Happy New Year. 2025 was unpleasant for many of us, and my year was difficult in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with climate or food or gaming or any of my other interests. 2026 does not, to be honest, fill me with hope, but same actions get us through bad years as they do good years, and the time will pass anyway. So we may as well do something useful with it.
[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! If you want to help keep the lights on, you can do so via Patreon or Ko-fi. All support is appreciated!]
A frosty field near Castletown House, back in January 2021.
Positive Things
Clean energy had a fantastic year in 2025. There was a lot of good stuff in the natural world too. And coal energy is falling in India and China for the first time in my lifetime.
Small Preparatory Actions
I’ve talked a lot before about things you can do to ready yourself, the place you live, and you community for the effects of climate change (and, somewhat coincidentally, other disasters like earthquakes, fascist takeovers, invasions, and possibly meteor strikes). Many of those have been relatively big things. Today I’d like to collate a list of things you can do that will help prepare you in small ways, things you can do in stages or in an hour or an afternoon.
Explore - most people no longer know the areas they live in. They know the route to work or school, which will often coincide with the nearest public transport stop, they know the way to the shops and the pub, and they may, if they have friends living nearby, know the way to their houses. During the early part of the pandemic, when regulations confined us to within a small distance, I took on the project of exploring that space. I walked down every side street and estate byway within 2km, and then as restrictions lifted, every street and road in the village and its estates, and every field I could access. I found shortcuts, apple trees, shady lanes with brambles, oaks and alders considerably older than the houses around them, streams, and in one case, a secret stash of raspberry canes, presumably planted by someone with no garden of their own.
I can’t predict what’s in your area, but you’re absolutely not going to know until you get out there and wander around, and there may be all kinds of things, some useful, some presenting possible risks (streams or floodable areas you didn’t know of are high on this), and some just plain interesting.
Invite People Over - part of the community building inherent in the Be Generous rule is going to gatherings, of whatever kind. But you can participate at a smaller scale by inviting people over to do a thing in connection with your community, whatever it may be. So for the SCA you can do an armouring day, or a research evening, for a golf group you can watch coaching videos together. Nearly every hobby that exists needs a gear maintenance session every so often, and having other people doing it at the same time is great. These not-at-the-actual activity things (along with travelling as a group, and waiting for things to start) are the times when community building happens. You don’t need a lot of space for this - if you’re watching how-to videos or reviewing recorded practices, all you need is a couch and a screen - but it’s a deeply effective part of the praxis of community.
Learn A New Skill - it almost doesn’t matter what, although I do have some suggestions. But the important thing is to learn something new. Learning is, in and of itself, a skill, and it’s one that can get very rusty if you’re not doing anything with it. My suggestions are foraging, cooking, sewing, knitting, woodwork, or gardening. All of these except the gardening can be done with no particular commitment of space, and gardening can be done at very small scales from window boxes or indoor planters upward. Woodwork will involve some tool acquisition, so it’s worth looking for a local makerspace, or someone in your community who already has tools or indeed a workshop.
Get A Medical Checkup - This is less essential if you’re in your 20s, and more so if you’re in your 40s or later. As someone who was recently diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, and who’s surrounded by people who are discovering one health issue or another, I’m keen on this one. It is much better to know about any issues that are there before you’re in a crisis situation - you’ll know what to do, you’ll have medications and prescriptions on hand, and should you be injured in some disaster, being able to tell the medical staff that you’re diabetic or anaemic or hypoglycaemic or whatever can make things better a lot quicker. I know that medical care is not all that accessible for many people in the US (and to some degree in other places), but that situation doesn’t look like it’s about to improve anytime soon, so it’s best to get in the queue sooner rather than later.
Also, if your doctor will allow it, see if you can get them to issue prescriptions such that you have a month’s spare meds. If your doctor won’t directly allow it, at least push your renewals by a day or two each month so that you build up a backlog.
Make A Bug-Out Bag - Or at least a list. Ages and ages ago, in fact two newsletter providers ago, I wrote this:
I can tell you what's (nominally) in mine, but they're a deeply individual tool. For those who don't recognise the term, it's the bag you grab when you're on the way out the door having been given 5 minutes to go. They're applicable in cases of flood, fire, and a selection of other things which are happening right now, whenever "now" happens to be. They're often more notional than real, but as a list of stuff to seize in those 5 minutes, they're very useful. So, not counting pets and people and not in a priority order: passport, wallet, keys, phone, phone charger, tablet and/or laptop and relevant cords, antihistamines, plasters, painkillers, cash, spare glasses if I have them, writing paper and pens/pencils, and the odd little calculator-like widget the bank uses for remote verification. Possibly also a torch, although the phone does one have one built in. I have no medication I need to take every day; if I did, that and the prescription for it would move right to the top of the list. As it happens, about half of this stuff does live in my day-to-day geek bag, or in my pockets, and I can lay hands on the rest in well under 5 minutes. The contents of yours may vary wildly, but should not exceed what you can stick in a medium-sized backpack in, well, 5 minutes.
Of course, I now do have medications to add to the list. Also, this is just good general advice - find your passport, put it somewhere that you can find it again, and as a backup, tell someone else where it is, preferably in an email or text message with the text “where I’ve put my passport”, so that if you can’t find it, at least someone else has a chance of knowing where it is. If you don’t have a passport, then do the same with whatever identification you do have and don’t carry all the time.
Where Should I Go?
A few people have sent me queries and messages about moving - some are looking to get out of the US, some just to move inland, and some are in entirely other situations where getting out is still important. The general gist of the questions has been “ok, I get that I need to go. But where?”
The most important thing to remember here is that in the context of climate chaos, there are no guarantees. There were people who had moved from coastal Florida to the southern Appalachian mountains to get away from hurricanes, only for Hurricane Helene in 2024 to arrive up there with force. And stuff that used to happen every hundred or five hundred years is now likely to happen once a decade.
Ireland, it turns out, is a pretty good place to be in general. We’re not currently prone to extreme weather (modulo the odd destructive storm), the island-at-the-edge-of-a-continent situation will keep most weather to a relatively dull medium, we don’t have earthquakes, volcanoes, or venomous beasts, and while we’ve been suffering more from wildfires in recent decades, they’re still not really a huge threat, and without a massive shift in climate, never will be.
Aside from that, I can better tell you where not to be, and by the time you eliminate those places, you can probably find somewhere that’s likely to be ok. So:
Not on the coast; preferably over 1.5km inland
Not immediately level with or downhill from any major body of water, including rivers
Not in areas where the majority of the population will vote in leaders hostile to you
Not in the bends of steep valleys, or preferably in steep valleys at all
Not in heavily wooded areas with poor roads
Not in deserts
Not in places that get just plain hot
Not in places that have had wildfires in the last two decades, or are at risk
Not in places that you can’t reach without vehicles (a long walk is fine)
Not too far from other people
Places that get very cold are, oddly, better in many ways (although avoid the places where houses are built in permafrost, because the frost may not be perma anymore).
I can’t nominate specific places that are “safe”, and the scare quotes are because nowhere really is; there are going to be changes everywhere. But if you take the list above, and look at a good map, you can work out for yourself what places are better and what places are just not going to be good at all.
Links
There’s a sort of state-of-the-nation’s-climate from the Irish Times, which basically says that Ireland is not doing well. Thresholds previously understood to be happening in 2040 are now pulled forward to 2030, and we’re absolutely not going to meet emissions reduction targets. This doesn’t surprise me, but it does annoy me.
Zillow has apparently removed a “climate risk” figure from its real estate listings (although they still make the information available if you go looking), and many buildings are becoming uninsurable. I’m firmly of the opinion that insurance will be the thing that will drive many people and businesses to move away from climate-chaos-endangered areas, because insurance has to deal with the actual statistically supported numbers.
In similar tones, John Harris in the Guardian is questioning why there isn’t more preparation for flooding in the UK. That’s the same question I’ve been asking here, but honestly, it just seems like the problem is not yet urgent enough to get governments moving.
Closing
Keep on keeping on. Make some small preparations, as above, if you can’t make bigger ones. Consider moving to somewhere better. If you’re in the US, resist, but stay as safe as you can.
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