This Week in the Apocalypse: October 6th, 2026

Hello and welcome to Live Like the World's Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. This is your weekly installment of This Week in the Apocalypse, and I'm your host today, Brooke Jackson, joined by a very, very special, most specialist, bestest guest ever.

Hello.

The one and only Margaret Killjoy.

Hi, I'm a guest, not a host.

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This is The Final Straw Radio, a weekly anarchist and anti-authoritarian radio show broadcasting out of occupied Salagi land in southern Appalachia. Hello and welcome to Live Like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy.

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And we're back. Excellent jingling as always. I feel jingle-icious. So this week in the apocalypse, we're talking about climate news with Margaret. Uh, she has many great things for us, but before we talk about the climate, Margaret, how are you?

Well, I'm always good on a day when I spend hours looking to take notes about the status of the climate.

You're good because it's very affirming, right? Your fears and paranoia and just general sense of doom about the universe are validated.

That's true. Although, okay, the one undoom thing— and I don't have my source on this because I didn't put it in my script— a recent study shows that I've for years said, well, you know what, nothing we do matters because at the end of the day, the Sun will devour the Earth one day.

Sure.

Well, new studies show the Sun might not devour the Earth.

What?

It might get right near the edge of the Earth but not devour it. It's, it's a It's uncertain.

Really?

This thing that I've taken for granted as an existential understanding for so long.

Oh my God. Okay, I'm Googling this now because I don't— I don't think I can— I don't think I can live knowing this.

I know. I know. I took a lot of peace in the fact that one day nothing we do has any meaning. Now, to be fair, no humans are going to survive when the Sun devours the first 2 planets and is right at our proverbial doorstep.

Apparently, we're not in danger of our Sun going supermassive. supernova because it's not big enough.

Yeah.

Lame.

I know, we've got a boring Sun. We should, uh, we should reroll a new solar system, right?

Ours is not cool enough.

Yeah. But other than that, and everyone being— the weather's nice right now where I am, I'll say that. How are you doing?

You know, I'm doing pretty good. We're having a lovely sort of final burst of summer weather here in my part of the Pacific Northwest. Which I love because I know that the cold, short, gray, foggy, rainy days are coming, and the misery that is December is looming forward ahead of us. So I'm soaking in these last bursts of summer while I still can.

We are the opposite temperament. This is why I liked the Northwest. I liked that it rained all the time.

To be clear, I like the rain. It's the light that's the issue for me. So another reason I want our Sun to go giant supernova, because just the more light, the better. I mean, yesterday I went out for lunch and we ate outside, and I took the seat that was in the Sun, and I stared at the Sun because that's what I do. I stare at the Sun and it makes me happy.

That's fair, I think. I don't think you're really supposed to do that, but I— okay.

We're going to hell anyway. Might as well enjoy the ride.

All right, fair. Well, you want to hear some hellish news about the climate?

I sure do. Yeah, there was almost nothing interesting in the headlines to talk about this week unless you want to talk about AI, which none of us really want to talk about anymore, even though we really should. Yeah.

What's our headlines? What do we got?

Well, you may have heard that there was an AI technology summit at the White House in which Dumptruck got together with the leading heads of technology companies that do AI and They created a list of voluntary regulations, rules and regulations that they can choose to follow if they feel like it.

I like— this is not— I'm not a subject matter expert in this, and no one listening needs to take my word for it. I'm pretty convinced by the argument that the reason that all the heads of AI are desperately looking to claim that they want this level of regulation is that they're trying to slow their IPOs in order to not that they're just trying to keep the bubble from bursting, that this is all like— people who seem smarter than me have made the case that what they're doing right now is just trying to keep the bubble from bursting. But the thing that I keep thinking about every time they're like, oh, whoops, sorry, we made a tool that did a bunch of crimes, is that I am reasonably certain— I'm not 100% certain. I need to talk to my lawyer before I finish the project. I'm reasonably certain that if I turned on my bank robber robot that goes into banks and sticks guns into people's faces and demands all the money and then shoots the people who don't give me the money, Yeah. I'm reasonably certain I'm legally liable Oh. For the actions of it. And so I'm confused by this, um, uh, I think that if you have a billion dollars, you stop being liable for the crimes of your robots. But maybe they're just trying to say that we're not liable for the crimes of robots, in which case a golden age of cyberpunk is among— upon us.

This is true. I think, I think part of having the billion dollars is that you have a whole bunch of other people that are working on making the robot. So there's just too many people to blame any one of them. And therefore you get away with it. That's my theory as to, as to why that works.

Yeah, that actually kind of works though. That actually kind of makes sense because there's sort of a level where, like, as soon as you have enough people where you think that they could probably, like, overthrow the government if they tried, the state handles you very differently. You know, like, I've always believed that voting is better than warfare, right? Um, and I think that voting, majority voting came around when people were just like, what if instead of every time we have a decision, slightly more than half of us kill the other half? What if we just like, war-gamed it out and figure out who would have killed the other side and then just leave it at that, you know?

Evolution.

Yeah.

So much wiser. Anyway, so I'm sure that these voluntary regulations will be, um, will be strictly adhered to by, uh, the existing AI companies and people trying to get into AI, and that we'll all be fine and, um, not totally fucked by, uh, these creations that are hacking into our systems.

It makes me so depressed. I have to admit, like, of all of the random things that are happening in our, like, polycrisis right now, omnicrisis, I can't remember what the word is we've come up with for it. This one is the most, like, fucking brain-dead of them. It's the most, like, the entire corpus of 20th century science fiction was entirely about this. And, like, it's the most— everyone's brains are gonna stop working. I hate it. I hate it. I've become a full Luddite, and I was always an early adopter of technology, and I'm just fully on time to get back to semaphore. If you can't communicate by semaphore, although you could probably program AI into semaphore, you could certainly program some stuff into semaphore anyway.

Girl, I love this so much because my family has been in technology for, like, generations now. And so we've always been big on tech and early adopters and so forth. But, um, you know, my, my tech genius oldest brother and everyone else in the family for that matter are all going, wait, AI? This is not— this is not good. This is— this is deeply problematic.

Yeah, it makes me sad. Uh, well, you want to hear about the climate as a nice, uh, sunny change of topic?

Yeah, nature never makes me sad. Tell me about nature.

You know, there is a horrible misanthropic part of me that is like, If the right people were being destroyed by nature right now, I'd be a little bit like, yeah, we had it coming. But instead, I'm gonna talk to you about a lot of developing nations that are in a lot of trouble right now.

Yeah.

But one of those developing nations is the United States, and one of the ways that the United States is in trouble right now— Lake Mead is the largest reservoir of water.

It's not actually—

I knew it was gonna be water. Yeah, no, it's—

Don't fuck with the water. It's always the water.

Yeah.

It is on the border between Arizona and Nevada. And it is drying up fast, and it has been for a while. It currently provides the water needs of about 40 million people. I've also read that it reads— meets the power needs of 40 million people, and the coincidence of that number makes me doubt all my sources, but I have many sources.

Yeah, it is part of the power supply to a great number of people for sure via the dams on it, but it's not like the only power supply that they have.

Totally. It's not like once this turns off, suddenly there's no power. We have a grid. It is a gridded thing. unless you're in Texas, in which case you have a separate grid, which is still a gridded thing. Lake Mead's water level— no one's— when I say, ah, I hate things, they're like, no one's talking about this big, bad thing that's happening. But genuinely, all kinds of mainstream articles are reporting on this. It's just not being talked about. The Lake Mead water level is currently 1,037 feet. And you're like, that's a lot of feet, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's 20 feet less than it was this time last year.

Mm-hmm.

It is going down during the time of the year where it's supposed to start going up again. It is 26.2% full, and that is the critical level. And more importantly than any of that, if it drops 2.7 more feet, 70% of the hydroelectric power of one of the most powerful, largest power plants in the country goes offline because—

Oh my gosh!

You know, if it drops lower than where the power plant, where the hydro is, it stops working. This is well above dead pool, which is the period at which, like, the lake I'm gonna get this part wrong. I didn't really research Deadpool enough, where it's just like not doing it. It doesn't have flow anymore or whatever, right? But this 70% reduction in its power is expected to happen by November.

Oh, wow.

So this is a probably. Whenever I read a thing that's like, this is definitely gonna happen, I, you should all turn on your skeptic brains. But, uh, yeah, this is like no longer a, like, a lot of other things are like, oh, this might happen kind of soon in a couple years. This is probably gonna happen this year.

Wow.

The dam currently powers over a million homes as part of an interwoven grid. This will put more demand on other power plants. It'll cause the electricity— cost of electricity to rise. The second largest reservoir is Lake Powell, which powers the Glen Canyon Dam. This is also at an all-time low, but the reason it's not currently causing more problems, it's kind of like with the oil reserves that we're doing right now where we're like, just like, releasing all of our reserves to keep the status quo going. We're also doing that with water. So Lake Powell, they're, like, fucking with— engineers are, like, fucking with other dams and other lakes and shit to keep Lake Powell from drying up too much.

Okay.

And it's bad. And also, you know, there's a lot about how the water from the Colorado River, like, provides the water for many, many states and basically, like, the whole Southwest of the United States. And, and there's all of these, like, rules. I didn't get into too much of this in the script, but there's all of these different rules about who has access to it. Of course, like, indigenous nations that are in that area are being some of the hardest hit by this because they have, like, you know, their rights have always been like, well, if we have a little bit of rights left over, you can have some.

Mm-hmm.

You know? And the long-predicted water wars come ever nearer. But if you're in the Southwest, maybe you're like, Well, it's actually raining quite a lot this summer. It's actually quite nice. And that is because of El Niño, or as one article I read called it, we've moved past El Niño, it's El Hombre. Because the El Niño is bad. Well, first we could talk about water. Do you have anything you want to say about water before we move on to El Niño?

I just wanted to clarify for listeners that maybe don't know the geography that both Lakes Mead and Powell are part of the Colorado River system and were created by the damming of the Colorado River. And clarify that the, the 40 million people figure that you mentioned, that's how many people who get water from the entire Colorado River system, including Lakes Mead and Powell. That's across, like, 7 states, I want to say, including places like San Diego and Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Yeah.

You know, just small cities.

Yeah, totally not the largest growing city, fastest growing cities in the country.

Yeah, you know.

Also, I try not to get on about veganism and climate change. Fully a third of the water from the Colorado River goes to growing crops for livestock.

Oh, wow.

Alfalfa, and I forgot to write down the other one.

I knew it was millions of acres of farmland were watered by that water system, but I didn't realize what that farmland was being used to create.

Yeah, whenever people are mad about almonds, and we probably should be mad about almonds, it's like anything we're growing direct for human consumption is substantially less wasteful than what gets grown to feed to something to then feed to somebody. Yeah.

But we can— we can talk about other types of water that aren't just in rivers and lakes.

Yeah, let's talk about the really nice warm water in the Pacific. I will say, as an East Coaster, every time I go to the Pacific, I think to myself, this water's fucking cold.

Yes, it is, Margaret. Yes, it is.

I've gone swimming in Oregon, and in order to do so, I had to put on a fake second skin, like an amphibian, or a wetsuit, as they called it, or a claustrophobia device, as they also call it. In order to swim.

The not dying of hypothermia in the water device.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I have good news for everyone who shares my concerns about the Pacific Ocean being too cold, who thinks to themselves, the Atlantic is so nice and warm. Well, El Niño, which is the regular seasonal thing that happens quite often, it's just nowhere near what we're dealing with this year, where the Pacific gets kind of warm and it has, you know, all kinds of impacts on global weather, Right? It is so off the charts that the primary charts that they use— there's, like, one way that these graphs are done, and they're gonna have to change the y-axis on them.

Oh!

Because the main chart that people use caps out at an average temperature of 30 degrees Celsius in the main affected area, and the current projections break that. We haven't yet broken it, but the current projections have us breaking it soon, and months sooner than the previous Like, we haven't yet reached the hottest that the ocean has ever been in an El Niño.

Okay.

But we have hit basically that several months before the last big one. This is the time of year where sea temperatures are supposed to go down, and instead they're going up. There has never been an El Niño that has warmed the ocean more than 2.6 degrees Celsius, and we are on track to potentially hit 4 degrees Celsius.

Oh my gosh!

Have you ever heard of that?

That's a huge difference.

I was—

I thought you were going to say like 2.9 or something.

No, right? Yeah. Because usually like, like, yeah. And the thing that's been like fucking with my head about this, I have always been— I don't believe that I am a doomer. I don't believe we are doomed. I think we are doomed, but like not in a— that's the start of the conversation, not the end of the conversation.

Right?

Like, I think we need to look soberly at what's happening and respond appropriately is what I believe. And I believe that we would be coddling ourselves to claim that things aren't as bad. as we think they are. And what I hate is I have always, deep in my little cynical heart, thought that things were going to be worse than what most mainstream media was reporting as the range of possibilities. And I have been right consistently for about a decade.

Yikes.

In all of my, like, cynical— I look at it and I'm like, it's going to be the worst number, not the less bad number. And I I genuinely believe, and I have a little bit of evidence I'm gonna get to a little bit later. I don't believe this— that I'm certain about this. Anytime I say, like, there's a conspiracy or whatever, I believe that they present us the range of numbers so that we are less freaked out.

Right.

Have you ever heard of a Kelvin wave?

Kelvin wave?

Yeah, it's called a Kelvin wave.

Like, Kelvin, the measurement of temperature Kelvin?

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know the etymology. Well, a Kelvin wave is heading for your coast right now. The entire Pacific Coast of the of North America. A Kelvin wave, it's not a big wave vertically. It's a big wave horizontally. It is 6 to 12 inches— Can we surf it, though? What's that?

Can we surf it, though?

No. But what it is is it's— the sea level is going to raise between 6 inches and a foot.

What?

From October till February.

What?

It is one big wave that just comes up. It's just the rising of the water. In a, like—

What? And I feel like this is— you're punking me right now.

This is the reason I find this hilarious. No, that's how it seems. And then also, because I've never heard about this a couple of weeks ago, and I was like— and it's in, you know, New York Times, Guardian, wherever you fucking want to get your, like, most science-y looking mainstream news. And a Kelvin wave doesn't really flood anything, right? Like, 6 to 12 inches is, like, within tides, you know? Like, that's— that's a— I mean, that's a big deal. But the main thing is what this does is it raises the baseline. So every storm that might breach seawalls or, like, flood beaches or get up into cities and do damage right now has 6 to 12 inches added to it as, like, on top of its base. Like, it creates a higher baseline. So this is going to dramatically increase the risk of coastal flooding this year. California has declared a state of emergency over this. And it's going to cause more coastal erosion this year than kind of maybe any other year in recorded history. Beaches are going to be washed away and are being washed away. And that's another major protective layer gone, right? And people are rushing to add sand to the beaches in California. El Niño has already caused massive erosion along Southern California's coasts. The photos are kind of dramatic. I don't know how— whenever I see dramatic photos, I'm like, cool, how does this compare to normal? I couldn't quite tell you.

Right.

You know, but it's like, you know, the cliff where the sand is like— it's not like 6 inches of cliff of— it's like 4 feet of cliff of sand, right? This has already caused a huge number of West Coast houses to get destroyed. Amusingly, Nicolas Cage's $10 million mansion in Malibu had a sinkhole that destroyed its driveway.

Is that the one with all the dinosaurs in it?

I don't know, because I tried searching Nicolas Cage mansion while I was looking for more details about this, and it brought up multiple— I believe this man has multiple mansions.

Yeah.

Which, you know, I probably would too if I had Nicolas Cage money. I'd also probably have dinosaurs. I'm not gonna be mad at that man about that. I'd like to imagine all my money would go to stuff, but I'd probably have at least one. Like, I'd probably hire someone to put together a brontosaurus so I could claim brontosauruses are real, you know? Oh, I love it! Sea level rise on the Pacific Coast was 8 to 12 inches in the last 100 years.

Oh, wow!

This is that level in a few months.

Yeah.

That said, it will likely recede at the end of El Niño, which is sometime around the end of winter.

Okay. The AP describes these Kelvin waves as being like water sloshing in a bathtub.

Yeah!

Which I think is a fun image.

It's hard to really wrap my head around them. I read about them a bunch, you know?

But, like— Yeah, it's not like a tsunami wave that comes in one big gust. Right. It's just like I think that's a good image.

And it's a good image with which to understand most climate change problems, right? Every now and then you get this tsunami that, like, wrecks shit, you know? But most of the time you get weird shit that's hard to imagine that makes everything else worse, you know?

Yeah.

And do you know how many Atlantic hurricanes there have been this year? We're past the month that is peak— September is peak Atlantic hurricane.

I had no idea. I feel like I've barely heard about them.

The reason you haven't heard about them is because we've had zero.

What?

Yeah. So not only none making landfall, but none forming at all. Now, there'll be, like, tropical storms, right? But none of them have reached hurricane status as of this recording. The last time there was no recorded Atlantic hurricanes was 1914, before we knew how to, like, use satellites to look for hurricanes.

Mm-hmm.

So we have no recorded once we actually have eyes on the ocean, we have no recorded instances of this ever happening.

Okay. So we don't entirely know what to expect.

Yeah. And this was like— people knew that this was an El Niño effect, you know? So this isn't like, holy shit, we have no idea what's happening here. I have no idea what's happening here because I'm not a weather woman. But I do watch way too much weather YouTube, like a— well, kind of honestly, like everyone I know who's like a weird prepper who ages. But the ocean is the great regulator of our climate. Last year, the ocean absorbed 40 times more joules worth of heat than the power used by the entire fucking planet of people.

Wow!

And basically, the ocean is the, like, climate battery, right? It, like, gives us this leeway, and that is starting to run out. The Guardian, when they wrote about this— I'm gonna quote The Guardian really quick. Oceans have absorbed about 1/3 of the carbon dioxide that humanity has spewed, and about 90% of the extra heat that greenhouse gas pollution has trapped in the Earth's system.

Wow.

So basically, the warming of the oceans is what precedes the warming of the air. In other fun news— eh, eh, eh.

More?

You've got more? There's so much more!

Margaret!

Tokyo had 37 days of rain in a row, its longest streak ever in history. By four, which is longer than the previous one by four days. But it finally broke a day or two ago. Eastern Japan has seen the lowest. You would hate this. You don't move to the east coast of Japan right now. Okay. It has seen the lowest sunlight levels total for September since they started tracking it after World War II, which of course affects their like you know ability to grow food and things like that. At least five people died in a typhoon there at the end of September. Indonesia. is where this is much more dramatic. One of the places Indonesia is dealing with a terrible drought and forest fire right now. There's 13 million people who are being forced to live in hazardous smoke conditions right now.

And a lot of people—

It's a disaster zone. There are people doing disaster relief everywhere. There's like people running around delivering oxygen to people who can't leave their houses. They're setting up oxygen houses where people can go in and actually breathe clean air for a while. There's been like— I forgot to write the number down in the script, but I want to say like 175,000 people who've had hospitalization-level of lung infections as a result of it.

Wow.

As a Northwest bliver, that might be on some level familiar when it's just all the photos are very dramatic. I was once in the Pacific Northwest when everything was kind of beautiful. I hate how beautiful wildfire smoke makes everything. It's fucked up.

Yeah.

And let's see, the city of Bangkok in Thailand, where 10 million people live, has flooded intensely. At least 40 people have died. Thousands of people have been displaced. And the thing is that, okay, so there's all these dramatic photos of Bangkok in Thailand. Everyone's— it's buried under chest-deep water. It's like a very shocking and moving photo of a person, an adult pushing their child through the water, floating inside a refrigerator.

Oh my gosh.

Right?

Like, the door is open, the refrigerator's on its back, you know?

Yeah.

But the thing about this, this is a city that has a rainy season.

Right.

Its sewers are designed to handle 60 millimeters of rain an hour, which is a fuck-ton of rain in an hour. I used to live where it flooded from, like, an inch and a half of rain, you know?

Right. I'm getting out my measuring tape because I need to figure out how big—

Oh yeah.

60 millimeters. Sorry, American.

Foot and a half?

Wow. That's— wow. That's a lot of rain to be able to process.

Yeah. That's how much it can process. This is more than that. There's parts of it that actually the sewers are designed to handle 80 millimeters of water an hour. But it's just so much rain so fast that it couldn't handle it. Whereas the UK's drought has caused what's likely to be the worst harvest in the UK's history. The Pacific coast of Latin America is fucked for fish because they've— all the fish have fled for hot water. This is, um, where the second most tuna in the world is caught. So it's like, sometimes Americans will hear, oh, that sucks for the fishers and on the west coast of Latin America, but that doesn't affect me. It probably does. Um, yeah, not as directly. And a lot of fishers are like, it's literally not worth the gas money to sail, to drive my boat out to the deeper water where the fish are to catch fewer fish. Like, I will lose money by doing that. I read one one fish you're talking about is $150 in gas for— no, it's $100 in gas for $150 worth of fish.

Oh, wow. Yeah. That doesn't— that's not gonna pencil out with all the other things going into it.

Yeah. And then—

So they're going— let me clarify this, sorry, because I'm curious. They're going deeper into the ocean to find cooler spots because it's too warm near the coast?

Yeah, the fish are.

The fish are. Okay. And people are trying—

yeah. Got it. And it's— it's, um— And I mean, on some level, it's like, This is kind of what we all knew would happen with climate change for a very long time, is that, like, the, like, the ecosystems would shift around, right? And that includes humans. Humans are going to be moving where things are worse.

Right.

Sorry, where things aren't as bad. When they talk about, like, places that, like, you know, India often reaches essentially unlivable temperatures and is the most populous country on Earth. And my, like, big fear around this. The thing that I've been advocating is the wrong word. I've been understanding things in a certain way for a while. I don't think that the right wing at the top of the chain actually disbelieves in climate change. I believe they are acting as though climate change is real and they are expecting more and more displacement of humans. And that is why closing the border is so important to the Global North right now.

Oh.

And now, this is the wrong attitude. Uh, bringing people in actually allows you to solve problems better because, um, labor produces all wealth. And in order to get stuff done, you need people to do it, right?

Right.

And we need like massive amounts of stuff to happen. We need to be building incredibly different infrastructure. We need to be building infrastructure that is easier to heat and cool. We need to be building infrastructure that is more resistant to natural disasters. And we need to be building infrastructure that has better HVAC systems.

Right?

And probably that means living in higher density period anyway, in terms of the cost per housing unit.

Right?

And so I, I believe we're having a moment, um, where there are 2 paths we can end up going down as, uh, the Global North. And one is climate fascism, and one is climate democracy, for whatever other term, or climate assemblyism would be much nicer from my point of view. But Climate Democratic Confederalism, whatever. And I also— my final thing about climate last year, and I want to do more reading about this. I only started reading about this right before, um, I put down my notes for the day. Last year, the UK's intelligence agencies put together a report about the impacts of climate change for, like, national security for the UK. And it's dramatic, but they've also suppressed the report. And so all the reporting—

Oh.

is about how they've suppressed it. Like, it's not, like, publicly available, but there's, like, pieces of it that have been made publicly available. And they are using it to talk to other foreign dignitaries to be like, hey, this is what we think's gonna happen. And it's, like, just actually dark.

Yeah.

And that, again, that's not conspiracism. You can read about it in The Guardian. But don't worry, Trump is working to weaken fuel efficiency standards for cars.

God.

And...

Gas is currently— this is my last thing I have in my notes— gas is currently $1.20 more per gallon in the United States than it was a year ago by national average, whereas diesel is almost twice what it was a year ago.

Yep.

Up $2.70 from the national average. What a good time to get rid of all renewables.

Oh yeah, we don't need that. Why would we need that? Everything is fine.

Yeah. And so I do worry about Chicken littling, right? I worry about being the, like, sky is falling girl.

Mm-hmm.

But we were talking about this earlier. One of the reasons the show exists is because I was feeling alienated from my peers because I was looking at some of the stuff in 2019 and worrying about it. And I did not find that that was particularly common in the social circles I was running in. And so I started this podcast in part to try and communicate to other people who shared my concerns or to try and express my concerns to other people so that these are things we can take seriously. And I think a lot, and I think you do too, as hosting a show like this, about what it means to be like, here's some fucking bad news, right?

Right.

And I like to think that we can use this bad news so we can actually, like, When a storm's coming, you close the shutters. You know, this is a terrible metaphor because it sounds like I'm— I mean, a literal fucking goddamn storm. You know, we take actions in response to what's happening, and that is better than ignoring what's happening. And it's also better than seeing what's happening and just losing our minds.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that that's the challenge in front of us right now, is that I think that everyone on some level knows this stuff, right? Like, none of this stuff— I didn't know what a Kelvin wave was before 2 weeks ago. But, like, I didn't read it and was like, what? Something bad's happening in the world? You know? But it's easy to let it sit in the background as just, like, an ominous horror.

Mm-hmm.

And it's harder to figure out what to do about it. But I think that that's the task in front of us. And I think if we do it right and we start talking about climate and fascism as interrelated issues, we can do more of that work at the same time. Uh, because we have to do that work at the same time. I used to refer to fascism as the mini boss and climate as the big boss, but I don't think we got time for that shit.

Yeah.

I think we got to do one cutscene battle where we fight them both. And like, and I think that in order to do that, we just need to actually look seriously at what's happening. Um, I was talking to someone in like, I do like community preparedness locally and it was someone who hadn't come to one of our things before. was a parent and was just like, you know, I was always someone who was just going to sit down and die when the horrible natural disaster happened. But now I have 2 kids, so that's like just not an option anymore, you know? And just like thinking about what it means to be like, we actually have to try. And dear listener, you're listening to the right podcast to start trying because every week we bring you all kinds of tips and tricks about how to build your own and your community's resilience. I don't know. I don't know. That's my current thought and spiel about doomerism. Like, just don't pretend like everything's fine, but it can't be the end of the conversation. The fact that we're fucked, I think we need to be able to say we're kind of fucked, but we need to have that be not a period but a semicolon.

Right.

Or an em dash, and we can use it for anything.

I love it. Yeah, I think it's, uh, you said it earlier about You know, looking soberly and honestly at the situation that it is, because there's so much that we can't do anything about. Like, the waters will rise, the temperatures will rise. These things are going to happen. Those parts, we're fucked and can't do anything about it. But what we do in response to rising temperatures, or how we handle that, you know, what we do to survive when that happens, we have control and power over that in our individual lives and spaces and communities. And so that's something we can take action against.

Yeah. And I'd rather go down fighting, and by that I don't necessarily even mean physically fighting. I'd rather go down doing disaster relief or working to try and keep myself and the people around me safe. And it's only by doing that that we find that we don't necessarily go down You know, absolutely.

Margaret, thanks for being on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I know you do this very professionally now, and, and sometimes this little collective doesn't, doesn't always get to rank as high.

Oh, it's just that I'm completely burned out on podcasting. That's the secret that I can't say on the show that is my job, is that I am so fucking burned out. I'm also like, I'm not convinced podcasts are a social good anymore. Oh, I watch, I watch the way that people who listen to the wrong podcasts get brainwashed into wild shit, you know? It's like the equivalent of the, like, your, your boomer uncle who watches too much Fox News, who, like, suddenly thinks the Earth is 30,000 years old, but, like, never believed that bullshit, you know?

Mm-hmm.

I, I watch that happening to people with, like, every weird micro-niche way of viewing the world. So if you listen to this podcast and you're like, I only listen to anarchist podcasts, stop. Listen to something that isn't us. don't echo chamber yourself. I also like what we have to say. That's the big trap. But yeah, anyway, that's why I like, um, I'm so burned out on podcasting. But I love it. I love my job. It's wonderful. Check me out on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Um, yeah.

We love you being here on our podcast and talking with us where you can say whatever it is that you want to say anytime you want to say it.

Yay! They don't censor me in the other ones. They just interject ads and I have to do a lot of work.

Yeah, for sure. Um, is there anything else that you want to promote that might be, uh, happening or coming or anything like that?

Well, possibly by the time you listen to this, but probably not. But soon, soon, dear listener, I will have a new zine of short stories called The Folktales of Lowland Sakhan, which is stories set in the world of The Sapling Cage, but you don't have to read The Sapling Cage to enjoy. Margaret wrote a bunch of Folktales set in a fantasy world, and it has all kinds of beautiful art. And it is like one of the most— like, it's— it is the most zine-as-art-object that anyone has ever made of my work. And that's coming from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And it might be up for preorder by the time you listen to this, but it probably isn't. But it will be soon.

Within days of listening to this, if not when you listen to it.

That's right.

In fact, that's right. I've got copies in my hot little hand.

I know, and I want one. I will get one soon anyway.

Okay, cool. And if you want to check anything else out from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, that is the publishing collective that brings you this podcast, as well as a couple of other great podcasts. And we have books, we have many wonderful fancy zines, we mail out a monthly feature to those who want to sign up for it. We have lots of free things on our website too, including PDFs of our Skills Zine series. Of which we're working on the next skill in the series. We'll have another one or two. One of those will come out at least this winter, perhaps a couple of them depending on how depressed we are and how much we feel like hiding under blankets and writing.

We'll see. That's the half-depressed level. Full depressed is hide under blanket, no writing.

Exactly. I like to hide under my blankets with a candle and paper and write stories.

Okay, but I have a friend who went to a burn ward for 3 months for going falling asleep with a candle while wearing— in a sleeping bag, so be careful.

Never— never—

whatever.

I've never had that problem. I'll be fine forever.

Okay, great.

And other ways to support the work of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness include checking out our Patreon at, uh, strangers—

patreon.com/strangersintangledwilderness.

Thanks. I can never remember if it's our full name or our half name, and I should know that one.

I think that one's our full name.

Yeah, I think you're right.

We sure picked a nice short title for ourselves. See the name of every book I've ever written except The Sapling Cage. It's the shortest one.

Oh, there's maybe gonna be another one that's shorter.

Oh, we'll see. I've been writing.

We love it. Uh, if you support us on Patreon, there are different tiers that you could choose to jump on. Um, the one where the folks support us at $20 a month or more, we give you a shout out at the end of all our podcast to say a special thank you. And that can be shouted out to you as a person, to your pets, to things that you love, to important causes, to books in memoriam, all kinds of things that we've got on this shout-out list. In fact, I'm going to read you 68 of them right now. Are you ready for this, Margaret?

Yeah! Hoss the dog!

The Chattanooga Free Store. Glenn, please fight anti-fatness. Arizona Sunsets, Bunny Bionics, Patrick Harnett Marshall, All Wiener Dogs Everywhere, Joseph, the first 2 chapters of The Eden Project by James Hollis, Kiwanis Socialist, the Athens People's Assembly of Athens, Georgia, Your Canadian Friend, Tiny Nonsense, A Future for Abby, the Canadian Socialist Rifle Association, Lancaster County Chooses Love, Karen, Astoria Food Pantry, Enchanted Rats of Turtle Island, Feral and WV, Blink Cat, the Massachusetts chapter of the Socialist Rifles— Rifle Association, Shulva, Jenny and Phoebe the Cats, Jason, Aidan and Yuki the Dog. Oof, boy. Aidan and Yuki the Dog. I'm having a hard time with the names today, my friends. Alexander Gopal, Sunshine, Opticuna, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Julia, Appalachian Liberation Library, Lord Harkin, Baby A-Cab and Her 3 Great Pups, Ephemeral, Princess Miranda, Janice and Odell, Boldfield, Ali, Papa Runa, Milicia, Theo, SJ, Paige, Pocono Pink Pistols, Nicole and Tick for the dog, David, Tazzer's Love of Opel Beasts, Carson, Dana, Chelsea, Amber, Marjorie, The Truth That We Will Outlive Them, Kirk, Mikaya, Chris, The Incredible Runner, Rye, Micah, and— wait, Margaret already said yay to this one.

Hoss the dog! The immortal Hoss the dog.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll see y'all soon.