IN THIS ISSUE

 

As the initiator of what has become a movement for ‘deep adaptation’ to societal disruption and collapse, I am pleased to have this means to continue to share with you what I think is important as we experience more troubled times. In DA conversations we often speak of ‘societal collapse,’ yet do not often explore what we mean by ’societal.’ For instance, are there norms and values that are fundamental to what we experience as society? Could they be as important for some people as matters of shelter, nutrition, or health? Or should we ditch certain values that have been central to our experience of society, if we think that will keep us safer? Who decides the 'we' that matters and the others who matter less? And where would such ideas of attaining safety come from? These are topics explored by signatories to the Scholars Warning on societal disruption. And with such topics in mind, I liked a recent summary of the Deep Adaptation movement in a review of my new book: “Unlike the growing prepper movement that prioritizes personal survival at all costs, Deep Adaptation calls for adaptive responses that spring from solidarity with all life, which requires an expanded sense of self and kinship.”

Part of my motivation for staying engaged after my DA paper went viral was to contribute to kind ways of responding to increasing feelings of vulnerability. Not only ways that are kinder than a ‘Mad Max’ future of violent crime in a lawless society. Ways that would also be kinder than a ‘Major Max’ future of totalitarian governments using fear to generate public aggression towards independent thought and behaviour. This is because I value human rights as central to what society means and therefore any suspension or denigration of such rights is an aspect of societal disruption. Worse still, if such rights remain curtailed by power and undefended by much of the public, then that represents a societal breakdown. Something which, in hindsight, might be considered an aspect of societal collapse. 

Many of us who anticipate societal disruption and collapse have been fortunate to avoid much direct disruption to our own lives due to environmental loss and its knock-on effects. How will we respond when we sense our immediate vulnerability and that of our loved ones? Given the connections between environmental degradation and disease originating in animals (even if only because of reckless scientific experiments in response to that risk), then 2021 can be seen as the first instance of environmentally-related societal disruption affecting everyone (to different degrees) in rich countries. How have we responded? 

In many cases over the last year, people responded with curiosity and solidarity. However, numerous people have responded with blame, denigration, and shaming of alternative ideas so that they undermine policy scrutiny and support authoritarian suspensions of human rights. That form of societal disruption—perhaps breakdown—is occurring right now. It is something that some of us—our friends, colleagues, relatives, and neighbours—have been participating in, or tolerating. Because it is happening now and not in a theoretical future, the topic is inevitably more emotionally charged. Which is why many of us have shied away from it.

Until recently. More people in the field of collapse anticipation are publicly challenging the trajectory of societies, while anticipating the backlash they will experience from some. Paul Kingsnorth was co-founder of the group Dark Mountain, which started exploring collapse some years before Deep Adaptation. His interview, where he objects to divisiveness and authoritarianism as the mainstream response to public health in 2021, has been viewed over a million times. Some of the vitriol he received from well-known commentators in the environmental movement highlights the ongoing breakdown in civic dialogue that he was pointing to.

Perhaps his circumstances are instructive. Anticipating the breakdown of industrial consumer society, Paul moved to Ireland to live closer to the land and try to be more resilient. His situation is a reminder that although many of us might wish to leave behind activism and politics and live according to our values in more local ways, the state, mass media, and general public will not leave people alone. Resilience cannot be found one allotment or support circle at a time. Just as activism can become an all-consuming distraction, so anti-activism won’t insulate us from what is unfolding in society. All of it is needed.  

That is why this newsletter features both the personal and political—the inner and the outer—in responding to societal disruption. It is also why I have released both an article and a music video on the need to counteract mass media lies about different activists and instead find common cause in defending our freedom to care for each other and nature. And it is why I am delighted that an experienced facilitator in the DA field is launching ‘Freedom to Care’ online peer-support circles for people who feel they are experiencing medical aggression. I am hopeful that in 2022 more of us will learn from the limits and missteps of the 2021 response to public health and so be better prepared for future health-related disruptions with a better citizen-based agenda. Although some of us might seek to avoid arguments by choosing to regard the current suffering from public policies as neither relating to societal disruption or deep adaptation, that could imply not regarding human rights as constitutive of what we mean by society. Such avoidance could become an appeasement of abuse. In finding a way through the polarisation generated by mass media denigration of our fellow citizens, we will benefit from the counsel of spiritual elders such as Reverend Stephen Wright, who is the first Deep Adaptation Q&A guest in 2022, later this month.  

The climate emergency will not be receding (ever). The latest letter from the Scholars Warning explained that the failure of international climate policy was a result of decades of corporate influence. That same influence will be exerted over the way governments and media present options for responding to the ensuing chaos. That is why leadership and communication from people who do not want their ideas on how to care for each other to be shaped by corporate propaganda will be essential, and are why I will keep teaching that at University.

I hope you enjoy this upgraded newsletter, which benefits from a new editor, Dan Vie, and associate editor, Jessica Groenendijk. Dan is a community organiser on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. His work is in local activism and participatory engagement through the arts. He’s also one of the moderators of the DA Facebook group. Jessica is a biologist turned nature writer and volunteers with the DAF editorial team.

If you would like to give feedback on any of the content in this newsletter I recommend doing so via the Deep Adaptation Leadership group on LinkedIn. If you would like to submit content ideas for the next newsletter in April please use this form. 

Our existing subscribers—such as yourself—are the only way we will reach new subscribers. Please forward this newsletter to a few people who might be ready for this agenda, so they can subscribe here. 

Happy New Year,

Professor Jem Bendell
Publisher, Deep Adaptation Quarterly

Canada Gets A Taste Of Collapse 
We make the road by walking. When a community’s resilience is tested by crisis, our capacities start to unfold.  

Chaotic storms turned Canada's west coast into a disaster zone last November, and BC became a poster child for collapse. Overnight, the continent’s fourth largest shipping port, trading with 170 economies, was landlocked by severe floods which devastated food crops, swept away bridges and highways around the province, and displaced entire towns. As gaping cracks were exposed in supply chains and infrastructure, governments and media channels sat up and took notice.   

Often those with the least to lose are hit hardest by displacement, like this small aboriginal community whose town was obliterated by flooding, and who were reduced to begging for financial aid: “The land that our ancestors had worked for thousands of years and ensured that we had a place to grow … productive crops, those lands are no longer there. They’re just rocks.” 

The Province of BC’s collapse event blew the whistle on everyone who downplayed the eroded ecology, or failed to invest in ‘future-proofing’, or refused to slow down deforestation—all making for the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This against the backdrop of long-haul campaigns to defend old growth and stop pipelines, characterized by Naomi Klein’s term for resistance movements, Blockadia. 

Who knows… Once poop gets real and the speeding train of civilization lurches to a stop, a culture of caring and sharing could emerge naturally. 
 
COP-26: So What… Happened?
Held up as the world’s last-ditch hope, COP-26—the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow with 120 heads of state attending and all 197 countries of the world invited—was staged once again as an illusion of care, with ‘blah blah blah’ as the main outcome. Delegates went through motions too soft to be meaningful, making the event mostly useful for critique. Critic and raconteur Jonathan Pie takes us on a subversive inside tour in The World’s End, a Yes Men-styled mockumentary featuring a staged heart-to-heart drinking scene with George Monbiot.  

DAF Holding Group member Malika Virah-Sawmy also worked to shift the COP26 dialogue from inside, bridging the culture of suppressed emotions by facilitating a space for deep reflection.

Meanwhile, representatives from the Global South were barely recognized at the COP26 table, with conference outcomes denounced by indigenous activists as a death sentence. On the street, activists held a memorial for those unable to attend - of the 1,005 environmental defenders murdered since the 2015 Paris Agreement, one in three was indigenous.

Other indigenous defenders turn to ligitation, like these passionate young defendants interviewed about their ecocide challenge to the UK High Court. For more, Mongabay offers this roundup of its top ten indigenous climate news stories of 2021. 
 
A Win For Pachamama – And For Humanity
In a significant win for local mining resistance, Ecuador’s highest court has ruled that copper and gold mining permits issued in the Los Cedros Protected Forest are unconstitutional and violate the rights of nature, or 'Pachamama'. The lawsuit was brought by mestizo and Afro-Ecuadorian communities near Los Cedros, supported by Earth Law Center, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, and the Center for Biological Diversity. Whether this landmark ruling against ecocide sets a precedent which will be applied elsewhere in Ecuador, and worldwide, remains to be seen.  
 
Letting Go Of Privilege 
It’s a pity that making land reparations so often defaults to the court system. This Canadian story of a self-identified ‘settler’ who has bequeathed her home to a local Native Friendship Centre stands out as an anomaly. And out on the Prairies,14 Saskatchewan farmers are sharing properties with local indigenous peoples through a new farming alliance, the Treaty Land Sharing Network, formed to enable reconciliation in action.

Seeking A Just Collapse
Follow the money: without budget disbursements to redistribute the wealth to just causes, we’re screwed—so at least the taboo of ‘don’t talk about adaptation’ is being publicly challenged, not only by lobbyists but also from inside the UN and IMF, and by politicians and bankers.

As COP-26 Ends, No One Is Coming To Save Us
At the close of COP-26, presenter Rupert Read laid his cards on the table to speak the bitter reality out loud, “no one is coming to save us”—that is, if governments refuse to act with urgency, the only alternative is to take action without government.  

Meanwhile, Read, Bendell, Virah-Sawmy and more than 200 academics issued a statement on the corporate capture of COP26, calling for climate justice and for political leaders to “take immediate steps to reduce inequality.” As Bendell and Read point out in this hard-hitting piece for Brave New Europe, The Davosification of COP: Why Capitalism Hasn’t Got Climate Covered, you “can’t bargain with nature.” Note that 40% of the IPCC authors also copped to their anxiety in this recent anonymous survey from Nature.

Healing Directions 
As the trappings of civilization fall away, the cycles of grief and loss can persist as an open wound. Without bravely addressing one’s trauma, how to move forward into agency? Deep Adaptation’s front line will always welcome refugees from normality, who are coming to terms with accepting that life isn’t normal any more.

Generative Somatics therapist Staci Haines encourages the embodied practice of making personal declarations to imagine the possible, guide our healing process, and provide an internalised rudder towards agency. She writes in The Politics of Trauma: “When we declare, we are intending and calling forth a future… those with the least systemic privilege often need to be reminded, encouraged, and empowered, through healing and political education, to declare and declare boldly.”

Supplicant Politics, And Planting Seeds
Blogger Brian Stout neatly names the problem of dismantling the master’s house as a failure of 'supplicant politics.' Stout surveys the art and necessity of building parallel institutions, quoting Jason Hickel’s statement that "sooner or later we will have to face the fact that asking the ruling class to stop climate destruction is not going to work." Elsewhere, Stout calls us to build our collective capacity by planting seeds for emergence, and helping them take root at scale—not by giving solutions, but by distributing the ability to solve. As a decentralised framework, Deep Adaptation invites you to begin your own initiatives.

Deep Adaptation Calls Us To Love in Action
In one of the best media summaries to date of the landscape of Deep Adaptation, this thoughtful article by Kiley Bense in Inside ClimateNews interviews climate scientists, post-Doomers, and signatories of the Scholars Warning letter about finding solace in the acceptance of inevitable collapse—and concludes that rather than succumbing to apathy and despair, a courageous, clear-eyed vision of our present conditions may move us to be galvanised by crisis: “The anxiety comes from not talking about it.”

Highlights from Deep Adaptation Forum’s Blog
The Deep Adaptation Forum’s blog offers an intriguing variety of perspectives on collapse matters, from powerful stories of personal transformation, to poems, film reviews, and reports on DA-related events. 

Recent highlights include this heartfelt piece by somatic eco-therapist Kristy Johnnson on listening to the land; an exploration of Dreaming at the End of Time by Deep Adaptation Dreamwork’s group co-founder Kristopher Drummond; a piece by Alan Heeks on 'deep nature' and learning to live with the bewildering emotions of the climate crisis; and an overview of methods for paradigm shift by DAF facilitator Kimberley Hare, co-founder of the HEART Community Group in Hertfordshire, UK.

Parenting In Dark Times
In times like these, it can be heart-breaking to be a parent. To listen to your child innocently making plans for their future. Or, worse still, to witness their anxiety or despair over the latest headlines. What can you say or do, and how do you say or do it, especially when you’re crippled by dread yourself? Fred Ehresman, a parent who is also a clinician specialising in the mental health of young people, describes his journey through the ‘emotional mill’, finding in the 4 Rs of Deep Adaptation—Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, and Reconciliation—“an accessible map to help us navigate with honesty and care some challenging conversations about the difficult truths that lie ahead.” 

For parents who want to read more, get mental health support, have conversations, and find community, Emma Pattee’s Where Parents Can Get Help with Climate Anxiety may prove useful.
 
Convert The Military To Earth Repair
As we push on ever closer to Mordor—that landscape of loss and decay, as this grim vision of turnkey totalitarianism illustrates—our cognitive blinders literally prevent us from seeing the State as our biggest existential threat. Andrew Nikiforuk calls it the 'technological imperium' - an anxious political class that “can’t imagine its own collapse.” Military intelligence briefs released by the US just prior to COP 26 also give a candid look at what governments are actually thinking. 

Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who annually measure existential threat by the number of minutes the world is away from midnight, is aligning with Seth Klein of A Good War and the Climate Emergency Unit in calling for a military mobilisation on the scale of the Manhattan Project, to kick the military’s powerful resources into urgent action: “State-level actors would need to treat climate change as a security issue… Once established as a war-like threat, climate change can be addressed with the gravity, urgency, and resources it deserves.”

Overshoot And Degrowth
Radical shifts of narrative are long past due, and those who bargain for time are—in the words of Arundhati Roy—"trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture." If we want to achieve harm reduction, we’d better start talking about overshoot. 

Earth Overshoot Day dropped 2021’s marker on July 29th as the day humans overdrew Earth’s bank account for the year. Meanwhile, degrowth is the last thing Wall Street wants to think about, since the very idea affronts the myth of perpetual profits and chastises everyone who’s still trying to squeeze blood from a stone. The NYSE has even launched a new asset class to commodify nature itself.

Decolonizing Therapy
Healing isn’t just for the able-bodied. Through a racial justice lens, the dominant policies are as colonialist as ever for 360 million indigenous people, whose lands host 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. WHO estimates 15 percent of Earth’s inhabitants have a disability, while indigenous disability in some countries may be as high as 50 percent—the systemic outcomes of exclusion. 
 
So is therapy another avenue for oppression? It could be—since many therapeutic models are skewed towards the privileged, rather than geared towards those who have inherited generations of oppression. As such, therapies could evolve towards a more trauma-informed vocabulary, and ultimately, become decolonized. 

Critical illnesses might need to provoke a state of inflammation before effective healing responses can come into play. In their book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, authors Rupa Marya and Raj Patel explore the meaning of inflammation as a path to healing the sicknesses caused by colonialism.

 

After The Apocalypse, What Next?
This future-forward research study by Joost de Moor, Postapocalyptic narratives in climate activism: their place and impact in 5 European cities, which surveys the psychological literature and includes Deep Adaptation in the mix, also interviews 46 climate activists to explore if breaching the “rules of feeling” by envisioning societal collapse can help people abandon their propriety, and move forward into meaningful action. The paper is a fascinating look at the reasons why adaptation strategies are kept out of climate discussions, and which kinds of actions could lead to the greater justice—while countering the critics of DA who claim that dwelling on ‘dark thoughts’ will demotivate activists.  

Shifting The Therapeutic Frame
Jem Bendell’s recent essay in the New Zealand Journal of Psychotherapy (reviewed in detail by Skeena Rathor), is a challenge to therapists to help their clients see beyond their worldviews and entitlements, and “escape becoming accidental fascists… it is difficult not to see any proposition that people be realistic and ditch key values as actually a call for the powerful to decide what must be done and to whom.”  

Events

Existing Otherwise - Learning from Ghana
On 4th of February, 2022, Jem Bendell will give an online presentation on the theme of 'Learning from Ghana', as part of the closing events for a year-long cross-cultural arts project called Existing Otherwise – The Future of Coexistence between XO Curatorial Projects in Berlin, Germany, and the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Arts (SCCA), in Tamale, Ghana. 

Jem will join in a panel discussion with Isabel Lewis (founder of Berlin’s Institute of Embodied Creative Practices), Ibrahim Mahama (founder of SCCA), and Solvej Ovesen (artistic director of Existing Otherwise) on matters of “ecological understanding, impromptu decision-making, and Covid-19 handling.” 

What's the Worst That Could Happen?
Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? In this free online talk 17th of January, 2022, at 7:30 PM, with the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Andrew Leigh will look at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, and explain how the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely. 
 
Andrew Leigh is the author of ten books, his most recent being What's the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics; and is a Member of the Australian House of Representatives.

Call Off the Thought and Sing - Broken World 
On Sunday, Jan. 16, 2022, at 6:00 PM, Jem Bendell will join with vocal improv teacher Briony Greenhill, XR co-founder Skeena Rathor, and Tamera Ecovillage leader, Martin Winiecki, to discuss our global ecological and systemic moment and “what the ??? to do???”
 
Call off the Thought and Sing is a monthly Zoom event which integrates discussion, singing, music, and movement, hosted by Briony Greenhill. The cost is sliding scale.

Governing Collapse. Possible? Unhelpful? 
In the second Deep Adaptation Q&A of the year on 31st Jan at 9:00 AM GMT, Jem Bendell will talk with Scott Williams of the UN Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) agency, to explore how organisations of governance can shift to slow the race towards societal collapse. Scott has led risk management projects in over 100 countries.

Courses

Short Course in Sustainable Leadership 2022 
Jem Bendell and Deep Adaptation Forum’s Katie Carr are offering a five-day experiential learning journey in Sustainable Leadership for professionals and community activists interested in the leadership challenges of climate change.

In this short course, which runs from June 13th - 17th, 2022, you will be challenged to explore what leadership on Deep Adaptation to our climate crisis can involve—based on the perspective that societal breakdown is either likely, inevitable, or already occurring. The program has a maximum of 28 places, with registration required by May 2nd. Subscribers to Deep Adaptation Quarterly qualify for the discounted course rate of  £400.
 
Complete our form to submit details of your own online event or course for consideration in our next DA Quarterly.

Energy activist and writer Phil O’Sullivan reviews Post Growth by Tim Jackson and Deep Adaptation by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read as offering “starkly different visions of how we as a society need to face up to the future of climate and societal collapse.” While Jackson focuses on post-growth, and Bendell and Read write about post-hope, both books centre the role of community, suggesting that “although we are most likely considering the end of the world as we know it, there is going to be a world which comes after it, and that the role of policymakers and activists is now to shape something which, intrinsically, must be entirely new.”

Deep Adaptation, Revisited
Joel Mowdy’s book review nicely summarises Bendell and Read’s Deep Adaptation anthology, in which the various authors challenge readers “to rethink what is most important to them, and what can be done to protect what they most value… Deep Adaptation calls for adaptive responses that spring from solidarity with all life, which requires an expanded sense of self and kinship.”

Many have the desire for building community but feel disconnected and overwhelmed about where to start. This section links to methods for building a better world, with kudos to the people and organisations with long experience in developing practical tools for leadership.
 
The Action Grid Landscape Map, created by Roger Benson, is a useful template for orienting where to direct your local, regional, or global energy to support this “one wild and precious life.”

Shareable hosts a massively eclectic collection of 300 starting points for community building.
 
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief invites a radical approach: don’t wait for government services, start organising your peers and initiate mutual care for those in critical conditions. Their site is a marvellous link-dump of resources.
 
Degrowth Resources is a Scottish collection of entry points for degrowth.
 
Cancel The Apocalypse: 30 documentaries at Films for Action - thirty stories for a better future, curated from this library of over 5,000 streaming social change films, all for free or low cost.

 

The Deep Adaptation Forum is a community which began soon after the publication of Jem Bendell’s ground-breaking paper. They connect all sorts of people, helping them embody and enable loving responses to our predicament, to reduce suffering and save more of society and the natural world.
 
Dear reader,
 
As ever, this has been a busy time for Deep Adaptation Forum so the following are just a few key points I’d like to mention. I know some of you are already Forum members. Others, if I can pique your interest, might explore our various platforms to find out more. All are welcome!
 
Reliant as we are on online activities (mostly), the resilience and integrity of the platforms we use matter. We know things could be better; greater accessibility, less risk of going ‘down’, improved functionality. So a group of us are working on solutions (working title: The New DAF Space), and a generous donor has provided funding. Thanks to all our donors for supporting this and our many other programs!
 
As ever, there are numerous regular events happening, ranging from Earth Listening meditations to Deep Relating practices; Death Cafés and Grief Circles; explorations of decolonisation/antiracism; and a newly established Arts circle where you can express responses to likely collapse through music, painting, and words.
 
Meanwhile, Deep Adaptation Dreamwork lets you explore your responses to your dream-life, and there’s a Womens’ Circle (and DAF Women’s Facebook group) curated by one of our most knowledgeable volunteers. In fact, several subregional/subject-specific groups have Facebook pages, but for people who don’t do Facebook, we also work on Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and there’s our website and blog. You can find links to many of these events and practices here and, if you’re a part of the DAF Professions Network, here.
 
DA, DAF, and other DA-aligned people see more mainstream comment every week. Jem and I were both quoted recently in the Financial Times in Pilita Clark’s excellent article on professionals who have left their cosier former jobs to work on climate issues.
 
The turn of the year has come and gone. We saw in 2022 with a 24-hour marathon of playlists, dance, chat, and…well, whatever people brought with them! We followed the sun around the globe, laughing and grieving as we nurtured new hopes, arising from older, dashed ones. And looking ahead, we’ll face the future with honesty, love, and compassion. We hope to see many of you (again) in the coming months. Join us for the tough stuff, the deep stuff and—we hope—some fun stuff, and much more. There’s always more, when love fuels the flame.
  
Cat Jenkins
DAF Communications Coordinator