There’s a triple-whammy coming between the fuel/fertiliser crisis, economic collapse, and El Nino. The system has no reserve left to absorb any of them, and their contradictions are going to feed into each other as a cascading collapse. In a moment of world-historic rupture like this, those contradictions will be plainly visible to people who deeply feel them. It’s going to be like the kind of polycrisis that drove radical movements in the 1930s, but potentially worse. There isn’t going to be any kind of institutional answer which meets the questions people will be forced to ask, and they don’t have the language to ask or answer those questions themselves coherently.

Now’s the time to double down on reading eco-feminist and scientific theory. Mutual aid projects are poised to become a much more impactful tactic, but leftists have to communicate their wider socioecological importance and make it like a post-wildfire town rallying together. Linking ecocentric localism with supporting families is going to give the public an offramp from liberal environmentalism and bourgeois electoralism. Otherwise the reactionary answer to the polycrisis is going to be looting local landscapes for price-gouged commodities, undermining the environment’s ability to recover in time for the next climate shock. I think “bread, roses, and habitat too” is going to be a very resonant kind of message when the entire urban ecosystem is maximally alienated. We’re the one group in society which is going to have some kind of holistic solution if we can seize the moment with a critique meeting the human and natural sides of it.