Tag: jem bendell

Collapse Redux

The basis of Jem Bendell’s original and revised paper on climate-induced societal collapse and Deep Adaptation was his review of current climate and public opinion research. In addressing the probability of societal collapse, his paper was and remains a contribution to popular understanding of the social implications of climate change, mainstream environmental advocacy and our current predicament. The definition of collapse he chose was an uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity and meaning.  Any distinction between collapse and catastrophe was not addressed. And, by the way, what is “societal” anyway? Whose society? Perhaps this omission was intentional, but clearly, he regarded any more specific definition of collapse as a separate pursuit. 

Bendell was obviously content with allowing collapse to remain mostly a subjective frame, which would account for wide differences in definition depending on whom is talking—and where. What, after all, is the normal mode of sustenance or shelter, or even pleasure? And what is normal? If sustenance was overtaken by a revolution in food production that fed more people for less money and didn’t even require soil, would that be an ending of normal? Security is also an awfully big tent if it contains governance, rule of law, energy, health care and public health. Burning the last drop of oil would certainly be an ending, but would it be collapse? The fact that there was no serious effort to be more specific, even if it might have proven as difficult as picking up mercury with your hands, guarantees that readers remain within their subjectivity without much questioning and that the resulting variability of responses don’t represent a very reliable measure of anything. Perhaps it’s only what people believe that’s important.

Bendell also goes to great lengths to describe different psychological strategies, including denial within the environmental movement itself, for mitigating direct confrontation with advancing collapse and especially how we, particularly scientists, steer away from alarmism. Bendell has been criticized for making declarations potentially triggering despair. Different cohorts, whether scientists, laypersons, academics, different age generations or even samples from widely different cultures may have very different ideas about what collapse would look like. But in the absence of (even flawed) parameters, we are left to imagine the worst possible scenarios and a very hazy timeline in which they might unfold. Bendell may have had good reasons to avoid defining collapse any more specifically than he did, but his orientation, given the evidence he was citing, was solely to advancing climate impacts without much attention to political or economic dynamics. 

In that avoidance we lose (or overlook) a capacity to evaluate whether collapse is already progressing according to dynamics not directly linked to climate impacts per se, or whether in grappling with a definition we might inevitably expand our understanding to include dynamics that only become more visible and valid according to a systemic perspective that doesn’t arbitrarily exclude those social, political and economic dynamics. 

Collapse also deserves a closer (and wider) review because it carries implications for determining whether climate signs already exist, whether there are additional signs of collapse which may not be specifically climate-related but will augment climate impacts, and because the use of this term in this context appears to exist within a limited ethnocentric (global North) perspective. Whether collapse is already here for parts of the global south or whether it remains at a comfortable distance for the industrialized north is not even an open question. It’s difficult to tell whether Bendell was writing for a limited audience. But for the north, at least, we are already fascinated and appalled at the same time, hovering between hope and despair as events increasingly break through our dissociation. But for areas of the South, the signs are more advanced and already clear.

If we considered a single individual as a metaphor of global human systems, we could easily diagnose the patient in the grips of a profound ecological disease, even a pathology, gradually taking over. The fever is rising and the patient is in increasing distress. We see organ systems on the way to failure. From Bendell’s view, collapse represents a transition of the patient into an unmanageable condition, human systems failing to remain in any semblance of harmony with the biosphere. In other words, how can we speculate about when collapse may occur without naming the signs of illness, the social and environmental symptoms along with those strictly related to carbon emissions?

Just to be slightly more precise, although collapse may be perceived as a response to catastrophic events such as the permanent loss of polar ice, the jet stream or the Gulf Stream, it’s more likely to be a slowly unfolding emergency (uneven, as Bendell said) whose impacts aggregate over time. How long that time may be could vary from 10-50 years, or even longer. The question is, where is the inflection point between a normally functioning society and one that is coming apart—or will we only know in retrospect? There will be many signs, increasingly varied and disruptive. There will be mitigation, from mostly effective to increasingly futile. There may be rampant denial and spreading panic. How much deforestation does it take to upend normality? How much pollution? How much ocean acidification before the food chain collapses? Is fascism a sign of greater or lesser security? Is mass surveillance a sign? Is the pandemic a sign?

We are challenged to investigate relationships among an increasing variety of events and systemic adjustments to come to conclusions about what is climate related and what may not be, realizing that as time passes, the increasing number of events portending collapse will most likely be directly attributable to climate. And even if those relationships appear to be tenuous, the reality is that all events are data points illustrating the operation of a social, political and economic regime driving violent global change. 

Bendell’s references to climate research include numerous big picture metrics such as sea ice, ocean acidification, the atmospheric carbon budget and changing weather patterns. He bases his theory of inevitable collapse on these advancing measures across numerous defined ‘tipping points’ and makes a case for near-term collapse based on these and additional effects of existing carbon emissions already baked into the atmosphere. The aggregate of emissions playing out over the next 1-3 decades will, he asserts, guarantee disastrous impacts. Likewise, despite the potential for sequestration practices at significantly greater scale or for radical reduction in emissions, the fact is we are adopting neither of these measures to the degree necessary, increasing the probability of collapse.

In addition to calculations of carbon emissions and sequestration, Bendell includes further and more recent data on the measurement of methane emissions and the likely scenario for their acceleration and resulting amplified climate effects as well. This is high-level analysis permitting the most general speculation about the sustainability of human and ecological systems and the likelihood of unpredictable effects on civilization, both agrarian and ocean-based food systems, human migration, disease and the loss of biodiversity.

The greatest proportion of global carbon emissions comes from a limited number of affluent nations. There is no dispute about this. We know the effects of those emissions will fall first upon less developed economies and peoples, but their impacts will also fall on local communities. In fact, while much of the affluence of industrialized nations derives directly from resources extracted from less-industrialized nations and guarantees the true costs of fossil fuel exploration and consumption to fall on those nations, the costs of other resource extraction practices also fall upon those less-developed economies. 

In case one needs examples of these practices to fully grasp the nature of globalized exploitation and the externalization of ecological effects, we need only look at the tar-sands operations of Canada and Colombia, the destruction of the Niger Delta, toxic residues in Ecuador, the deforestation of Indonesia, the burning of the Amazon, mountaintop coal mining and the destruction of water resources in the US. In other words, the wealth and hence the carbon footprint of industrialized (white) nations derives primarily from the appetites and extractive practices of those nations in the global south. 

In the most general terms, what collapse looks like is the transition of a society from greater to lesser complexity. Outside westernized urban centers, much of the global south is already less complex than the industrialized north, with agrarian culture’s economies more localized and resilient. But since Bendell shies away from defining collapse (or catastrophe) in anything other than the most general terms, one gets the impression the destruction he speaks of will only become real when it effects industrialized societies who have benefited the most from emitting carbon—at the expense of everyone else–and that their very development and stability insulates them from initial and less dire effects of climate disruption. 

Indeed, Bendell rattles off the list of recent international institutional efforts created to mitigate the effects of climate by building resilience into developing economies. Unfortunately, these efforts aren’t much more than institutional green-washing, too little and too late. While the North refused in Paris (2015) to adequately compensate the South for climate impacts, giving themselves the freedom to define their own mitigation efforts in the absence of any enforcement mechanisms, they sloughed off their responsibilities to underfunded excuses, continuing Business As Usual and guaranteeing catastrophe far away from their own shores.

Meanwhile, contemplate just a few drivers of uneven endings:

  • The massive and unprecedented shift of wealth upward for the past four decades 
  • Unregulated capital markets and the creation of phantom economies using unregulated speculative financial instruments, shifting risk to the collective.
  • Increasing extraction from labor and destruction of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. 
  • Intrusive and controlling policy serving narrow economic interests at the expense of health, education and the welfare of the commons.
  • Mismanagement of land and degradation of food safety: food and soil quality declining with monoculture, pesticides, additives, GMOs & preservatives.

What collapse feels like is also not a matter to ignore. What may not be at the forefront of awareness is rising anxiety and apprehension about the security of current lifestyles, a viable future and the ability (not to mention willingness) of governments to respond. Do the incremental changes in perspective, the rising apprehension and pessimism about the future (solastalgia) count as a signal of collapse? The reality of these proliferating signs of economic and psychological stress are likely more widespread than we realize. And we’re not likely to be able to calculate their true effect until it’s too late.

Meanwhile, the North continues to generate climate impacts in the South, knowing the effects and continuing practices foretelling social disruption and eventual collapse elsewhere. Climate-related signs are already present, but again, it’s only from the perspective of highly developed western economies that Bendell presents the probability of collapse, failing to account for existing signs in less developed economies. 

A few examples: 

  • Much of Bangladesh is under water. Between this year’s monsoon and a climate-amped cyclone, millions are affected by the pre-existing COVID lockdown, the closure of businesses, the loss of rural income usually provided by urban workers and the loss of arable land by erosion. 
  • Indigenous societies in Brazil are undergoing attack and destruction (ethnic cleansing?) by Bolsonaro’s aggressive agricultural development practices, directly driving climate change in the Amazon and the planet. 
  • Parts of the Pacific island nations of Fiji, Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Vanuatu and Micronesia are already disappearing. Human settlements, sanitation, agriculture and fresh water supplies are threatened due to rising sea levels.
  • Disastrous multi-year drought and total crop failure in the north of Syria caused mass migration to the cities and, along with resource mis-management, foretold the destruction of that nation. 
  • Sudan is experiencing climate driven variability and timing of extreme temperatures and rainfall, disrupting food supplies, triggering civil war, the displacement of millions and a succession of either military dictatorships or civilian incompetence. Suffering is pandemic.

We could go on. It will likely be only when there are unavoidable signs occurring at home that developed nations will take notice:

  • The rich central valley of California supplies a vast majority of all the fruits and vegetables for the entire US. Yet extended drought conditions have forced growers to tap groundwater supplies for years. Wells are now dropping 150 ft. or more into the falling aquifer. Water war is a long-standing condition between densely populated northern California urban centers and the agriculture industry. Factor in the declining snowmelt of the western Sierra and we have conditions eventually forcing choices between food and water.
  • The Southwestern US relies on water supplies from the Colorado River and Lake Mead. Water levels of both have been in steady decline for decades. It’s only as matter of time before the viability of the metropolises of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles are threatened.
  • The UK wheat crop is the lowest in 40 years, foretelling a sharp effect on food prices. 

Climate related migration has been already underway in many locations, causing economic and political destabilization. Coastal property insurance costs are rising and coastal land values are falling. Migration from the Florida Keys, Houston, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta is rising. Whether it’s flooding or water scarcity in India, climate migration will result in unchecked urban growth just as it did in Syria, taxing inadequate infrastructure and further causing political and social stress.

What global events have been telling us for quite awhile and which have become especially clear very recently is that virtually no aspect of human presence, other than by reductionist efforts defining linear causation, can be culled from the whole and paraded before us as irrelevant to a calculation of impending collapse. Does collapse mean preventive measures have already failed? Would the implementation of security measures or the initiation of resource conflicts themselves represent collapse? Would mass food insecurity alone or rising crime in response to food insecurity constitute collapse? Does collapse imply a breakdown of governance, lawlessness or border disputes? 

One of the most practical aphorisms of this age is to “think globally, act locally.” From this view the Deep Adaptation agenda makes sense, although it could stand some scrutiny and even radical expansion of what Reconciliation means from a global view. Personally, I see few signs of human resolve to revert to true reciprocity with the natural world in time to forestall broad collapse. Given the pace of events, the high degree of integration of global systems and realizing the entirely ethnocentric orientation of this agenda in the face of a huge disparity between the outlook and fortunes of the North and South, we might consider reversing the aphorism to “think locally, act globally,” asking what we need to do on an international scale to restore reciprocity and reverse the drastic inequities already playing out as consequences of our privileged over-consumption of carbon-based products. In doing so, we might even be saving ourselves. 

Bumps in the Road

Things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster.                                                                                      —–Tom Atlee 

Conditions are changing so quickly at the emerging edge of climate response, culture, politics and technology that we’re perpetually building a raft as we hurtle down the rapids. What is still very much undecided is whether we’ll end up crashed and splintered against a rocky reach or spill into a vast and placid common future. Many would say there’s a far greater probability of the former than the latter, but that we’ll more likely muddle along with great uncertainty and increasing risk.

When Jem Bendell wrote his article launching Deep Adaptation, his analysis was based solely on an assessment of climate science. His conclusion was that social collapse (due to climate factors) within 10 years was a virtual certainty. The primary critique he received was from climate scientists or psychologists worried his conclusion would be too difficult to assimilate and only throw us into despair–and inaction. Those who have gravitated to Deep Adaptation, aligning with this assessment, considered themselves “collapse-aware.” There are others, outside the membership of the Deep Adaptation Forum or Facebook group, and preceding it by a significant period of time, might also consider them selves collapse-aware.

Now, two years hence, what was once lurking quietly at the periphery of movement politics, gaining traction, adding adherents, analysts, writers and organizers, and due largely to the blatant inequities revealed by COVID as well as recent and shocking displays of racist policing, is now exploding into awareness across the entire progressive spectrum as an ideological singularity; namely, that racism, climate, public health inequities, economic inequality and the entire extractive economy are a single issue. The implication being that by bending any distinct manifestation of the global operating system, whether it be economic inequality, the extractive economy or racist policing, toward justice would result in reduced overall violence and be reflected as a reduction in carbon emissions.

Simply stated, the determination that ‘climate’ refers not strictly to the state of the atmosphere or the oceans, the polar ice caps or the Siberian tundra, not solely to an unfolding extinction event, but to the ‘climate’ of the entire macro system driving us toward extinction. And as well, the micro conditions in which we find ourselves, the deeply troubling cognitive, ethical and spiritual conflicts are also part of that larger operating system. The deeper we go into the neuro-linguistic labyrinth where we address personal and collective trauma, the degree to which we have all been colonized by the macro system, the closer we get to the roots of that system, to understanding its power dynamics and the engine driving it.

From this view, we may regard emissions as a derivative marker of global violence, not as a single issue among many to be assessed and prioritized, but as a summation of the effects of economic extraction and oppression, social control, the authoritarian politics of domination and cruelty and exclusion across all domains and geographies, not to mention all the financial crimes inherent to its operations. Just look at Brazil as one example. To address emissions as the primary driver of global climate change without demanding fundamental economic and political change is to save one tree while letting the entire forest burn.

America is its own poster child for this view. The systematic (or at least attempted) deconstruction of environmental regulations, emission standards, the preservation of sacred lands, attacks on indigenous populations, reopening offshore oil exploration, combined with renewed rhetoric and secret subsidies to the fossil-fuel economy while undermining the renewable energy industry harken back to Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James G. Watt who, 40 years ago famously said, “When you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all.”

From the Trumpian view, it’s clear that the response of the global operating system to the approaching dangers is to double down, to prevaricate and procrastinate, to camouflage reality in public relations double-talk, to co-opt and to funnel more money upwards toward toothless ‘remedies’: in short, to hasten the apocalypse. All of it is the definition of insanity.

To be looking at global emissions as a separate marker among many, devising policies and practices to directly limit global emissions and focusing on the renewable energy build-out as the principle remedy for avoiding climate catastrophe has for decades been the organizing principle behind the climate movement. Along with the integration of decolonization as an approach to personal and social transformation and examining how our reflexive responses to the ethical and moral issues of our time can get in our own way, we are realizing that the calculation of global emissions is a symptom, not the disease itself.

The modern extractive economy was originally (and ultimately) based on oppression, colonization, violence, slavery and even genocidal policies. The social structures maintaining racial and economic hierarchies remain deeply entrenched and largely in place. The minority view of white capitalist patriarchy is the primary obstacle to the realization of gender, racial, economic and democratic egalitarianism at the heart of the movement for social and political transformation across the world.

In this context, Deep Adaptation represents a critical shift away from direct opposition to entrenched climate policy to direct organizing of local resources to develop adaptive systems and practices in anticipation of imminent (or ongoing) collapse. Deep Adaptation is an alteration of our sense of time and a search for efficacy beyond control. How do we avoid the pitfalls of the control mindset in the presence of obstacles, ideologies, contradictory surges of events, side currents flowing into the mainstream — all of which intend to become the mainstream?

Deep Adaptation largely remains a niche phenomenon. As we discuss the Four Rs and  even as we expand them to include more R-words, how much attention is spent reinterpreting Deep Adaptation in terms of the emerging singularity at hand? Are we becoming more facile with cross-systems thinking and less wedded to linear causality? Are we escaping reductionism and understanding the exponentially disruptive nature of emerging technologies? Can we be fully aware of the forces directly opposing us even as we explore the spaciousness of Deep Time in which there is no urgency, only an expanding possibility of relationship and common purpose?

What are the prominent obstacles to the transformation we seek? There are many to choose from, but I would list three in particular: Incumbency, white nationalism and property rights.

Incumbency is one obstacle to the propagation of a different view and a different ethic because it carries the expectation that the continued exercise of economic and political power in the future will be by the same players and in the same ways as in the past—also known as insanity. Incumbency presumes legitimacy and appeals to our own natural resistance to change as much as to any intrinsic resistance by the incumbent. Incumbency relies on linear forecasts not taking the full complexity and potential near-term disruptive power of emerging forces into account. If they did, the continuity of any primacy accorded them would immediately come into question.

This goes, of course, for economic and political players, primarily central banks, investment banks and asset managers. It goes for monopolistic utilities, Big Oil, airlines and other large transportation interests, multinational corporate interests, trading interests (WTO), global supply managers and the primary resource extraction interests. This is the priesthood of ‘normalcy.’ And of course it goes for the giant global technology interests, who may well have a better view of the future, but are also no less interested in retaining economic control of it. The inertia of incumbency, as we well know, is also buttressed by the money-driven political system, populated by players whose fortunes are wedded to Business As Usual.

A second less well-known or understood obstacle is white nationalism. Given that the Trump administration is populated by numerous authoritarian white-nationalists whose primary interest is to dismantle the gains of collectivist environmentalism, one would find it odd, not to mention disconcerting, to know that there is a ‘green’ faction within the white nationalist movement labeled ‘eco-fascists.’ A very recent extensive article on this topic resides here.

Two of the most recent and devastating mass shootings (2019), in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas, were committed by avowed eco-fascists whose manifestos provided an open window into their ideology. A third eco-fascist actor, Anders Breivik of Norway, was responsible for the slaughter of 77 youths in 2011. He also left an extensive manifesto, providing the ideological basis for the Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant.

In eco-fascism we see a convergence of white nationalism, environmentalism, anti-Semitism (attributing anthropocentrism to Judeo-Christian influence and blaming Jews for capitalism and the destruction of the natural world) and eugenics (a pre-occupation with population control). The most recent example of the potential for environmentalism to be coopted by this ideology was Michael Moore’s movie, Planet of the Humans and its director’s (Jeff Gibbs) preoccupation with population control.

In fact, Trump and the Republican Party have now positioned themselves as passive executioners of minority populations and the elderly, those most susceptible to COVID-19, whom the eco-fascists regard as the actual virus and thus expendable for the sake of reopening the economy. But being ‘environmentalists,’ eco-fascists also advocate for biodiversity and thus also support racial diversity—human biodiversity—even bioregionalism, except only under strict segregation into ethno-states. In other words, North America belongs to them. Everyone else must go.

These ideas, like high-volume tributaries entering mainstream ecological thinking, are also propagating among numerous known and obscure nodes of cyberspace, all anti-immigration and anti-egalitarian, and are–believe it or not—each gaining a foothold in the environmental movement. Though their advocates will carefully couch and dilute their ideas in acceptable language, they are as much a part of the deep cover of politically influential actors as Christian Dominionism is to the person of Mike Pence. The danger of eco-fascism is that they also recognize oncoming…and even wish for…looming social collapse. Their objective is to be provocateurs, to hasten that collapse, and to then exploit it for their own purposes.

In the words of author and activist Daniel Denvir—[white] nationalism “poses a greater threat to addressing global warming than climate denial-ism.” The environmental movement, particularly the collapse-aware cadres of DA, must recognize that the ground will continue to shift, that a threat of cooptation exists, and remain vigilant to what this threat portends for the larger crises to come.

Finally, a third obstacle to the transition we seek is the entrenched machinery of intellectual property. This could be extended to general property rights, but in this case, privatizing IP is even more threatening to a viable future because the frontiers of technology are extending into the territory of DNA manipulation (CRISPR) and Precision Fermentation. These are emerging technologies already showing signs of prominence in our future. There will be thousands of opportunities to create new biological entities that could improve human immune function. PF may have profound influence on nutrition and health, producing food at a fraction of current costs, all while improving safety and using fewer resources.

The promise of these and other technologies will propagate and be enhanced in an open-source world, whereas restricting what will likely be a mushrooming of benefits to a few companies holding the secrets of low cost, healthy nutrition not dependent on physical land will essentially privatize innovative, inexpensive and mobile production systems for food at a critical time when humanity will be needing such developments to address the consequences of widespread social collapse. Few developments could be less democratic and more damaging to a world in transition than such a scenario. Yet a tenacious and vigorous and pitched legal battle for retention of property rights over essential life support is virtually guaranteed.

All of these technologies can either become extensions of, even accelerators of the organizing system currently driving us toward catastrophe (shortening our ‘time’), or they could be turned to the dismantling of that system, transforming human culture into an open-source, transparent and egalitarian structure benefiting all (lengthening our ‘time.’)

We might even observe that there isn’t much time to deliberate. Yet to regard these matters as urgencies and to find ourselves reacting as if they are real emergencies is to regress into the capitalist definition of time and to allow ourselves to become fragmented and diverted from our primary purpose, which, among all the things Deep Adaptation may also be, is about stepping out of conventional time and not being wedded to and swept away by views misaligned with the natural pace of emergence.

“The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world. 
The end of the world as we know it will be the end of a way of knowing the world.” 
                                                                    —Dougald Hine

The Doomasphere

Jem Bendell has been criticized for promoting what some call “The Doomasphere,” –a dark vision of the future–though until now I couldn’t have named any of Deep Adaptation’s neighbors in that ‘hood. Is he alone? Who else occupies the Doomasphere? Is that even what he’s doing?

It turns out there are several neighbors; in fact, some very evolved and well-established ones. The premise may not in all cases revolve around a prediction of near-term collapse, but orient around the inherent fragility of modern social and technological infrastructure, which purports to be expanding and integrating continuously, thereby becoming more fragile, more volatile and less predictable. In other words, the very definition of chaotic.

Adding climate change to that mix, and especially because that continuous expansion is driving climate change, there is the recent French TV mini-series called L’Effrondrement, set in the near future and updating Jared Diamond’s Collapse, depicting how easily everything we take for granted may be swept away. It’s based on a 2015 novel promoted as a “manual of collapsologie” for present generations, upending the ideologies of sustainability, a green economy or a smooth energy transition.

Well, we already aren’t (or shouldn’t be) deluded by the notion of any smooth transitions, especially with each passing month of increasingly dire news. In fact, it’s been two decades since we passed the option of a “smooth” anything.

The pendulum of human history swings between moments of our being harmoniously embedded within natural processes and periods of population concentration, political centralization, and an urge to transcend the earth’s resource constraints. We develop economies of scale, agglomerate extractive industry on a grand scale, but ultimately overexploit our natural foundations.

The New York Review of Books

The result is articulated by another occupant of the Doomasphere, David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. In the aggregate, the primary strategies of the environmental movement have been a failure. Exxon has won. Not because they didn’t believe the warnings. They knew well before the warnings were issued. The Green New Deal, one of the most recent elaborations on the meaning of Resiliency, according to key figures in the French Doomasphere, is nothing more than a repackaging of the California technological fantasy. Also doomed to be inadequate. One of the earliest members of the Doomapshere is surely the Club of Rome, which produced a landmark report in 1972 called The Limits of Growth, in which the onset of stagnation is predicted in the 2020s. Prescient!

“We must prepare small-scale, resilient bio-regions,” on the scale of only a few thousand inhabitants. Economic circuits must be scaled to local ecosystems and resources, eschewing global supply chains. Visions of the good life that are predicated on unlimited mobility and expanding human wants must be replaced by an ethics of rootedness, the joy of living and working in a defined space.

Yves Cochet

Collapsologie shares a view of the coming world with Deep Adaptation by requiring not only a realization of our true place in the natural world, but a spiritual re-conversion to an ideology of sharing. Their view of “liberty” is also diametrically opposed to the narrow definition of Darwinism adopted by our self-appointed thought (and investment) leaders of economics and politics and the Hobbesian view of life as “nasty, brutish and short.”

While every Conference of Parties since Paris, 2015, has devolved into further finger-pointing and subversion of consensus, the narrowing of any viable environmental strategy has limited rational choices to (among other things) the escalation of resistance to further fossil fuel development, the elimination of global oil subsidies, widespread and radical rollback of income inequality and compensation for the first victims of catastrophe—the global south. All of this while preparing viable strategies to coalesce into regional resilient enclaves.

The existence of a compelling and now 10-year old conversation departing from the mythologies of ‘progress’ and ‘nature’ (why do we even have a word for nature?) resides here at the UK-based Dark Mountain Project. These conversations on the theme of Uncivilization will touch you in profound, surprising and unforeseeable ways, bouncing from head to heart to the deep somatic. There is no prescription here, but rather a litany of “hard truths to help you stay rooted in difficult times,” while building a bridge to a possible future. Dark Mountain is ambitious, illogical, arresting and most of all, real.

Finally, though I’m pretty sure he would object, Charles Eisenstein might be viewed as yet another occupant of the doomasphere simply because he views the issue of human viability as much broader than climate. In his hierarchy, pollution in all its many forms rank higher than climate change, which is about 3rd or 4th. Yet unlike any of the other inhabitants cited above except Deep Adaptation, his is A Revolution of Love, the most daunting prescription of all.

 

 

 

 

Teens talk of Climate Collapse

This is a fresh and unique 34 minute video, produced by Jem Bendell, about a 13 year-old’s exploration of climate collapse. It’s authentic, revealing and very touching.

Deep Adaptation II

Jem Bendell arrives at his assessment of existing climate conditions to conclude that near term social collapse (within 10 years) is a certainty, mid-term catastrophe is likely and species extinction is possible. That’s his core platform. He is now the principal progenitor of what is being called the Doomasphere. Yet for us to proceed as if this is the only possible scenario is silly. Each of us may come to a very different subjective assessment on the issues of collapse, catastrophe, personal impact, timeline or helplessness/hopelessness. Every person will make their own assessment, regardless of its rationale, and arrive at a personal ‘temperature’—what they expect will happen over the next 10-50 years. This will become the basis of further inquiry, examining our assumptions and refining our perspective.

Second, Bendell’s reference to collapse and catastrophe only hint at the wide range of possible differences each of us may face depending on our location, climate and social conditions. An urban dweller will face different issues from a rural farm site. I have unpacked them and created a process to look deeper at our own attitudes about these issues and to form an outlook to address these possibilities in our own communities. However, as Bendell says very clearly in his initial paper, denial gets in the way of seeing clearly and moving forward. Hence, though it’s not as simple as we might imagine, denial in its many forms must be addressed.

Third, Bendell also alludes to values several times in his video interviews. But again, he is not explicit–nor do I think he should be. We have an opportunity—perhaps an obligation—to come to consensus about what we hold most important, particularly as we might anticipate conditions that will cause conflict. This is the territory of Reconciliation, determining what principles we will hold and measures we will create to reduce conflict.

I understand Deep Adaptation to be about reducing suffering. The deeper we go into the values, intentions and objectives for developing personal and collective local responses to the advance of climate disruption, the more clear it becomes that this is the primary directive.

Finally, as Bendell also indicates in multiple communications, the possibility of extinction implies the onset of rising fatalities due to displacement, the loss of infrastructure or support systems—the possibility of mass death, being personally impacted by community or family vulnerabilities, even our own death. That possibility may be very slim for some people and quite daunting at the very least. But again, here is where denial enters the calculations.

Imagine receiving a personal diagnosis of a condition, which, if left untreated, would definitely be terminal. Beyond the initial shock and grief, what would become most immediately important to you–a commitment to the treatment, the values on which you can no longer compromise or procrastinate, defining your community, deciding how you wish to live? Humanity is being given that diagnosis. Bendell has cut though a great deal of chaff to define the territory. It is up to us to explore it. That’s what Deep Adaptation means to me—discovering how we wish to respond.

Where Did Deep Adaptation Come From

Jem Bendell is a professor of sustainability and leadership at the University of Cumbria. In July, 2018, he published a paper, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Based on his assessment of all available climate data, he reached a conclusion that Social Collapse is “inevitable” within 10 years, that climate Catastrophe is “probable” in the mid-term and human extinction is “likely.”

His paper received a dramatic response, all the way from highly critical reviews from scientists, social psychologists and others, to viral circulation and positive responses from the general public. Since that moment 18 months ago, over 100,000 people have downloaded the paper and many around the world have quickly become involved or connected in some way to this approach.

A Deep Adaptation Forum emerged in March, 2019, providing 10 different categories of engagement including an active community forum. The principles that drive Bendell’s approach are the 4Rs: Resilience, Relinquishing, Restoration and Reconciliation. In order, he’s talking about saving what we need, restoring what has been lost, letting go of what we don’t need and what needs to be done to reduce conflict as we enter more extreme climate conditions.

The issue of Deep Adaptation has significant personal and collective implications. What needs to be done individually; what needs to be done to build trust and confidence among people who wish to become involved at this level and what needs to be done collectively to address the world that is coming? These are not simple issues to untangle. But there is a vein of rational assessment, emotional clarity, creative potential and spiritual hunger that is being galvanized by this approach. I feel it and I’m in.

What I intend to be doing on this issue is to explore many questions arising around this approach to the climate emergency, finding clarity for myself and offering the same to anyone else who cares. I will also be exploring what needs to be learned, how to craft an accessible and fulfilling approach to Deep Adaptation for those wishing to become more involved and active in their communities.