Breaking Together for free – and my launch speech

So that cost is not a barrier to people accessing the analysis in my book Breaking Together, today the ebook becomes free to download. The book is also available as paperback, hardback, kindle and audiobook. My speech at the launch of the book is now online (see the video below, along with a rough transcript). We will be discussing the themes in the book in London on July 20^th and Berlin on August 1st. Then I’ll disappear again to the organic farm school I am developing with fellow doomsters. If you, or someone you know, are feeling difficult emotions about this topic, or the recent climate news, then neither of you are alone. I recommend visiting deepadaptation.info and connecting with that community, or finding a relevant Deep Adaptation Guide. Please consider forwarding this information to anyone who might benefit from peer support on this topic. Thx, Jem 

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Rough transcript of the speech to launch Breaking Together, June 18^th 2023, Glastonbury UK (check with delivery).

I am pleased to be here with you in Glastonbury Town Hall. The very name of some towns communicate a story in global culture, don’t they. Mecca, Davos, Hollywood, and Glastonbury. I know many people like to launch their books and reports at Davos. But for me, Glastonbury is perfect. For in the English-speaking world, this is the epicentre of contemporary praise for the divine feminine. That matters because I think we have entered an era of the collapsing of the culture and systems that denied that divinity. Although such harm will continue, those systems will collapse. And that allows more of us to now sense our own choice to break free. 

My book Breaking Together presents a twofold hypothesis. First, that many foundations of modern societies are breaking together at the same time, and so societies won’t recover to what they were. That makes the word ‘collapse’ an accurate one for that ongoing process. Second, when we recognise that trajectory, it’s possible for our previous preoccupations to break down, so we get to choose to live more consciously and creatively. My view is that unless we talk about collapse then our suppressed anxieties will be manipulated by incumbent power to make matters worse. 

It can be difficult living with this outlook. I have certainly experienced periods with difficult emotions. Hands up if you have also experienced difficult emotions because of your awareness of what is happening and what is to come? In that context I think fellowship is important. Please take a moment to catch the eyes of someone you don’t know well and then hold their gaze. Despite being here today at an event on collapse, the person you are looking at is not actually that weird. And neither are you. I say that because opinion polls report that more of us, both here and around the world, are not positive about the future. Of course, some people like to tell us to cheer up. But the data shows that we are simply being attentive. The Human Development Index is the most basic indicator on this. It has been declining each year since 2019 in 80% of countries, in all regions of the world. Some of that data is collected 2 years before release. So it’s a decline that began pre-pandemic. Previously it had been rising, always, in richer countries since 1990. Data on our quality of life shows a global plateauing since 2016 and that 90% of countries have a declining quality of life. In the rich OECD countries this fall has been consistent since 2016. And some of that data was also collected a few years prior. So that suggests a persistent decline starting before 2015.

So, when world leaders were on stage in New York, grandly signing off on their sustainable development goals, most of their countries had already begun their decline.

In the book, I connect the cracks on the surface of modern societies to the crumbling foundations in our economic, energy, environmental, and food systems. Climate change is an accelerator of all these fractures, as well as being a problem in itself. Specific societies have been disrupted terribly for centuries both by natural disasters and political violence. But the evidence I present in Breaking Together supports the view that we have reached a point where most modern societies, while continuing to function on the surface, are already in the early stages of their collapse. 

But of course, elites don’t experience this reality. And top experts in their silos are incentivised to ignore an integrated perspective on this situation.

Young people are less psychologically invested in society as it has been. They are less likely to shun difficult information, or cling to their existing identity and worldview. So opinion polls consistently tell us that young people assess the future to be more difficult than what older people do. The response from adults can be to gaslight them, by claiming their attitude or mental health is the problem, rather than the state of the world. I find it odd that the sustainability professional is no longer focused on the so-called business case for action, but is obliging us to believe business can save the planet or we are seen to be at fault for when they don’t. History is full of anxious elites being similarly strange. Young people need something else, just like we all do. What we all need is to find new ways to live positively without fairy tales that someone or something is going to fix it all. That would not be a stubborn optimism, but a stoic certainty about living with reality in a positive way, come what may.  

Krishnamurti is often quoted as saying that “it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” That reminds us the problem with our mental health is less about individuals than the culture and systems that abuse us all. It is important this matter is a priority of the new mayor of Glastonbury and that proceeds from today will contribute to local mental health support for the homeless.

I want to say something about the climate. After decades of scientific concern, and some small steps by various organisations, climate change has finally become something talked about by the general public and the elites. It appears that the shift in seeing this matter as a danger to our own lives has been crucial. My role in that shift is partly why some of you are here today. But we must admit this new awareness doesn’t mean that humanity is ready to act decisively. 

There is a rise in scepticism about the extent of the problem and what to do about it. One reason is the anxiety about what was done in response to Covid, which I’ll come to in a minute. But another reason is how the scientific establishment’s attempts to control the narrative on climate have included mistakes that both opened the door to sceptics and narrowed our understanding of the emergency. One mistake establishment climatologists have made is to downplay the role of deforestation in reducing the bacteria and pollen that help to form the clouds that cool. That was downplayed as it was not considered global, and yet we now know it is a regional and global process. Modern humans have cleared as much forest in the last 120 years, as the previous 9000 years, with rates rising since the early 1970s, which correlates with the rise in global temperatures.

The implication of all this is that we need to broaden and deepen the response to climate change. Humanity’s very survival might depend on us stopping deforestation – now – as well as speeding up appropriate reforestation and agroforestry – now.

Two things can be true at the same time. On the one hand, there are efforts to take our freedoms and money under the cover of climate actions. These are ecologically dubious, self-enriching and even counter-productive measures. Often by hypocrites. In the book I call it the agenda of the fake green globalists. On the other hand, there is a climate and ecological crisis that needs our own bold and urgent response. That is the dual crisis we face. The environmental crisis and the crisis of the elite response to the environmental crisis. That response comes from the same systems, organisations and even people who helped to drive us into the mess in the first place. Environmentalism didn’t used to be that way. It’s time to reclaim environmentalism from the elites.

I talk about this in the book as a freedom-loving environmentalism. Naturally the question is then freedom from what? So I want to say a few words about the money system. For years when I heard people say all the environmental and social problems are being driven by the money system, my mind went blank. Yeah, it sounded about right but I had no clue how that happens. And it all sounded a bit abstract. And the insight from that not useful. Anyone had that experience? Yeah, in my case, I also had a particular phobia about understanding money as I hated maths. I used to think there were 3 kinds of people in the world. Those who can count, and those who can’t. But despite that I persevered. I now confidently understand that the reason we haven’t reversed the negative impacts on the biosphere is the expansionist monetary system. I go into it in detail in the book. Banks create our money supply through loans and as all their earnings aren’t spent back into circulation, there always need to be more loans to top up the money supply. So a society is not sovereign when it is not free to choose if it does not want to expand its consumption. Currently to choose that would then mean that as loans are paid off the money would disappear from circulation. So, there isn’t the chance of a steady state economy, unless we change the money system.

This imperative that we consume more and faster becomes suicidal as it hits natural limits. We all know the world is changing badly. My mum can’t even reassure me anymore that there are plenty more fish in the sea. Just some more stinging jellyfish. Yeah, even our platitudes are becoming endangered. Lost to language by how much modern humans have trashed nature.

In my lifetime, populations of wild animals have declined an average of 68%. So now wild mammals comprise only 4% of mammals on earth, the rest being us, our pets and livestock. Now that’s a lot of wonderful humans and beautiful cats, but shows just how much damage and distortion has occurred. It means that an expansionist economic system is the last thing we need. But stubbornly privileged optimists cling to the lie that we can decouple economic growth from resource use. In my book I summarise the hundreds of studies which show that isn’t happening for either energy or resources. Renewable energy adds to energy supply rather than displacing fossil fuels. And more efficient utilisation of metals, for instance, just seems to enable more demand. The recycling of materials isn’t replacing primary extraction either. Nearly 160 years ago William Stanley Jevons explained that efficiencies likely increase demand for resources, not reduce them. More than turning, Jevons must be gyrating in his grave at the ongoing denial.

As collapse affects everything, my approach to the book was interdisciplinary. That meant at times I delved into history, including that of pandemics. I do like the saying that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. With that in mind, some analyses of what the authorities did during the London Plague in the 1600s are particularly interesting. The dominant idea at the time was the disease was transmitted by bad smells. Of course, cats and dogs always smelled the way they did. But wanting to be seen to be decisive, in the early days of the outbreak, the authorities ordered a cull of all cats and dogs. That meant the rat population boomed and with them the fleas that transmitted the plague. The sociological and psychological theories that explain why elites regularly make matters worse are called elite panic and worldview defence. Basically, anxiety amongst the powerful can drive their own defensiveness and aggression. So we need to be vigilant about that today. As societies become more unstable, the instincts of officers of the establishment will continue to be to protect and project their power. They will aim to control our ideas, our emotions, and our behaviours. As well as to demonise and criminalise dissent. Unfortunately, most leaders of the green profession and movement have been inconsistent in their challenging of the abuses of power during the last few years. Some have been aggressive in policing dissent against authority. Instead, we need to develop and defend a people’s environmentalism, that respects the potential for all of us to respond positively to public challenges if well informed and not prevented from doing otherwise. 

You may have picked up that I don’t believe there is an evil cabal that coordinates everything in the world. But there are powerful systems that we could all do more to resist and replace. We can start with ourselves and our own forms of compliance. I include myself in that. I have been reminded of that recently due to a particular dead billionaire being in the news. I was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by someone at the Gates Foundation. I was fundraising to support a global network of community currencies. After that video call, I googled him. It was 2012 and I recall reading that he had been found guilty of using underage prostitutes. Ten years later, I know that there was a lot more to it, and that prostitution is the wrong word – paedophilia, sex trafficking and even blackmail are more accurate. But back then, when reading about that, did I simply cut off? No, I decided to send him the proposal that he had requested. I wrote to him that none of the events he might fund could occur on any of his properties and that he could not be a host, simply being a guest. Well, I never heard from him again. But looking back, I wonder what I was doing. I was prepared for him to fund work I believed in, just so long as I managed the reputational risk. I had rationalised that the work was so important to support. So there I was – someone driven by principle and I wasn’t even thinking about how the victims of his actions. I was too easily influenced by others, such as the people who introduced us. I mention this today as an example of how people who believe in themselves and what they are doing can make really bad choices when they are so convinced of their need to make the world a better place. Those who associated with Epstein provide an extreme example of how the desire to succeed through working with elites is what helps to maintain destructive systems. I now have far greater respect for the people who refuse to collaborate with elites or officers of the establishment and instead focus entirely on grassroots organising. 

If we take the time to really look at what’s going wrong in the world in general, it can be worse than disheartening. How could humans have done this to each other and the natural world? What’s wrong with us? This can be a dark and angry place to arrive at. In some cases, it means people illogically imagine that one group of exceptional humans will rise above human nature and forcibly fix everything for us. Some people like to think they will be one of those transcendent beings, or might have their ear, or agree with what they do, or at least not be the ones being ‘fixed’ by the superior humans. Such perspectives are unscientific as well as unethical. They are unscientific because they ignore how complex human societies existed for tens of thousands of years without destroying their environments. Some of them damaged their environments and then learned from that and changed. Speaking about the ecological wisdom of her Native American culture, Lyla June told me that “we weren’t just born this cool.” She said they learned to live in balance with nature over time. Which reminds me, for any pagans in this room, you were actually born that cool, you just remembered your innate coolness quicker than the rest of us. My point being that if we recognise the manipulations from the economic, political and cultural systems we live within, then we can choose if we want to escape them, and to return to our original coolness as the hominin expression of life on Earth.

A freedom-loving response to collapse arises from recognising that it is not innate human badness that caused the destruction, but the manipulations and appropriations of economic and political systems. It was not our personal freedoms that added up to this crisis, but our lack of freedom from those economic and political systems. 

The breaking of societies won’t set us free. It presents us with the choice to set ourselves free. And makes that choice more urgent. Initially the shift can be in worldview, identity and priorities. Skeena can’t be here today. But her response to my first public lecture on deep adaptation to climate change showed me what was possible. That was in 2018 and she dropped everything to go full time working with Gail Bradbrook to develop ‘Extinction Rebellion’. Beyond activism, here in the UK the challenges to break free like that are huge. So much about living here is costly, and is dependent on industrial consumer systems as well as drawing upon the rest of the world’s resources. That is why I admire the efforts to relocalise life in general, whether that means more sharing of heating, growing, cooking, playing, and caring. And doing it all with less resources from elsewhere. It can be as simple as neighbours gathering for singing and games, rather than being on their own watching telly. That is that people’s environmentalism, not the corporate one. Many people have realised they need to move to a new town, village or intentional community to do that more. But in many cases the costs are prohibitive. That tells us how trapped people are in commercialised nations, due to the way the economy has been structured. Another way of saying that is we are enslaved by debt and rent. In my own case I had to move to a country to where land and labour are far cheaper. That has meant I could develop a collapse-ready organic permaculture farm school – something that would require millions in finance to do in the West. 

This economic imprisonment is why I am so enthusiastic about people creating alternative exchange systems as part of their efforts at community development. In the book I offer the example of how a slum in Kenya created their own alternative credit system to act as a local currency. That has helped people to trade together and organise collective works, including new agroforestry projects. These kinds of efforts can be regarded as contributing to a great reclamation of our power from big corporations and the governments they control. It is also part of a great reclamation of our power from the culture of control and exploitation. 

Despite experiencing more creativity, compassion, collaboration and urgency, in these last few years, and engaging volunteers around the world, we have often been condemned as apathetic doomers. Previously many of us have felt a bit defensive about that, or decided to keep our heads down and get on with our new directions in life. But I believe we have reached a point where it’s time to express ourselves more fully. I wondered how we might describe ourselves, so that we can recognise each other, connect with each other, and support each other. So from now on I will describe myself as a doomster. We are far cooler than hipsters, because we are composting mainstream ways into more vital ways of bold, caring and creative living. Doing what’s right with whatever is left, and doing what’s right, whatever may come. 

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