A-Infos (en) UK, AFED, Organise - (WILD FIRE) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

As I write this, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving their homes 
to avoid fires in France and Spain. Surrey is on fire, and parts of 
Scotland are still covered in ash. It's a trite point, but events like 
this have been happening in poorer parts of the world for decades. Yet 
as the weather turns on us in Europe and America, it suddenly becomes a 
much bigger story. ---- It was in this context that I was listening to a 
debate about a wildfire in America. A man, introduced as working for a 
university, claimed that climate change couldn't be blamed for the 
fire-it was simply the result of a downed power line.

This sent me back 15 years to a conversation at university, inside a 
smoke-free bar. Booze had been consumed, and a man I'd met five minutes 
prior was explaining to me that he wasn't single because he had cheated 
on his partner, but because she had found out.

Climate change is a stress multiplier. It makes bad things that happen 
anyway worse. When you hear of a forest fire, what you don't hear about 
are the dozen consequences it brings for working people: more strokes, 
more lung cancer, and more premature deaths. The same is true of all the 
disasters made far more likely thanks to climate change.

Climate change is the result of CO2 and other gases being poured into 
our atmosphere, trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space. 
This leads to a series of ever more complicated and dangerous 
environmental consequences-floods, droughts, fires, and everything else 
filling the news right now.

So what produces these gases? Our industrial system, our methods of food 
production, and how we transport ourselves. Because we live in a 
capitalist society, decisions about how these sectors are run are made 
by the tiny minority who own our society.

That tiny minority makes decisions based on the core organising 
principle of capitalism: that the strong take what they can, and the 
weak suffer what they must.

In an industrial context, that means producing and transporting goods in 
the cheapest possible manner. If that means pouring more heat-trapping 
gases into the atmosphere and fuelling more disasters, then so be it.

Climate change is now an existential threat to organised human life on 
Earth. Remarkably, this remains true even when it is now cheaper to 
produce green energy than it is to burn gas or oil. How is this possible?

It's possible because, despite the fact that we can produce cheap, 
environmentally friendly energy, plenty of massive corporations have 
invested heavily in carbon-emitting infrastructure. To extract profit 
from those legacy investments, they use their political and economic 
power to secure state protection. In America, they do this by 
controlling both the Republican and Democratic parties, ensuring the 
state continues to subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of tens of 
billions of dollars a year. They also criminalise protest movements, 
going so far as to bypass trial by jury when juries show a reluctance to 
lock away the younger generation just to protect corporate profit margins.

But why does this happen? Why are political parties that are supposedly 
meant to represent working people actively accelerating the potential 
end of organised human life? It is arguably the greatest crime in human 
history, and in the US, it is playing out in broad daylight.

It's happening for two reasons. First, representative democracy in 
Western nations is structured to systematically ignore the needs and 
interests of working people. Second, these political parties serve 
wealthy elites. But why would these elites allow the world to end? They 
live here too.

The truth is, they believe they can survive the environmental apocalypse 
in their billionaire bunkers. In fact, with the rise of AI and 
automation, the rich no longer require the poor in the same numbers. A 
planet that vomits out excess humanity is, to them, quietly 
convenient-it saves them the trouble of getting rid of us themselves.

I'm not sure how they imagine the political economy of a billionaire 
bunker working long-term. Personally, I hope the last thing the CEO 
class sees is a working-class security guard's hands wrapped around 
their neck, drool falling from the guard's mouth. More likely, though, 
they'll find a way to keep the few remaining slaves they need alive.

The only way to build a society where the climate isn't sacrificed for 
profit is through genuine worker control of the economy. If every 
business, factory, school, and office is run by democratic committees 
truly representative of the people working in them, we won't allow the 
Earth to be burned for profit. Such a system abolishes the drive for 
endless accumulation, eliminates environmentally destructive production, 
and reduces unnecessary work altogether.

So if we need to rebuild the economy on democratic grounds for the long 
haul, what can we do right now? Alone, you can do nothing; collectively, 
we can change the world. Start by getting involved with your local 
anarchist group or a radical trade union. At the same time, we need to 
build local mitigation strategies-planting trees, creating urban 
gardens, and taking back space. The state and charities won't do it for 
us, so look for a local guerrilla gardening group and get your hands dirty.

Eric

https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2026/08/10/wild-fire/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en