The Fire Is Here. So We Build What Comes After.

And we dont wait till the fire has died out by burning everything down.

"We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history, but we are not afraid of ruins. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts."
— Buenaventura Durruti

David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost. He isn’t trying to shock us. He’s telling the truth. Not the truth that governments perform on podiums or the truth that corporations print in greenwashed reports. The other truth. The kind that sits in the chest when you're quiet. The kind we’ve all felt for a while now, in the smoke-thick skies, the failed harvests, the floods that don’t recede.

What Suzuki didn’t say, but what his message implies, is that once the fight to prevent collapse is lost, a new fight begins. This one isn’t about saving the world we knew. It’s about preventing the worst of what's to come, and building something fiercely beautiful in the ashes. And it's not going to happen in parliaments or boardrooms. It's going to happen in gardens, in occupations, in the streets, and in the quiet rooms where people decide to stand together against a dying system.

Capitalism cannot solve this. The state does not want to. These aren’t broken institutions. They are functioning exactly as they were designed: to extract, to concentrate power, to shield the few and sacrifice the rest. That’s the machine we live inside. And the smoke coming out of it is not an accident. It's the design feature of a system that treats the planet as a ledger and people as fuel.

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable, but the hard-headed realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”
— Edward Abbey

If they won’t stop burning the future, then they’ve lost their right to shape it. It really is that simple. What remains to be done is not repair. It is resistance. Withdrawal. Exile from the logic of growth. Sabotage when necessary. Care for each other, even when it feels impossible. A great and grounded refusal, with dirt under its fingernails and songs still left to sing.

Let’s not romanticize it. It will be hard. Collapse doesn’t happen in a clean break. It happens in waves. Some will be violent. Some will be slow. Some will arrive in the form of droughts or storms, others in the form of fascist consolidation and elite panic. The only thing that protects us in times like these is what always has: each other.

“Freedom is the mother, not the daughter, of order.”
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

This isn’t about returning to the land in some naïve way. It’s about reclaiming control of life’s necessities from the machinery of profit. We grow food not to escape the city, but to escape the supermarket. We build community health not because the state won’t help, but because it never really did. We form unions, cooperatives, mutual aid pods, and neighborhood assemblies not as protest gestures but as prefigurations of a world that no longer believes in kings.

When people hear "collapse," they imagine the end of meaning. But collapse is not the end. It's a redistribution of meaning. And what we do next determines whether that redistribution serves capital and control, or freedom and regeneration. If we let the current powers consolidate, they’ll build fortresses, not futures. They’ll let the poor drown while rationing desalinated water to the rich. We must not let them script what comes next.

“What we call today a ‘free market’ is, in fact, an enormous network of rules and regulations, designed and managed by the state, in order to maintain the power and wealth of those who already have it.”
— David Graeber

Resilience is a beautiful word. But it’s become a poisoned one. They want us to believe that resilience means weathering the storm while doing nothing to stop the hand that stirs it. They want community gardens that don’t feed rebellion. Mutual aid that doesn’t question property. Spirituality without solidarity. But real resilience doesn’t conform. It rebels. It bites. It grows where they told us nothing could. It refuses to be polite while the world burns.

Let’s be clear: we’re not just talking about being ready for disasters. We’re talking about ending the rule of those who make disasters inevitable. We’re talking about striking from their systems, starving their logistics, and stealing back time. We’re talking about building dual power. One hand with a hammer, the other open in welcome. The state is too slow, too cynical, too compromised to meet this moment. So we will.

There’s nothing more dangerous than people who have nothing left to lose, and nothing more beautiful than people who realize they always had each other. The future isn’t going to be decided by summits or carbon markets. It’s going to be decided by whether people like you and me show up for one another in the dark. Whether we organize in the ruins. Whether we turn the shock into signal.

No, it’s not going to be perfect. It never has been. But we can be clear and intentional. We can build in ways that don’t replicate the hierarchies we inherited. We can learn from Indigenous knowledge, from queer liberation struggles, from abolitionist movements, from anarchist federations and peasant revolts. We don’t need a master plan. We need flexible constellations, threads that interlink and support and remember one another when everything else forgets.

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

The fire is already here. The question now is how we move through it. Whether we breathe together, or suffocate apart. Whether we become shelter for one another, or walls for our own fear. The old world is ending. But there are seeds in the ashes. There always have been.

And you, you’re not powerless. You're not too late. You're not alone.

We carry the future like a coal cupped in our hands.

Keep it alive.