Although I’ve been immersed for years in the news and scholarship on the unsustainability of modern societies, it is difficult to keep all of that information at the forefront of my mind. Not only is it a ‘heavy’ topic, it uses a specific part of my mind, and perhaps my body and soul, to critique, synthesise and communicate on such issues. So after doing a dozen podcasts and talks since my book came out, I paused to make more time to develop my organic farm school and play music. I’ve also been enjoying teaching again, both online (join me?!) and in person (including the Bay Area in October). Looking back at the various interviews, I think the first one I did to mark the launch of Breaking Together is the one to watch. Dave Derby of Lowimpact invited a focus on what is most at fault for driving the collapse, as a starting point for discussing what we can do to soften the crash – for ourselves and others. That meant we explored the role of an expansionist monetary system, and alternatives to ‘green’ authoritarian panic as the science darkens and societies are disrupted. You can watch us discuss that here. But as many people prefer to read, I’ve checked the transcripts and compiled them into one document in this blog post.
In my book I looked at other ideas about what is to blame for collapse, critiquing some of the ideas that have become popular in the ‘doomersphere’ about societal collapse being predestined by the nature of species or technologies. You can hear that in a free audio of Chapter 9. I am pleased the book is now available from various online book stores, not just Amazon. If you are in the UK, the best way to buy a copy is from the publisher.
If you are more interested in helping nurture alternatives, than criticising causes, then please consider supporting my crowdfund for organic and resilient small farms in Bali. Check out the video and info here… we are creeping towards the finance we need to train smallholders in organic methods (so you contribution could help).
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Dave: Hi Jem. You’ve got a new book out – Breaking Together, and you’ve changed your position slightly haven’t you – you’re saying that collapse is a process not an event, and that it’s more than inevitable – it’s already underway.
Jem: Yes. It’s been 5 years since the Deep Adaptation paper, since when I’ve discovered it’s much worse than I thought. In the majority of countries we looked at, quality of life indicators have been falling since 2015. That can be related to the underlying systems – energy, food, biosphere, economy, money, climate. Then the question is: ‘what to do about it?’ (and ‘what not to do about it?’).
D: I discovered you in 2011 – in a TED talk, asking ‘where does money come from?’ I thought at the time ‘it comes from the government’ and you said: “I bet you think it comes from the government” – but I learnt from you that it doesn’t. Almost all money comes into existence when banks make loans. Then I did the MOOC that you developed with Matthew Slater. I found Tom Greco and Matthew via you, and Dil Green via Matthew. I’m now working to promote and support mutual credit, credit clearing, commons institutions – nationally and globally with Lowimpact and locally with Stroud Commons. So you were very instrumental in where I am now.
J: It’s great to hear the connections. Matthew introduced me to the problems associated with the money system. I studied it and realised the debt-based money system is indeed the core of our problems. So either we need monetary reform (which isn’t going to happen) or we need to get stuck into building a new system. Crypto got all the attention for a while, so it’s really good to see the kinds of things you’re involved with having a bit of a leap forward in terms of tech, protocols etc. So people can exchange with each other without having to rely on banks or crypto billionaires.
D: Yes, it’s about trading with something that can’t be extracted and concentrated – which kills the corporate business model.
J: Yeah – there’s a chapter in the book on the money system, and how it enslaves us to a particular way of being in the world. We’ve all grown up with it, and so been manipulated and coerced into a destructive approach to life. We don’t know what it would be like to live free of that – how much we could be cooperating with each other, rather than harming each other and nature. So when I talk about freedom, I’m talking about getting free from our damaging monetary and economic system, and the ideology connected to them (which I call Imperial Modernity), and allowing ourselves to collaborate better with each other and to live more in harmony with wider nature.
D: In the book you say that most people will find the idea of collapse shocking. That’s not my experience. Almost everyone I talk with thinks we’re headed for disaster – maybe it’s the circles I move in. I’m more shocked by the opposition you’ve had from some on the left (I’d expect it from capitalists). NASA says that without major action to reduce emissions, we’re headed for 2.5-4.5 degree increase by 2100. But 2022 saw the highest carbon emissions ever, so that major action isn’t coming, is it?
J: A lot of young people think that our system isn’t sustainable, and already in decline. Polls show that younger people are more pessimistic about the future than older people. Some frame this as a mental health crisis in the young, rather than the young seeing reality as it is. They have less invested in this system, so they’re more open to this information. However, it’s still taboo in mainstream media, and suppressed and hidden by social media. So we’re not invited to have open-minded and open-hearted conversations about how to live with what’s coming, which will include huge environmental and social damage, but still stay positively engaged.
We’ve been told that humans are in control and that material progress is inevitable. Those are juvenile concepts, that don’t exist in ancient wisdom traditions. We can live fully and creatively without believing those things. So I’m being more public now. It’s time to tell people that they’re not alone if they see the world this way, and that we should be having more conversations about it. That’s the reason for this new book.
D: But some (including on the left) call you a ‘doomer’. Are you a doomer, and if so, you’re saying that capitalism is doomed, not humans or nature?
J: A lot of the criticism hasn’t been accurate – it’s more of an emotional rejection of the general idea that we can’t avoid massive harm now. I’m not going to speculate on their reasons, but I remember I reacted badly when I first came across people with such ideas. Dark Mountain came out with similar ideas in 2009, and I was working in corporate sustainability. I didn’t like hearing that it wasn’t going to work – that this way of life was going to break down. I assumed that meant giving up, and despair. But those assumptions weren’t right, and were created in me by my culture. Actually, research shows that fear of catastrophic outcomes are more motivating than believing that some technology or billionaire is going to save us.
I didn’t investigate more, because it was scary to me and to my identity, my status, my income and the idea that I’d wasted years of my life. I blanked it out. If Dark Mountain had got as much publicity as Deep Adaptation, maybe I might have been aggressive in criticising them publicly, as some people have with me. It’s disappointing though, when people misrepresent what I say in order to delegitimise the topic.
Even when people share the conclusion that we’re in a collapse period, there are many whose proposed solutions I disagree with. I don’t agree with ‘doomers’ who say there’s no need to look at the cause of this mess, or with those who believe that the influx of a huge a non-renewable resource made collapse inevitable. Those are self-serving, scientifically-incorrect views. There’s a lot of aversion to guilt and shame in the ‘doomershpere’; they don’t want to look at this mess. But there’s a different way of responding – becoming free from the culture and systems of modernity and becoming more courageous and radical in anticipation of collapse. There’s a lot of people who are like this, and I call them ‘doomsters’.
D: I look at it as building lifeboats or safety nets.
J: There’s confusion about what lifeboat means. I know in your case, you’re thinking of ways for people to look after themselves and each other better in communities. Some people think of it more in terms of keeping people out. But in Britain, 60-80% of our food comes from elsewhere. We can’t have lifeboats unless we relocalise production.
D: It’s very fragile, isn’t it?
J: Britain is one of the most fragile places in the world. It’s scary how arrogantly dependent we are on the rest of the world’s resources. The work you and others are doing to try to relocalise production is essential. It’s really simple – getting people reconnected with their neighbours to grow food together, to cook together, to play together, to share resources, to help each other out. It’s not new.
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D: I want to ask you about governments. They’re not going to provide solutions are they? They’re all locked into a capitalist game to grow GDP. There have been 27 years of COP meetings, followed by record carbon emissions, and they’re still subsidising fossil fuels and funding their war machines. Here’s a direct question: do you think COP meetings are a waste of time and aviation fuel?
J: I’m beginning to think they’re worse than a waste of time – that they’re part of an ongoing illusion that distracts people who care. When I was in Egypt for COP 27, it was a career-fest and trade fair at the end of the world. It’s all about people doing business and prioritising their own personal success. It’s pretty sick, to be honest. Collapse is about much more than climate, but climate is an accelerator of the other problems, as well as being a major problem itself. It’s strange that as we’re witnessing the climate going bonkers in terms of weather, ocean temperatures etc. that there’s also so much scepticism in society about climate change and what’s to blame; and there’s also resistance to bold action, as it’s seen as synonymous with global capitalists trying to control us, and steer us towards their dubious schemes, like direct air capture of carbon. So it’s a total mess. Not only do we have an ecological and climate crisis, we have stupid, greedy responses to that crisis, with understandably negative reactions. I call them the ‘fake green globalists’ in my book. The environmental movement needs to be reclaimed from capitalist interests and ideology – for example, the lie of ‘decoupling’, which has been recognised as a lie for decades. Decoupling is the idea that we can square the circle of an expansionist monetary system without growing energy consumption and environmental damage. It doesn’t work – efficiencies lead to more demand in a growing economy. Renewable energy doesn’t reduce the use of fossil fuels in a growing economy; recycling metals doesn’t reduce mining for metals in a growing economy.
D: That’s Jevons’ Paradox
J: Yes. He wrote that 160 years ago, so we should know it by now. Jevons should be turning supersonic in his grave by now. I want to say more about COP. Establishment climatology has made it seem that carbon dioxide is a thermostat for temperature. It’s not – it’s a temperature amplifier, but it’s not the only factor influencing temperatures. But because of the focus on carbon reduction, establishment climatology has left the door open for opportunist deniers. About 50% more carbon has been added to the atmosphere in the last 200 years, but before that, world temperatures got higher not because of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide levels lagged behind the warmer weather by 2-300 years. Pre-industrial revolution, carbon would have been released by warmer oceans. Now that doesn’t disprove carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but it means that we’re not in control. We’re about to go into a period of high sunspot activity and have a warm Pacific Ocean current – El Niño. These could tip us over the edge because we’ve already got so much carbon in the atmosphere.
The other thing that’s been ignored is the importance of deforestation – forests sequester carbon, but also seed clouds with pollen and bacteria. That was downplayed as a local phenomenon, but it’s not – it’s a global phenomenon. In Tibet there’s snow that’s been nucleated by forests around the world. In the last 120 years, we’ve removed as much forest as in the previous 9000 years. It’s clear that forest removal is a major part of global ambient temperature rise. This has all been drowned out by the focus on carbon in the atmosphere and getting to net zero. We should be having massive reforestation programmes in partnership with communities. We should be stopping all deforestation and rolling out agroecology and regenerative agriculture everywhere – not with the idea that it might save this system or society, but that it might save the human race.
D: I want to talk about those who say we need some sort of authoritarian control to solve our problems. Most people still see our responses as being controlled from the centre, don’t they? But centralised power always ends up authoritarian – whether it’s bought by the super-wealthy or seized by the super-violent or wriggled into by the super-ideological. Most people can see we’re in trouble, but ideas about what to do about it are very different, aren’t they?
J: Yeah – I’d go back to the issue of how painful it is to be an environmentalist now – working hard and trying new ideas to bring about change, but seeing everything going the wrong way. And we’ve all been brought up in a patriarchal society where we’re told that we need strict daddies or the kids will hurt themselves. So we’re in a panicked, desperate state, understandably, and some environmentalists believe that we need a mythical strict daddy to come and fix it for us. This is often mixed with the idea that human nature is just not good enough – but we’ll have a magical big daddy who will force us all to change in ways that are good for us. Of course, that’s stupid, and often, when people are saying that, they’re thinking that they’ll be part of the big daddy consortium, or at least that the big daddy won’t decide that they’re the problem (so they won’t have to go to the concentration camp). It’s understandable that when people are freaked out they start calling for a ‘vanguard elite’ to force us all to change.
My book is promoting a freedom-loving environmentalism in opposition to eco-authoritarians. There are only a few public figures promoting eco-authoritarianism, but there’s a lot of people around them who agree, who witness their colleagues putting forward ‘eco-Stalinist’ ideas, but don’t challenge them.
D: I think this is the most important subject that you cover in your book. Authoritarianism has always killed movements that could have done a lot of good. For example, in one of your latest blog posts, you talk about the mass graves of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. I’d add to that – between the February and October Revolutions in Russia in 1917, workers took over the factories and peasants took over the fields. But it was all taken off them by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution put them in complete control from the centre. If that hadn’t happened, and the workers and peasants had been left alone, the 20th century could have turned out so differently. We don’t want that sort of thing to happen again.
J: Yes. I’m glad you picked up on that in the book. I’m a left-libertarian, but in contemporary media, libertarian is automatically assumed to mean right-wing. But left-libertarianism is about believing in human nature – that we should all treat each other as sovereign beings, and that we should work together to decide how much of our power we give up to authority. The starting point is that we help each other to be free, and that any curbs on our freedoms need to be accountable to us. It’s the opposite of a misanthropic view of human nature – the opposite of the idea that we’re naughty kids who need a strict daddy to sort us out for our own good. This has always been the biggest part of environmentalism, philosophically. ‘Small is Beautiful’ for example (it’s the 50th anniversary this year). It’s all about localisation, local control, bringing people closer to each other, and to nature, so that we’re more attentive to the impacts that we’re having on each other and on nature. It’s difficult for people to care about what’s happening to people and nature in China to make their T-shirts. It’s much easier to care about what’s happening right next to us.
Localisation can be done with global solidarity. People like Michel Bauwens talk about ‘cosmo-localism’, which isn’t about ‘my place is better than your place’, it’s that all places are better if they’re governing themselves.
D: ‘Libertarian’ only became associated with the right after the Second World War. It used to be associated with left-anarchism, and was really just about decentralising power.
J: Yes. And there are lots of environmentalists who don’t like to see arguments between those who care about the environment, so they don’t want to argue about this issue. But if we don’t, left-libertarian, decentralising, democratic ideas and initiatives will continue to be the poor cousins to ‘eco-modernists’ with their modular nuclear power, direct air capture and all their other scams and schemes to get lots of taxpayers’ money from governments. So for all those XR and other rebels out there who are not being explicit about their politics, then you’ll end up being useful idiots for the venture capitalists. Perhaps all we can point at from XR activity over the last 5 years is a whole lot of government funding for useless venture capitalist projects, and calling it a ‘climate response’.
D: Yes, that’s the big split now, isn’t it – centralisers v decentralisers, not left v right (it’s not even clear what those terms mean any more).
J: Well, the old left was about first recognising the undemocratic power of capital, and that’s really important. We have global monopolies in big tech, which manipulate the public sphere world-wide. An overt scepticism of and challenge to corporate power in a coherent way is the tradition of the left, and organising among working people, small business owners, co-op members and commoners, against the abuses of corporations and their mates in government. Those are good traditions, and we need to resuscitate them.
It’s interesting that some on the right are now also rebelling against corporate power, but they tend to do it on the issues that they’re currently interested in, rather than a broader critique.
D: I guess a lot on the left believe that the state is some sort of counterbalance to corporate power… rather than an agent and an administrator for them.
J: Yes, you’re right, and they can be quite aggressive about it. They see themselves as socialist and my position as not socialist enough. But I don’t think that public funds being given to multinational corporations for ecologically-dubious technology schemes has anything to do with socialism.
D: Any more authoritarianism right now, to try to protect the biosphere, gets us trapped in some sort of oxymoronic merry-go-round, where the system is used to the benefit of corporations whose agenda is responsible for the damage in the first place.
J: The other thing is that socialism is supposed to be internationalist, so that indigenous people who live in the forests, who have the lithium and rare earth metals for ecomodernist, Tesla-driving Westerners under their feet have rights too. But with this ecomodernist story of net zero in Britain, and the belief that we can all switch to driving Teslas, it’s a nonsense, and there’s going to be huge damage to the most pristine environments in the world in order to maintain that story.
There’s no way of looking at this fairly without concluding that we need to reduce consumption levels in the West, and that needs to be done in a fair way, which needs redistribution.
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D: I thought your chapter on framing and narrative was fascinating – especially looking at Guardian headlines on environmental news. Very reformist and anti-radical, for example that we can ‘make deals’ and somewhow fix this system rather than having to replace it. Putting lots of emphasis on environmental professionals and states to solve our problems.
J: And the Guardian gives the most column inches to environmental problems in the UK, and it’s part of an ideological defence of global capitalism.
D: A lot of readers think it’s still owned by the Scott Trust, but it’s not. It’s owned by a capitalist business that deliberately chose the name Scott Trust Ltd, to make people believe that. If you put your faith in professionals and states to solve our problems, you have to ignore the fact that those professionals and statists have completely failed. If you don’t ignore that, you might lose hope that capitalism and our high-consumption lifestyles in the West can be saved.
J: I’m very aware of the argument that the state has power – over the military, over monetary systems etc. – and so to ignore the state in your political project is naive. In the book I choose to frame the project that we’re involved in as an attempt to reclaim our power from imperial modernity – the system of economics, politics and culture that coerce and manipulate us to help elites accumulate more power. We can reclaim power in all sorts of ways. We can start doing things for ourselves – music for example – rather than consuming content alone via our apps. I’m trying to help people do things for themselves in ways that add up to more than those individual actions. But it’s not a revolutionary discourse, because for me, as you mentioned, revolutions tend to be replacing a bunch of characters who love controlling other people with another bunch of characters who love controlling other people.
For real change to occur, we need to build from the bottom up, but keep thinking about how we can be more than the sum of our parts, and insulate ourselves from attack from centralised power. If we do believe that the current system is breaking down, then we just keep building from below and they will keep breaking apart from above.
D: We’ve supported co-ops and mutuals for years, but they need to go into debt, with the banking system, to bring infrastructure into the co-op world, and that debt burden has handicapped them to the point that they’re being bought out now by capitalists. The Co-op Bank and Co-op energy are now capitalist institutions, as are most building societies. So there’s only one serious response as far as I can see, and that’s the commons movement, and especially the new commons ideas coming from people like Dil Green, Chris Cook, Hans-Florian Hoyer, Matthew Slater and others. They don’t require debt, and they can introduce a new money system that doesn’t allow wealth to be syphoned out of communities and concentrated. A group of us in Stroud are working with them to build a commons economy in Stroud and to document what we do so that it can be implemented in other towns, and linked together to form the basis of something new.
J: Dave, this is the first interview I’ve done since the book came out, and that’s deliberate, because not much of the book is about what to do – just one chapter. It’s about seeing this ‘great reclamation’ as something we can all start. But within that, a crucial part is reclaiming economic power and our means of exchange – not being reliant on banks. I’m still the same person as when you discovered my work in 2011, and I believe that reclaiming the economy is fundamental to everything else. If we’re not doing work on that, then any other work we do will come unstuck at some point. For me, what you’re doing needs to be known about and done everywhere. They’re doing great things in Kenya, and I’m now in Indonesia – we’ve started a permaculture farm school, helping locals to develop permaculture farming; and on the back of that, we’ll be building a community monetary project that will allow people to buy the produce, but for doing something else, not by using bank-issued money.
I’m interested in currency innovation if it’s done in the right way – community-owned, using these commons ideas, using free/open source software, so that we don’t end up becoming dependent on corporations. I don’t know how much time we have before things get really messy. It’s quite scary what’s happening in the oceans – the pace of climate change and what that might mean in terms of knock-on effects for agriculture, production of and international markets in grains etc. But we’ve got to keep trying to do the right things. And what you’re doing is one of the right things.
D: Thank you. I’m writing a book about the commons, and your position on collapse is probably the first plank – to explain the need for a new system.
J: That’s interesting. Michel Bauwens took some time during covid to read up on past civilisations and how they collapsed. There are theories that in times of breakdown, the commons flourished. It’s interesting – as you were saying, when Tsarist Russia was collapsing, co-operative ownership flourished.
D: People stepped up.
J: We do. It’s the stupidest lie that we need someone with an official designation from on high to tell us what to do. We all know from our professional lives that those who climbed to the top of the corporate-state ladder had something wrong with them. It’s usually down to some sort of trauma, but as soon as they lose the ability to be challenged and removed, then things get really risky.
D: I don’t think green authoritarians will defeat the commons. People don’t like authoritarianism, but people of all political persuasions like the commons. When it’s rolling, and providing benefits for people – especially working-class people – that will make it very hard to stop.
J: It’s so good you say that, because a large part of the localising stuff have been through things like Transition Towns, which haven’t really got anywhere near the working-class. But there’s a lot of community solidarity and collaboration within working-class communities that could be recognised, supported and built from. The way that you can work with local, small businesses and entrepreneurs and groups in working-class communities with commons tools – that’s the way to go. That really is building from below, rather than just working with the middle classes who have a little spare cash to dabble in ideas like the Totnes Pound etc.
D: Yes. I’m from a working-class town and family, and I know that a lot of the ‘concerned middle classes’ don’t understand the working-class. But the vast majority of the world is working-class, so if we can provide useful, affordable things for them, we don’t have to worry about building a broad-based movement – we just sit back and watch it spread. Well, keep doing the good work. I look forward to seeing you one day in Stroud.
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Part 1
Part 2 (where my amazing cat-friend Buki appeared at the end):
Prof Jem Bendell 