What To Expect When You're Expecting The End Of The World - Jem Bendell And The Deep Adaptation Paper

Jem Bendell had postponed his personal crisis long enough. For years, he’d been setting aside the worrying news about climate change he came across in a folder on his computer, waiting until he had the time (and emotional capacity) to look at it. In 2017, he took leave from his job as a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, in the United Kingdom, to finally dive in. He read that melting permafrost was releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that speeds up warming — which in turn, melts more permafrost. It was a dangerous feedback loop that he had learned about as a student at Cambridge in the 1990s and had been told would likely start in 2050, if climate change went unchecked. Unfortunately, it arrived early.Bendell read more and more about unprecedented floods, devastating forest fires, and vanishing Arctic sea ice. It was all happening too fast. He became convinced that the rich world’s way of life — year-round strawberries, next-day delivery, flights across oceans — was nearing its end. That meant his life’s work had been, in his words, “all a bit deluded.” He’d just spent two decades arguing that businesses could help fix environmental problems and heal the flaws of capitalism, writing books, organizing international conferences, and teaching MBA courses on corporate sustainability. That had left little time for his family, his health, and, you know, having fun.

All those sacrifices, and for what?“I felt raw, cracked open by all of this,” Bendell said, “and I had lost my previous sense of identity and purpose.”So he tried to fill the cracks with something else, searching for meaning in a world that felt like it was coming apart. Bendell channeled his thoughts into a paper he self-published online in July 2018, titled “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” Normally, when people talked about adapting to climate change, they’d been looking for solutions that would allow their current way of life to continue. Bendell, instead, started from the premise that people will have to give up a lot, posing the question, “What do we value most that we want to keep, and how?”

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Online critics of the fear-forward approach of writers like Bendell and Wallace-Wells called it “doomism”; they thought laying out worst-case scenarios was just as dangerous as denial since it could spur resignation instead of resistance. They pointed to social science research showing that all this talk of doom could overwhelm people, leading them to check out emotionally. Climate scientists, meanwhile, raised a narrower critique: that Bendell’s conclusion — the end of modern life was inevitable — went beyond what the scientific consensus could support. They challenged Bendell’s portrayal of climate “tipping points,” saying that his claims about melting Arctic sea ice and methane escaping from permafrost were exaggerated or cherry-picked. In response, Bendell acknowledged a few corrections in 2020 and updated his paper, adding a caveat that he couldn’t prove the collapse of society was certain. His conviction wasn’t based solely on climate science, after all, but his instincts about how society would respond to environmental chaos. By mid-2020, according to Bendell, there was a widespread effort to paint Deep Adaptation as unhelpful doomism, debunk the paper, and smear him. He described it as a shocking and painful experience, and he coped by reading the book The Courage to Be Disliked, by the Japanese writers Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. When he responded to criticism, often coming from young people, he admits he often came across as an arrogant, older professor. “It was all a bit awkward,” he said. But he felt compelled to defend the Deep Adaptation community, because they were trying to do something good: not just prepare for the worst, but to face it with honesty and compassion.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, a scholar of societal transformation, has also experienced blowback from talking about how modern society might break down. In her books, she’s argued that the oppressive, unsustainable mindset underpinning the status quo is reaching its limits, and we need to learn to let it go. (“What if you know — in your bones, not just in your mind — that major social and ecological collapse is on the horizon?” she wrote in her book that came out last year, Outgrowing Modernity.) People would argue with her that airing these ideas was irresponsible, because it opens up a range of dangerous reactions. But she says it’s irresponsible not to talk about what the future holds. “If you haven’t really processed the feelings that you have around loss and grief in a very different way, when you are face-to-face with it, you won’t be able to coordinate — you will be stunned, right?” Machado de Oliveira said.

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https://grist.org/culture/jem-bendell-society-collapse-deep-adaptation-doom/