Author: jembendell

Guest post by Simona Vaitkute, Holding Group, Deep Adaptation Forum.

When talking about the climate crisis, it is jarring to hear an invitation to be horrified, feel helpless, and sit with the pain, when the dominant response in Western culture is to look away, or adopt greener lifestyle changes while faithfully waiting for technology to rescue us.

In their interviews last year with Dr. Jem Bendell, four educators and activists— Dr. Vanessa Andreotti, Skeena Rathor, Amisha Ghadiali, and Nonty Sabic—suggest we learn how to respond to the climate tragedy from people who have experienced trauma, oppression, and discrimination. More of us in the Global North are moving into a position similar to that of many indigenous peoples when Europeans landed on their shores with guns and diseases: our familiar world is about to crumble and we cannot stop the change from coming. Millions of people in the Global South are already suffering from climate change, with warming temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns driving economic hardship, food insecurity, and migration. And it is going to get worse. Even in the West, where people like me still remain largely sheltered from the worst effects, “people are looking for ways of addressing the anxiety and depression of dealing with the imminent end of the world as we know it,” says Dr. Vanessa Andreotti, Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change. She spoke from Peru, where she works with local indigenous communities. Some of these communities live, and even manage to thrive, in conditions that affluent westerners would define as breakdown—i.e. without access to supermarkets, gas stations, banks, the energy grid, tap water, and treated sewage.

So much activity does not happen online, and does not get seen online. And thank goodness for that! As I research what is happening around the world as people wake up to the likelihood of a more unstable future, I am feeling grateful and reassured that so many of us want to make a difference, and can, even if small, or fragile, or transient. As I used to live in Southern India, I was excited to hear what is happening there, and this guest blog is the result. If you have your own local story to tell, please contact the blog team at the Deep Adaptation Forum.

Lakshmi Venugopal, member of Deep Adaptation Auroville and Founder, Inner Climate Academy.

As an Indian woman returning from abroad, I was attracted to the international spirit of Auroville, an intentional community in Southern India. Both Indians and foreigners seek to live a life that is a holistic application of the principles of Sri Aurobindo. We seek not to separate the spiritual realm from our livelihoods and lifestyles. Therefore, for decades, the people of Auroville have sought to live more gently on the land and with each other. That holistic approach to conscious living may be the reason why the Deep Adaptation concept and framework has been flourishing here in our corner of Tamil Nadu, with implications for our wider region. As I witnessed the international discussions online in the field of collapse anticipation and Deep Adaptation in particular, I have wondered whether there are many people like us in the Global South, but whose experiences and initiatives are being overlooked. I wondered whether it might help to share what we are doing, so we might learn from each other, inspire others, and perhaps even shape the international agenda.

This is a copy of the letter sent to 500+ signatories to the international scholars warning on societal disruption and collapse, from Dr Jem Bendell and Dr Pablo Servigne, announcing the launch of an initiative to help more scholars engage publicly on collapse risk and readiness. A version in French follows below.

The Scholars Warning letter on the risks of societal collapse was published in The Guardian and Le Monde in December 2020. By the end of the year, it had been signed by over 500 scientists and scholars from over 30 countries, representing dozens of academic disciplines including climatology, environmental science, psychology and sociology.

Thank you for signing this public invitation for more sober and kind conversations about how to respond well to our global predicament. The full list of your fellow signatories is available.

A video of some of the signatories reading the letter to camera was also released through Facing Future TV. The full-length version of the letter is available and it has been published in German, Croatian, Spanish, Hungarian, as well as French. A list of the translations is available. You can follow engagement with the letter on twitter via @scholarswarning

Dr. Rene Suša is a coauthor with members of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, of a chapter in the forthcoming book on Deep Adaptation, which is now available for advance purchase. In this guest blog, he explores how desires for innocence and “normality” can make us cause even more harm in the long term, as societies are disrupted due to environmental change.

Slightly over a year ago, our collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures was invited to contribute a chapter to the Deep Adaptation: Navigating Realities of Climate Chaos book, edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read. Our writing focused on the subject of mapping different responses to climate change and potential climate collapse. At that time, we mapped four main groups of responses (romantic, revolutionary, rational, reactionary) that we were able to observe in our work with various social justice movements, sustainability initiatives, policy makers, advocates and activists, mostly in the global North.  We did not, and still do not, consider this mapping as exhaustive of all possibilities, deterministic or fixed, but rather as a provisional tool that helped us outline some of the prevailing (problematic) patterns that we were able to observe in the four main groups of responses to climate change, identify some key absences and disavowals, and mobilise further conversations and reflections. One of the main reasons why we engage with this topic, is, because in our work with various (mostly Indigenous) communities in the global South, as well as with marginalized communities in the North, we have been noticing that it is often them and their immediate surroundings that suffer the most direct and gravest consequences of our denials, inconsideration, irresponsibility and self-centredness. 

How on Earth do we begin to talk to each other and work from a starting point of experiencing or anticipating societal disruption and even collapse?

It needs to become the biggest conversation, with views from different contexts. I am still learning as I talk to more and more people from around the world. Some of them share their thoughts in this book, including Rene Suša, Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Tereza Čajkova, and Dino Siwek, who are scholars and activists in decolonization efforts, and XR’s Skeena Rathor, who works on co-liberation from the systemic oppressions that underlie environmental destruction. With this detailed attention to the causes of climate chaos, I hope the book helps support a sober and non-divisive approach to navigating the implications.

This is the foreword to “The Responsibility of Communicating Difficult Truths About Climate Influenced Societal Disruption and Collapse: An Introduction to Psychological Research” which provides a synthesis of some relevant peer-reviewed literature within the field of psychology. An audio of this foreword is available.

Professor Jem Bendell, University of Cumbria, UK.

Your anxiety or even emotional distress about the situation with the climate is normal, sane, healthy and even righteous. Those difficult emotions you have been feeling may also be a painful gateway to a different expression of who you are, depending on how we support each other in that process of change.

My steps with integrating international development and deep adaptation.

Guest post by Dr Malika Virah Sawmy.

It’s heart breaking to witness how intentions are real and absolutely beautiful in international development. Everyone wants a more beautiful and fairer world. But the issue is how we manifest those intentions. How do we manifest the more beautiful world our heart knows is possible, to quote Charles Eisenstein.

Sadly, when you work in international development, you have, what I think, are two main coping mechanisms to deal with our work in the context of an unfolding global crisis with climate chaos – and what has been termed by scientists as a period of biological annihilation.

The commitment to nonviolence in climate activism and deep adaptation is a central principle and we must criticise anyone who suggests otherwise. The risks of tolerating any deviation from this principle are too great & therefore we have no choice but to risk painful reactions, even from colleagues, when confronting it.

Trying to reduce harm and the antecedents of harm during societal disruption and collapse is not going to be pretty. I launched the Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF) as a safe space for people to help each other process difficult emotions and work out what next in life to reduce harm, save more of the natural world and seek meaning and joy in the process. It has been wonderful to see the voluntary commitment from people around the world to grow the activities. I left the daily operations in September 2020 and on February 8^th this year I tendered my resignation from DAF’s non-executive board, called the Holding Group. That is the final step of me stepping away, in line with my knowledge of the research that shows we humans are susceptible to the counterproductive self-infantilising process of arguing about ‘leader’ character and views rather than taking responsibility ourselves. I am delighted that two experienced women from the Global South have agreed to be nominated in my place and look forward to seeing them communicating about Deep Adaptation.