climate – Prof Jem Bendell

A dozen disputed but now demonstrable facts about climate change from the consequential Deep Adaptation paper of 2018

August 28, 2026 jembendell

As I drafted the first part of the Deep Adaptation paper in 2018, I sought to summarise what I had concluded was the most salient climate science that established “the premise that it is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.” In the months and years after the paper went viral with a million downloads, there was a backlash from top climatologists and environmental professionals. One of the main arguments from experts dismissing the paper was the lack of peer review. But years later, it’s been reviewed by reality, in the form of observational data about our current climate. There were a dozen claims in Deep Adaptation which were disputed by mainstream climatology but are now considered decided by science, or demonstrable by observational data. In 8 years, these dozen claims went from contentious to near consensus.

In this essay, I will summarise the claims made in the paper, compared to what the position was of ‘establishment climatology’ (as represented by IPCC and top climatologists), and what is near-consensus in 2026. My purpose here is not to update the record, defend past contributions, or complain about mistakes by individuals. Instead, I aim to contribute to a discussion of how organised science and the environmental professions can avoid making new mistakes based on the same dynamics that led to past ones. Those mistakes included not confirming and communicating the twelve claims I will explain in this essay. They also included dismissing, suppressing, and sometimes demonising such claims and the people making them. Unless such mistakes are recognised, even privately, then they can be repeated in new ways, with significant consequences for what is an existential issue.

Although some top climatologists may wish to claim they warned us about what is happening to our world, the truth is they didn’t predict the extent or speed of current changes and publicly claimed that they were avoidable with the right policies. This departure of lived reality from established views, and potentially some underlying theories, means that earnest forms of integrative research analysis can be more welcome in future. For instance, when critics claimed I was cherry-picking the science, they were ignoring the important process of salience-picking from a mass of information for identification of real-world implications and applications of knowledge. Research analysts with the necessary skills and a focus on identifying what describes reality, not what is an interesting area for further investigation, can sometimes be better at salience identification than scientists within an established academic discipline. Consequently, there remains a role for such integrative analysis, just as there remains a role for climate scientists working within various institutions that combine to produce what becomes establishment climatology.

After interrogating the claims in this essay, I believe you will agree that the recent data and research confirm that the alarmists on climate were mostly right, and our critics were wrong, so we could all learn from that to guide a better response today, without further mistakes due to the dynamics which produced previous ones. That presents us with a fresh challenge. Without boasting and blaming, nor pride and prejudice, professionals in climate science and communications must now find a deeper level of courage, to explore what has been overlooked or marginalised in the past, to then call people to action on a wider agenda, including emergency adaptation, environmental restoration, and economic transformation, alongside the remaining challenge of carbon cuts and drawdown.

The dozen climate-related claims in Deep Adaptation (Bendell, 2018)

Claim 1: Sea-level rise is accelerating worldwide. I made this claim based on global satellite data that was available at the time.[1][Numbered references are at the end of the document]. Therefore, it was already an observed reality, but it hadn’t been confirmed as scientific fact, nor discussed as a centrally-important indicator, in establishment climatology at that time. The IPCC AR5 in 2014 was cautious, noting that the rate of rise detected during the satellite era (from 1993 onward) was higher than the 20th-century average, without making that a headline finding. In 2021, in their AR6 publication, the IPCC recognised acceleration in sea level rise as an established observation rather than a tentative finding. A study in 2026 confirmed a doubling of the rate of the global rise.[2]

Claim 2: Climate change is probably accelerating. I argued that the acceleration of sea-level rise is a good indicator of what is happening in the global climate system, as the most contributory causes are thermal expansion of water and ice melt from on-land sources. The only theoretical caution on that view is if part of the rise is a delayed response from thermal expansion of water at deeper depths due to past warmer surface waters mixing with them. However, top climatologist Professor Stefan Rahmstorf had already noted in 2007 that, all things considered, sea level is one of the most robust indicators of long-term warming because it integrates climate changes over time rather than reflecting short-term atmospheric fluctuations. Adding evidence of accelerating sea level rise to the science on heat-amplifying feedbacks, I concluded that we were probably at the start of greater acceleration in climate change. At the time, the scientific establishment did not agree (e.g. IPCC AR5). In 2021, in the AR6, the IPCC reported the acceleration in warming, reaching 0.2°C per decade in the period 2001–2020. However, it did not make that a key finding, and many of the most famous climatologists continued to claim there was no acceleration. Despite them, it is now widely agreed that the rate of climate change has already accelerated, with disagreements on how fast and why. Key texts on this came out in scientific journals in 2024[3] and 2026.[4] I continued my own research analysis on the topic, going to COP27 in Egypt in 2022 to warn about aerosol reductions leading to heat acceleration.[5] Then I went further last year, summarising the evidence and theory for declines in natural cloud seeding from large forests and healthy oceans.[6]

Claim 3: Natural carbon sinks, including forests and oceans, will probably decline and some turn into sources of carbon, so natural emissions will increase. I cited the science available on this issue at the time. I also pointed to the science on how the carbon fertilization effect on plants was probably reaching its limit, thereby removing this past buffer. However, the consensus at the IPCC since 2014 had been that the carbon fertilization effect would mean that during this century there would be an expanding uptake of CO2, before a future decline in high warming scenarios. Today the evidence is extensive that the global carbon cycle has already been altered to reduce the effectiveness of both land and ocean sinks. One integrative study in 2025 found that this already accounts for around 8%, of the observed increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration.[7] A study the previous year reported on the certain end of the carbon fertilization effect on land due to the extent of recent warming.[8] Another paper reported that in 2023 the global non-polar oceans probably absorbed about 10% less CO₂ than expected due to heating up.[9] The long term prospects could also be more bleak than previously assessed, as one study in 2026 found that microbes break down far more carbon into CO2 after decades of being in a significantly warmer environment.[10]

Claim 4: Self-amplifying feedback threatens further acceleration of heating despite potential emissions cuts. In the paper I wrote: “Non-linear changes are of central importance to understanding climate change, as they suggest both that impacts will be far more rapid and severe than predictions based on linear projections and that the changes no longer correlate with the rate of anthropogenic carbon emissions. In other words – ‘runaway climate change.’” I did not use the term ‘runaway’ warming to claim exponential or eternal warming, despite subsequent negative misrepresentations of the paper. At the time, some scientists were working on the concept of ‘tipping points’ where there would be irreversible forward lurches in warming, but establishment climatology was not foregrounding this issue. For instance, in AR5, the IPCC mentioned such dangers in the context of “long term climate change: projections” with low confidence in predicting their likelihood during this century.[11] Today, there is more serious analysis and discussion of such tipping points. Some analysis concludes that certain tipping points are probably already passed, in the range of 1.5C global warming above pre-industrial levels.[12] That average heat has already occurred for a whole year, and less than that average is unlikely to be witnessed again by our generation (although in 2026 mainstream climatologists continue to frame it as a potentially temporary overshoot).[13] Analysis of the Earth’s net incoming energy-flux imbalance has helped to clarify this situation. Some experts in that field concluded that the data “implies a climate sensitivity much larger than is generally accepted, and under some interpretations even runaway warming.”[14] Some scientists have concluded that whatever humans do with emissions cuts, sea ice in the Arctic will disappear in the years ahead. [15] Because of the probable return of Arctic sea ice in the winter after a summer without it, some scientists prefer not to regard such a change as a tipping point, despite how the additional heat captured in the oceans from ice-free summers then makes the ice-free winters inevitable, further amplifying warming, massively.

Claim 5: The rise of atmospheric methane concentrations is accelerating, and we cannot be sure if one source of increase is from the oceans, which points towards potential existential risk. At the time of publishing Deep Adaptation, the consensus science, as represented by AR5 of the IPCC was that rising methane concentrations were not certainly accelerating and that a largescale release of methane from the sea floor was very unlikely, so not something for near-term concern. Since then, observational data has continued to show unanticipated non-linear increases in methane concentrations in the atmosphere, confirming my claim in 2018.[16] That has been difficult to explain with existing methane sources, and it is also difficult to use isotopes to differentiate methane hydrates on the seabed from some other sources, such as wetlands. The view of establishment climatology remains that a massive release of methane from the seabed is not a significant risk this century.[17] New studies confirm my view that subsea sources are something to remain curious about, observe carefully, and include in our scenarios. In 2026, a study reported that ancient methane is demonstrably escaping from Arctic subsea permafrost systems.[18] There is also evidence that methane hydrates on the sea floor can migrate around 40 km, so can be released into shallower depths where they can reach the atmosphere.[19] Obviously, I am intensely relieved that I could find nothing more significant to report on this topic, other than the worrying data just summarised.

Claim 6: Do not rely entirely on climate computer modelling to assess future risks. The Deep Adaptation paper set aside establishment climatology’s reliance on computer modelling of future climate scenarios as the centrepiece of discussions on global warming. Instead, I focused on what, as an outside research analyst, I considered the most salient research findings (including the paleo record) and current indicators (such as sea level rise acceleration). Since then, some model simulations were misrepresented for a narrative to run for a few years that warming would stop after emissions hypothetically ceased, which was strongly debunked by 2024.[20] In addition, some experts and journalists scraped some good news stories together from hypotheticals involving tweaks to model simulations.[21] Previously in 2019, the latest and most sophisticated models projected far hotter temperatures,[22] which were closer to my 2018 conclusions, only for them to be deprioritised by establishment climatologists in a rather arbitrary way.[23] By 2026 that deprioritising was found to be untenable, after incorporating recent measurements on the Earth’s energy imbalance.[24] Over the last 8 years, some of the world’s leading modellers, such as Dr Wolfgang Knorr, have criticised the rather worshipful deference to modelling. However, models remain the centrepiece of mainstream climatology, with top scientists arguing that any failings of models should mean more funding for better modelling. Also in 2026, measurements of changes in the world’s climate revealed that many of the models being relied on were likely underestimating future heating.[25] That adds weight to the view we shouldn’t be relying entirely on models for risk assessments. Perhaps 2026 will come to be seen as the year that models lost their primacy in climate policy advisory.

Claim 7: Global average heating above pre-industrial of 2C is not a smart ceiling to avoid, as many heat amplifiers would already be triggered before then. In the paper I did not focus on what I considered to be the mythical story that avoiding a 2C ceiling of heating might be safe and enable humanity to bring down temperatures. I regarded such discussions as much about giving space for professionals and policy makers to discuss incremental change. A few months after my paper, with the IPCC report on 1.5C, there was far wider support for the idea that 1.5C might be a lower ceiling for ‘safe’ climate change, by avoiding self-amplification. That began a global communications effort about staying below 1.5C, despite it being obvious to independent scholars, and to climatologists when speaking in private, that accelerating climate change already meant limiting it to below 1.5C was impossible. By 2022, some climatologists were already pointing to evidence that 1.5C would not be safe either.[26] There is already observational data on this matter, with one study analysing current impacts to conclude that past assessments of climate risk to ecosystems underestimated the biological consequences of warming.[27] That backs up early studies which explained how models underestimated the weather extremes and volatility that are relevant to damage to ecosystems (and agriculture).[28]

Claim 8: Emissions won’t come down so we won’t likely stay below 2C. My paper explained that modern societies, including transport and agriculture, are highly dependent on fossil fuels, so emissions were steadily increasing and scenarios for reductions were unrealistic. Despite my wishes for the salvation of society, humanity and biodiversity, as evidenced by my decades of prior work, I did not entertain magical thinking about a sudden achievement of (net) zero emissions globally. Eight years later, annual global fossil CO2 emissions are around 4% higher than in 2018. [29] Moreover, the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere increased, reaching a record 3.76 ppm per year in 2024, compared with 2.39 ppm in 2018.[30] Meanwhile, official assessments of government policies conclude that countries remain off track to meet their emissions targets.[31] Worse, a major study in 2025 found that emissions have been about 15% higher than that reported by countries.[32] Then we could review the political trends in various countries, and the various conflicts, with implications for climate action – which would be a whole other essay.

Claim 9: Impacts on agriculture are key and make this matter one of societal relevance, including peace and security. The most quoted part of the Deep Adaptation paper was when I departed from academic writing style and addressed the reader directly about how societal collapse can be frightening to experience. I explained that the impacts of climate change on agriculture could be severe and have knock on effects on crime, conflict and migration. At the time, the impacts on agriculture were not at the forefront of discussions on climate change, especially not in the society, where it was largely considered an issue for ecosystems and non-human animals. The AR5 report of the IPCC did give it some attention but assessed that crop yield losses exceeding 5% become more likely than not beyond 2050, and that risks to global food security would only become large at around 4°C of warming. Since then, the impacts on agriculture are more widely analysed and forecast to impact humanity hard by mid-century. One massive study estimated that each additional 1C of global warming reduces the global availability of calories from the crops they studied by approximately 120 calories per person per day. That is about 4.4% of average daily consumption per degree of warming, with the actual impacts being grossly unequally experienced.[33] That is a significant contributor to an assessment by a UK professional group of actuaries that there might be 4 billion fatalities if the world passes 3.0C by 2050. [34] My own further study on the topic in March 2023 explained the contribution of climate change to wider mechanics of food system breakdown.[35]

Claim 10: Countries will turn to carbon capture technologies that won’t make a significant impact and waste huge resources. In the paper I explained that capitalism would problematically shape future responses to climate change, just as it had shaped the problem, the diminishment of it, and the ineffective responses until that point. This approach was enshrined in global climate policy when the IPCC illogically included direct air capture and storage (DACCS) in its modelling of future scenarios in 2023 in AR6 – a magical techno wand to maintain the charade of a managed transition. A comprehensive review, synthesising more than 800 publications on the topic, concludes that DACCS remain constrained by high costs, substantial energy requirements, with any scaling dependent on long-term government subsidy and their impact being tiny compared to something climate-significant.[36] Clearly, PR and lobbying firms did their job, so Western governments have allocated huge subsidies to DACCS over the last few years, in what is another example of the existentially-treacherous role of corporations and their puppets in government.

Claim 11: Societal collapse is a reasonable expectation of the impacts from climate change, when interacting with other factors. When trying to tie everything together for understanding the situation, in the Deep Adaptation paper I wrote: “We do not know for certain how disruptive the impacts of climate change will be or where will be most affected, especially as economic and social systems will respond in complex ways. But the evidence is mounting that the impacts will be catastrophic to our livelihoods and the societies that we live within. Our norms of behaviour, that we call our “civilisation,” may also degrade.” I called for greater attention to adaptation to the changes, including going far deeper than the ideas for how to adapt at that time. I argued that it is irresponsible to regard that agenda as a theoretical defeat for the climate aware, as it concerns a reality we will live through. Years later, the need for urgent adaptation is now more widely discussed. Over 600 scholars from around the world joined me to sign a public “Scholars’ Warning on Societal Disruption and Collapse”.[37] There is now a diverse field of ‘collapsology’[38] and updates to past predictions of the collapse of our civilisation.[39] Over a hundred academic papers, across disciplines discuss aspects of Deep Adaptation as an impetus, ethos and/or framework.[40] However, the topic of societal collapse is not being discussed as an inevitability by establishment scientists and mainstream media. Instead, some climatologists and professional bodies are warning of the likelihood of mass death (as mentioned above) which would constitute collapse in some parts of the world. My own view on this has evolved, as I put the stressors from climate in the context of wider fractures in the foundations of modern industrial consumer societies.[41]

Claim 12: Near-term human extinction risk is something to take seriously as we assess priorities for action. In the paper I wrote: “Nothing is certain. But it is sobering that humanity has arrived at a situation of our own making where we now debate the strength of analyses of our near-term extinction.” I did not predict near-term extinction, regarding it as a possibility if nothing significant changed. At the time, this topic was either never mentioned, or actively dismissed, by establishment climatologists. Some even actively worked inside the environmental action group Extinction Rebellion so it would not talk about human extinction risk; nor about societal collapse. In recent years, some climatologists have moved on from that view and call for some of the worst-case scenarios to be analysed by science and incorporated into policy assessments.[42] A scientific assessment published in 2026 from some of the world’s most experienced climatologists reported that the world is warming so fast that we may be close to cascading feedback loops that eventually make it uninhabitable.[43]

Learning from past mistakes to improve scientific understanding and action on climate and environment

The concern that some people expressed when the Deep Adaptation paper became well known was my personal conclusion that the processes of climate change will lead us to societal collapse, inevitably, whatever the human response might be. As I’ve written elsewhere, a weakness in the paper was that I did not explain the mechanisms by which collapse would unfold. Therefore, I conducted a 2-year multi-disciplinary research project which concluded with the book Breaking Together. In that text I set out the evidence that can be interpreted as widespread societal collapse being an unfolding process rather than an inevitable future event.

In the Deep Adaptation paper, I had argued that we must try to reduce the speed and harm of that collapse, save lives and more of the biosphere, and increase the chances of future forms of society. Those arguments were disregarded by people who assumed that inevitable collapse would mean we would not try to reduce or drawdown emissions. I regard that as their projection, related to an understandable aversion to societal collapse, which then drove processes of denial that I had even mapped out in the second half of the paper. This reaction may be one reason why some scientists offered broad unspecific dismissals and major distortions of the paper’s claims on climatology. Claims which were correct at the time, and more demonstrably so today.

Fortunately, not everyone was distracted by the criticism. There was a huge response around the world, not just to the Deep Adaptation paper, but to more alarming interpretations of the situation with the world’s climate. People were radicalised, changed careers, and new groups started up to help advance an agenda of social change ahead of further disruption and collapse. That has included people quitting various jobs to go full time in Extinction Rebellion, boards deciding to reorient multimillion dollar foundations towards understanding collapse risk and readiness, an academic quitting and setting up MEER (Mirrors for Earth’s Energy Rebalancing), and launching international or national adaptation groups. We have not all agreed on the ideal responses, but we have all learned a lot over the past 8 years. With feedback, the Deep Adaptation framework for inquiring into how to respond has evolved to six guiding questions (the 6Rs). It is now complemented by a framework for our personal capabilities or orientations to cultivate in the face of collapse (the ‘reckon’ framework). More recently, a menu for how to begin to prepare for disruption and collapse in a light-hearted, collaborative and creative way is being used (‘rainbow prepping’).

Although my life is busy from working on such matters, I returned to reading climatology this year because there could be great benefit from the leaders and institutions in the sector recognising their mistakes in order not to make new ones on what is a matter of existential threat. Conducting scientific research on climate and the environment is essential, and I am grateful for the people who continue to do the science, especially as it can trigger such difficult emotions. I know how it can generate a general sense of dread and sadness, not confined to one’s working hours, as I have experienced that again over the last two months, while researching for this essay. For such effort and resources to be worth it, we need to discuss how to better gain insight from that scientific endeavour.

Why did the mainstream miss a dozen key insights on climate change at the time, yet someone analysing their research from the outside identified them? And why did many mainstream scientists feel confident enough about their incorrect readings of the situation to join the criticism of Deep Adaptation? Why did climate and environment journalists not report more critically on what was being concluded, or the implications for the public? These questions need more serious exploration. So before concluding this essay, I will offer a few thoughts on them.

It’s neither corruption and conspiracy, nor laziness and stupidity, that led to deficient understandings of the climate crisis by mainstream climatology and the environmental climate policy community. Nor is it merely the dynamics of denial that I described in the second half of the Deep Adaptation paper. Rather, it is a widely understood and documented phenomenon throughout the history of science, and fields of knowledge more broadly. Deficient understandings arise from the psychological and institutional dynamics that occur within any established field of scholarship. I discussed them in my book Breaking Together, and will briefly mention them here. There is a lot of scholarship on each area, so if you are interested, I recommend using DeepSeek to get started (10 times less energy and water usage than the AIs from Big Tech firms). Yes, I am not going to reference everything like I did earlier (normal life and less depressing activity are beckoning me back).

First, there is a siloed approach to scientific endeavour which can leave a lack of skill and support for scientists towards lateral thinking and salience identification. It is essential that scientific research asks “what we don’t know yet” within their specialist expertise. But that is not enough to assess what is most important to know now for assessments of risk and action. When engaged in research professionally then the aim, implicit or explicit, is always to do more research. However, as I mentioned at the start of this essay, if we analyse scientific research from outside a specific discipline, then our aim can be to assess what’s relevant for life on the basis of existing information. That’s been explored elsewhere as ‘post-normal science’.[44] The issue becomes whether one has the necessary time and right skills for such analysis. In my book, I explain the components of ‘critical wisdom’ which help one to do such analysis. Another way of describing it is to allow more possibility for integrative and context-aware cognitive processing, associated with the right hemisphere of the brain.[45]

A second area of psychological and institutional dynamics affecting knowledge production and dissemination are the habits associated with occupational closure, occupational expansion, and peer esteem. These are well discussed by sociological research on professions, the history of science, and disruptive innovation. Every field of work that professionalises must uphold agreed standards in ways that then lead to suspicion and negation of potential contributions from outside the profession. That standardising brings benefits but can also compound systemic biases and blind spots within a profession. In addition, any profession has a natural interest in its expansion, to generate more employment and career opportunities. That interest can lead management of institutions in such professions to focus on topics, approaches and narratives, that more easily generate funding, such as computer modelling and the associated idea of managing risk with technical adjustments to societies. On top of that, a normal desire for peer esteem, and to avoid peer disdain, acts as a form of self-policing, which isn’t conducive for open inquiry. I know how powerful these effects are, as I had to make the decision to deny the utility of much of my past work, my sub-discipline of academia, and be prepared to lose my job or resign.

A third factor influencing the field of climatology has been our culture of modernism, combined with an understandable concern about the effects of communicating alarming news to the public. We see that when nothing in the data of a scientist’s new study is positive, but they still include statements about it being not too late to avoid some unspecified outcome, if there is a magical change of everything. Giving homage to the secular God of positivity and progress is widely assumed to be the ‘permission slip’ for being respected. In private, the story is often different. Nine out of ten climatologists anonymously told a newspaper they did not believe humanity would manage to stay below 2C global warming. That was 17 years ago.[46] Despite working on sustainability, I did not hear about that for nearly a decade. In that time, like so many people, I worked incredibly hard (making personal sacrifices) on what some scientists were privately regarding as a redundant agenda. They were the experts paid to determine what is happening in our world but felt the need to self-censor their intuitive processing of the situation when communicating publicly.

A fourth factor has been the scientific deference and time-constraints of mainstream journalists, and the ideological blinkers of their editors. Even now that some famous climatologists are proven to have been incorrect by current observational data, they are still quoted for the truth on the climate situation. Journalists are grateful for obtaining a response and having some validation for their writing by including a famous name. When some journalists make the time to go deeper into a subject, they then need to get past the editors, who act as ideological police. One example is how one of NPR’s best journalists had her documentary on my work cancelled just the week before broadcast as “we can’t put that out”. There are many other examples, but to recap on either the attacks or suppression would be depressing.

Recognising that science always gains and loses something from institutionalisation doesn’t mean we just shrug our shoulders and move on. What is key, is that once observational data clearly disproves some established understandings and challenges the focus of scholarship, and the related policies, is that professionals seriously admit their mistakes. To seriously, not superficially, admit mistakes, involves: first, recognising the materiality of those mistakes to society; second, to be open to the possible causes of those mistakes; third, to make efforts to not make new mistakes in future that would derive from those causes. Therefore, simply correcting past mistakes is not enough, as it means the person might be making new ones due to the same dynamics. In the field of climatology, that means if a scientist says they predict a far greater amount of heating and damage by 2050, that is not good enough. To do so, without introspection and openness, on how to not make new mistakes, would display an unseriousness. That would not matter as much if we weren’t talking about something so existential for humanity. To encourage urgent learning, we must ask:

What might be the blind spots in climatology today, due to the various factors that shape and limit any institutionalised field of inquiry?
What topics are journalists not taking the time to explore and challenge, to bring focus on what’s important?

As you might have guessed, I have some ideas. The obvious one is that we need a focus on emergency adaptation. However, I have another idea, related to the causes of climate heating itself. I want to see climatologists and environmentalists look at whether carbon might only be half the story for explaining the most recent climate changes from human impacts. The only potential good news about the recent awful spikes in global temperatures is that they might not only be due to background warming from carbon gases. The clue is the rapid drop in the reflectivity of the planet, due to the loss of cloud cover, which is especially important over oceans, where the sunlight is mostly absorbed.[47] That points us towards what processes have been reducing cloud cover. It is why I have been advocating more attention to biohydrological cycles, as part of a more panecological approach to climate. In simple terms, we need to look at how to restore natural cloud seeding processes by large forests and healthy oceans, to increase the chances of the survival of societies in a scenario of climate chaos. When you next have some time to read my work, please read this essay on what I am talking about.[48]

Some people with an audience on climate and environment are beginning to change their public explanations. One of my past critics, from the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told Propublica that meeting goals to limit global warming has become “functionally impossible.”[49] A few famous environmentalists now state publicly that it is too late for stopping catastrophic change, despite telling those of us who said that before to “shut up”.[50] If more leading voices explore the dynamics that generated past mistakes, then new mistakes arising from the same dynamics could be avoided. Know someone who might be ready to move? To commit to learn more about what could be improved in climate science and its communication? Please send them this essay.

To be continued…

—

The Deep Adaptation paper is available here, including translations. I made minor corrections in 2020 which did not change any of the 12 claims listed above, nor remove other claims. Like so much on this matter, the content or implications of the update was misrepresented e.g. even now on Wikipedia.

[1] Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era | PNAS

[2] ‘Severe’ stress on oceans as rate of sea level rise doubles in 10 years, UN warns | Oceans | The Guardian

[3] Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?

[4] Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly – 2026 – Geophysical Research Letters

[5] Climate Honesty – Ending Climate Brightsiding – YouTube

[6] The Dangers of Climate Dogma – and what we can do about it – Prof Jem Bendell

[7] Emerging climate impact on carbon sinks in a consolidated carbon budget | Nature

[8] Weakening of global terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity under increasing intensity of warm extremes | Nature Ecology & Evolution

[9] Unexpected decline in the ocean carbon sink under record-high sea surface temperatures in 2023 | Nature Climate Change

[10] Three decades of continuous warming in temperate forests destabilizes persistent forms of soil organic matter – ScienceDirect

[11] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter12_FINAL.pdf

[12] Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points. – University of Exeter – Figshare

[13] Implications of overshoot for climate mitigation strategies | Nature Climate Change

[14] Earth’s net incoming energy-flux imbalance (and its implications for understanding climate change) | View | MPG.PuRe

[15] Observationally-constrained projections of an ice-free Arctic even under a low emission scenario | Nature Communications

[16] Global methane emissions rebounded in 2024 despite a deceleration in atmospheric growth | Nature Communications

[17] IPCC AR6 Working Group 1: Technical Summary | Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis

[18] Triple-isotopic analyses pinpoint microbial methane release from subsea permafrost in the inner Laptev Sea | Communications Earth & Environment

[19] Long-distance migration and venting of methane from the base of the hydrate stability zone | Nature Geoscience.

[20] ESD – Exploring climate stabilisation at different global warming levels in ACCESS-ESM-1.5

[21] Climate Honesty – are we ‘beyond catastrophe’? – Prof Jem Bendell

[22] New climate models predict a warming surge | Science | AAAS

[23] Climate simulations: recognize the ‘hot model’ problem | Nature

[24] Recent Temperature and Energy Imbalance Trends Point to Higher Estimates of Future Warming – Gyuleva – 2026 – Earth’s Future – Wiley Online Library

[25] ESD – Climate models with moderate climate sensitivity best simulate the magnitude of Earth’s energy imbalance

[26] Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points | Science

[27] Reassessment of the risks of climate change for terrestrial ecosystems | Nature Ecology & Evolution

[28] State-of-the-art global models underestimate impacts from climate extremes | Nature Communications

[29] ESSD – Global Carbon Budget 2025

[30] Trends in CO2 – NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

[31] Emissions Gap Report 2025 | UNEP – UN Environment Programme

[32] Worldwide inference of national methane emissions by inversion of satellite observations with UNFCCC prior estimates | Nature Communications

[33] Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation | Nature

[34] Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature

[35] Beyond fed up: six hard trends that lead to food system breakdown – University of Cumbria Research Portal

[36] An ecosystem of carbon dioxide removal reviews – part 1: direct air CO2 capture and storage | Energy & Environmental Science | The Royal Society of Chemistry

[37] Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability: International Scholars Warning on Societal Disruption and Collapse

[38] Societal collapse: A literature review – ScienceDirect

[39] Update to limits to growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data – Herrington – 2021 – Journal of Industrial Ecology – Wiley Online Library

[40] +”Deep Adaptation” +climate – Google Scholar

[41] Breaking Together – The Schumacher Institute

[42] Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios

[43] The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory: One Earth

[44] Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos | Wiley

[45] The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist | Goodreads

[46] World will not meet 2C warming target, climate change experts agree | Climate crisis | The Guardian

[47] Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo | Science

[48] The Dangers of Climate Dogma – and what we can do about it – Prof Jem Bendell

[49] https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton

[50] ‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost

Rainbow Prepping – a brighter way to get ready for collapse

August 4, 2026September 2, 2026 jembendell

Why read? Here’s a 4 minute chat about the essay.

The farcical nature of some prepping activities can make rather dark comedy. Let’s face it, not many of us are suited to archery or skinning a rabbit! That’s why the movie “We’re All Going To Die” is such an engaging watch (view at the end). At the movie premiere in Berlin, I mentioned that anyone who seriously engages in personal prepping for either disasters or broader societal collapse, soon realises they can’t do it alone. That is demonstrated well by a popular collapse-commentor, Jessica Wildfire, whose blog portrays a roller coaster of attempts at prepping, giving up and enjoying the moment, to ultimately regarding prepping as a necessarily ongoing aspect to modern life. Many people are joining that ride, with the prepping sector booming by selling items like 6 months of prepacked non-refrigerated food. Even some friends and family who haven’t read my work on collapse have begun storing essentials and watching videos on how they might cope better in disasters. So I thought it a useful time to systematise and share some thoughts about ‘prepping.’

Discussions and initiatives have evolved in some parts of the world towards ‘solidarity prepping’ in communities and even ‘insurgent planning’ to prepare for disasters. That arises from a more collaborative mindset, but it can involve some of the same underlying emotions. In my experience, whether focused on individual or collective prepping, a rather grim defensiveness can pervade discussion. That also applies to some national level conversations about adaptation. Although it is reasonable to frame the environmental situation in terms of national security, that can promote a defensive mindset, and one where action seems like a burden to be taken on by good and courageous persons. That can be a short step away from imagining such people need to impose upon the rest of us for our own good. It is a reaction which, from psychological theories, I predicted would arise amongst collapse-deniers when they finally ditched the idea that tech, education and better policy would transition societies, yet retained the subconscious craving for a story that might suppress their despair [ref 1].

As we cannot know whether the form and pace of collapse is fully set, or its full implications for humanity and life on Earth, we can attempt to increase the chances of a lesser catastrophe. Waking up to the predicament doesn’t mean giving up on doing anything. In a speech that will be ten years ago this November, I explained the Deep Adaptation perspective for the first time [ref 2]. Since then I have not seen the goal as being to maximize the odds of individual survival. Nor is the goal about increasing the odds of community or national survival. Rather, I have been inviting attention to increasing the likelihood that we live kindly and cooperatively amid disruption, in ways that create possibilities for both humans and wider life, without any certainty. For the millions of people for whom that idea resonated, it has endorsed a shift from distraction to reflection, from stockpiling to capabilities, and from defence to relationships.

Over the years most of the leading volunteers in the Deep Adaptation movement didn’t focus on physical preparedness, with some local initiatives being exceptions. Efforts at relocalising economies and spreading soft skills for getting along with each other in stressful times have often been talked about. My own response was to change jobs and country, connect people on this topic, start an organic farm school, share more of my analysis on collapse, and throw myself into devotional music. It’s been quite a ride, and I’ve evolved a lot, but I don’t feel particularly well prepared as a result. Now I realise there could be more discussion of positive approaches to prepping within the Deep Adaptation movement. It is why prepping will be the topic of the next salon of the Metacrisis Initiative.

To help discussions and initiatives around prepping to be more generative, I’ve developed a list of action areas for real preparedness for societal disruption and collapse. It is a synthesis from a range of sources, which I’ll mention later. I am calling this a list for ‘rainbow prepping’. Perhaps it’s obvious why: when we see a rainbow after a period of rain, it is not only an impressive sight, but indicates a brighter time is coming after a storm. In the Abrahamic story of Noah, after the great flood, we read that God showed a rainbow as a promise to never again destroy the world with water. For me, seeing a rainbow is always a reconnection with my wonder at, and gratitude for, being alive and able to experience beauty. I’ve recently learned that in many cultures, across eras, the rainbow symbolised a connection between the earthly and divine. It represented a bridge between worlds in ancient Norse, Greek, Buddhist, Hawaiian and Japanese myths — perhaps many more. Contemporary usage expresses the beauty of diversity in areas where prejudice is sadly rife. I wish to honour all of that in my use of the term for how we prepare for collapse.

I recommend we treat the following action areas more like a ‘play list’ than a ‘to do’ list. By that, I mean we can ask ourselves what we are attracted to explore more. My aim is to help avoid the heaviness and anxiety of seeking to survive, and to encourage the people we engage with on preparedness to relate in that way. The fifteen action areas are sequenced for the mnemonic, not in order of their importance:

Residence resilience / Amusement sustainability / Income diversification / Neighbourhood involvement / Business localisation / Orthobiotic living / Water and food security / Practical skill acquisition / Relocation readiness / Ecological stewardship / Psychological wholeness / Political engagement / Information and interaction sovereignty / Needs simplification / Gumption promotion

Residence resilience

Whether you own or rent, think about long-term resilience, in all its dimensions. Firstly, consider whether your location will remain viable under climate, economic and political stresses. Consider improvements in passive heating and cooling, as well as multiple options for additional temperature moderation. Look into reducing potential damage from storms, fires, and floods, including initiatives in your neighbourhood. Have backup lighting, micro-solar charging, safe fuel storage, and a way to cook without electricity. Consider being involved in neighbourhood watch schemes and, if relevant, volunteer fire response teams. Get to know your local police. If possible, adapt your residence to be able to welcome people in need, overnight. If home is where the heart is, it’s time to manifest more of your views and values in your living space.

Amusement sustainability

You don’t stop wanting to enjoy life just because there’s stuff happening that you don’t enjoy. Now you can reduce your dependence on industrial systems for the ways you enjoy yourself, so that continues even when those systems become unaffordable to you, or disappear. Non-amplified live music, circle dancing, storytelling, poetry reading, potluck meals, offline games, improvisational theatre, drawing, painting, and more. Fun activities can calm nerves and open hearts. So they are not a luxury – they are part of your resilience. Put down your phones. It’s time to unplug your play.

Income diversification

When you rely on one main source of income, from work or investments, you are more at risk of economic disruption, and more easily silenced. You can assess how to do more work that will remain valuable as the formal economy contracts. Some of that might include the practical skills that I will list later. What we receive from others, and from the environment, is not only through monetary exchange. Growing things, swapping, and sharing, can all be part of income diversity. Could you reduce your outgoings and channel more of your income, or time saved, into that diversity, as well as other aspects of ‘rainbow prepping’? Multiple means of accessing your money is also part of this consideration, which suggests having more than one bank account, a crypto account, and securely storing some cash and precious metals at home.

Neighbourhood involvement

Strong social bonds can be more important than individual preparedness. Know your neighbours, join local initiatives, practise mutual aid, actively resolve conflicts, and generally become someone who contributes to your community. Schools, libraries, religious groups, cooperatives, and volunteer organisations might welcome your help. Explore ways of participating which you might enjoy. Then encourage more understanding within local institutions of the need for local leadership on preparedness for disruptions of various kinds. Promote initiatives for caring for people locally who need support but can’t pay for it and, soon, might not obtain it from the government. Trust is one of the most valuable forms of wealth during disruption, whereas the decline of trust in neighbours is an aspect of collapse itself: don’t be part of that collapse.

Business localisation

As part of shifting the emphasis of resilience from individuals to communities, we need to produce and buy as much locally as we can. Although various products and services are not suitable for local production, many are. For not being part of a globalised financial system, you can favour cooperative enterprises. You could join initiatives like time banks, tool and equipment sharing systems, savings clubs, and commitment pooling. If you are approaching retirement, consider how you can invest in local organisations in ways that might also generate a passive income if your savings and pensions disappear. Unless a community is knitting itself together economically, it’s only ‘cosplaying’ community, and won’t help during real difficulties. This agenda can also become part of your approach to national and international solidarity – promoting this approach everywhere.

Orthobiotic living

Our health is foundational, yet medical products and systems will become less available, affordable and reliable. Orthobiosis comes from two Greek words: orthos (correct) and bios (life). It is a fancy way of saying that “right living” is when we seek wellness by cooperating with nature rather than fighting it. That includes attention to mobility, cardiovascular fitness, deep rest, sleep, metabolic health, nutrition, gut health, disease vigilance, and complementary therapeutics, including herbs. Maybe you need to adjust priorities in life to release time and money for orthobiosis? Start with what you enjoy. Then get better at how to help the injured, whether yourself or others. Get a home medical kit, learn first aid, and keep spare spectacles (if you need them). Slowing your own physical decline will be good for everyone — it helps to be well to help well.

Water and food security

Without the basics, much of the efforts at preparedness in your household and neighbourhood will fall apart. So assess the vulnerabilities of the supplies you most rely on – drinking water and fresh food – with the aim of making those more secure. It is unlikely this involves self-sufficiency. Instead, participate in or support local efforts at food growing, help some local farmers, know local edibles,and learn food preservation. Then engage the relevant organisations that provide food and water at scale, to encourage their preparedness. Recognising the importance of the security of these essentials will mean attention to physical security, which takes us back to the matters of residence resilience and neighbourhood involvement. Yes, you might need to get political, and we will come to that.

Practical skills

As the era of cheap replacements and spare cash ends for many of us, practical skills become as valuable as possessions or money. If you ever had an interest in one of the following, now is a good time to learn: carpentry, plumbing, electrics, sewing, bicycle maintenance, fermentation, bee keeping, fire making, fire fighting, massage, holistic therapies, conflict resolution, group facilitation and non-violent self defence. Adopt an attitude of repair, towards clothing, electronics, furniture and appliances. Are you someone others will want on their team?

Relocation readiness

Unfortunately, many people need to move when faced with disruption. You can become better prepared to evacuate ahead of events such as fires, storms, floods, and military action. Longer term trends can also push a decision to move, such as the cost of living, crime rates, cultural regression, and political repression. Have clear thresholds for deciding when to leave, agreeing with family before a crisis hits. Transport plans, financial reserves, and payment options are important. Emergency international travel also benefits from planning: how well do you know where you would relocate to abroad, are your travel documents up-to-date, and how would you cope if capital controls were applied? Ensure you have multiple physical and digital copies of the various documents required for the administration of your affairs. It could also be useful and fun to maintain relationships with some friends elsewhere in the world.

Ecological stewardship

Whatever happens, the environment remains our source of life and our venue for choosing care over violence. You can reduce and resist both pollution and habitat destruction. You can support the regeneration of habitats, including reforestation, watershed restoration, soil regeneration, and help for pollinators. You can reduce and resist human cruelty to animals. You can joyfully refresh and share your wonder at being part of creation. You can do all of this locally, regionally and remotely, both practically and politically, without attachment to outcomes in unpredictably complex living systems.

Psychological wholeness

Anticipating, and living through, societal disruptions and losses, can trigger difficult emotions. We want to avoid making matters worse by our reactions and, better still, express ourselves positively because of the circumstances. Some ideas about life, as well as specific practices, can help you become more comfortable with uncertainty, change, and loss. Consider meditation, prayer, singing, time in nature, journaling, and community service. Make time to consider your values, and any meaning(s) and purpose(s) for your life. Also make time to have your own relationship with infinitude, which might, or might not, involve your sense of the divine and spiritual. Look for relevant groups, or set one up, to support such wholeness within a community.

Political engagement

You can choose to advance, not retreat, politically, due to your awareness of societal disruption and collapse. You can try to influence how politicians and officials realise the levels of destruction, the causes, and how to prepare for, and respond to, specific disruptions and breakdowns. You can engage in local government and national politics, to seek more policies that align with ‘rainbow prepping’ activities. You can participate in civil society groups, including religions and trade unions, to advance that agenda. Look out for novel political activities like people’s assemblies. It is worth remembering that, due to their use of force and massive budgets, little else will have an impact if governments become aggressive on behalf of agendas emerging from deluded or panicked elites. Engaging in politics doesn’t mean assuming collapse can be prevented, but attempting to reduce unnecessary suffering.

Information and Interaction sovereignty

Finding the information you need and interacting with the people and businesses you want to are both essential for coping with disruptions; both functions are highly fragile, due to modern technological dependence. Take steps to maintain your ability to communicate even if cut off (by a hack, physical disruption, or political action). Don’t rely on one global email account and one phone number for all your online access. Don’t rely on phones and cards for all payments. Keep physical records of phone numbers and addresses. Download maps and key files, and install a local version of an open source AI system on your computer. Maintain old landlines. Own micro-solar to recharge devices. In the meantime, don’t let either BigTech algorithms or mainstream media determine your information diet – actively seek out independent professional media sources.

Needs simplification

So much of what we are accustomed to is not necessary for our quality of life. So gradually reduce dependence on stuff and services you pay for. See how you can live comfortably with less energy, fewer new possessions, fewer trips in private vehicles, and a less complex non-seasonal diet. Go deeper into how you can benefit from a non-aquisitional mindset, where you need less certainty, control, savings, connections, contacts, and even less self-advancement. Notice any attachment you might have to the idea of having more children, or prolonging your own life for as long as possible. Become open to self-acceptance as the ultimate self-actualisation. None of this simplification needs to reduce your yearning for more equity and social justice. Change is easier when chosen rather than imposed.

Gumption promotion

In rapidly changing situations where we don’t have a standard answer or routine to follow, we will benefit from people around us being able to decide what is the best thing to do in a particular situation, and then do it with capacity and determination. That is ‘gumption’, and our educational and cultural systems have tended to reduce, not improve, it. In education that is formal or informal, for children or adults, there are opportunities for teaching more practical skills and approaches to, for instance, orthobiotic living, psychological wholeness, and amusement sustainability. Part of gumption is the critical thinking to avoid being manipulated into fear-driven herd behaviour or, in some cases, cults. Helping knowledge transfer between generations can be part of that. A good way to maintain and grow one’s own gumption is to try to help others with theirs. The impact is obvious: someone who trains ten people may contribute more than someone who stores ten months of food.

It took me almost as long to work out how to order these action areas into the ‘rainbow prepping’ mnemonic as it did to identify them. Hopefully, that will help more than myself for remembering them! The categorisation is a bit arbitrary. Perhaps you already noticed not only some overlap, but that actions in the different areas could reinforce one another. Good health helps you contribute to the community. Community improves food security. Live music and singing strengthens relationships. Practical skills support livelihoods. A sense of meaning and purpose can make hardship more bearable. I think this more positive approach to prepping aligns closely with the ethos of Deep Adaptation: preparing not simply to endure disruption, but to help create communities where people continue to experience care, dignity, creativity and even joy as industrial consumer society becomes less dependable. So I regard this list of fifteen action areas as a complement to the existing framework for Deep Adaptation: that comprises six Rs for inquiry into how to begin to respond to an awareness of collapse, and six qualities or orientations to recognise and cultivate in ourselves as we live into more challenging situations.

Since sharing this ethos in public, nearly 10 years ago, I felt reluctant to describe what we should do, as collapse affects everything in life and responses need to be developed locally and personally. That reluctance was also because I wondered whether a rapid focus on action might avoid the time needed to process the pain of realisation and allow it to transform us at a deeper level. However, as we enter the age of consequences and the discussion on societal collapse spreads, I am pleased to make this contribution to identifying what we could still be doing to help.

The ideas for the fifteen action areas I have listed in this essay arose from three sources. First, my own assessment of how to prepare. Second, what I’ve learned from people who have been preparing in their own ways. Third, what I have learned is being done around the world by the chroniclers of resilience and adaptation, including the Transition Network, degrowth scholars, Earth Regenerators, Global Ecovillage Network, Local Futures, Global Action Plan UK, and various Deep Adaptation initiatives around the world. With this framework I am re-packing a diverse field of endeavour into something that is, I hope, relatable and memorable for you whenever discussing collapse risk and readiness with people. I have benefitted from the process, as it now leaves me with the clarity that I happily prep for the rainbows I will never see, while enjoying those I do.

The ‘rainbow prepping’ concept inspired the cover of the German version of Breaking Together. The book is a free download for the duration of Kollapscamp 2026. I hope it helps initiate a translation-review team so we can get a better version out as paperback and audio in due course, with a progressive local publisher. Also until the end of August, there is a 25% reduction on the paperback in English, but only via Amazon (it returns to $22 in September).

Within the peer mentoring of the Metacrisis Initiative we will use the ‘rainbow prepping’ list of action areas as a means of self assessment, personal reprioritising, and commitment making. You might benefit from asking yourself: in which domains of ‘rainbow prepping’ would I like to play some more?

Later this year, I’ll share some of my own stumbling, humbling, and positive experiences of ‘rainbow prepping’ via my Instagram and Youtube (subscribe to either to be informed). If you are not part of the Metacrisis Initiative and would like to chat about this topic then the Deep Adaptation group on Facebook is one place to start… but don’t get stuck there (remembering your information and interaction sovereignty!).

Stream: We’re All Going To Die – A mostly funny documentary

Refs:

1] Psychological insights on discussing societal disruption and collapse | Ata: Journal of Psychotherapy Aotearoa New Zealand

2] Engaging the Climate Tragedy – Prof Jem Bendell. Lecture given November 29th 2016, at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

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Could there be some beauty in collapse?

July 8, 2026July 5, 2026 jembendell1 Comment

Although many people are breaking apart into self-righteous factions, many people have been breaking together, whereby they allow the upsetting situation to break down their old habits, so that they become more open-hearted and open-minded in how they live their life, including the way they relate to other people. As a result, they are dramatically changing their lives to prioritise creativity and social contribution. They are worrying less about their career, their financial security or following the latest trend. They are helping those in need, growing food, making music, campaigning for change and exploring spiritual paths. That is happening because they have rejected the establishment’s view of reality and no longer expect its officers to solve any of the worsening problems in their society. After decades of greed, hypocrisy, lies, corruption and stupid policies, they are no longer waiting for any elites to rescue the planet. As they let go of false hopes that they will be saved, they can move through grief and begin living creatively again, with an awareness of how every day is a blessing. This doesn’t mean they don’t grieve, worry or feel sad and angry, but that their feelings of wonder and gratitude about life don’t immediately trigger those other difficult emotions or keep them stuck there. Instead, they are living life more fully, according to what they value. It is precisely because these people regard modern societies to be breaking down that they are living more freely. They need neither an underground bunker nor a fairy tale of a better tomorrow as they live, today, for truth, love and beauty. Who are they? I call them doomsters. I am one of them. Perhaps you are, too?

If so, welcome. There are many ways to live differently from now on, as seen in Chapter 10 of Breaking Together. (This text is a reproduction of the closing pages of that book, released 3 years ago). Any change in our way of life doesn’t need to happen all at once. In my case, I think I was emotionally knocked down onto a metaphorical canvas and took years to fully stand again. The general ethos and approach to dialogue that is described by the phrase ‘deep adaptation’ was key for my own process—and I still recommend people engage in networks that use that framework for mutual support. But some years later I arrived at a far less inward-looking orientation. I am certain we cannot wait for the storm to pass or seek to skirt around its edges—we must learn to dance in the rain. (That led me to update the Deep Adaptation framework this year).

That dance does not need to become a rave. Modern culture indoctrinates us to admire largesse and express grand aims about changing the world. Instead, we can reclaim our freedom to be small in our desires for impact, in our communities and local environments. Unfortunately, our ability to dance our own little shimmies of freedom and social contribution is under threat… I wrote Breaking Together for people who are ready to connect their work to a broader ‘ecolibertarian project’ of a great reclamation of power of all kinds and at all levels. Together, we might become a more significant force for positive social change in this era of societal collapse. We are a peoples’ environmentalism in contrast to the agenda emerging from corporate domination. Together, we might elaborate a policy agenda at all levels of governance from the local to global, to counter the agendas of those I describe as ‘fake green globalists’.

If you take on board the arguments in Breaking Together (summarised for you here) it will be like taking a green pill . Swallowing the ‘green pill’ opens your eyes to how the modern money system is a death matrix that shapes our lives, so we collectively destroy the living world. The greenness of the pill describes both our waking to the living world and the role of the money-power in its destruction. But there is another aspect to this opening of our eyes. “Our whole culture, our whole civilisation, in so far as it is involved in time and living only for a future, is nuts, it’s not all here. We are not awake, we are not completely alive now.” Those were the wise words of contemporary psymusic voiceover artist Alan Watts, who, before he died, was a teacher of Eastern spiritualities in the West.[i] E.F. Schumacher thought similarly, and suggested that “the life and death problems of industrial society… [lie] in the heart and soul of every one of us.” The ‘evotopian’ vision I have floated in this book is of a world where dominant systems don’t restrict us so much from being able to experience ourselves, each other and nature. It is a vision where many more of us are not prevented from opening our hearts and minds to each-other and nature. It is a world where more of us would feel safe enough and free enough to care for ourselves, each other and nature. Helping to promote that in our own lives is one great beauty found within the pain of collapse. “Let us truly live the beauty and responsibility of being a prophetic people,” said Bishop Oscar Romero, before being murdered by those working with US imperialists. This kind of work is not for the wishy washy…

Dancing long into the night will involve a lot more than being convinced about the science on our predicament or eloquent about its implications. It will require a commitment that comes from a depth of faith in the eternal rightness of living from universal love. Because unfolding collapse will be more of an ugly process than a beautiful one. No sugar-coating of our predicament is possible. We messed up, in the biggest possible way a species could mess up. Let alone an intelligent one. By ‘we’ I mean the modern human, with our irrational stories of self and reality. So, I can’t leave you with an upbeat ending about our ‘salvation’. Probably only deeper faith can sustain us in the years ahead. It’s where we sense the infinite powers of creation and the ultimate rightness of reality, whatever may come to pass. Human extinction? Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world! But what strange times we are in that such jokes can be told (not that I think near-term human extinction is inevitable (please check out Chapters 3, 4 and 5 in Breaking Together))…

I am keenly aware that the youth of the world could be better helped to organise around these issues. One way that older people can help is simply by stopping gaslighting the young. Instead, we can help validate what many young people sense about their future and encourage them to discuss and experiment with creative ways of responding. One simple idea for how to encourage them came to me on Christmas Day. My Dad knew it was the last Christmas that we would have together, so his parting gift was a t-shirt with the following emblazoned across the front:

“I’m not arguing, I’m just explaining why I’m right.” Since then, I have felt a strange pride about my feeling of embarrassment as people I walk past on the street look at my t-shirt. I will be making some t-shirts in his honour, to give them to the young people I know, to help spark their conversations. I think the first one might say:

“Doomsters have more fun.” Because, why the heck shouldn’t young people have fun by living free of the habits of the stupidly self-destructive society we have left crumbling around them?

Nevertheless, I hope future generations may remember that we weren’t all so dumb. In that spirit of recognising our elders, I will close with the words E.F Schumacher used to close his own book, fifty years before I wrote this one: “Everywhere people ask: ‘what can I actually do?’ The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, put our inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.”[ii]

The previous text was taken from the closing of Breaking Together, published 3 years ago. Most of the book is available as a free audiobook.

The author was interviewed recently about the book by the hosts of Collapse Life (see video).

In the August 2026 salon of the Metacrisis Initiative we discuss the spiritual invitation and response to metacrisis and collapse with Reverend Stephen Wright. If you are a member of the initiative, then there is no need to register: just see the details and video link below, which will appear if you are logged in. If you can’t see it but are already a member, then use the email associated with your paid membership to request a password reminder, or a log in link, to your inbox. Any problems: use the contact form for this site and we will fix things for you.

You can learn about Reverend Stephen Wright from some my previous essays:

Deep Spirituality in an Era of Collapse – by Stephen Wright

They Weren’t 10 Commandments – on a dialogue between Stephen Wright and Jem Bendell

Heartfullness: The Way of Contemplation – review of book from Stephen Wright by Prof Jem Bendell

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[i] Yes, I am jesting here. I first read a book from Alan Watts in 2002 but it didn’t quite reach me as much as his ideas do now, after I’ve been sufficiently wounded by life. I recommend this video on this his and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6lRcGxH-Mc

[ii] Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is Beautiful. Blond & Briggs. https://archive.org/details/small-is-beautiful-1973-e.-f.-schumacher/page/n221/mode/2up

Women’s leadership and ecofeminism in the metacrisis

April 15, 2026April 21, 2026 jembendell

“Our Mother Earth Says Me Too!”

It was a gorgeous but disturbingly warm day in London, seven years ago. I was inviting the crowd to chant with me, as I gave the opening speech of the international rebellion, in Oxford Circus. In the two weeks after April 15th, 2019, the campaign group Extinction Rebellion forced greater attention to how rapid climate change threatens our way of life, not just that of the polar bears. The #MeToo movement was in the news at the time, with people challenging defeatist attitudes on sexual harrassment and sexual violence. Seeing violence towards the environment as arising from the same heartless habits that harm women and girls, I wanted to make the connection in my speech. I also knew that many women were taking leading roles in the new wave of civil disobedience on climate ignorance. I wanted to make the big picture of how we collectively violate the Earth to be felt as something that is also expressed in our interpersonal relations.

“Today and this week, we will have the honour of seeing mothers and grandmothers putting their bodies on the line for the defence of Life itself. For the defence of your children. So I see the women protesting today as our elders. They are here for you. They are here for me. They are here for all of us. So to our police, I say, when you lay a hand on mothers and grandmothers you will not just be doing your job. It will be your personal decision to participate today, in a process of oppressing women and their wisdom that reaches back thousands of years. An oppression that is at the root of our crisis today. All of us, including the police, can remove ourselves from that chain of destruction. We can refrain from that act of uninvited touch. So I ask you to listen to the loving call of nature in your own hearts. And you might hear that Our Mother Earth Says Me Too.”

After the speech, one of the organisers joked that “the ecofeminists probably had an orgasm.” She was referring to people who regard the same hierarchical, paternalistic and dualistic thinking that enables the domination of women as also enabling environmental destruction. A core idea of ecofeminism is that Western ideology has associated women with nature and men with culture in a way which devalues both women and nature. You’ll know the stereotypes, where body, emotion, and intuition are associated with women and mind, reason, and civilization are associated with men. Whatever the biologically or sociologically shaped tendencies within women and men on such matters, regarding some qualities associated with the masculine gender as requiring prioritisation, is a root cause of both sexism and environmental destruction. In short, ecofeminism perceives that we cannot slow down the ecological crisis without addressing gender inequality, and vice versa.

The destruction being led by toxic masculine individuals on both the world stage and in bigtech is no surprise to ecofeminists, and seems to add weight to that worldview. The awesome work of women in responding to ecological and social malaise is also a pointer towards the relevance of a gender lens on the era of ‘metacrisis’ that humanity has clearly entered. Last year, a surge in environmental leadership by women’s organisations was described by Inside Climate News. It reported on the group Amazonian Women Defenders of the Rainforest, in Ecuador. They resist oil and mineral extraction on their ancestral lands, which has brought pollution, violence, and sexual exploitation. Their tactics include organizing protests, physical forest monitoring, legal action (such as winning a landmark case at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights), reforestation projects, and building Indigenous-led businesses. There are many other examples of women’s organisations being on the front line in challenging destruction. Sadly, much of that now involves challenging the mining activities of companies that are being supported by professional ‘environmentalists’ who prioritise electrifying everything over a smart, holistic, fair and accountable green agenda: AKA most ‘environmentalists’ you and I know today (see the ‘fake green fairytale’).

As the effects of accelerating climate change kick in, many women are leading the response in communities. A new film profiles some of that women’s leadership, called ‘Emergence: women in the storm’. I recommend the trailer alone, for its gobsmackingly inspiring string of statements from women who are doing what’s best in a bad situation. It reminded me that when the Deep Adaptation movement was taking off in 2019, I wanted to draw attention to the ideas and initiatives of women on environmental and social issues, so I hosted many Q&As with women leaders. Simona Vaitkute reviewed some of the crosscutting themes from those conversations. One theme she identified was that our environmental imagination needs to move beyond technological fixes and lifestyle changes. Instead, mainstream environmental movements need to drop the “progress story” of managerial salvation. In the place of such failing hubris, we could learn more from communities who have endured oppression and loss – including Indigenous peoples and those in the Global South already suffering climate impacts. The consistent message from the women I interviewed was not to focus on anger or blame, but on healing, including the recovery from a fictional “story of separation” between the Earth, each other, and ourselves. Those women told us of a path forward that involves vulnerability, reconnecting with intuition, and a place for inclusive rituals of healing.

Those themes were important to two of my friends, who were important women leaders on environmental change and justice and passed away last year. One was Joanna Macy. After she discovered my work on Deep Adaptation, she and I chatted with some fellow travellers, online, once a month for over a year. I had used Joanna’s workshop guidance for years previously, to help people viscerally sense that we are part of a web of life, rather than atop a pyramid of domination. As the Deep Adaptation framework and networks took off, I realised her methods for how we honour and express our difficult emotions about the state of the world would be key. She reminded us that our pain is a result of our love. It was an invitation to escape the dishonest and toxic optimism that the culture of patriarchy promotes, especially in our professional relations.

I remember when I visited Joanna in her house in Berkeley that there was a wall crammed top to bottom with pictures of all her family and friends. As I looked at it, I immediately had the voice of Ram Das in my mind. A famous American spiritual teacher, associated with the New Age, he once joked that he sometimes fell back into being the lecherous Dick Alpert, and would ask a fan he fancied: “would you like to come up and see my spiritual pictures?” As I looked at Joanna’s wall of love, I thought these were her spiritual pictures. An embodied spirituality, without a separation between life and the divine, is one that does not rely on images of Gods or Gurus.

Joanna lived into her 90s, but sadly Stella Nyambura Mbau left us much younger. Previously a youth climate activist, she had become a lecturer in Kenya, and worked on the Agroforestry Regeneration Communities initiative. I enjoyed working with Stella, including presentations at COP27 in Egypt. In her quiet voice, she didn’t flinch from a damning critique of the mainstream agenda on agriculture (here and here). She helped me understand how that self-appointed expert on all things, Bill Gates, had rather dumb ideas on how to improve the resilience of farms and farming communities in the face of rapid climate change. The analysis reminded me of one most coherent voices against ‘Gatesian’ managerialist approaches to society — the ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. Over the years, I was pleased to help Stella get her views published for an international audience, even if only in the niche publication Resilience.

When discussing these issues, the term “patriarchy” comes up. I need to keep reminding myself that most people think it simply means ‘rule by men’ and that a critique of it means blaming men for all of humanity’s ills. So, the academic in me wants to pause and define terms. For me, and most people who use the term as a useful one for understanding our situation, the term ‘patriarchy’ describes a cultural system that advances characteristics and values that are regarded as masculine, subordinating those regarded as more feminine. That enables societal systems where men typically exert more power, in areas including political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, the control of property, and the value of work. These systems are produced by both men and women, although with differing agency, and can oppress people of any gender, sometimes compounding other unequal hierarchies of identity. The term ‘feminist’ is also widely misunderstood as something only describing women who focus on women’s issues, rather than referring to any of us who recognise that unequal power relations between genders goes against our core values of human dignity, freedom, and self-actualisation.

Not all women who we might recognise as ecofeminists choose that description for themselves. Any term can ‘pigeon hole’ people, as much as convene them. My own misunderstanding that feminist analysis could only be about women held me back for years from exploring the resonance between my critiques of research methodologies and those made by feminist scholars. When, far later in my career, a committee blocked my institutions’ participation in a ‘women’s leadership’ research consortium, as they regarded it as ‘off topic’ to sustainability, I was reminded that patriarchal ‘pigeon holing’ of the feminine as niche and marginal remains widespread, and with major implications for resources and attention. I mention that past experience as what’s key today is that we recognise that women leaders can be leaders for all of us, and that feminist critiques in general can be holistic agendas for all of us.

Ecofeminist inspiration for living in the metacrisis

I think ours is a moment to be bolder in exploring what ecofeminist-related philosophies could help us to see and imagine during the myriad disruptions and breakdowns ahead. Could we better respect, revere, and remunerate, the roles of caring, of nurturing in the home, of dialoguing in our neighbourhoods, and of stewarding the commons? Could we escape, through serious economic redesign, the requirement of transactional value for so much of the paid labour in our societies? Could we have confidently relaxed attitudes about gender identities so that no one feels compelled to fit into a simple binary, whether by behaviour or biological modification? Could we develop healthy masculine identities, rather than merely complain or resist the toxic forms, or swap out more men for women in senior roles? Could we even identify what we like from within the system of patriarchy, if separated from its ills?

Speaking of a bolder agenda for ecofeminism in this age of consequences, one of the founder members of Extinction Rebellion, Skeena Rathor, mentioned to me the idea of ‘rematriation’. The concept arises from the insights and demands of Indigenous women leaders, as they seek to defend or regain stewardship of their lands and space for their cultures. Some think it could become a broader agenda for modern cultures that have lost their connection to the landscapes that hold them and nourish them today. I am hopeful that by introducing ‘Regeneration’ as a 6th R into the Deep Adaptation framework for reflection and dialogue, I am better recognising the way many people are acting on their collapse awareness. I hear that they are nurturing life in various ways, through their love of life rather than belief in a theory of what might ‘save the world’. I am happy to be asking myself and others: how are we nurturing life?

What the Indigenous elders who Skeena is working with are pointing to is a deeper spiritual subjugation that has been occurring through patriarchal cultures. Over millennia, religious institutions increasingly regarded the living world as less intrinsically valuable than a separate divine entity or realm, which humans could seek to ascend to or reunite with. This deep and subtle alienation with the natural world around us, and not experiencing our own bodies as part of that wondrous nature, is a core revelation from Indigenous teachings. But it is also one revealed in some of the ancient religious texts that were rejected by the Roman Empire when codifying Christian belief. One such text, The Gospel of Mary, spoke about a spirituality centred on inner awakening, unity, and direct experience of the divine. Salvation is not achieved through external authority, doctrine, or hierarchy, but through awakening the divine presence inside oneself. A key theme is the “sacred interbeing” of all existence: all life exists “in and with each other,” reflecting a holistic, relational cosmos where divinity permeates everything. The text shows that in the earliest years of Jesus-followership, Mary Magdalene was regarded as a spiritual authority who embodied intuitive, experiential wisdom rather than institutional power. Excluding her teachings, and, later, even speculating she was a prostitute, reflects the wider pattern of religious institutions suppressing mystical experience and female authority in favour of male-dominated hierarchies.

I was so pleased to read about her ideas that I wrote and performed the Mariam Mantra. But in the process of discussing the teachings of Mary, and discovering the sub-cultures associated with her, I noticed that patriarchal habits are hard to kick, even amongst those who see themselves as liberating the feminine. For instance, there is a widespread sexualising of Mary Magdalene, where she is portrayed as both sensual and as relevant to us because of her intimacy with Jesus. But if we drop patriarchal assumptions that centre men in our understanding of the world, we can be open to possibilities such as whether she might have been a key teacher of Jesus, or that she might not have desired him intimately. Yes, even Christ could learn from someone; and not be sexually appealing to every woman! Such speculations are just as likely as any, once we drop patriarchal assumptions. And the fact they might jar with some people reflects the power of those assumptions. Without them, questions of whether they were intimate or married become very secondary.

Ecofeminist ideas can also help us to imagine and inhabit healthy masculinities within the metacrisis. To begin with, men can simply respect and value women more, as well as the qualities that have been categorised in our societies as feminine. However, a healthy masculinity can be more than that. It can retain and repurpose what we culturally associate with masculinity. What is true strength? True protection? True courage? True rationality? True merit? True authority? In a culture that learns from its mistakes, all of those qualities can be reconceived and reborn for everyone, without ‘essentialising’ them as only masculine. That would be smarter than the ideas coming from traffic-hungry pundits speaking to the economically and socially disadvantaged men in late capitalist societies. I am pleased to see a few initiatives explicitly working on this opportunity (such as Starfish Collective). Many men’s support groups embody similar thinking, even if not explicitly recognising feminist critique as having contributed to the building blocks of their approaches.

Beware the close enemies of ecofeminism

Loads of people talk about feminism and women’s leadership in relation to social and environmental problems. But that doesn’t mean they are not reproducing patriarchy and accidentally oppressing others, and aspects of themselves. Therefore, I can’t finish this essay on ecofeminism in the metacrisis without mentioning the ideas and behaviours which I have witnessed and consider to be the ‘near enemies’ of true feminism.

First, there is the patriarchal women-washing of dominant organisations and systems. Being a female leader doesn’t necessarily involve the person behaving differently to the role as it has been defined by society before them. Instead, we all know many female executives and politicians who appear to be copies of their male predecessors, whether in terms of their rhetoric or decisions. To avoid any doubt, we could label this with the rather oxymoronic term: patriarchal feminism. It is a superficial feminism, often counter productive, that does little to challenge the masculine-coded values that are considered superior in patriarchy, such as competition, forcefulness, transactionalism, reductive rationality, emotional suppression, hierarchy, and the domination of nature. Instead, it enables a select group of women to participate in wielding power within existing systems and cultures, and to strive for that power in ways that disrespect (or even damage) people in its pursuit.

Second, and related to patriarchal feminism, is when women leaders use deep patriarchal tropes to discipline our dialogue and behaviour. Eternal optimism, for instance, can be regarded as a form of emotional suppression that then invites a level of acquiescence to power. Some of the most senior women in climate science and climate politics have, for years, exhorted us to be stubbornly optimistic. Sometimes that can involve censorship. For instance, there was a period when my XR launch speech was taken offline, due to a woman executive deciding they shouldn’t platform anything so negative. The Deep Adaptation videos only survived due to the founder Stuart H. Scott pushing back (despite being preoccupied with terminal cancer at the time). It led to a split in the organisation, and the birth of Facing Future TV.

When critics of ‘collapsology’ imply, or directly claim, that it is harmful or morally deficient not to be optimistic, they are expressing the patriarchal trope of shame. It is true that the concept of shame exists across most, if not all, cultures, but is a particularly powerful means of social control in patriarchal societies. Therefore, a third expression of patriarchal feminism is the use of shame in public discourse. In particular, I have noticed the use of apparently feminist concerns to invite shame upon people that some women leaders disagree with. In my case, a number of senior women, with higher academic rank than myself, used my maleness and age as a basis to frame my response to inaccurate criticisms of my work and character as evidence of my patriarchal attitudes. That was at a time when the backlash against Deep Adaptation from the mainstream environmental professions, and the nuclear industry, had begun. The aim of some of the criticism was to encourage people to feel principled in hostility towards my character, and thereby dismiss the veracity of my analysis of the environmental predicament, as well as anyone who might agree.

Once again I noticed the patriarchal preoccupation with opportunities for shaming when a newspaper missed what was rare in the story of my interaction with Jeffrey Epstein. I never met him in person, and he didn’t fund my work, but we had phone calls and correspondence. To make amends for the limited interaction I had with him, I spoke about it publicly in 2023. I believed the survivors deserved more attention to his crimes, and that people like me, and the people who introduced us, needed to re-assess why we didn’t take these issues more seriously in the past. It was the launch of my book Breaking Together, and I explained I had learned to have less deference to power and money, and work instead at the grassroots. Nearly three years after that speech, with the release of my emails with Epstein, a local journalist reported on the matter as if I had spoken in response to forced disclosure. That meant some readers would interpret the story as being one of scandal and shame, rather than about someone having pushed for attention to the case and expressing contrition as they shared what they learned. If we can’t welcome people being open about their past limitations in not always quickly or fully standing up for what is right, then we aren’t helping a shift in culture. It would be wrong to assume that any coverage of this topic is pro-feminist. Instead, the survivors want attention to the aims and resources of the networks of power that produced the criminal behaviour by, and associated with, Epstein — and then covered it up. When coverage falls short of that, it could be part of the effort to avoid deeper accountability and change.

On the one hand, the idea that a guy has no legitimacy or contribution to make in talking about feminist issues, including some criticism of some women’s views and actions on these issues, is prejudiced and counterproductive. On the other hand, it is also true that men like me need to accept there will always be some criticism for sharing our views on these matters, and that some of it might seem unfair and arising from unresolved trauma. I have experienced that a few times in my life, and it was painful to be subjected to anger and condemnation. My initial reaction was to try to understand better and explain myself more fully. With time, I realised that if expressing themselves from a traumatic wound, there is little opportunity for understanding. We men weren’t harmed in the same ways by patriarchy, and we benefited in so many ways (that only ignorant males refuse to see). So sometimes our best contribution is to find the strength not to react. That doesn’t mean always ‘holding space’ for, what might be, trauma-driven responses. Sometimes, it can mean not responding at all. If we have been fortunate and strategic enough to surround ourselves with wise women, then they will be better suited to respond.

Sources of inspiration and what to support

I am grateful for the way the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion welcomed my work and invited my contribution to their early work. Over the years, I have kept in touch with the three women at the heart of its launch: Clare Farrell, Skeena Rathor and Gail Bradbrook. Each of them have continued to lead, beyond XR, in ways that reflect some of the many dimensions of women’s leadership in the metacrisis.

Clare Farrell is convening the Humanity Project UK, which is supporting the development of grassroots ‘assembly culture’ towards an agenda for self rule. She is also director for Absurd Intelligence, which she describes as “a thinktank for the shit show”. More recently, Clare has been seeking out the wisdom of those who specialise in spiritual life, to gain insight on “strategies of constructive resistance whilst we hurtle into breakdown” (sharing some on her Substack). Skeena Rathor has become an ‘Elder Guardian’ of a Global Movement on Indigenous Commons. They support efforts at repairing and restoring the world’s water flows, from rivers to oceans and atmospheric processes, which also include large forests. She also focuses on ways that capital flows can be redirected to repair life on Earth. Gail Bradbrook has been developing the model for community resilience in the context of system breakdown, and trialling it in her hometown of Stroud, with the moniker ‘lifehouse’. While continuing to regard reductions in carbon emissions as important, each of them has moved beyond that to work on community resilience and regeneration. Their practical and collaborative responses to “the shit show” echo the leadership in the new “women in the storm” film.

Want to discuss this?

In the next salon of the Metacrisis Initiative we will discuss women’s leadership and ecofeminism in the metacrisis. Skeena Rathor will join us. If you are a member of the initiative, look out for registration information in your inbox in a few days. Meanwhile, as members, you can share your reflections in our community chat on Telegram (if you aren’t part of that, also look out for the reminder in a few days). See you there! Warmly, Jem

The Dangerous Honesty we Can No Longer Avoid – by John Foster

April 1, 2026March 28, 2026 jembendell

Guest article by John Foster, University of Lancaster, UK, and author of After Sustainability.

Note from Jem: In previous essays, I have criticized what I regard as the authoritarian sentiments and imaginations of some environmentalists. I have articulated an approach that focuses on freeing us from the manipulative and exploitative systems that accelerate environmental destruction. British Academic John Foster is one intellectual who I have debated on these topics. He penned a reply to my recent essay, and I am sharing it here to encourage dialogue about the future of environmental politics in a fracturing world. Over to John…

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There is a peculiar challenge in debating how a society should prepare for its own possible collapse. The usual rules of political argument – the cut and thrust, the simplification of an opponent’s position into a convenient label – begin to feel not just unhelpful but actively dishonest. When the stakes are this high, the window for meaningful action this narrow, and the situation so unprecedented, we owe each other something more than polemic. We need to accept that we can’t know what might work to reduce harm and give future generations of humans, and other species, a better chance.

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Let’s Look Down: Dining for the Chance of Resilient Communities

March 26, 2026March 28, 2026 jembendell1 Comment

This is a guest article from Tyler Sycamore Hess, the Ceremonial Chef.

“We really did have everything, didn’t we?” says Leonardo DiCaprio’s character during the final scene of “Don’t Look Up.” There is a small group engaging in an elegant last supper, while the extinction-causing comet hurtles toward Earth. The table is beautifully set. The wine is poured. They feel gratitude and camaraderie, at the end of the world.

But what if we could feel such emotions at dinners that create new worlds, not just lament the passing of the old?

My mission as a chef and educator is to craft dinner experiences that begin from that premise, that we can create a better future through intimate relationship with our local ecology and food system. We don’t only ask each other to “look up” at graphs and headlines about growing threats to our way of life. We invite people to look down: at the soil under our feet, the water moving through our watershed, and the hands that plant, harvest, mill, and butcher in our local communities.

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Why Regenerativity Matters to a Changing Climate, and Beyond

March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 jembendell

Visiting the Green School in Bali in 2018 was a revelation for me. I met students who were bravely facing the troubling science on how badly we modern humans have damaged the biosphere and climate. I explained the bad news about what that probably means for the future of our societies, and witnessed them discussing how they might integrate that into their future plans. I was so impressed with the way they engaged the topic, I made a film about them! Seven years on, I went back to the school, to share some lessons from my regenerative farm and training centre in Bali. I discovered the Green School staff have evolved their understanding of ‘green’ to embrace “regenerativity’ as their mission. Discussing with parents, I realised that this aspiration to pursue ‘regenerativity’ could give new impetus for action on our changing climate, including both attempts to reduce its pace and negative impacts, as well as reshape how we live well in an era of disruption and collapse. However, I also heard one teacher who seemed to use the term more as a nod to environmental care without admitting the pain of failure that is now associated with the concept of ‘sustainability’. Coming away from the School, I took time to consider what the concept of regeneration might add to a realistic agenda on the metacrisis of economic, social, ecological and political disruption that is unfolding around us. That got me asking the question: who or what can I nurture due to my love of Life? After decades of working on sustainability, from the highest levels of the UN to the grassroots of a farm, this felt like a moment for evolving my focus, and so I’ve written this essay to share about it.

In the following lines, I am going to explore the potential and the pitfalls of the regenerative agenda as a response to our unfolding metacrisis. On climate, it is important to recognise that regenerating key living systems is not just an adjunct to emissions reduction but should be a core part of our climate response. It is also important to see that for the concept of regeneration to be meaningful beyond our climate predicament, we must acknowledge the profound failures — scientific, economic, political, and cultural — that have led us to this point. After discussing those, I will share some thoughts on how the term ‘regenerativity’ might be used authentically to convene genuine action, or misused to obscure the same failed ideas. I’ll explain how I’ve concluded the concept can offer a deeply personal and practical signpost for living with love and purpose in an era of metacrisis and collapse. It’s why I’ll conclude this essay by proposing ‘regeneration’ as a 6th R within the Deep Adaptation framework.

Panecological climatology

For decades, climate action has been a story of subtraction. The central metric has been carbon and our primary goal has been emissions reduction. This narrow calculus, while critical, is proving insufficient. Not only are most economies remaining carbon heavy, the agenda has been framed as limiting damage from one factor, carbon emissions. Instead, both recent climate observations, and growing bodies of research, point to the role of large forests and healthy oceans in modulating the world’s climate through seeding clouds which reflect the sun’s rays. If that is new to you, please check my essay on the topic, or the work of Dr Anna Makarieva. The findings of such research tell us that attempts to regenerate the planet’s living systems from a degraded state should be more central to climate action in future. The principle, capability and agenda known as ‘regenerativity’ could encapsulate that planetary imperative, if it is conceptualised honestly, and in light of the failures of our past attempts at sustainability. Moreover, efforts to regenerate both degraded ecosystems and human cultures offer pathways for attempting to adapt to inevitable disruptions from our changing climate – the situation many now term the ‘metacrisis’.

The conventional carbon-centric view is missing the forest for the trees, quite literally. It treats the climate as a simple atmospheric chemistry problem. Yet, as emerging ‘panecological’ analysis emphasises, Earth’s thermostat is affected by humans not just by our greenhouse gas emissions, but by our impacts on the dynamics of major ecosystems — particularly vast forests and healthy oceans. These are not passive carbon sinks but active climate modulators. The great boreal and tropical forests, for instance, do more than store carbon. Through the release of bacteria and pollen, they seed clouds that directly cool their regions, and beyond, by reflecting solar radiation. There is evidence that the condensation processes also draw in air from the oceans, creating a ‘biotic pump’ that affects the Earth’s energy balance. Similarly, a thriving ocean teeming with the right kinds of phytoplankton doesn’t merely absorb CO₂ as it is the source of over half the world’s cloud-condensation nuclei, via the production of dimethyl sulfide. The functioning of these systems directly shapes planetary albedo, or reflectivity, and thus temperatures around the world.

A regenerative agenda could respond to this profound interdependence. That is because it brings our attention to restoring, renewing, and revitalising our environmental, social, and cultural systems. Environmentally, the focus is on healing ecosystems. That involves soil health, habitats, biodiversity, and cleaning up toxics and plastics. But it could also involve restoring the innate cooling capacity of the planet. This means regenerating forests for their cloud-seeding and biotic pump, not just their timber or carbon credits. It means restoring marine health for climate regulation, not just fish stocks. The goal can be to enable these systems to return to their climate-modulating potential once again.

Critically, this regenerative lens could transform how we think about regulations, investments, and subsidies in response to a climate emergency. Because the most potent climate technology available is Life itself. Therefore, funding large-scale ecosystem restoration — from mangrove swamps to peatlands to seabed grasslands — becomes an investment in natural climate engineering. Of course it also buys the potential for enhanced biodiversity, water security, and community resilience, alongside the beautiful intrinsic value of wild habitats. In comparison, those focusing on expensive and energy-hungry machines to capture carbon from air, or trialling means of atmospheric blocking of the sun, can be seen as misunderstanding the complexity of climate within the homeostatic processes of a living planet.

In addition to the wider climate cooling potential of repairing ecosystems, large forests can also help to moderate some of the local effects of more variable and extreme weather. Therefore, environmental regeneration can be seen as part of the process of adapting to climate change. For instance, rather than just erecting higher seawalls, a regenerative strategy could revive coastal mangrove ecosystems that attenuate storm surges, nurture fisheries, and sequester carbon. For farmers confronting aridification, it means regenerating the soil’s sponge-like capacity through agroecology, reducing irrigation needs while protecting yields. For cities, it could mean creating more water-retentive green spaces to help manage floods.

Of course the climate adaptation of human societies is as much about culture, politics and economics than it is about ecosystems. By including these aspects of our lived experience, the concept of ‘regenerativity’ may help promote a more holistic understanding of climate chaos and what to do about it. For instance, socially and culturally, we could seek to promote forms of organisation and community that promote well-being and creativity, without relying on further consumption or economic growth. I say ‘could’, because to attempt that authentically, and at scale, we must not sideline politics and economics from our analysis and agenda.

Transformative failures

One thing I appreciate about the term ‘regenerativity’ is the implicit acceptance of failure. Otherwise, would we only have stuff to generate, not re-generate? If our environment, society and culture weren’t so badly degraded, would we not be talking about greater expansion, improvement, conservation, persistence, or sustainability? So when using the term regeneration authentically, rather than tactically or superficially, we need to acknowledge what it is that has failed, degraded and died, and what we are learning from that.

I think the concept of regeneration can point us to scientific, economic, political and cultural or spiritual failures, which have culminated in the unfolding ecological failure. Scientifically, those of us modern humans who care about each other and wider Life, have failed to comprehensively understand the complex interactions of living systems in ways that might inform transformative activism and policy agendas. Economically, we have failed to accept that an expansionist monetary system and portfolio-maximising investment strategies have combined to blast through ecological limits, engineer unnecessary wants, and distort public understanding of what is good and true. Politically, we have failed to generate national and international political movements and policy agendas that are sufficiently free from domestic corruption and transnational capitalist control to put people and planet first and foremost. Culturally and spiritually, we modern humans, on average, have failed to experience our interbeing with the environment sufficiently to protect it from harm, and therefore ourselves.

Together these failures can be observed in the poverty of the modern environmental movement and professions themselves. Professionalisation of environmental concern transformed effort into a technocratic project with neither honesty nor soul. Most of us ended up being campaigners for, or officers of, one faction of global capital involved in lower-carbon energy, promoting the ‘fake green fairytale’ of a managed transition to an electric wonderland where we don’t have to give up anything (something I explained on ABC radio in Australia). Instead, any meaningful use of the concept of ‘regeneration’ or ‘regenerativity’ must involve accepting our personal and collective wounds, the need for healing and regrowing. It means that we, and our organisations, are involved in nurturing Life, in its various forms.

For decades I worked with some peak institutions in the world on the topics of Sustainable Development and Corporate Sustainability, such as the United Nations, World Economic Forum and large NGOs. I’ve heard former colleagues sound personally disheartened and dismayed by failure, while maintaining a public charade of positivity about their work. They have been wanting to find a way of incorporating the tragic decline and disruption, while maintaining their professional status, income, and sense of purpose. As a result, some are moving into the idea that adaptation to climate change is the new agenda to lead on. Others are adopting ‘regeneration’ as their label. They say versions of: “sustainability was about being less bad, but in this situation of great loss, we need managers, leaders and entrepreneurs committed to regeneration”. That represents an attempt to recognise failure while avoiding looking at how one has been bystanding that failure, or even helped it to occur through one’s own career choices and the role of one’s profession.

I don’t blame them. We tend to crave upbeat stories. Even about death, with all the consequences for society that produces. But what such misleading framing of ‘regeneration’ could mean is that many people miss the opportunity for a deeper reckoning, learning, and transformation in their own lives. One of those learnings is that a cause of past failure has been the financial and societal incentives for people in business, government and civil society to express delusional and toxic optimism rather than explain truths which threaten our support for incumbent power. Unfortunately, the sloppy and opportunistic use of regenerativity discourse by consultants and NGOs could mislead people about where to find really authentic and committed folks, who are incorporating a recognition of systemic failure in their desire to nurture Life. More broadly, the chance for a general public awakening on ecological breakdown to then generate transformative agendas, which naturally challenge or move beyond capitalism and imperialism, could be sunk under the deluge of people claiming they are about ‘regenerativity’.

The power of a term is how it convenes

I’m not claiming there is only one true definition of regeneration and regenerativity. Like any concept, it is a social construction, and we would waste a huge amount of time and energy to chase the impossibility of an uncontested correct definition. Even if we adopt the concept in a devout way, we must admit we don’t actually know if there is much ecological regeneration-by-humans possible at scale in the context of a destabilising climate. We humans fall into the trap of reification – because there is a word for something, and a history about that word, we think there is a tangible something it corresponds to, rather than pointing at an arbitrary grouping of diverse contextual unfolding effemeral phenomena. That goes for most concepts. Buddhists (and critical discourse theorists) say for all concepts. This realisation doesn’t mean we give up on trying to be clear about what we mean, and why, when we use terms; it means we think critically about what ideas, framings and narratives enable or hamper different parts of society and ways of being. It means we recognise the value of a concept that helps people with similar concerns and intentions to find each other. It means we assess our own use of the term, to make sure we aren’t repackaging our old efforts, or overselling small projects to help the powerful tell a palliative fairytale for all. This approach to concepts is part of the ‘critical wisdom’ we must cultivate in ourselves and society if we are to lessen the harms of living in a metacrisis (as explained in Chapter 8 of my book).

An academic study reported in 2024 that “notions of regeneration have entered discourses in several fields that are relevant for sustainability, including, among others, ecology, agriculture, economics, management, sociology, psychology and chemistry.” Amongst those fields, agriculture and economics seems most vibrant. Regenerative agriculture, as we understand it at Bekandze Farm, is a land-management practice that actively seeks to improve soils, increase biodiversity, and maintain water cycles, so that the farming can restore the ecosystem of the land rather than depleting it. Similarly, regenerative economics is a framework that views the economy not as a machine to be optimized, but as a living system embedded within the natural world. The idea is there can be economic activities which restore, heal and build the health of social and ecological systems. The concept has been developed by Daniel Christian Wahl and others to apply to whole cultures. That means we design or defend human societies that actively restore, heal and enhance the health and vitality of social and ecological systems.

With all that in mind, we could ask ourselves more complicated questions than what a regenerative farm, such as my own, could look like. Will there be a regenerative automobile? A regenerative global financial institution? A regenerative medical profession? If regeneration involves the nurturing of Life, then the bar is set quite high. Could an automobile, whether hybrid or electric, ever be truly regenerating nature and society? It is unlikely — especially if you consider the full life cycle. Instead, projects to help people live closer to work, and use public transport to get there, would be far more Life-nurturing, in various ways. Put that way, I can see an honest use of the term not appealing to corporate executives and consultants and business school academics, who prefer buzz terms to promote themselves to prospective clients and students. It is one reason why I am pleased to have quit my professorship and now work freelance in support of those who aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions of themselves, organisations and society (the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative).

Having this awareness that any term is as valuable as what it does or doesn’t enable, means that we can also look at the potential shadows of the term regeneration, or regenerativity. One shadow could be the subtle reassertion of ‘anthropocentrism’ or human-supremacy, where we imagine that humanity must fix wider nature, rather than rediscover a way to live in harmony and partnership with our environment, much like a ‘keystone species’ (something I explore in the latter half of my book Breaking Together). Another shadow could be the exclusive nature of the conversation it invites us into: as only those who aren’t just trying to cope with difficulties are able to discuss how to align their lives with regenerativity. Recognising possible shadows does not negate a concept, or mean everyone who uses the concept is ignoring the shadow: instead, that recognition helps us to address potential limitations, if we wish.

Deep Adaptation, regeneration and me

For those of you who have followed my work on societal disruption and collapse, might be wondering how an embrace of the concept of regeneration might fit with the existing framework of Deep Adaptation (DA). If you don’t know about that concept, suffice to say it means seeking to adapt personally and collectively to the societal disruption and collapse that arise, directly or indirectly, from climate change and ecological damage . Deep Adaptation was the title of a paper I wrote which went viral, with over a million downloads. Over the years I have noticed many people inspired by their anticipation, acceptance or experience of societal collapse, have been moved to work on nurturing life in particular or in general. They aren’t attached to outcome, but become re-connected with what they most value and cherish, which includes the living world, loved ones, and the processes of creation. In addition, I have been aware that the existing DA framework of 5Rs does not invite much attention to our environment. Therefore, I think it would be useful to support more discussion of what and whom we are nurturing within the context of metacrisis and collapse. Therefore, I am proposing ‘regeneration’ as the sixth R in the DA framework for reflection and conversation. The question we can ask ourselves is: What or whom can we nurture due to our love of Life? Putting it more simply, we can ask: how am I nurturing Life?

Asking myself that question, I realised that some of my choices in the years since I became collapse aware have been aligned with this Life-nurturing sentiment. At the simplest level, I started rescuing kittens! Initially they were for other people to adopt, as I had bad allergies. But finally, I gave in and rescued one for myself from the Buddhist temple in the north of the island — and overcame my allergies. Then I rescued his likely nephew from the same temple 2 years later. I found them in distress, as I was co-hosting meditation and kirtan retreats at that temple. I have now co-hosted 17, as my small way to enable, in myself and the other participants, both inner calm and outer curiosity, in an interfaith setting. That is also why I play in bands that host kirtans and cacao ceremonies, and am now a dance leader in training, with the Sufi-founded Dances of Universal Peace. It is also why I produced Oracle Cards to help people return to gratitude, wonder and agency in the face of the metacrisis.

These personal activities may seem less obviously regenerative than the organic farm and farm school I founded, but they have been more central to my sense and expression of love and care. I hope we can find a new business partner or donor who shares similar perspectives and intentions, so we can build the facilities to open a small residential school. I won’t feel attached to that outcome, or sacrifice to get there, as I know that a shift towards a more nurturing intention will express itself in many ways, depending how life unfolds. In that process, I recognise how important it will be to have fellow travellers. It’s why I welcomed the personal focus of questions put to me by podcasters by Carlotta and Catie, and why I will be joining one of the peer mentoring groups of the Metacrisis Initiative (…with the deadline for first cohort of the peer mentoring coming soon).

Back to climate chaos, and beyond

Our predicament of a rapidly destabilising climate, and overshoot of the capacity of the Earth to sustain humanity, cannot be responded to by subtraction alone. We must couple urgent emissions reductions with a bold, additive strategy of ecological renewal. A panecological understanding of life on Earth points to how a relatively stable climate was a product of a healthy biosphere. By embracing regenerativity as the principle of shaping ways of living that generate more life, health, and potential than they consume, I hope we broaden our field of vision and action on the environmental tragedy that has been unfolding around us. Human survival may depend on recognising that the best way to stabilise our atmosphere is to re-animate our Earth, rather than submit it further to machines.

Ultimately, regeneration is not a new metric to be achieved, nor a project to save humanity so it can persist a little longer on Earth. Instead, it can be part of the conversation as we reorient our very being — a shift from asking “how long can we last?” to “how fully can we live?” As a new question within the Deep Adaptation framework, it invites us to regard our ‘success’ not in years of survival, but in the depth of our connection to the living world, the creativity we unleash in service of life, and the love we cultivate in the face of loss. It means some of us embracing our role as a ‘keystone species’, not by controlling the planet, but by participating in its healing, and in doing so, healing ourselves. Regeneration, therefore, can invite a conversation about the quality of our existence on this earth, not merely its duration.

I hope Green School and other educational centres that adopt concepts like regeneration can do so while avoiding any rebranding of failed organisational dynamics and social change strategies, or accidentally sidestepping the lessons from decades of effort on sustainability and social justice. Instead, educational institutions can approach the concept of regeneration with ‘critical wisdom’ to help their students and staff explore a meaningful way of living through metacrisis, disruption, and even societal collapse. It looks like with Regeneration27 and related initiatives, many at the school are taking this matter seriously — I’m hoping to see some ripples.

Thx, Jemx

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If you have the financial means to help us develop Bekandze Farm School into a destination with accommodation, please get in touch via www.bekandze.net or info@bekandze.net ….If with lesser means, but a wish to help promote organic farming in Indonesia, please consider our crowdfund. If you are in Bali in May or August 2026, please consider our weekend retreats at the temple.

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What is the Courageous Response to Climate Chaos? Not eco-authoritarianism.

February 11, 2026February 12, 2026 jembendell1 Comment

Are you hearing more people talk about needing to do “whatever it takes to save the planet”? Have you heard people blame democracy as the reason for our intractable problems, including persistent poverty, extreme inequality, and the unaffordable cost of living, or environmental damage and breakdown? I have been hearing variations of that perspective, particularly from people rightly dreading the impacts of climate chaos. Over three decades of work on the topic, I witnessed authoritarian musings of frustrated environmentalists being expressed in private. But now I hear them articulated in public. One person who has brought this topic into the open is the environmental academic John Foster. Writing at the Greenhouse Think Tank, he argues: “the intelligent and informed who do recognise the urgency of transformation must organise themselves for a vanguard seizure of power…” He has a new book out this year, which reminded me I hadn’t responded to his critique of my arguments against such eco-authoritarianism. As John’s Lifeworld book will go deeper into his philosophical justification for authoritarian rule by an ecologically-minded elite, I think it is a good time to rejoin the conversation. If you are interested in the future of politics in a metacrisis, where societies experience environmental breakdown, then I hope this long-form essay will provide some stimuli for your own political opinions and campaigning.

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Reclaiming Environmentalism: Saner Responses to the Ecological Crisis

January 14, 2026January 20, 2026 jembendell3 Comments

I invited an essay from a conservationist who recently worked in the crucible of US politics, and is now seeking ways to bring more authentic attention to ecological realities.

By Aaron Vandiver

Over the past several decades, environmentalism has been driven far from its roots. What began as a movement grounded in ecological understanding, love for the living Earth, and resistance to industrial destruction has been reduced to a narrow technical problem: carbon emissions.

When, on this blog, Professor Jem Bendell explains a pan-ecological perspective, he is calling us back to a truth environmentalists once grasped intuitively. As Rachel Carson wrote, “Nothing in nature exists alone.” Forests, oceans, soils, coral reefs, and natural hydrological cycles are, as philosopher Charles Eisenstein puts it, the “vital organs” and systems of a living Earth. A mechanical climate model focused on atmospheric physics and emissions cannot capture this living dimension. As Professor Bill Rees put it in response to Jem’s essay, climate is not primarily a physical system but a “biophysical” one. Recognizing this requires elevating biology — life itself — to the same status that physics and chemistry have enjoyed in the institutions of science on environment and climate.

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The Mirage of Climate Action at the Summit in Brazil

November 5, 2025November 8, 2025 jembendell

In this era of societal disruption and metacrisis, international climate summits provide us a Shakespearean display of the human craving for credible myths to avoid daunting truths. Four lanes of greed carve through one of the remaining lungs and heat-shields of our planet — and this month it speeds 50,000 souls towards reassuring each other that they are noble, not needy, and well-informed, not foolish. Earlier this year, the summit secretariat rushed to tell everyone that this new highway through the Amazon Rainforest would have been built anyway. They’d probably heard how new roads cause – and then enable – deforestation. The Brazilian government responded with some more commitments on rainforest protection. That’s promising, but they still give permits to dig up the Amazon for the metals under the trees. The mirage shimmering above the asphalt, seen by delegates as they approach the city of Belem, is a symbol for what passes as scientific curiosity, environmental care, and responsible leadership on the world stage in 2025.

Ahead of the latest tropical junket, I spoke with the Climate Emergency Forum about what the climate has been telling us through the crazy temperature readings over the last two years. The changes can’t be explained through carbon gases alone. There are various contributing factors — and an important one is that human activity has badly disrupted the biohydrological processes where large forests and oceans naturally seed clouds. I explained the need for a paradigm shift in climatology and related activism and policy, and mentioned my recent essay on the topic, where I summarise the evidence. As many people have followed my analysis on the topic since 2018, I thought it important to summarise my latest understanding — beyond ‘carbon-centrism’.

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