Red Bird #9 | Where is the climate movement?

After launching in 2024 and publishing several editions, we’re re-launching Red Bird, a bulletin for strategic discussion around ecological struggles.

Our initial thinking in launching Red Bird was creating a space to do two things:

Firstly, to raise the level of strategic and tactical discussion across the movement – to learn from good actions, spread them elsewhere, and interrogate what to do next. 

Secondly, we hoped that in putting forward provocations about anti-imperialism, workplace organising, and more, we could also cohere a ‘left-flank’ within the environmental movement, supplanting the often NGO-centric and liberal leadership of the movement.

After a break of several months, it is important to recognise that this assessment needs to change. Before, the work was relating to a wide variety of groups and actions, putting forward clear political arguments for ecosocialist work. 

As we reach the close of 2025, it becomes increasingly clear that the variety of groups taking action around climate and ecology is at a low point. We’re no longer just bringing together ecosocialists; we’re also working out how to deal with a ‘movement’ at a lower ebb.

What are the reasons for this?

There are several reasons for the ebbing. Rightly, since the escalation of the genocide in Palestine in October 2023, people who were previously maintaining ecological collectives have focused their energies on opposing the genocide. 

As with Energy Embargo for Palestine or Youth Demand, this has sometimes taken on the form of building ecological organisations focused on the intersection of fossil capital and imperial support for Zionism. 

Yet, in other times, it has seen the migration of individual activists away from previously existing collectives like Just Stop Oil or other activities to focus their activities on Palestine direct action groups. 

Focusing on resistance to the genocide in this way is entirely correct. Not just from a moral perspective, but in understanding that resistance to the genocide engages a significant section of the British working class against the state – with the undermining of the British state through mass politics around Palestine also undermining British state support for pollution. 

Similarly, many have focused their energies on defending hotels and wider anti-racist activities in response to the wave of violent far-right mobilisations, both in localised attacks on hotels and also in the unprecedented racist Tommy Robinson march through central London. 

Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, the scale of repression has forced collectives to turn inwards to deal with its impact. 

It is no coincidence that Defend Our Juries has led the resistance to the proscription of Palestine Action. Their activists, coming out of Extinction Rebellion, have been at the sharp end of state repression, having been turned towards the Palestine movement.

A deeper political crisis

The rise of the far-right across the world itself poses a challenge to ecological movements. Whether the ascendancy of Trump to the White House or Reform’s march forward in Britain, there seems to be a marked reaction to any limits on pollution. 

Fossil fuel companies themselves, far from the brief moments of negative oil prices during the Covid pandemic, have turned towards greater expansion of their operations. 

These forces are coming together in what Richard Seymour has rightly termed Disaster Nationalism. Even when greater disasters occur or climate change is worsening everyday life, these things are instead capitalised on by the far-right and those committed to further environmental destruction. 

This reaction, combined with the low ebb of ecological groups, has caused a deeper political crisis amongst those who might identify as environmentalists. 

Into this space, many have conceded the possibility of any effective mitigation, embracing a growing ‘collapse’ politics – arguing that ecological and societal breakdown is now locked in, and that we must organise to prepare for this instead. 

The risks of such a politics are several: Continuing to retreat from the terrain of reducing emissions, allowing further breakdown. People retreating into attempted provision of ‘mutual aid’ that merely becomes a kind of charitable service. And, at its most extreme, a prepper-like individualism – where people retreat from the field of struggle completely.

The triple fight

We are at a time when a strong ecological movement is needed more than ever. An internationalist movement opposed to imperialism and militarism, and a movement rooted in the lives of and led by the working classes and the oppressed. 

Now, ecological politics faces a fight on three interrelated terrains:

• The already established struggles to mitigate emissions as much as possible as soon as possible.
• The struggles against the form of transition currently being imposed by states and capital.
• The struggles around adapting to the pervasive and growing impacts of ecological breakdown.

These three terrains require a re-examination of the kinds of left environmentalism that have

dominated for the last decade, especially given the poor state the movement finds itself in.

For these reasons, we are relaunching Red Bird. We need to convene conversations across people struggling in these terrains to be able to intervene seriously in the face of this moment. 

By seizing the initiative and reflecting on the struggles of previous years, we can begin to chart paths forward. Towards a new ecosocialist politics!

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