Dunwich Heath, Suffolk coast. 150 hectares. Seventy to one hundred and twenty firefighters at peak, with a helicopter dropping seawater from the North Sea because there is no other option. A “major incident” declared on 29 July and still in place as this is written. The National Trust heathland reserve at Dunwich has been burning for days.
That is the leading incident. It is not the only one. ACR holds its summer school in Suffolk. Some of us were on a planning trip to the site this week and could see the smoke on the horizon. That is where we are: a planning meeting for socialist education, smoke from a burning nature reserve visible through the window.
Surrey has had fires at Chobham Common, at Whitmoor Common, at Hankley and Blackheath Common; the heathland corridor running south-west of London, visible on clear days from the M25, has been burning on and off all summer. Dorset has had fires near Poole, at Bourne Valley nature reserve, with more coming. By 28 July, fire services in England and Wales had attended 706 wildfires this year, 208 of them in the preceding fortnight alone. The Environment Agency has declared a drought across parts of England. France, as in previous summers, has its own version of the same story.
England burning is not a metaphor. It is the condition.
Marijke Colle said it years ago, in an IIRE lecture that deserves to be watched this week: “We are in this global crisis which is accelerating.” Not approaching it. In it. She was listing fires across North America, Southern Europe, Siberia, North Africa. The list was already long then. It is substantially longer now, and the Suffolk coast has joined it.
Michael Löwy, speaking on ecosocialism for the same institution, put it with the impatience of someone who has been watching this unfold for decades: “Let’s not think it’s a vague threat for 2100; no, it’s in the next few decades that this is going to get worse and worse.” He was right. We are in those next few decades. Dunwich Heath is in those next few decades.
The IIRE’s video series on the global ecological crisis is worth several hours of your time right now. Not because it offers reassurance. It does not. These are lectures for people who want to understand what is happening, not to be comforted about it, and the analysis they contain has been grimly vindicated by events since they were recorded.
On the cause, Löwy is unambiguous: “It is a capitalist system... which cannot exist without expansion, growth, competition, accumulation of capital and profit, and then therefore inevitably growth and destruction of the environment and climate change.” One can wrap this in softer language. The IPCC does, regularly, and the IPCC is not wrong to do so given its audience. But stripped of the diplomatic formulation, the conclusion is the same: the fires are structural, not accidental.
The IIRE speakers have a precise term for the mechanism. They call it the metabolic rift: the fatal disconnection between human economic activity and the biosphere that sustains it. Capitalism treats nature as two impossible things at once, an infinite resource to extract from and an infinite dumping ground for the waste. The atmosphere cannot absorb carbon faster than it is being pumped in. The fires are the symptom; the rift is the diagnosis.
Manuel Garí Ramos introduces two principles worth holding onto: prevention and precaution. His summary of the first is almost brutal in its simplicity. “Stay away from the fire.” Obvious, you might think. But the political class spent thirty years moving toward the fire, and the fossil fuel companies spent those same thirty years paying people to argue that the fire was not getting hotter. No new extraction. No fracking. No deep-sea drilling. No oil from the Amazon. These are not demands from the radical fringe; they are the minimum entailed by “stay away from the fire,” and no major government has met them.
Colle’s contribution is structural, and it is where the analysis becomes uncomfortable for those who want a technical fix. A climate plan, she argues, means nationalising and socialising the energy and finance sectors. It means public transport development everywhere, reconversion toward ecological agriculture, an end to monocultures and export-oriented food production. It means, and she is direct about this, taking the energy sector out of the hands of the large multinationals.
There is an obvious objection to all of this, and Colle addresses it directly. What if we simply consume differently? What if enough individuals make the right choices? She uses Belgium as the test case. Imagine every Belgian became vegan tomorrow morning. Consumer demand for meat drops to zero inside the country. And yet Belgium would still export six million chickens a year, because the capitalist system does not produce to meet local human need; it produces for profit, and if local demand dries up, supply finds new markets. Individual consumer guilt is, in this framework, a trap. It distracts from the mechanics of the engine while leaving the engine running.
The medium-term picture Colle and Garí Ramos sketch is routinely dismissed as impractical, which is interesting given what is currently on fire. The end of monoculture forestry, which Anticapitalist Resistance has recently argued turns managed woodland into tinder waiting for a spark. Transport reorganised; housing retrofitted. Car factories converted. Garí Ramos makes the conversion argument with specific examples that remove the abstract quality from the demand: a weapons factory in Toledo, Spain, whose workforce already understood heavy machinery and large-scale manufacturing, was retrained and the plant converted to produce blades for wind turbines. The shipyard workers in Cadiz who built heavily polluting cargo ships in the same dry docks that could, with political will and funding, build offshore wind platforms instead. The skills translate. The infrastructure is there. What is missing is not technical possibility but the political decision to prioritise it.
These are not marginal adjustments; they are the reorganisation of sectors currently organised around the logic that is producing the smoke over Suffolk. There is a word for the current arrangement: practical. The practical arrangement is on fire.
Which is where Löwy’s ecosocialist framework becomes something more than a theoretical position. “We have completely to change the productive apparatus,” he argues. “It has to be broken down and replaced by another way of producing, another logic of production and other sources of energy.” Not reformed at the margin. Replaced.
That requires clarity about what replacement means, and what it does not mean. The Soviet model, whatever its other claims, reproduced the same extractive logic as Western capitalism. The draining of the Aral Sea is one monument to that. State bureaucrats directing production quotas replaced corporate executives directing production for profit, but the underlying drive to conquer and consume nature remained identical. Eco-socialism, as Löwy defines it, is not that. It is not taking the existing apparatus and running it under different management. It requires dismantling the apparatus and rebuilding it on a different logic entirely, with production decided democratically: “the people themselves will decide what are the priorities of production.” This is the part that the commentariat finds hardest to process, not because it is implausible but because it implies that the current arrangement, in which investment decisions are made by capital and energy companies, is the problem rather than the solution.
Colle’s conclusion: “we can’t struggle against these dangers without overthrowing the system.” That phrase lands differently in July 2026 than it might have in a seminar room. Not because the argument has changed, but because the evidence is in the skyline.
The IIRE has made these lectures freely available. Watch Colle’s two-part series on the global ecological crisis and climate activism. Watch Löwy on ecosocialism. Watch Garí Ramos on the strategic questions. International Viewpoint has also published a strategic piece on heatwaves that addresses what organised responses to the climate crisis actually look like in practice. And then watch, if the smoke has cleared enough, the news.
Watch the talks
Marijke Colle: The Global Ecological Crisis and Climate Activism — Marijke was speaking in French; you hear the English translator’s voice throughout.
Manuel Garí Ramos: La Crisis Ecológica Global y el Activismo Climático — in Spanish; YouTube’s auto-translation is good.
And the government’s response to Dunwich Heath? A £97 million upgrade to National Resilience assets and new specialist wildfire teams, announced in June and due to be operational by the end of that month. The teams are operational. Dunwich Heath is still burning.
