Month: November 2023

A climate of trauma

jembendell4 Comments

The unfolding environmental tragedy arose from collective human trauma and the response to it has been shaped by that trauma – including COP28. Fortunately, there is a wave of activity emerging to help.

An audio narration of this essay is available.

When I first heard someone explain that the climate crisis is a result of our collective human trauma, I was a bit confused. ‘Speak for yourself mate,’ I thought. I hadn’t been feeling particularly traumatised about life – just worried about the damage we are doing to the environment. Surely the climate crisis is a pollution problem which our political and economic systems aren’t allowing us to respond to properly, I thought? So how could people’s emotional injuries be involved in such systemic problems? It didn’t make sense to me. Over the years, as I have learned more about what is meant by collective trauma, and what is at the root of the destructiveness of modern societies, I changed my tune. I have come to understand what people mean when they say the climate crisis, like the ecological crisis more broadly, results from our collective trauma. By that, I mean the subtle and lasting psychological wounds that most of us have from growing up in societies that maintain stories of reality that generate fears about ourselves and each other. Therefore, a trauma-informed approach to the climate crisis can open up new areas for individual and collective action, as the climate becomes more unstable. This trauma lens can also help explain why the response to the environmental crisis has been so inadequate, and even why environmentally-useless climate summits have become so popular. As the world’s climate professionals turn their attention to COP28 in Dubai, highlighting the subtle but pervasive role of trauma in influencing our behaviours can bring wider attention to this important topic and open new arenas for meaningful action on the environmental predicament. That is why I am pleased to participate in the trauma-aware Climate Consciousness online summit that runs in parallel with the deathly programme in Dubai.  

Continue reading “A climate of trauma” →

Repurposing blockchain for societal collapse

matslats1 Comment

Matthew Slater is the audiobook narrator for Breaking Together. But when he is not reading books out loud, he works on the design and implementation of community exchange systems – also known as community or local currencies. I recently wrote about how expansionist monetary systems drove societal collapse. If you don’t fully understand that, then I recommend asking the new JemBot to explain things, as it draws from my book. But once we accept such an analysis, it can leave us a bit stumped about what to do about it. That’s why in Chapter 12 of my book on positive responses amongst those experiencing societal disruption or preparing for societal collapse, I mention a few initiatives that include a monetary aspect to their local resilience efforts. It is a fast moving field, and one that is now attracting attention from those with experience in the rather less community-focused arena of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Therefore, I am delighted to publish an essay on these trends from Matthew Slater. It is a rather technical topic, but an important one, which I believe is set to grow. Thanks, Jem

Jem Bendell’s book Breaking Together emphasises how the destruction of life on Earth is driven in part by an expansionary monetary system, which also shapes our behaviours towards each other and nature. He holds little hope of any meaningful reform at the national and international levels. Rather, he points to local initiatives that practice alternative forms of exchange, with alternate currencies, in a context of building community resilience.

Continue reading “Repurposing blockchain for societal collapse” →

Engage the book “Breaking Together” with an AI chatbot

jembendell

The chatbots that use artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way some people research and write. I have not yet used a chatbot to help me write any of my scholarly texts, which is probably why I remain rather verbose! The tech took off too late to affect my research process for Breaking Together, although I squeezed in a quote from a dialogue on freedom that my colleague Matthew had with ChatGPT. But there is an interesting new way that such chatbots can be used – as interfaces with specific publications, or collections of works. For instance, ChatPDF has been launched so people can interrogate academic articles with a chatbot. Some publishers are now looking at providing chatbot interfaces to some of their books. So when I heard that the awesome nonprofit Servicespace.org is helping to create chatbots for some authors, I decided to create one for people to engage with my new book. Consequently, JemBot was ‘born’.

News of JemBot within the Deep Adaptation Facebook group generated a range of reactions. Some people see AI as the latest creation of a doomed techno-obsessed culture. Some see it as endangering societal systems. They might be right, but that doesn’t mean we don’t deploy it for straightforward and positive reasons. As with all technology, the key issue is ownership, intention, use and governance. 

Continue reading “Engage the book “Breaking Together” with an AI chatbot” →

The Covid Sham Continues

jembendell

Establishment lies about Covid-19 continue. In the UK, currently there is an inquiry into the pandemic. It is as much of a sham as the mainstream media’s coverage of it. Due to a bereavement, I’m briefly back in the country, and watched the 6 o’clock ITV news for the first time in a long while. Their viewers were encouraged to assume that lockdowns were a good idea. That’s ignoring evidence from comparing the policies of various countries which has shown that lockdowns didn’t help curb the disease, while also generating widespread damage to both physical and mental health. That’s before we even consider the damage to small businesses and ordinary people’s incomes. The viewer was also encouraged to think the only alternative to lockdowns would be a callousness in letting the virus kill the elderly and vulnerable. There was nothing mentioned about other interventions that could have helped, such as air filtration systems or helping symptomatic workers to stay home. Learning meaningful lessons to curb Covid-19 transmission is incredibly important, as the virus remains an ongoing threat to long-term health due to recurring and persistent reinfections. If you are unsure what I’m talking about, or want to see official evidence and scientific papers for what I’ve just stated, then please review my essays on the topic, since October 2021.

Continue reading “The Covid Sham Continues” →

Talking with relatives about societal collapse

jembendell

I’d just spent the last few minutes demolishing the fanaticism of the belief that technology will fix all the problems in the world. As we were coming to the end of our conversation, Daniel Pinchbeck asked me what I could say that’s positive about my conclusion that we have entered an era of societal collapse. I was sitting in my father’s living room, having returned due to him passing away just a few days earlier. I suddenly realised how grateful I am for how my father and I became closer to each other in the last few years. Probably one reason is how I changed since I felt the grief of what is happening in the world, as well as the potential proximity of death for both myself and everyone I know. I hadn’t talked a lot with Dad about my findings on the environmental predicament or the implications for society. But it had come up, and he had been more attentive to the news on climate change as a result. Perhaps that helped him to be more open and appreciative himself. I didn’t ask. But something changed for us over the last few years. That feels like a very personal and unexpected benefit from anticipating societal collapse. It’s an example of what I call ‘breaking together’ not apart. We won’t all react that way, but it’s a real possibility for many of us. Talking about that seems far more true to me than the elaborate ideas some people have about the emergence of an ecological civilisation or a collective higher consciousness after a collapse. I’d happily swap such stories of brighter tomorrows for some extra kindness between more of us today. Especially as we see such appalling and unnecessary violence around the world right now. 

My conversation with Daniel reminded me of what I wrote in the introduction of my book about my stumbling efforts at chatting about societal collapse risk, readiness and response with my parents. In case that is a challenge you are also grappling with, I felt like sharing some of that experience. Therefore, below is an excerpt from my book where I write about it, and then some simple advice on how to approach talking with relatives, and others, about this topic. My chat with Daniel is available here, and a slightly odd transcript (as it didn’t pick up on sarcasm) is here. 

Subscribe / Support / Study / Essays

Continue reading “Talking with relatives about societal collapse” →