A Realistic Guide for Surviving Climate Apocalypse

I started my research into what I am calling epistemologies of survival, exploring ways of living with and beyond climate apocalypse, after an evening spent making lists of what it would actually mean to try and survive societal breakdown. As I wrote down the tenets of what a basic survival strategy could look like – self-defence, foraging, shelter-making – I realised my city life left me totally unprepared for anything I couldn’t Google the answer to. And what would an ”apocalypse” actually look like anyway? Surely not like in the movies. How do you prepare for a future you can’t even imagine?

I began, in Timothy Morton’s words, with an ”ecological information dump” – anxiously stockpiling facts to try to equip myself with the minutiae of our impending doom. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t make me feel any more prepared. In fact, I felt paralysed by the sheer insurmountability of the challenge, how to make it all STOP – the rising temperatures and seas, the droughts and floods, the disappearing islands and the islands of rubbish, the critical zone – the clearly impending ecosystem collapse, ecological crisis, biosphere erosion, planetary emergency.

I wanted survival to be solving the problem of ecological catastrophe. But as Mike Hulme points out in Climate Change,this just isn’t a problem we can solve. It’s a predicament. It is a state we are in and no experts, technology or diplomacy is going to get us out of it. And if we can’t fix it – then we have to adapt to it. This thought experiment – thinking in the apocalyptic – is what led me to begin compiling a ”Realistic Guide for Surviving Climate Apocalypse”.

I started with concrete strategies: a feminist self-defence course, exploring concepts of post-capitalist care, DIY shelter-building. The Guide evolved into an exploration on the alternative to paralysing dread: action. This action, however, is not so much a guarantee of survival as it is the practice of surviving, and of telling stories of survival. Stories of how people have forged paths through crises in other contexts. Because if an ”ecological information dump” can’t save us, stories might.

Epistemologies of survival then, comes to mean knowledge passed down through practice, memory, and migration, rather than written records. It is not only material, but relational. And importantly for me, it frames intergenerational knowledge systems as a way to survive ecological collapse.

It aims to reclaim ”prepping” from the alt-right manosphere. In contrast to dominant ways of knowing – those of the ”modern”/Western tradition, often built on exclusionary hierarchies that valorise progress and whose methods often contribute to ecological destruction – epistemologies of survival seeks to learn from the margins.

During my residency in Mustarinda I learnt that in an old growth forest nutrients accumulate at the edge, and so I turned to the edges, the liminal spaces, the margins of society for stories of how to survive its collapse. This led me to my own heritage, that of the Romani people, who have survived centuries of marginalisation, persecution, slavery and even death camps to remain resiliently, proudly, alive.

I became particularly interested in the traditional use of naturopathic medicine within the British Romani community. I see it not only as healing, but as resistance. Historically excluded from accessing the burgeoning medico-religious systems that underpin Western medicine, the Romani have long had to be self-reliant. In part their ostracisation preserved traditions, from herbalism to traditional music, that mainstream society was busy erasing.

Across Europe, Romani engagement with public health systems has often led to state violence: from forced sterilisation and wrongful institutionalisation, to being the testing ground for Nazi eugenics. A distrust and resistance to the mainstream then, becomes a means to survive: resistance and survival becoming intricately interwoven. This knowledge of healing is often passed down through practice, through stories, through communities; not through written texts. It exists outside the logic of extractivism.

As traditional travellers, the Romani also offer a lens through which to understand migration, adaptation, and endurance amid ecological collapse. Migration is increasingly becoming a shared condition: forced displacement, habitat loss, those displaced within their own nations by their political systems, and the universal experience of a migrating weather system leads us all to exist in a state of flux, the severity of which is felt to varying degrees. Disproportionately, it affects those who never benefited from the industrial systems that caused it.

The Romani demonstrate how people can survive, flourish even, on the edges of a system not built for them. How maybe we do not need the ”protections” of the nation state after all. Or how those protections were only ever intended for a select few.

Bruno Latour argues that we in the West live in a world that depends on the destruction of all other worlds, all margins, all alternatives – characterised by an aggressive globalisation and a single story of progress. It is only now that the crisis of late capitalism, climate change, and political instability begin to make the ground, that we stand on uneasy, that suddenly the message is clear: there are other ways of living better than this. And the people, whose worlds ours has destroyed, maybe had it right all along.

But this postcolonial revelation comes too late, because the world we now want to learn from has already been largely eroded. Ailton Krenak, a Brazilian indigenous scholar, states that as a species we have become so disassociated from the earth as a living organism that in our planetary system sustainability is no longer possible. Even our concepts of coexistence have been colonized.

Which is what draws me back to the power of story as a means to survive. To the plurality of our existence as part of a holistic ecosystem, even if it is one where the damage may already be irreversible.

We cannot go back in time to a pre-industrial, pre-colonial world, and I do not wish to idealise a version of history that paints utopian visions of a lost past. But we do have the power to listen and recognise alternative narratives. To see the edges of the forest as fundamental to the whole. As Mike Hulme writes: ”What predicaments need are stories. Interpretive stories – what some may call guiding myths.”

So my Guide is not a list of tips and skills. Just as with survival itself, it is an evolving practice. It – and I – will have to adapt to the future challenges we face. We will have to learn to live within the new stories, in their messy entanglement.

I have come to see that survival means building a future in the margins of a lost world. And once we arrive, we will realise that others are already there.

Riah Knight’s Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/riah.knight/