the safety net of society as a given. Ever. We’ll protect what remains of the wild and beautiful around us for as long as we can. We know the contract with government is broken.

There is beauty in our life, especially in our grower community work. We laugh almost every day, because Geoff’s deep humour will not be squelched. But we move forward through palpable grief that hangs in every breath, in every day, in every long night.

I want to spare you the pain. I want to spare you climate chaos storming through your door. It’s why I seek to shock you. To break you from the cycle that Joad describes, while recognising in myself how seductive and addictive it is.

There are plenty of sharp minds speaking plainly about the what and when of climate collapse—the facts, the flaws, the warnings. Many give freely—truth shouldn’t be paywalled for the privileged. You can find what you need—if you’re willing to look.

But Geoff and I want more from you than that. More than knowing. More than reading. We want you to feel it. To grieve it. To rage at it. To rise from it.

We want you to start building the life that will carry you through climate collapse. While there’s still time to protect what remains.

We want you to wake while you can. We want you to act.

Solidarity & Soil

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I walked away from the algorithm’s choke-hold to work where it counts: hands in soil, words on the page, shoulder to shoulder and word to word with those adapting to climate chaos. This is fire-and-flood writing—scorched, storm-beaten, and stubborn. If it moves you, pass it on like a sandbag in rising water.

There’ll be no paywalls here, ever—climate collapse is brutal enough. But if you’ve got coin, become a paid subscriber. Every dime fuels the RESILIENT ROOTS GROWER COLLECTIVE, where we’re seeding trial-by-fire systems and hard-won knowledge.

And if you’re looking for practical tools, maps, and field notes for the road ahead, start with A COLLECTIVE GUIDE TO SURVIVING CLIMATE COLLAPSE.