In the past few months I have attended many gatherings on Deep Adaptation to our climate tragedy. Some of them have involved a talk, followed by Q&A and discussion. One of them was a week-long retreat in Devon, UK. Another was a dinner of leaders within the Extinction Rebellion. Online gatherings using zoom have also been a revelation, with friends joining from San Francisco to Kyoto. The interest groups on the Deep Adaptation Forum have also started meeting on zoom, and the collaborations that are emerging are wonderful to witness. Each of these gatherings, whether online or in-person, has offered opportunities for people to express difficult emotions and feel into our predicament, before then moving into discussions about what to start and what to stop.

Some of these gatherings have inspired participants to go on and lead future organising. For instance, the Poetics of Leadership conference my University organised with Crossfields Institute in September last year, inspired some participants to help launch Extinction Rebellion. The retreat in Devon also helped nourish the personal connections that were carried into the International Rebellion week. I could write a roll call of names, but you know who you are, and I love you for who you are and how you have been responding to our predicament. You helped me appreciate the value of gatherings in a way I had never experienced before. Because I had lost all interest in conferences, talks, and workshops. They seemed like soulless exercises in small talk and card swapping, punctuated by pep-talks from people we were told to listen to due to their seniority. But thanks to the amazing experiences of the past 7 months, I am convinced of the value of people gathering to share their pain, confusion, insights and faith that we will find meaning and useful action.

To make the most of these gatherings on Deep Adaptation, some principles and practices of hosting and facilitation could be useful. For me, one important aspect is to welcome participants connecting with and sharing any of their emotions, however painful. Another aspect is to invite everyone’s questions as much as anyone’s ideas for answers. That is because, when facing collapse, we are in new terrain, where people who have been most confident in society-as-we-find-it today might not be the most helpful to our inquiry in future. In hosting such gatherings, there are many existing processes that can be drawn upon. Facilitators of the Deep Adaptation Deep Dive in Devon adapted a few practices from The Work That Reconnects (from Joanna Macy) and the Inner Transition, which Sophie Banks and Naresh Giangrande had developed for participants in the Transition Towns movement. Toni Spencer also used some practices for grief tending.

As my partner Katie Carr and I now design two forthcoming retreats on Deep Adaptation, I realise that many facilitators could benefit from sharing ideas on principles for hosting such gatherings as well as guidance on specific processes. Therefore, I have started a thread within the Deep Adaptation Forum on facilitating gatherings, within the Holistic Approaches interest group. If you are a facilitator, then I invite you to join us there and share ideas and experiences on hosting gatherings, whether in-person or online.

One issue will be how to scale the provision of such gatherings. Katie and I are not able to offer more than a few retreats a year, and so we are particularly interested in participants who can host future meetings and retreats. If that resonates with you, and if you are in Greece or could make it there for June, then we would welcome hearing from you. A few late cancellations mean we have 3 places available at the time of writing (click here for information and to apply). Katie and I will also be teaching leadership for deep adaptation at the University of Cumbria over 4 days in the English Lake District in July, which also has some places available. Also in July, Katie and I are hosting a free one day event on deep adaptation in Lancaster, UK.

In a few weeks I will also be able to announce the 5 free events that the Deep Adaptation Forum will be funding (around the world). If you are able to financially help the organising of such gatherings in future, please contact us.

If you are organising a gathering on the theme of Deep Adaptation, please feel free to announce it by leaving a comment below.

If you would like to promote the success of these gatherings, and the effort to help people share practices for effective hosting of them, then I’d be grateful if you could share this blog to your relevant professional networks.

My own schedule of gatherings is rather busy until the end of this year (some of them are listed here). Therefore, I will not be accepting any new invitations to speak at any event during 2019. Instead, superb thinkers, speakers and hosts can be found via the forum at www.deepadaptation.info

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On April 29th 2019 Prof Bendell gave a talk at the anti-fracking demo at Preston New Road, where he called on more insiders to take inspiration from the Extinction Rebellion and take risks to Tell the Truth about our climate crisis.  The video of the talk is here on Facebook. The following is the transcript.

It’s good to be back in the Northwest, after the launch of the international rebellion against extinction in London. There I spoke from the pink boat of truth about the need for our politicians and media to wake up to the scale and urgency of the climate emergency. Today I’m here outside the shale gas fracking site of Cuadrilla because this project was only conceivable because people were afraid to accept the truth on climate change. Afraid to see the truth for themselves, so unable to tell the truth to others and therefore unable to act as if that truth is real.

Seeing people give up their freedom on the streets of London and elsewhere sends a strong signal to people everywhere that it is time for taking personal risks in the pursuit of truth, love and transformation. Extinction Rebellion has opened the space for truth telling.

So I’m here to thank all you activists, for also helping us all to create that space. And I want to say some more about what that truth-telling could involve now.

The truth is that climate change is unfolding faster and harder than we were told was likely. Seventeen of the eighteen hottest years ever recorded have occurred since the year 2000. We have woken up to the warm dawn of dangerously hot century. The colourless blanket of carbon gases wrapping our planet is trapping so much heat that forests are catching fire and harvests failing. Already there have been more forest fires in the UK in 2019 than ever recorded. The last highest year was 2018. Also last year we saw how chaotic weather could begin to threaten our own lives. In the UK and in many European countries the production of grains and open-air vegetables fell by over twenty percent. The climate emergency is therefore about all of us, and the future of our food and water. Yet humanity is heading in the wrong direction, with carbon emissions rising last year faster than ever.

That is why it has been so important to protest fracking at this Preston New Road site. We should not be building any new fossil fuel extraction facilities anywhere. The excuse that gas is better than coal is like saying ketamine is better than heroin. We need to get off these fossil fuel drugs entirely. The fracking process can also release fugitive methane. It is a greenhouse gas many times more warming than CO2. And that’s before we consider the poisoning of our water table. To risk such poisoning at a time when the country is facing a new era of unprecedented water scarcity due to climate change, is frankly absurd.

So the only reason this fracking project can be here is because people have been lying to themselves and each other about how bad things are. So the time has come from more people to take risks in their own lives to come clean and tell the truth about what they know of our situation. It is time for people in senior jobs across our society to come clean or step down. By which I mean come clean on the scale and speed of our crisis and what that means we must now focus on now.

That includes people who care about climate change. But who are in denial about how bad things are and the risks they now need to take. It is time for more of our Climate Experts to come clean about how bad things are. In particular, the members of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), who will issue new advice later this week. They advise the government and are meant to be somewhat independent. In the past, they have justified ongoing fossil fuel development, such as fracking shale gas and airport expansion. They have ignored emissions from aviation, shipping, imports & exports. The CCC assumes that Carbon Dioxide Removal & Negative Emissions technologies will work at a huge planetary scale. That is a convenient fantasy for them but is a travesty for the children who will have to live with the reality. It is time for the CCC to tell the truth on the perilous situation we are in, and the need for emergency responses to protect food and water.

In the past 6 months we have seen some of the climate experts in established institutions be clearer on the alarming situation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC last October finally rang the alarm bells. It told us we have to cut carbon emissions by 18% a year, globally, each year for the next 12, just to have a chance of avoiding catastrophe. And soon the UNISDR will report on risks to global food production from the destabilising of our weather. But we need more experts to step forward and tell the truth, so as to build the public will for the scale of changes that are needed to reduce the harm from climate change.

Academics like me also need to tell the truth to ourselves. We work in a profession that is meant to identify knowledge and share it. Yet we get stuck in silos so have a very partial perspective on public issues. We focus on publishing in specialist journals that reach so few people. After criticism for that lack of impact, the response is now to pursue impact only in ways that can be easily documented and that government can approve of. In my case, I realised my old work in sustainable business was becoming meaningless in the face of rapid climate change. It was only when I decided to follow my concern outside of my comfort zone and publish for the goal of sharing my truth that did I have a significant impact. Instead of a handful of experts reading my paper on Deep Adaptation to our climate tragedy, now over 400 thousand downloads later, many people are reading it and waking up to the emergency we are in.

Since my paper on climate went viral, I have been contacted via email by many hundreds of people. Some of those people have been insiders in organisations with privileged information on our climate crisis. People within NASA, our Royal Navy, and food security institutes. They have told me that the information they have means that the situation is as bad as I am saying or even worse. And therefore, that I should keep going. Well I’m not a journalist or Wikileaks, so its time these people and other insiders with similar views, speak out for themselves. The climate crisis is such a risk to humanity that there has never been a greater matter of principle for which to be whistle-blower. So please, join us in telling the truth.

For years I was told by colleagues in the environmental movement that we should be positive and not be too alarmist. That we should inspire action with a positive vision and tales of success. However, decades of that green positivity coincided with humanity releasing more carbon than ever before. Although my work reflected my despair, and has triggered despair in others, that has been transformative. It has meant we have left behind our concerns with conforming with assumptions of what is appropriate and pragmatic. Our despair took us into truth and radicalised us. That is the personal story of so many of the activists in Extinction Rebellion and will make it such a resilient and transformative movement.

The success of XR has caught the attention of business people who are engaged in public issues. Some have expressed their support. But the clearest form of support would be to admit what hasn’t been working. Since the 1990s business people have been engaged in voluntary activities to promote sustainable development. Its time to tell the truth that for all the effort it hasn’t worked at achieving the changes at the speed and scale that would make a difference to either carbon emissions or biodiversity loss. To tell the truth that it was wrong to think we could achieve the necessary change within the existing system. Instead, it’s time to throw their weight behind systemic reforms, and that should include a redesign of our monetary system so that we don’t require economic growth just to keep our money circulating. Without such change, our efforts at reducing carbon are like swimming up stream.

The question of what to do is more difficult if you work in a company like this one, Cuadrilla, or other companies involved in the current problem. Everyone has bills to pay and so it is difficult to know what to do. If you are working in a fossil fuel company or a bank, or a multinational selling stuff we don’t need, then you must be wondering what to do. Perhaps the stories your CEOs have told you about how your company is doing OK are now wearing thin. So, what do you do? You could look for another job. But you could also start telling the truth in your offices and meetings. And if you need the job but can’t have those conversations, then here is another idea. Show up at work and do absolutely nothing. Let us see rebellions inside oil companies, fracking companies and banks where staff show up and spend the whole day watching youtube, reading novels, and even having fun wasting their colleagues time. Because rebellion can take many forms. And we are not in this the blame and shame but to invite everyone to find a way of participating in rebellion in their own lives.

Ultimately what XR has brought to light is that climate change is a political challenge. It is positive to see a response from politicians, both locally and nationally. But to those politicians now declaring a climate emergency, we also need to talk about telling the truth. Because declaring a climate emergency would itself be a lie if it is not backed by measures that give it meaning. Our climate emergency requires us to respond at speed and scale, across all of society, and to prepare for what’s coming. It must be recognised as a whole-of-government agenda where both reducing and adapting to climate change are central concerns of all departments, as well as a standing item in cabinet meetings. So, to the politicians declaring an emergency, I ask you to now tell the truth. The truth about the coming disruption to our food production and imports, our fresh water supply, and our essential services. About what we need to do to reduce the disruption. About how that will entail sacrifice. From us all. And that this will be hard for most of us to accept and respond to. But that this is the conversation the country has to have. And have now.

Only then will pressure build on government to take significant action. Because there is a lot to change. The UK government has given the go ahead for a new north-sea oil field that will amount to one quarter of a billion tonnes of CO2 across the life of the oil field. The UK government has also just overseen planning permission for a new coal mine. Perhaps it didn’t realise how bad our situation is? Well since the IPCC report in October there are no excuses. It said we have to make massive cuts right now, each year for the next 12 years to have a chance of avoiding catastrophe. The government has done little to nothing to respond to the IPCC report.

So this is my message to the Prime Minister. You may not care much about the environment, but climate change is now a matter of national security. It is disrupting food production and water supplies. It threatens the future of Britain as a stable and prosperous country. Its time you heard the truth and told us the truth.

For the Prime Minister, it is time to come clean or step aside.

I was fascinated to read a letter in support of the Extinction Rebellion last week, expressing support, as business people, for the aims of XR. After 24 years focused on voluntary business efforts on sustainable development, last year I abandoned that to explore different approaches to our climate disaster. That included supporting people putting together XR. Part of that was being a lead signatory of the letter from academics last October that declared our support for the forthcoming rebellion. So, I believe in the utility of expressing public support as professionals in addition to what we can do as volunteers in the range of activities needed in a social movement. But the negative reaction from some to the letter from businesses brings to light some issues that need to be explored at this critical time, so I am writing this open letter.

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I see that the letter was signed mostly by people who work in companies that are proactive on environmental issues. So that means, like me, you have been following global sustainability issues closely, and must be feeling a similar anxiety at how bad things are becoming. The confirmation from the IPCC that we are heading for imminent disaster for the human race, as well as the rest of life on Earth, really helped bring that home. Suddenly, the lives of our own families seem at risk. Then there is the deeper pain we may feel as we sense that our own choices were mistaken. We believed that we had time and techniques to reform this capitalist system towards something sustainable. It was a wonderful idea at the time, and even got its swansong with international agreement of sustainable development goals. I have experienced myself how difficult it is for that sense of personal efficacy to fall apart.

The frustration we feel at the predicament we are in means we can feel great solidarity and respect for people giving up their freedom on the streets of London to bring national and global attention to our climate emergency. I felt such an honour to have helped a bit and spoken to launch the international rebellion on April 15^th.

As some of you may now have heard, the letter of support for XR from business leaders, and its suggestion of some sort of “XR Business” initiative, caused concern amongst many volunteers and convenors of XR, both in the UK and internationally. While some might think this was simply a case of uninformed negative views of businesses or business executives, that would be mistaken. There is something to be learned from the concern, which may help any potential future support from businesses, banks, celebrities or anyone with perceived power in the current unsustainable system.

Perhaps some of you have already joined in XR individually as meeting organisers, arrestables, legal observers, or the other many roles that exist in the movement. But in writing a supportive letter that identified your companies and your role as business people, you are not simply joining in as equals. You are deploying your status as people in the private sector to help add weight to this activism. We did the same as academics when we wrote that letter of support. In the case of business leaders, this raises some questions about the role of business in our current predicament and how that will need to change. While organisations and individuals from the private sector have major roles to play in responding to climate change, and in helping us cope with the massive disruptions ahead, it is important they help not hinder the power of citizens coming together for radical change.

So I am going to suggest some ideas that could be recognised by business people if considering support for Extinction Rebellion. These are only relevant after you confirm you understand what XR stands for. The group has declared a peaceful rebellion, which means inviting non-violent law-breaking as a way of rejecting the legitimacy of governments and the system they are part of. So in declaring support, you are recognising that our climate emergency means that our current political and economic system is broken and in need of transformation. After accepting that, then the following five ideas could be useful to hear from business leaders. If you may excuse the presumptuousness, I will have a go at writing it as a letter from you to XR:

Dear XR activists, as business leaders we recognise the following:

First, we failed. Although we tried to make businesses and financial institutions more sustainable from the inside, it has not stopped carbon emissions rising or biodiversity loss increasing. We work in the most funded and dynamic sector of society but couldn’t achieve the change we hoped for.

Second, we were wrong. We believed that working with existing systems of power, within market systems, was the way to deliver positive change at scale. While we do not know what could have been achieved by efforts going into other approaches towards climate stability and biodiversity conservation, we told people our approach was more pragmatic and scalable.

Third, we will learn. We believed that being business professionals gave us credibility in addressing issues of climate and biodiversity. Now we realise that some of the assumptions and attitudes we have learned in the private sector may not be that useful, so we are ready to learn from others.

Fourth, citizens need more influence than us. Although as individual executives we think we have been useful participants in dialogues with communities and governments, overall, the effect has been to prioritise the interests of profit-making over other concerns. Because businesses can fund initiatives, lobbyists and so on, as a sector we have had unfair influence over our societies. As this has coincided with the predicament we are in, it is understandable to conclude this unfair influence is at fault. Therefore, citizens and scientists need more influence than us in future on how to drawdown and cut carbon, as well as how to manage the difficulties ahead.

Fifth, we must be made to behave. Although it is difficult for some of us to say this, it is the natural implication of where we have got to now facing catastrophic climate change. Praising individual companies doing useful things was never enough. We need state intervention to redesign the economy so we can more swiftly decarbonise and also prepare for the disruptions ahead. That means corporate support for changes in the law, perhaps even introducing a law on ecocide by corporations.

We hope that by expressing these realisations, we can find ways for our knowledge and resources to help humanity respond to our climate emergency. That may mean supporting you from a distance as organisations, but closely as individuals. Or it may mean finding ways to support you more actively with our organisations. Perhaps we can find ways to hold space open for your activism and ideas without any influence from the private sector. We will certainly work to ensure other companies do not get in your way.

Sincerely,

Concerned executives, deeply impressed by your sacrifice.

I do not speak for XR in presenting these suggestions. However, I am aware of the sentiment of many of the lead organisers and volunteers and believe that if business executives wish to support or engage as representatives of companies, then it will help to acknowledge the need for massive change.

The XR leaders I have worked with all recognise that the difficulties we face require a great coming together of people from all walks of life and all corners of the world. They deliberately avoid blaming people or sectors, as they know we need to foster a culture of forgiveness and love, so we do not make matters worse as an unstable climate ruins our normal life. It’s an approach that I share, and what we are promoting in the Deep Adaptation Forum, which is focused on enabling readiness for likely societal collapse.

Like me, the XR leadership does not believe that one group or ideology has all the answers. To help get things started, with Rabbi Newman, I shared some ideas for the kinds of economic reforms we will need to help us decarbonise and prepare for disruption, on the XR Blog. While we will need more ideas to be shared and trialled, the options for responding to the climate emergency must not be driven by those with more time and money to shape dialogues, policies and initiatives.

I understand how deeply challenging this issue is so thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Jem Bendell

Professor of Sustainability Leadership

Former Director of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS)

Relevant reading:

In the Company of Revolutionaries

The Love in Deep Adaptation

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Hundreds of professionals are gathering on the Deep Adapation Forum to find each other and collaborate. A new monthly online Q&A series gives you an opportunity to put a question to a leading thinker on personal and collective responses to anticipated collapse due to climate chaos. Each session will be hosted by Professor Jem Bendell.

This year we’ll be talking to:

Carolyn Baker
May 3rd

Carolyn offers life and leadership coaching as well as spiritual counseling for people who want to live more resiliently in the present as they prepare for the future. Carolyn works closely with Andrew Harvey and other spiritual luminaries to live and promote Sacred Activism—the marriage of effecting change in the world with consciousness transformation. Carolyn is the author of many books on collapse.

Joanna Macy
June 4th

A scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A hugely respected voice in the movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with five decades of activism.Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.

Gail Bradbrook
July 17th

Gail has been researching, planning and training for mass civil disobedience since 2010 and is a co-founder of the social movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) which rapidly spread internationally since its launch in October 2018.

Deb Ozarko
August 7th

Deb is the creator and former host of the Unplug podcast and the author of “Beyond Hope: Letting Go of a World in Collapse.”

Adrian Tait
September 2nd

Adrian is a co-founder of the Climate Psychology Alliance. He is retired after 25 years as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with extensive experience in teaching and supervision in the NHS and privately.

Katherine Wilkinson
October 10th

Katharine speaks about climate action and gender equity. She was Senior Writer for the New York Times bestseller Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin, 2017). The book details the 100 most substantive climate solutions and articulates a bold vision of a future without global warming.

Vanessa Andreotti
November 4th

Vanessa has extensive experience working across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, community engagement, indigenous knowledge systems and internationalization. Her research focuses on analyses of historical and systemic patterns of reproduction of knowledge and inequalities and how these mobilize global imaginaries that limit or enable different possibilities for (co)existence and global change.

Charles Eisenstein
December 14th

Charles is the author of “Climate, a New Story” and other books, and it widely considered one of the world’s leading contemporary environmental philosophers.

To attend the webinars, you’ll need to join the forum!

(The video appears at the end of the transcript)

I’m glad to be here in Oxford Circus where today we challenge the circus of lies that is our political system and mainstream media.

I am an academic, a Professor at a University. So my profession is meant to be all about finding and sharing truths. But I discovered that most of us have been too afraid to look closely at what is happening in our world and what we are doing to it.

For over 20 years I slaved away at changing business and finance to be a little kinder to people and planet. Then a couple of years ago I was invited to speak at a conference on climate change and business. As the time to speak came close I felt a rising fear. To get up on stage and give another pep talk? To say well done and let’s do more? It had begun to feel like a lie. I ditched my standard speech and told a room of climate specialists that I think it is too late to save this system. Too late for tinkering around the edges. I spoke without any idea what it means we should do now. Apart from how we must stop pretending to ourselves and to the world. And start speaking our truth.

We have come out on to the streets today to raise our voices in alarm. We knew climate change was coming, but we didn’t know how fast. 17 of the last 18 years were the hottest ever recorded. We have woken up to the warm dawn of dangerously hot century. Forests are catching fire, harvests failing, animals and insects dying off in vast numbers. The extra energy trapped from our carbon emissions is warming the oceans by as much as if six atomic bombs are going off every second. That’s an explosion of warming and turbulence that we cannot turn off.

Our media have failed us. When it was over 20 degrees during mid-winter most of us thought it was nice but weird and scary. But on TV and newspapers we were told how people were just happy to be basking in the warmth. The same journalists scoff at climate change when a blast of Arctic air is forced down on Britain precisely because of the breakdown of normal air patterns.

Last year we saw how chaotic weather could begin to threaten our own lives.
In the UK and in many European countries we grew a fifth less vegetables and grains because it was too hot and dry. Imagine that year on year, globally, and worse. If the authorities think today is a bit of a headache imagine if we were all hungry right now.
In the last few years we have seen more worrying information from the world’s most credible organisations. Just last month the UN’s weather organisation reported that the global sea level is rising faster and faster. That tells us that the warming of our global climate is speeding up. Which suggests the Earth has begun to heat itself because of what we have started.

So I’m sorry, our future climate is not under our control.

So what do we do? Go home?

No.

We gather and rebel not with a vision of a fairy-tale future where we have fixed the climate, but because it is right to do what we can. To slow the change. To reduce the harm. To save what we can. To invite us back to sanity and love.

The truth is we are scared and we are brave enough to say so.

The truth is we are grieving and we are proud enough to say so.

The truth is we are traumatised and we are open enough to say so.

We are angry and we are calm enough to say so and invite others to join us.

And though we are uncertain, we are smart enough to say so.

We are here to demand that the government admit the truth to themselves and start the dialogue on what to do now.

As countless scientific reports emerged in the last 12 months about how dire our situation is, what has the government done to prepare us? Or even warn us? It did not say, we need to think about how to feed ourselves when other countries have no surplus to sell us. It did not say, let’s build seed banks, greenhouses, and irrigation so we can grow food whatever the weather. No, it said we are doing OK in reducing our emissions, so we can frack gas and mine coal.

Given what we know about climate, we can see that; The government is lying to us that the future of our food supply is nothing to worry about. The government is lying to us that our pensions will be worth anything 20 years from now. The government is lying to us that the economy is stronger than in 2007. The government is lying to us that our children should stay in school and study hard to get on in a global economy.

Maybe that is because they are lying to themselves. We are here to wake them up.

Since Al Gore’s film in 2006 we have been told to do our bit. I can switch off a light, but I can’t switch off the consumer society that requires us to trash more of the planet to service debts to the banks. Our climate crisis was always a political challenge. The Extinction Rebellion is now making that known.

And it has started to work. Some politicians are slowly coming on board. Last month the Labour Party declared a climate emergency and backed the school strikes. But their policy proposals will need to go so much further.

Meanwhile the government still sees climate change as a mere hindrance to economic growth. They seem to believe that the belly of Mother Earth contains unlimited fossil fuels for us to gouge out and burn. Nothing seems to shake this belief. It’s why peaceful disobedience is needed to force their attention.

And if the politicians do all come on board then the necessary changes won’t just happen. Because they don’t have any track record in pursuing the kind of systemic change we need. That means taking on the financial system. We will need to peacefully rebel again and again.

Today is the start of a broader rebellion against business as usual. Taking inspiration from today, we need to stretch the rebellion into our workplaces. Not simply to disrupt. But to risk those awkward conversations with our colleagues, so every decision might begin to align with reducing or adapting to the climate crisis. Because the changes ahead will affect all of us in every workplace and community.

Our elders in action at Marble Arch (members of Christian Climate Action).

Today will be beautiful. But it might also be stressful, especially as the rebellion unfolds, as it will. So, I want to address our fellow humans here today and around the world who serve as our police.

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.

Our Mother Earth Says Me Too. Our Mother Earth Says Me Too.

I want to share a poem that speaks to this. It’s not a famous old poem but written by a friend. Because we are writing history right now. It’s called Galvanize, by Toni Spencer.

“The time has come
to galvanize those heaving sighs from
fraught days and spiritual malaise. From
miles and miles spent in supermarket aisles
overwhelmed by choices to the point where
we lose our voices and so silently
we loosen our ties to life.
“Oh my loves what magic we could make if we
galvanized. Realized beyond fantasized futures, the
power of our presence”
Yes. The time has come, to get together.
To claim the prize of a collective awakening:
Get off our arses. Realize our vastness and
put it to work: Stopping the shopping and stepping out in the
streets. Shop fronts. Fields.
Boardrooms. Classrooms. Living rooms.
It’s time to galvanize. To alchemize a fullness of voice.
A radical choice. To speak up for what we know
to be true.”

We will not accept this mass extinction quietly.

We will not accept the threat of our own extinction quietly.

We may not succeed in shaping the future but we can succeed in living our truth today.

And living it louder. Living it prouder. Living it together. Thank you.

In recent months, I have talked privately to more third sector workers, activists, philanthropists, religious leaders and government officials who seek to be useful in the world at this difficult time. They have been reflecting on what it is they could be doing and supporting with their funds, networks and know-how.

People involved in funding charitable activities have a particular challenge, because climate change risks undermining everything. Whether you sponsor a school, human rights organisation, lifeboat, museum, donkey sanctuary or something else, it is all going to be affected by climate chaos and a societal collapse. Crucially, the threat of imminent societal collapse poses a challenge to normal notions of prudence within charitable foundations. Why only spend the earnings or a share of the endowment each year when we have such a short window for action to reduce the scale of the catastrophe ahead?

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This topic of likely collapse is so huge and all-encompassing that it affects everybody in every part of the world in every professional practice, in their work, family, community and political lives. Last year I wrote about the various forms of collapse-acceptance and the ways I have been seeing people integrate this into their lives and the choices they are making professionally and personally. Since then I have been on my own journey. As I have a background in non-profit and foundation strategies and performance, writing a report for the UN over a decade ago, I am interested in how activists and grant makers are exploring where to focus their energies and funds. To aid your thinking, I am going to list some of the approaches I have heard people taking, before explaining why I have taken a different path with the launch of the Deep Adaptation Forum. I share these ideas because if you are someone who could provide grants for others, then you have an important role to play as the world wakes up to our predicament.

First, you could decide to attempt to reach the most powerful people in the world in terms of decision-making power and the ability to move money and seek to help them understand, decide and implement what to do to buy societies some time before a societal collapse, reduce harm during the process and plant the seeds of a new way of life. Who might such powerful people be? In my experience of working with board level executives of large organisations and top politicians, I know they are limited within what their roles allow. Therefore, some people are now looking towards engaging the billionaires and leveraging their power to promote wider change. Let’s call this the Benevolent Billionaire strategy.

Second, you could decide to reach out to those who are disproportionately affected by climate chaos, because of our concern for human rights, equality and justice. For instance, you might seek to help disadvantaged communities to become more resilient to future financial or food shocks, or the breakdown in law and order. Or you could try to increase the voice of people from marginalized groups within countries and worldwide, on policies in general and climate adaptation in particular. With this approach it also makes sense to focus on young people and helping them to prepare. Let’s call this the Solidarity Forever strategy.

Third, you could decide to begin from where you are at, and therefore look at what skills and networks you have that you could re-purpose for this agenda. You could do that even if the people and activities involved might not be the most important in terms of systemic or scalable impact. Your reason could be that you would know what you are doing and who you are talking to. So, if you are working in investment finance, you might seek to bring “deep adaptation” into your investment work. Let’s call this the Step-by-Step strategy.

Fourth, you could seek to raise awareness about impending collapse, as fast and as wide as possible, without an allegiance to any one approach to reducing harm. That might involve you joining a civil disobedience campaign, getting arrested, tweeting a lot or just having tough conversations with colleagues, friends and family. Let’s call this the Shout-it-Out strategy.

Fifth, you could take time to re-discover what it is you most love doing, now that your old stories of identity, conformity, respect for the system and for incremental change no longer hold true for you. That might mean you drop everything, sell your house and retrain as a yoga teacher, breathwork host, or documentary film maker. No, this isn’t fiction. I’ve talked to many who are exploring such a path. Let’s call this the Live-a-Little strategy.

I suggest these names for the different strategies to make it easier to discuss (for instance, leave your comments below). I have been supporting such responses in a number of ways in the months since my Deep Adaptation paper came out (downloads from the top right). But I see they all have some limitations. Benevolent Billionaires can prove elusive and once engaged tend to have their own ideas, set hard from a past of ego-affirmation. A Solidarity Forever strategy soon comes up against the realisation that while people can do some things in their local communities, they aren’t really in control of most means of resilience. And working street-by-street really doesn’t seem to match the urgency of our challenge. A Step-by-Step Strategy soon invites confusion, apathy or ridicule from people who are busy on their normal work and wondering “what’s got in to you”. After such set-backs you can begin to wonder why you are seeking to influence a profession that probably won’t exist in 10 years. I can report that the Live-a-Little strategy feels wonderful. Until it doesn’t. And you begin to desire to be doing something a bit wider. If you are that-way-inclined, then the Shout-it-Out strategy also feels wonderful. Until it doesn’t. And you begin to wonder whether waving placards, avoiding police batons and hoping government wakes up will impact much in the long run.

As I wrote at the start, this agenda affects everyone you know and all aspects of their life. That’s why I have found it difficult to give all my focus to one of those five types of response I listed above. So what should receive our attention and funding?

A typical strategic approach to grant-making is where the funder asks a person or organisation to present an argument about what is important to do for a specific target group, with a clear theory of change and mechanisms of accountability. That sounds very sensible, and far more professional than the kind of grant-making that seeks to make the donor look good (or less bad). But given the predicament we are in, I do not believe the typical approach to be suitable for all forms of philanthropy. Because to focus on that approach would reflect a hubristic view that we can predict the future, control reality, as well as the idea a donor has a better view than others. Instead, none of us really know what the heck to do right now as we face unprecedented times. Therefore, I see the importance of helping people, whose acceptance of likely collapse is affecting them deeply and transforming their approach to work and life, to find each other and co-create initiatives of all kinds. Therefore, the Deep Adaptation Forum and its associated social networks is not based on a strategy for enabling change other than helping people come together around this agenda and explore ideas from a spirit of compassion, curiosity, respect, and agency. That means we still believe that there are things that can be done to buy humanity time, reduce harm and enable learning, perhaps awakening, within these difficult times.

Within the Forum we are pursuing these aims by supporting the formation of professional groups, from coaching to schooling to farming, where people are enabled to meet by videolink. We professionally facilitate those online meetings as well as train volunteers to do so. We are also supporting in-person dialogues that use open space facilitation to respond to the issues that participants wish to discuss. We have launched monthly online Q&A sessions with relevant experts. The Forum is and will remain free and activities are produced through voluntary work and small donations that are paid direct to freelancers. Many new projects may emerge over time, from the participants themselves. To guide that emergence, we are clear about how we wish to both embody and enable loving approaches to our predicament. That might sound obvious, but on this topic some people take discussions towards preparing for violence, while others say that nothing is worth doing at all.

Aside from the Forum, what kind of philanthropic or grant-making philosophy could be useful today in the face of increasing climate-related disruptions to our way of life? If you are providing grants for specific services to the disadvantaged, such as victims of environmental catastrophes, famines or wars, then questions of efficiency and traceability are important. However, this kind of grant-making does little to address the causes or risk factors behind the such troubles. To work on that, invites us to support wider efforts at education, cultural change, governmental reform and economic reform. In that arena, my experience in giving and receiving financial funding is that the most interesting and powerful impacts and the best relations are where four things are made explicit.

First, that the funding is a gift. It is not about the funder trying to build their own profile and power or to control the recipient. It is a statement of faith in the person, their organisation (if they are within one), the general domain of action and the unfairness of our societies which create such divisions between those with funds and those without.

Second, that the funding is to empower the recipient to work on the issue domain as they determine, where the forms of action may change as the recipient learns along the way and as situations evolve.

Third, that the grantee shares the grant-makers’ philosophy of responsiveness to those with less power in society, and so does not impose their solutions on others. This leads to a form of cascading downwards accountability to push back against power injustices in society.

Fourth, that the funder and recipient agree to a means of ongoing communication which is like that of honest and critical friends, rather than one seeking to please the other. The extent of communication is agreed between the two and might simply involve a bimonthly email update and video call.

I will call this approach Generative Giving. It recognises that the wisdom is not within the funder, but is found through dialogue between the funder, funded and those affected. The likely impact is not increased by more spreadsheet entries in either the planning or reporting. Instead it is increased by basing relations in a spirit of gift, trust, empowerment and dialogue. It is the kind of approach that the freelancers of the Deep Adaptation Forum have benefited from greatly. If you share this philosophy, we would love to hear from you (via the About page).

I realise that if you work as a grant maker in a foundation then it is not so easy to fund activities in the way I have just described. In the pursuit of professionalism and accountability the field of charitable giving has been twisted into a bureaucratic process, overseen by trustees who assume a quiet life and don’t rock the boat. Well that boat is about to sink. Given that we face societal collapse due to climate chaos, the financial assets that support philanthropy will evaporate in the process. The power of the philanthropist only exists within this society and our systems. Therefore, it would be prudent to spend down an entire endowment within the next ten years to try and buy humanity time, reduce harm and seed what might come next. If that means changing the core rules of a charitable foundation, or flouting them, then so be it. Now is the time for trustees and grant-makers to rebel against a stifled approach that is not fit for our time of crisis.