The valuable gift of anger in a chaotic world

I am an angry, rage-filled woman. I’m consumed by fury, and there are so many things to be angry about. I would be chasing my tail, snapping at shadows, utterly powerless, without direction.

Maybe that’s the point of the atrocities: to keep us directionless?

The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident. Karis Nemik, Andor

The one thing I’ve learned about activism so far comes from mining. You chip away, chip away, and one day, maybe, everything collapses from above.

But you have to chip away in a specific direction. Otherwise you make a round hole for yourself, larger and larger, but ineffective.

The overlaps of disaster capitalism

The trouble is, all the atrocities intersect. The murders of thousands of civilians in Gaza - mainly women and children - are directly linked to the hawk-eyed envy of extractive capitalists, who want the oil and gas in the Levant Basin, and the real estate on the edge of the sunny Mediterranean.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, described Gaza as a ‘real estate bonanza’ on Wednesday ... Speaking at a property development conference in Tel Aviv, Smotrich said … ‘the demolition, the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.’ (The Guardian, Sept 17, 2025)

The subsequent burning of around 122 trillion ft³ of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil will continue the destruction of the environment at 37 gigatonnes of CO² per year – and a significant use of oil now is to manufacture plastics. In the region of 20% by some predictions. So now we’ve got multiple “garbage patches” in quiet ocean gyres, filled with plastics. Precious places, where endangered animals, like eels, secretly reproduce.

People in both global hemispheres are being poisoned with PFAS and PFOA chemicals in the name of polymers. Do you know where PFAS came from? The Manhattan Project. Forever chemicals created because nothing else could contain the corrosive uranium hexafluoride. And now we’re back to nuclear power. The so-called answer to the climate crisis.

In September, the UK and the US made a deal in hell, planning for multiple new nuclear reactors to be built, including some untested reactors with the latest technology: molten salt reactors or liquid metal coolants. These create waste so toxic and volatile that there is no certainty that it can be contained at all, due to its chemical reactivity.

And the science for nuclear waste disposal is still not settled. You’d expect the two biggest environmental charities, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to be all over the new ‘Golden Age of nuclear’. But that’s a no.

And what do you know? Nuclear is the answer to the needs of AI corporations. AI has made all our lives harder: overuse of energy and water; massive data centres constructed everywhere; and its threat to digital security and human rights. Not to mention its monstrous use in Gaza.

I could go on. I’m sure you don’t want me to.

But if this were a board in an old-style police detective’s office, the red threads would connect each and every event to the others. All of them would lead to a single motive: money and the pursuit of so-called ‘growth’.

Unlimited growth means endless uncertainty

The ‘status quo’ to many westerners is an uncomplicated state of life, where we get to keep living the existence we’ve chosen, without interruption. We go to work, the car keeps moving, the TV streams, and none of the atrocities directly affect our lives.

Lucky us.

For the government and all those big business folk, the status quo means something different.

It means ‘uninterrupted growth’.

The trouble is, uninterrupted growth now disrupts the lives of the people. Staff numbers cut, jobs lost, parents under pressure to send reluctant kids to school, kids pressured to perform education. TV has been reduced and enshittified for the sake of guaranteed money to the platforms. The learning and understanding of the world that used to be available to the masses through TV has gone. Wars, pandemics, and global disasters are ever closer and more personal. Even if we ignore the news, we can’t avoid massive price rises on everything with no accompanying wage rises.

What use is growth if it doesn’t work for everyone?

None. Nobody is winning until everyone is winning. The extraction of every perfect material, substance or particle from the earth is not a long-term strategy.

What can degrowth activism look like in your life?

I might be angry, but I seek solutions for emotional issues. I want to acknowledge the problem, observe it, and heal the anger.

Why am I angry? Is it because of the injustices, or because I do not do something about them?

As a westerner, I live with the same status quo as everyone else. The rising prices, and the desire to keep everything exactly the same. The guilt I’m faced with every day is a choice. A stark and gut-wrenching decision, because once we see the atrocities, we are complicit unless we actively reject them.

I am complicit.

But what can I do that is useful and won’t land me in prison in an increasingly heavy-handed UK?

I can chip away: at my understanding; at other people’s understanding; at organisations complicit in the global firesale. I can refuse to make profits for undeserving corporations; I can use my hard-won skills to support people who are doing good work. I can refuse to make things worse, even if I can’t make them better.

So, I write. I write about climate and greenwashing, and the marketing on steroids selling us pretend ‘climate solutions’. I support local anti-nuclear activists in a small way, such as helping to write press releases; or promoting a crowd justice campaign to aid a legal challenge against the dumping of radioactive water in a protected river. I make terrible occasional videos to persuade and annoy local people into responding to the nuclear waste dump plans.

I write to local councils and outwardly respectable organisations involved in projects clearly at odds with their remits, to ask them to explain themselves. I make complaints to the appropriate regulator where I believe overstep has taken place.

At home, I reject plastic packaging, I refuse supermarket ready-made products. I buy only second-hand clothing, books, and electrical items. (My most prized recent purchase being a 50-year-old Kenwood hand mixer, because if it breaks, it can be repaired). I mend, repair, recycle, remake, and recreate almost everything I can. I refuse to dump total rubbish on charity. I reject streamed TV and buy second-hand DVDs instead. (I got the message loud and clear from the Julia Roberts film, Leave the World Behind, which ironically, was a Netflix movie).

Above all, I read, I learn, and I push to understand the horrors of the world. I’m a chicken. A terrible coward, but I now face what’s happening with my eyes open.

Sometimes all we can do is something. To chip away continually, until something above us collapses.

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