The world isn’t ending. A world is ending. Our job is to midwife the next one.

The powerful adapt for themselves while the rest are left to drown. But beneath the rubble, movements are already planting seeds of the next world.

Collapse is not a future threat. For billions, it is already here. It arrives in tidal surges and hunger queues, in wildfire smoke and toxic tap water, in crop failure and constant fear. It is the ash falling in Chilean fishing villages. It is the cracked soil of sub-Saharan farms. It is the flooded homes in Jakarta, the salt poisoning Bangladesh’s rice fields, the rolling blackouts in South Africa, the mass graves after heatwaves in India. These are not natural disasters. They are systemic ones. And they do not fall evenly.

We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm. But a truth we must accept is that some are clinging to rafts while others sail superyachts. This collapse moves along the same old fault lines: race, class, empire, and extraction. The countries most responsible are insulated by wealth, walls, or guns. The countries most affected are still paying the debts of colonisation. In Somalia, families walk for days through failed crops, only to bury a child to hunger. In Peru, entire towns are poisoned by mining waste for lithium and copper used in electric cars. In Tuvalu, rising seas swallow ancestral land while politicians in luxury suits talk of “resilience” at climate summits.

The powerful are not ignoring collapse. They are adapting to it for themselves. Fortified compounds, private fire services, AI-powered food systems, armed borders. They call it innovation. But it is insulation. It is business-as-usual for as long as possible, for as few as possible.

Meanwhile, the real response is coming from the people who have the least and risk the most. In West Papua, Indigenous groups resist logging and mining. In the Philippines, land defenders face assassination for protecting forests. In Kenya, youth climate organisers are demanding an end to fossil fuel finance. In Ecuador, Indigenous women led a successful legal fight to protect half a million acres of Amazon rainforest. In Pakistan, mutual aid groups distribute water and medicine in heatwaves. In Aotearoa, Māori-led campaigns push to restore rivers as living ancestors.

These are not just acts of protest. They are acts of care, of refusal, of world-building. Because while the powerful sell us the fantasy of green growth and techno-solutions, it is frontline communities who are treating this crisis like the emergency it is, often without resources, recognition, or rest. And let the record state, there is still no other solution today that has protected more biodiversity, or prevented more emissions, than Indigenous land defenders.

BUT the burnout is real. The people doing the most are often the most exhausted. The unpaid organisers. The youth carrying grief they did not create. The communities holding each other through disaster after disaster. While oil executives buy new yachts, climate justice advocates are scraping together rent. While governments subsidise polluters, public schools teach kids in flood-damaged classrooms. The gap between responsibility and power has never been more obscene.

But this story does not end with collapse.

A new world is already emerging. You can see it in Cuba’s agroecology systems, where local food production has replaced imported dependence. In Amsterdam’s doughnut economics model, which centres ecological ceilings and social foundations. In South Africa’s shack dwellers’ movement, which builds housing from below. In Brazil, where the Landless Workers’ Movement has reclaimed land for 350,000 families, creating cooperatives, schools, and clinics.

These are not utopias. They are living laboratories of justice.

To midwife the next world means grounding our movements in values that capitalism has tried to erase: solidarity, reciprocity, dignity, slowness, kinship, collective care. It means economic systems that meet needs rather than fuel greed. Legal systems rooted in restoration, not punishment. Energy systems owned by communities, not corporations. A global politics built not on borders and bombs, but on accountability and repair.

It means reckoning with history. Climate justice is not only about emissions, it is about land theft, enslavement, displacement, and extraction. Justice means reparations. It means returning land. It means cancelling unjust debts and holding polluters criminally accountable. It means ending fossil fuel subsidies, decolonising climate policy, and giving real power to frontline communities.

But most of all, it means remembering that this world was designed. The inequality, the extraction, the injustice, none of it is natural nor necessary. It is a result of choices, choices made by those with power for those without. But we can choose differently.

So we must try to honour the grief of what is ending, but not confuse it with surrender. Collapse is not the whole story. Beneath the rubble, there really is something growing. Movements are converging. Ideas are maturing. Values are shifting. Across oceans and borders, people are learning to dream together again. The next world will not be born in boardrooms or battlegrounds. It will be born in the quiet work of building solidarity. In the loud defiance of a protest march. In the shared meals, the repaired homes, the co-governed gardens, the collective refusal to give up.

The end of this world has already begun. But the birth of the next is in our hands.