August 2019 – Prof Jem Bendell

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The concept of Deep Adaptation to impending societal breakdown due to climate disruption is spreading around the world. It was first coined in a speech by Professor Jem Bendell in December 2016, but spread rapidly since his Deep Adaptation Paper went viral. The topic is vast, touching on all aspects of our personal and professional lives, in all corners of the globe. There are now many people seeking experts to speak on this topic around the world – from journalists, broadcasters, and event organisers. If you are seeking a credible speaker on this topic, please read on…

Professor Bendell only does a few talks, interviews and workshops (videos here). To respond to the demand, the Deep Adaptation Forum is prototyping a roster of Deep Adaptation Advocates. These are people of many different kinds of experience and expertise, who are known to Professor Bendell as having something interesting to say on the Deep Adaptation agenda. They are located around the world. Some can travel and all can speak by video link. Some do not charge a fee but some may need to. Any payments are handled directly, not via the Forum.

Please note that Prof Bendell is not available for any talks before April 2020 (you can check his diary of appearances and courses in 2019 and 2020).

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Here is the current list of advocates in alphabetical order. All speak English. If you do not specify someone we will try to source the advocate nearest to your event (if online video participation is not an option).

Melissa Allison, journalist in Seattle, WA, USA. Spent more than 15 years reporting business news for major daily newspapers in the U.S; now editing an economic research/housing site; does somatic experiencing, yoga, meditation, recording and listening (Cheri Huber tool); “I believe we will succeed best if we work toward a soft landing, particularly in the area of food security, and toward our own spiritual growth, the latter in order to both make the most of our lives and ensure that we don’t add to the pain for ourselves and others.” Available by online video and across USA and Canada.

David Baum in Seattle, WA, USA. Moderator for the Positive Deep Adaptation (PDA) Facebook group, engaged with people coming to grips with climate breakdown and societal collapse. “Our lives as we have known them will change drastically. We must accept this, grieve, then find new meaning built on a revelation that truth and love are primary in human life. I have read thousands of posts expressing all manner of emotion and thought about our situation and how to cope with it. I have a thorough understanding of how people react to Deep Adaptation when encountering it for the first time. I can be helpful in interpreting key concepts.” Available by online video and worldwide in person.

Naresh Giangrande, BSc chemist in Totnes, UK. Researcher and online facilitator for Gaia Education; Facilitator, Trainer, and cofounder of Transition Network. Focuses on community resilience building and communicating climate science. “Our civilisation in the global North is dead, and the sooner we accept this fact the sooner we can get on with the important tasks doing whatever needs to be done next. The more people that understand and accept this the more likelihood we have of minimising harm.” Blog post, Radio interview, Ecociv podcast. Online and UK engagements only.

Alan Heeks, MA Oxon and MBA Harvard, living in Dorset, UK.

Director & founder of nonprofit Seeding our Future, working with individuals, communities and businesses; social entrepreneur; writer; “This crisis is a huge call for love and compassion: for ourselves and for all life including Gaia.” Recent blog, short video, web site about happiness. UK and online engagements only.

Shu Liang, MA Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation, living in Holland. Founder and director of Stichting Day of Adaptation, a non-profit based in the Netherlands which does local level climate adaptation capacity building through collective and experiential learning (fun and interactive activities). Masters thesis, Linkedin profile. Available online and in Europe only; also speaks Dutch and Mandarin.

Kay Michael, Southern England. Cofounder of Culture Declares Emergency; cofounder and co-curator of Letters to the Earth. holds a Permaculture Design Certificate; Theatrically trained. “It is our broken culture (of separation, consumerism, extractivism, individualism) that has led us to this place; and now radical imagination is required to revolutionise that culture into a wholly regenerative one that can support us through the difficulty.” Workshop video. Available by online video and potentially worldwide in person.

Cordelia Jilani Prescott, BA musician, in Northern England. Certified Leader and Mentor of the Dances of Universal Peace International; teacher in the Sufi Ruhaniat International (a Universal Western Sufi Order) “I work to bring comfort and solace through deep loving connection, and to help strengthen inner and outer peace and the ability to be with intense and difficult feelings. I use chant, movement, and other practices as a framework and container, facilitating circles of people to be more fully alive, to feel safe together, to share love and deep connection and to touch a sense of the sacredness of life.” Recent blog post, web site. Available by online video and potentially worldwide in person; also speaks French.

Herb Simmens in Washington DC, USA. Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future. “I immerse myself in the climate literature and attend climate meetings and workshops all over the western world and have done so for about five years now. By recognizing the urgent need for a deep adaptation perspective we can save lives, reduce harm and conflict and enhance planetary welfare.” Blog post, interview, web site. Available by online video and potentially worldwide in person.

Cecilie Smith-Christensen, tourism and heritage manager in Oslo, Norway. Applying the Deep Adaptation approach within the tourism and heritage sector; parenting sensitive to our predicament. Web site. Available by online video and potentially worldwide in person; also speaks Norwegian.

Toni Spencer, MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice living in Devon, UK. Course mentor, trainer and teacher for Call of The Wild with Wildwise /Schumacher College including grief tending, deep ecology and embodiment. Web site; Bristol talk with Jem Bendell. Available by online video and UK-wide in person.

Simona Vaitkute, MAs in Diplomacy & Philosophy in Lithuania. Works in education including wilderness and life skills for youth. “We need to prepare our children for the likelihood of major disruptions to our way of living; families, communities and schools can use the 4R frame of DA to create learning plans that are suitable for their unique circumstances.” Available by online video and short flights from Lithuania; also speaks Lithuanian.

Dean Walker, Oregon USA.
Dean Walker has been designing curriculum, facilitating and coaching in the field of Collapse-Awareness, for the past six years – drawing extensively on his prior 30 years of Executive and Personal Development coaching and training. He is the author of The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience at the End of Business as Usual. His body of work now includes: Individual and Group – Transformational Resilience Coaching, Safe Circle Support Groups, Deep Academy online learning series, and workshop design and facilitation. “The calling of these times is for reconnection with the Web of Life.” Dean is available any time for online interviews – and live speaking and workshop events across the USA and internationally. Youtube channel, interview, web site.

As a member of the Deep Adaptation Advocates group, these people provide both emotional and technical support to each other, as well as receiving support from the Forum (resources permitting). If you would like to be considered and trained to be an advocate for the Forum, please first join the Campaigns, Advocacy and Lobbying group of the professionals network of the Deep Adaptation Forum and become active there for a few weeks before approaching the curator of that Forum with your enquiry.

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I’d love to see serious discussion about what kind of economic and social justice policies are needed to reduce harm in the face of societal collapse from climate chaos. Currently, I haven’t seen much. So, in the hope of getting more decent left-wing engagement with our predicament, here is a quick invitation.

Deep Adaptation is a framework for inviting conversation on what we do if we anticipate societal collapse, or are experiencing collapse around us. It is now a movement. I coined the term in a paper I wrote in July 2018. I wrote that for a management academic audience. So where was the critique of power and of capital? Is the absence of a discussion of structural violence of capital an indication that the Deep Adaptation framework is not radical?

women holding a planet over profit sign — Photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com on Pexels.

I am told that question is being raised in some left-wing intellectual discussion boards, and I have started getting emails from left-wing academics that complain, basically, that I’m counter-revolutionary.

So, here is a quick message to left-wing intellectuals about Deep Adaptation, in which I will give some links to my past writings about how crap capitalism is for the planet… and some ideas on what to do about it.

But before I start, a bit of humble pie. Despite my disdain for capitalism, I stayed working within the system, as my heart and mind were also captured by the system. The Deep Adaptation paper was a long apology for that. But I do a fuller mea culpa in my piece in the forthcoming Letters to the Earth book.

In the Deep Adaptation paper, the power of capital in keeping us compliant is implied in the section on denial in the environmental profession. But that paper wasn’t the venue to further elaborate on that, for instance by discussing the role of capital in the social construction of the stories that kept people quiet within the environmental movement and profession. Because, I was writing for the sustainability profession. Yes, I know, I was embedded in that system.

I have written over 100 publications in my academic career, and I can’t include everything I think in one paper. But, on the topic of Deep Adaptation, I have already discussed capitalism elsewhere. In my first speech on the topic, to climate policy researchers and climate business executives at the end of 2016 (not your most Marxist audience), I said that capitalism is at fault for our predicament, but that the cause is even deeper than that. If you have gone further into post-Marxist critical theory via people like Adorno, you will understand. I said:

“My own analysis is that the West’s response as restricted by the dominance of neoliberal economics since the 1970s. That led to hyper-individualist, market fundamentalist, incremental and atomistic approaches. By hyper-individualist, I mean a focus on individual action as consumers, switching light bulbs or buying sustainable furniture, rather than promoting political action as engaged citizens. By market fundamentalist, I mean a focus on market mechanisms like the complex, costly and largely useless carbon cap and trade systems, rather than exploring what more government intervention could achieve. By incremental, I mean a focus on celebrating small steps forward such as a company publishing a sustainability report, rather than strategies designed for a speed and scale of change suggested by the science. By atomistic, I mean a focus on seeing climate action as a separate issue from the governance of markets, finance and banking, rather than exploring what kind of economic system could permit or enable sustainability.”

So, to repeat, I would really welcome left-wing and, as importantly, critical theoretical analysis of what policies and actions could help enable adaptation of any kind, or Deep Adaptation in particular. I want to spend some time working on these issues myself, but haven’t got to that point yet. When I do, will draw upon some of my past work on economic aspects of our unsustainability. Here is a short list of some of the key arguments from my past publications that I think are relevant to this discussion:

The need to move beyond the dangerous and oppressive ideology of managerialism. Here.

The need to place new duties on shareholders, at a minimum, as part of a capital accountability agenda. Here.

The need to transform our monetary system away from bank-issued debt as the basis for our money supply, in order to have any real go at either mitigation or adaptation. Here.

The need for currency innovation to free us from the poverty-inducing banking control of our money supply. Here.

The need to avoid the same corporate power dominating the new currencies. Here.

Socialist scholars are needed to engage in our climate emergency and Deep Adaptation movements. But its important to be engaged in what’s happening now. Armchair intellectuals who pontificate about ideas in ways that disparage people or ideas by using one or two articles that suit their stories of reality are wasting everyone’s time, including their own.

We face annihilation during the 6th mass extinction, and so uninformed writing that is not engaged with the current activists is misleading. If people aren’t involved in activist movements or political campaigns themselves, while writing about these issues, then they aren’t serious. Or maybe working for the spooks.

An example of that kind of uninformed debate is this piece in ISJ. It says Deep Adaptation (and I) aren’t as radical as Extinction Rebellion. Yet I’ve been involved in XR since the start, spoke at the launch of the International Rebellion, and am inputting into their strategy process, including ideas on economic justice issues. Moreover, many key people in XR came to it after reading the Deep Adaptation paper. A quick search would have also revealed this blog on XR’s website about its potential for organising an economic rebellion, which I wrote with Rabbi Newman.

So… there’s lots of left-wing intellectual discussion to be had. If well informed, it will be useful. If you are seriously into this stuff then please join the research group on the Deep Adaptation Forum.

Update in Feb 2020: I have released an idea for activism which some may regard as left-of-centre, involving trade union action on climate safety, including strikes.

Month: August 2019

Source a Spokesperson on Deep Adaptation

A Quick Message to Lefty Intellectuals about Deep Adaptation