essay – 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

Here are some frameworks for helping each other amidst the mess

August 17, 2026August 4, 2026 jembendell

colorful abstract swirls in vibrant tones

Billions of people are experiencing strange weather, rising prices, bad politics, and watching worse on the news. Sadly, there are a range of distracting responses similar to what I predicted in my first speech on the topic of collapse, back in November 2016. Despite that, there are many people seeking to integrate their awareness of the predicament into how they approach life from now on. That is why I updated and added to the Deep Adaptation framework of questions, which helps us explore how to respond. As the concept is used within hundreds of initiatives, people have their own ideas about how to deeply adapt, but I believe the upgraded framework is a useful and more comprehensive tool.

As I noticed more people feel anxious about disruption and collapse, I complemented the Deep Adaptation framework with two new models. First, is an approach to personal development, called the RECKON framework. It has been shaping the type of qualities and orientations we are cultivating in each in the peer mentoring of the Metacrisis Initiative (called metacritical mentoring). Second, is a set of 15 action areas, which I dub ‘rainbow prepping’ to emphasise how they enact a more positive orientation than many prepping conversations and initiatives.

Below I provide brief summaries of the concepts, as well as what I mean by societal collapse and the metacrisis. If you wonder if some people sound lost in the face of disruptions and bad news, then this post/email could be useful if you would send it to them. We will discuss the Rainbow Prepping approach in our next Metacrisis salon (meeting info follows at end).

Societal Collapse

A process of the breakdown of modern industrial societies is already underway, driven by ecological degradation and the internal contradictions of an expansionist economic system. As there is such overshoot and momentum, although breakdown could be softened and new systems seeded, the process can’t be stopped, and so collapse is an appropriate term. It does not necessarily mean near term human extinction, but that becomes increasingly likely without massive awakening and organising. See Chapter 1 of Breaking Together for a fuller discussion.

Metacrisis

A useful term for our global predicament, for some of our conversations, can be “the metacrisis.” The term points towards a deeper crisis underlying the myriad problems we experience today, in politics, economics, culture, health and environment. That underlying crisis is in the assumptions, values, beliefs, norms and habits of our societies. Therefore, the term metacrisis can invite us to consider what is in crisis within ourselves, which can be the beginning of deeper transformations. However, many commentators avoid that when they use the term to speak of a degradation of the traditional values and economic structures which privilege them, rather than realising that is what drives the disruption and degradation. See my speech on ‘the magic of the metacrisis’ for a fuller discussion.

Deep Adaptation

After becoming collapse aware, many people are inspired to change their lives and engage in a pro-social and pro-environmental manner. That involves working on adapting personally and collectively to increasing disruption, loss, and damage. Some people find the term deep adaptation useful to explain their approach. Some use the 6R framework of Deep Adaptation, which I developed, for their reflections and discussions. The term and concept became well known after my paper in 2018 with that title went viral. See the completed framework for a fuller discussion of the topics of Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, Reconciliation, Reclamation and Regeneration.

Rainbow Prepping

Preparedness for disasters and collapse can be reframed from defensive survivalism to a positive, collaborative approach. Unlike conventional prepping’s grim defensiveness, ‘rainbow prepping‘ emphasizes living kindly and cooperatively amid disruption. The concept offers fifteen action areas (organized as a mnemonic) spanning residence Resilience, Amusement sustainability, Income diversification, Neighbourhood involvement, Business localisation, Orthobiotic wellbeing, Water/food security, Practical skills, Relocation readiness, Ecological stewardship, Psychological wholeness, Political engagement, Information and interaction sovereignty, Needs simplification, and Gumption promotion. Rather than a burdensome “to-do” list, these areas form a “play list” inviting exploration. The rainbow symbolizes both hope after storms, connection between earthly and divine, and the celebration of diversity. It points to an approach to collapse readiness that maintains dignity, creativity, and joy even as the systems we depend upon become unreliable.

Metacritical Mentoring

Collapse-aware people need supportive spaces that honour difficult realities without delusional positivity or professional gatekeeping. Therefore, evolving professional and life coaching so it equips us to live within the metacrisis and is more widely available, is an important challenge and opportunity. Unlike conventional models assuming stable progress and individual optimization, Metacritical Mentoring foregrounds collective truth telling and liberation, emotional authenticity, adaptive capacity, and critical wisdom. Participants mentor each other as equals, welcoming difficult emotions like grief and dread as sources of insight rather than obstacles. The approach seeks to cultivate “heartfulness”—compassionate presence. The approach in the Metacrisis Initiative aims to democratize access by not relying on paid professionals. It also invites meta critique of the process itself, to empower the evolution of practices and models.

RECKON orientations framework

This is a personal development model of six orientations for responding meaningfully to the metacrisis and societal collapse. Reality-facing means courageously acknowledging difficult truths without denial. Emotional appreciation involves processing difficult feelings as sources of intelligence rather than weakness. Critical wisdom integrates logic, mindfulness, intuition, and critical literacy to see clearly and resist manipulation. Kinship responsibility recognises our interdependence with all life and future generations. Organic meaning releases attachment to progress ideology in favour of presence and participation. Numinous adaptability is the term offered for flexible identity adjustment while maintaining ethical grounding and embracing spiritual transformation. These RECKON orientations complement the 6Rs of Deep Adaptation, addressing how we respond, not just what we respond to, grounded in heartfulness and contemplative liberation.

For a more comprehensive list of the concepts I use in the field of deep adaptation, see the Key Ideas page.

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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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Living Purposefully within Metacrisis and Collapse

July 18, 2026 jembendell

Last year I was dancing in a field with hundreds of people from countries across Asia. We were singing, holding hands, and moving in the ways we had just been taught. Most of the songs used mantric phrases, taken from different religions. But a couple of songs were in English, and at one point, I found myself singing…

“Why have you come to Earth?

Why have you taken birth?

Why have you come?

To love, serve and remember…”

The melody and simple message stuck with me. Subsequently I discovered it was written by John Astin. He was inspired by the words of Maharaji, who had told one of his famous pupils to “love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.”

The song offers an answer to something really deep. Like many people, at times I have struggled with the matter of the “meaning of life”, and its related rabbit holes on the nature and meaning (or many meanings), of the cosmos, Life, evolution, humanity, or my own life. How such meanings might inform my own life’s purpose, here onwards, can also be a confusing question. Clearly, our means to understand such matters through our senses, cognition, conceptualisation, and language, is fundamentally limited. But that doesn’t mean we either dismiss the matter altogether, or adopt a pre-packed story from our culture (and defensively dismiss curiosity as lacking humility). As our old assumptions and aspirations weaken in the face of metacrisis and collapse, many of us have been returning to these deeper questions of life. Many of us are doing that as part of finding a new direction in life after ditching the old. In this essay, I want to speak more fully to that issue than before, to help you reconsider, or reconfirm, your own sense of meaning and purpose in the midst of metacrisis, or whilst considering societal collapse. It’s also because currently I am doing the same.

Talking with people who have participated in the salons and peer mentoring of the Metacrisis Initiative, I am reminded of the range of views on how to live in response to our predicament. Some are primarily focused on emotional stability, inner peace, and learning how to cope, personally, with difficult realities. Others are focused on doing whatever remains possible to reduce harm and generate possibilities for the future, without any certainty that such efforts will succeed. Many of us have been trying to find some balance between these impulses.

These conversations led me to adopt the strapline “living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse” for both my website and the Metacrisis Initiative. I will come back to the concept of ‘purpose’ in a moment. When I use the term Metacrisis I am referring to the interacting worldwide crises of our time and their deeper causes and implications. Those include ecological overshoot, climate disruption, biodiversity loss, wealth inequality, economic fragility, political dysfunction, technological acceleration, and cultural fragmentation, and the deeper crisis of meaning that shapes our responses to such changes, while being implicated in their cause. When I speak of societal collapse, I mean a significant and enduring reduction in the complexity, capacity, and reliability of systems that people depend upon for everyday life.

Neither term is a prediction of imminent armageddon and human extinction. Rather, they are ways of describing a predicament that is unfolding and will shape our lives in unpredictable ways for years to come. In my book Breaking Together, I laid out the data that suggests we are already within a process of the creeping collapse of industrial consumer societies. In such circumstances, it is only normal, and right, that people question the meaning and purpose of their lives. That is a powerful implication of collapse-awareness, which is so often overlooked by people who want us to remain positive and hopeful.

The concept of ‘meaning’ concerns how we understand our lives and experiences. It involves ideas of coherence, significance, identity and belonging. I’ve been experiencing my own ‘meaning crisis’ since 2017, as my personal sense of self-worth before then was bound up with the idea of contributing boldly to a managed global transition to a sustainable way of life. Without that, I have recognised there’s meaning for me in being more present to life in all its dimensions, with an open heart and mind. That is associated with my realisation that the meaning of life could be to simply live it more fully. What does that mean? Currently, I see it means I don’t let my fears, wounds, culture, and egoic drives push me too far from the possibilities for love, wonder, gratitude, connection and creativity. I’ll return to that later, but for now, I want to look closer at the idea of ‘purpose’.

When the concept of life’s meaning has an application and direction, we are in the realm of life’s purpose. What do we orient ourselves towards, and seek to embody or contribute through our lives? That question of our purpose is asking us what we do about our sense of the meaningfulness of life (in general, and of our own lives).

Some collapse-aware people don’t like the concept of purpose, as it seems, for them, to involve both ego and attachment to outcome. The most resilient people in terrible situations have been observed to be those who can find meaning in the smallest of things, rather than retaining a story of their activities contributing to a wider purpose. However, I wonder if they also have a sense of purpose, or underlying orientation. To devote oneself to presence is a purpose. To cultivate non-attachment is a purpose. To embody compassion is a purpose. So the distinction between being and doing is often less clear than it first appears. People commit to, and practice, ways of being present and kind in the world. Thus, we are orienting towards something, even when that something is a deeper quality of being.

We orient ourselves in this life. So we tell stories, implicitly or explicitly, about what actions matter and why. That reflects a yearning for purpose that is a deep aspect of human nature, and such purpose can be found at many scales. It would be a mistake to consider the yearning for purpose as synonymous with setting external objectives on a large scale. For one person, purpose may involve raising children with love and integrity. For another, restoring a local river or forest. For others, it can be creating music, supporting neighbours, preserving wisdom, accompanying the dying, growing food regeneratively, strengthening community resilience, or helping future generations inherit something of value. Some purposes focus on collective outcomes. Others focus on ways of being. In my experience, most of us involve some combination of both, whether or not we are explicit about it.

Before I gave up my career in academia, I was regularly interacting with people who were discussing purposes on the largest possible scales. For instance, they wanted their lives to contribute to goals such as the salvation of humanity, the flourishing of all species, or the healing of the planet. Such visions and aspirations can be beautiful and inspiring. They can also motivate extraordinary dedication and sacrifice. I inhabited such stories for decades (or they inhabited me). But in that time I also became aware of a paradox. As purposes become grander, they can become less authentic. Because they can drift away from lived reality into abstraction. They can become performative identities rather than genuine callings. Grand visions and purposes can sometimes distract us from what is immediately present and possible. We may become attached to stories about changing the world while neglecting the people, places, and responsibilities directly before us. Maybe that’s why there are many examples in history of people who were principled leaders while negligent with their families.

Being aware of this paradox does not mean that large-scale visions and purposes are wrong. It means they require humility. The larger the scale of our aspirations, the greater the need to remain grounded in the reality of our own lives and relationships. We can also be vigilant about another risk of grand visions, that no matter how laudable, they can impose a way of thinking on other people and stimulate criticism of people who do not accept them. We see that in the field of religions, where people preach dogmatic interpretations of the future for us all, and how we should live. Similarly, in the field of environmental concern, some commentators tell us we must believe in a transition to an ecologically sustainable society, or that we would be partly to blame for future failure. This process is closely connected to policing of our emotions, which sadly serves authority not democratic dialogue.

Visions can be useful at personal and collective scales. They can help us choose what to do, and what not to do. They can also help us find motivation and inspire motivation in others. However, psychological research demonstrates that such visions do not need to be grand, such as those describing the future of large organisations, whole nations, or the planet, for there to be a positive effect on clarity and motivation. Depending on the person and situation, visions can become delusional, enabling denial of circumstances and delaying difficult choices.

My own positive vision is not primarily a vision of a future society. It is a vision of more people living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse. It is a vision of people becoming clearer about the importance of love and awareness, wonder and inquiry, and how they wish to live amidst uncertainty. Within that framework, it means my individual purpose can be found in helping more people to live like that, as well as orienting myself towards that. I’ve been summarising it to my friends as attempting to be well to help well.

When I mention love, I mean universal and unconditional love. That is the quality of engaged benevolence towards all life, including one’s own. It is not naive or idealistic for that to be the foundation of personal or collective purpose, as precisely when outcomes become uncertain that returning to deeper and universal understandings and feelings can be our guide. For if, instead, our purpose were to depend upon achieving a particular collective outcome, then it would be fragile. Instead, when our purpose is grounded in love (for people, places, creatures, communities, future generations), then it can endure regardless of what happens.

To arrive at this view, I have been helped by the mystical strands of various world religions, and the people involved in them. I have also been shaped by moments of tragedy and grief, where the primacy of love cut through my daily preoccupations and social conditioning. I have also benefitted from some non-ordinary states of consciousness, which dissolved my sense of separate self, so I felt as if the most fundamental reality is itself universal unconditional love. That perspective on fundamental reality, in a physical and metaphysical sense, also provides a potential answer to the ‘meaning of life’ question – for all life, or one’s own. As universal unconditional love is the fundamental nature of being, then the meaning of life is simply that love, however it is being expressed through matter, energy and information. That is why so many mystics, from Christians, to Hindus, to Sufis, to Animists, say that the meaning and purpose of our lives is to wake up to our true natures as an aspect of the universal unconditional love which cultures label differently as sacred, divine, soul, spirit or God.

With that in mind, the way ahead involves two dimensions. First, we must include in our normal lives whatever tunes us towards a more expansive consciousness. Second, we must notice whether it is from our moments of expansiveness or contractedness that we are assessing our options in life. Fully expansive, we can await guidance from beyond ourselves, whichever way we might conceive that which is ‘beyond’. That’s why many people feel like they have a ‘calling’ to do something in life. Just as long as we don’t get attached to that calling, as a new egoic identity, it can become a beautiful motivation in life. I believe the qualities or orientations for Deep Adaptation can be helpful for that, especially the ones I labelled ‘organic meaning’ and ‘numinous adaptability’ (outlined here).

Our era of metacrisis and collapse involves finding ways of interpreting and applying ancient ideas on meaning and purpose in a novel context. Important aspects of our situation are both the certainty of material decline for the majority of humanity in the foreseeable future, and uncertainty around what could be useful to do to produce a slower, kinder, and more generative collapse. It is a time that asks us to be able to care without illusions, to remain open-hearted without reward, to act without guarantees, to be well enough to help well, and, ultimately, to love without end.

I can’t say I have been living like this myself — but more so than before. I am currently struggling with what the core ideas I’ve described in this essay mean for my choices today, in new circumstances. Those include being older, living differently, earning less, and knowing different people. That’s why I am grateful to be part of a peer mentoring group within the Metacrisis Initiative, and to also have the benefit of guidance from spiritually reflective people, whether or not they have official roles. One teacher is Reverend Wright, who joins the August 2026 Metacrisis Salon. Information on that follows at the end of this essay, for members of initiative.

Rather than share with you more ideas on how myself and other people are finding meaning and purpose in an era of metacrisis and collapse, it could be more useful to ask you some questions to reflect on. They are not as punchy as the way you’d be asked about the purpose of your life at a Business School. So I won’t be asking what you’d die for: any useful intensification from such a question can paradoxically shrink personal reflection into what might sound right according to a peer group. Instead, I have composed the questions to unpack some assumptions and open up some possibilities. I recommend making notes on them, and then sharing this essay with a collapse-aware friend of yours with a request to discuss your respective answers. If it happens, I hope you have fun!

After publishing this, I’ll be learning ‘Love, Serve, Remember’ on guitar and how to teach the moves for us to sing it in our future circles of the Dances of Universal Peace.

Questions on the meanings and purposes of lives

So much of our thinking is influenced by deep stories of what is right and wrong, admirable or embarrassing, which we have learned from our culture, family and friends. So when you reflect on the following, try to sense whether there is any of that ‘social gaze’ on how you should think and feel; if it might be influencing your answers, try to answer them again as if that external judgement didn’t matter.

Could I live fully without any sense of meaning or purpose in my life?
Is finding the meaning or purpose of my life a basic need and/or central goal of my life?
Could meaning or purpose in my life be fixed and singular, or plural and changing?
Might any potential meanings and purposes of my life be discovered by me, chosen by me, given to me, or taught to me? Does that matter to their validity, in general, or to me?
Why might some meanings and purposes for my life be more valuable than others?
Do I think (or sense) that there is a universal meaning and purpose for any human life, or Life in general?
Is it important for me to understand such meaning and purpose? To be able to describe it myself? To be able to communicate it to others? If so, why?
How do the meanings and purposes of my own life relate to a broader sense of the meaning and purpose of Life in general, if at all?
With all these ideas on general and personal meaning and purpose in my heart and mind: what might collapse be asking of me?
What could be an additional question, or a better question, to guide your own inquiry on this matter?

If you answered any of these questions using the standard language of your (sub-)culture, such as “God teaches me…” or “Karma dictates that…” or “Being a responsible parent/child means…” or “The plant medicine revealed to me that…” then I’d ask you to reflect on these questions once more, without those words and concepts, to allow your insight into what might be underneath such labels for what is true and good.

I invite you to share your thoughts on this essay, these questions, and any answers, on the relevant thread of the Facebook page of the Metacrisis Initiative. If you are a member of the Initiative please share them in the community chat, and also join the salon on this topic on August 3rd/4th. These questions also comprise the reflection exercise ahead of Meeting 5 of the Peer Mentoring. If you want to join a future cohort of peer mentors, please join the initiative.

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The image represents some Indian spiritual figures from different religions and periods, all of whom understood the joy of awakening to the oneness of reality (however we choose to label it). Over the years I’ve appreciated learning what each of them said and/or did. So the image is my celebration of the wisdom from a land which I am excited to be returning to for the Dances of Universal Peace. Do you recognise any of the people depicted here? From left to right: Anandamayi Ma, Ambedkhar, Mirra Alfassa, Vinoba Bhave, Inayat Khan, Kasturba, Maharaji, Sri Sarada Devi, Anthony de Mello, Hazrat Babajan.

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They Weren’t 10 Commandments

June 18, 2026June 13, 2026 jembendell

by Jem Bendell

I went to a Catholic school. For boys. Run by monks. When I tell people that today, it draws some sniggers or even questions of concern. Despite some scandals which I learned of later, I have nothing salacious to report from my own time at St John’s College. The couple of friends I’m still in touch with from those school days have found their own faith, but not due to what we learned at school. Looking back, I realise we were being shown religious belief in a way that felt out-dated and restrictive. The importance of love, and of serving others, would sometimes get mentioned, but the culture didn’t feel that way. At times it was violently the opposite. Looking back, I sense we missed out on something important. As the true message in wisdom traditions is both kind and liberatory, including the message from a deeper Christianity. A recent example of my misunderstandings of Christianity from childhood, highlights the challenge and opportunity for a kinder and more emancipatory embrace of faith in today, as times become tough and worrying.

At school in the 1980s, the Ten Commandments seemed like the conceptual equivalents of our old desks with their unused holes for ink pots. We scrawled in biro across exercise books on top of those desk relics from an era that was alien to us. When we were taught about the commandments not to steal, lie, and murder, they seemed sensible — but the language around them was strange and pompous. “Thou shalt not bear false witness…” It was like being handed a tasty pasty in a rusty wooden chest. Welcome, but not with the dusty heaviness.

Only last year did I learn of a different way of hearing them. It was a beautiful summer’s day in England’s Lake District. My friend Stephen was taking me to somewhere he described as one his pilgrimage sites. When we parked just off the sternly busy A66 highway, I didn’t have high hopes. But after walking for half an hour, the rushing cars had faded into the distance and the birdsong, blue sky, fluffy clouds, green fields and friendly chatter were reassuring me this was a “nice thing to do” during my short visit to Cumbria. Walking around a hedge, we looked down into a meadow, dotted with sheep, heads down, munching away. In the distance was a building, lying low beneath a towering oak that curled over it like a protective arm. The red stone walls had been bleached into soft shades of rose by centuries of Cumbrian rain, and maybe the occasional sunny spell. The dark arched windows told me “Church,” while the grass growing around its weathered wooden gate told me “maybe abandoned.” Approaching closer, I saw its graveyard hosted waves of green grass with headstones leaning left and right, as if bobbing in between.

The Lake District is an epicentre for tourism, but visitors were not getting their lakeland kicks off this part of the A66. Although Stephen Wright is a Reverend, this Church-without-congregation was not our destination. We walked on, towards a river that curved at the back of the meadow. Its meander had created a pebbly beach from where you could walk into a transparent blackish-brown water to paddle or swim. Stephen stripped off and jumped into the river with a glee that made me wonder whether I could learn, one day, to enjoy cold water. Afterwards, we sat sunbathing and discussed the things that crop up with contemplatives like Stephen.

“Those ten sayings weren’t actually commandments – they were ten commentaries. They were describing how we mere mortals function, naturally, when we haven’t been wounded by our life or poisoned by society.” Stephen was explaining that this way of understanding the ten commandments is surprisingly old — and perhaps unsurprisingly ignored. Our conversation on the banks of the river prompted me to look deeper into this perspective on what I learned, as probably you did too, as the ‘10 commandments’. I found that there is even a clue in the New Testament. The apostle Paul wrote about gentiles who “do by nature what the law requires” because God’s law is “written on their hearts” (Romans 2:14-15). That’s partly why the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas argued that the commandments were not an arbitrary list but a restatement of ‘natural law’ i.e. a basic moral grammar we’re all born with. Perhaps they both knew something about the original texts, which is worth exploring for a moment.

The text we now call the “Ten Commandments” was originally written in Ancient Hebrew, which described them as “the Ten Words” (or ten phrases: Aseret HaDevarim). The verbs that Bibles translated as imperatives, such as “lo tignov”, on stealing, did not use an explicitly imperative tense. That would be “al”, which means “do not” (e.g., al tignov for “do not steal”). By using “lo” followed by the imperfect tense of a verb, it can be understood as describing a present or a past and continuing reality. As there is no “thou” or “you” stated in the phrases, they simply mean “non stealing,” “non lying,” and so on. As those phrases begin with, “and not” (v’lo), it connects them to the preceding sentence which describes the nature of the Sabbath rather than ordering it. Therefore, an Irish biblical scholar, A.D.H. Mayes observed these phrases are less commands than descriptions of a natural, unbroken way of being. More recently, philosopher J. Budziszewski wrote that the commandments are “what we can’t not know.” So, rather than being rules imposed from the outside, they are truths recalled from within.

Looking up at the sun drying his long salt and pepper hair, I remember it seemed like this was how the Reverend preferred to share; from a pebble beach, not a pulpit. “You know, it’s not just the commandments that were mistranslated,” he said, warming into mystic mode. “Any translation of ‘sin’ that makes us think it is something other than falling away from who we are, and ‘missing the mark’ of what we are aiming at, is not the message.” He was watching the current, as if gathering thoughts from its surface. “We are invited to remember and welcome into ourselves the sense that love is at the core of all-that-is, and that we are already immersed in it.”

“Like being in the river,” I thought, “if it was warmer.” Stephen’s voice dropped, as if sharing what the water already knew. “When we remember that reality, it shifts our relationships and behaviours towards everyone and everything. Afterall, real love isn’t lazy.” Moving up on his elbows, with a smile on his face and liveliness in his voice: “So what was translated as commandments can even be seen as promises, because they tell us how we will naturally behave once feeling the love of the Beloved.” Fortunately, I had my phone on me and recorded some voice notes about our riverside chat. His views on the commandments stayed with me for months, until I found time to read into the matter.

Looking back to that lovely lazy summer’s day, I also remembered that while Stephen was re-baptising himself in the water, I had noticed a crooked tree. From its base it had grown at a 45 degree angle, pushed sideways by a large rock, before twisting upwards to the sky. It must have been so close to the rock, when a sapling, that it had been obstructed. At the time I enjoyed looking at its unusual shape and gnarly strength. Looking back now, I also see that the tree was not in its uninjured form. It was coping with damage from the rock. I wonder if that’s like me, perhaps like you. Might we all be living in a cultural forest stunted and twisted by proverbial rocks of hurt, harm, and numbing? In that sense, the Ten Commentaries or Promises, can be heard like a tree surgeon calling into the forest, “hey guys, this is what normal and healthy looks like.”

I told Stephen it had taken a Christian youth camp when I was 15 years old for me to focus on, and be transformed by, the nature and centrality of Universal Love that was taught by Jesus. It wasn’t just my schooling that was lacking – I couldn’t find a group that focused on the true message of Jesus, and so I didn’t remain in Christian community. Instead, over the years, I explored the insights and methods of Buddhist, Taoist, Animist, Hindu and Sufi traditions. That meant what Stephen told me resonated with what I’d learned elsewhere. For instance, in Buddhism, the Brahma Viharas — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — are not presented as pious aspirations you try to force yourself to feel. Instead, they are regarded as the natural radiance of an uncorrupted heart and mind. When you remove the fetters of fear, tribal conditioning, and emotional injury, these four qualities, or virtues, arise within us on their own. Other religions, such as Taoism and Jainism, teach similar qualities are both aspirational and natural — a fact that is unattractively ignored by those scholars who wish to claim that Christianity civilised the world.

It is only decades after my childhood experiences, that I am rediscovering a mystical, gentle, just and joyous message within Christianity. My learnings and experiences from other spiritual traditions have helped me to see Christian texts with new eyes. It is why I am now able to hear what Reverend Wright shares as a contemplative Christian. Interestingly, then, that the other spiritual traditions are not temptations or ‘stony ground’ for the faithful to avoid. Rather, they can be a way to learn those deeper truths that have been suppressed by institutional religion, yet still smoulder underneath it, ready for our return. Considering some messages from the non-canonical Gospels can be a part of that journey, and why I believe existing Christian denominations should become more curious about them (such as that of Thomas and Mary Magdalene).

I’ve been keeping the deeper insights of wisdom traditions in mind as I design the peer mentoring within the Metacrisis Initiative. So that we know what we are encouraging in each other, it seems useful to identify some qualities or approaches to help us thrive in situations of disruption, confusion, and collapse. The challenge is that any personal quality, value, virtue, or trait, is somewhat intangible and contingent, so labelling them can give a false sense of certainty, and an unwise attachment to them as positive, whatever the context. Ultimately, there is no getting away from how our state of consciousness, with open hearts and minds, is key to how we show up positively for each other. It is why we will be centering the cultivation of what Stephen calls ‘heartfulness’ in the mentoring.

Although I am pleased to be developing that Initiative, I am aware that religions will remain far more impactful than any self-help networks in this tough age of the consequences from extractive and destructive systems of human organisation. It is important, therefore, to see the power in questioning our religious education. Reading the ‘ten commandments’ as commentaries or promises can turn the rather boring and distant Christianity that many of us learned at school completely ‘inside out’. The religion stops being a straight jacket you can choose to wear or, worse, demand others to wear. Instead, it becomes an invitation to return home to who you naturally are. Ideally, it also provides some tools and community to help. It’s why Stephen has built communities of learning and peer support, in the form of the Sacred Space Foundation, and St. Kentigern School.

With authentic religious invitations to return to our kind heartedness, we can look first at our own impediments. Where am I tight with fear? Where has culture taught me to acquire, defend and harden my heart? How can I help myself return to my true nature? Silence? Forgiveness? Dance? Collective song? A walk together with friends, or alone in nature? Helping someone in need? Perhaps making time to remember the love at and from the centre of everything?

And then we can look wider. What in our society keeps pressing rocks against so many saplings? Its speed, its status games, its lonely competitiveness, and its erosion of common wealth, all impair our ability to grow well with presence and care. A culture that wounds hearts will always produce people who seem to need commandments to behave. That means we can identify our own ways to resist, exclude, or transform those economic and political systems which steal us all away from our true natures.

Like you, I have also heard the argument that some people need rules and threats of punishment in order to avoid anti-social behaviour. That argument does not only appear in cultures with concepts of ‘original sin’ but also within those that explain how some of us are dominated by experiences of consciousness related to ‘lower chakras’. Certainly many of us are deeply wounded by our experiences and culture, and not feeling the open-hearted open-minded way of living that is our natural way. But even with this in mind, do rules and threats, derived directly from religion or through integration into law, provide a good basis for pro-social behaviour? I am not so sure. And I think there is a huge cost. Because one thing we see is a profusion of dogma-reciters with the power to finance, coerce and kill. Some of them take a line of scripture to justify or celebrate the murder of people they disagree with. Although they proclaim unquestioning allegiance to scripture, their belief that it included the commandment not to kill didn’t stop authorising the recent missile massacre of school girls or torpedoing unarmed sailors returning from an international ceremony. Instead, if we recognise “non-killing” as a commentary on how normal and whole human beings behave, then we immediately see how only a deeply damaged person would be delighting in their war crimes and citing scripture to help.

I have just cited an extreme example. But many institutional religions continue to include brazen declarations, with loud certainties, and an enthusiasm for naming who is out and who is in. Conversely, real courage requires us to become still enough to feel our own emotional and psychological injuries. Real bravery involves us living more in the uncertain space of inviting a direct relationship with the divine, so that loving action, right action, can emerge naturally within us. Universal love transcends our interpretations of scripture, our articulation of concepts, or our following of rules. So although we have grown up hearing about ‘ten commandments’, I now hear ten commentaries about you and I before we were hurt. We don’t need to wear a straight jacket of religious edicts. We only need to remember what standing rooted, tall, and expansive, already feels like. And part of that is to recognise that we are part of the wider flow of consciousness within and beyond nature, rather than merely a separate struggling entity.

With that idea settling in me as we rose to leave the river bank, my heart began to pound. It’s the feeling I get all too often, about the juggernaut of damage that continues around us. I turned to Stephen. “It’s crazy that nothing has really changed.” I said. “Right now, in the name of religion, so much nonsense is being taught, to both kids and adults. Why aren’t we demanding that officials within institutional religion admit the potential damage of misguided interpretations of ancient texts?” My old story of needing an impact began to bubble up. “Stephen, I noticed you stayed away from the strong current. Is it time to swim out of the eddy?” He smiled, raised his eyebrows, and scoffed “You didn’t even get into the eddy. Too much time in the tropics has made you a bit soft, lad.”

Returning past the Church-without-congregation, this time I gave more attention to its graveyard. In some cases it was not just grass but bushes that obscured the text on the grave stones. I pulled some branches back, to see names and years of passing. Mostly, they were people from the 1800s. I imagined someone standing where I was, in the past, cutting the grass, laying flowers, feeling sad, yet probably also grateful. Those mourners have also passed away. But now this headstone was being naturally adorned by cream-white blossoms, a kind of foam atop the grassy swells. Protruding above the meadowsweet flowers were some purple foxgloves. Could I see this as nature’s bouquet? When there is no one left to remember us, nature will lay flowers on our grave. It was then that a deeper calm settled my angst at the distortions of religion, and by religion. Despite our recurring folly, on some level, all will be well.

If there is a next time, maybe I’ll jump in that river.

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Reverend Stephen Wright will be joining us in the August metacrisis salon, to discuss the various issues arising from the spiritual and religious dimensions of collapse awareness. Registration info follows below the picture, for members who are logged in.

***“When there is no one left to remember us, nature will lay flowers on our grave.”***

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AI declaration: I used Deepseek to help me with research into where in the Bible it said about the commandments being in our hearts, as well as what the original Hebrew text said, and whether scholars had previously made the arguments I was developing for this essay. The writing is mine, so my apologies for it not being as polished as AI. Deepseek uses multiples less energy than other AIs.

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Studying past civilizational contraction could feed imagination on managed descent

June 6, 2026 jembendell

Five years ago, the edited collection on Deep Adaptation, from Polity Press, explored the implications of collapse anticipation for a variety of intellectual fields, from climatology to psychology, and from education to politics. One area that editors Rupert Read and I did not include was archaeology, particularly insights from the collapse of past civilisations. As the topic of societal decline and collapse has grown in the public conversation over recent years, so has curiosity about past civilisations. Therefore Rupert and I teamed up again to review the relevant scholarship, and how it might help inspire and inform conversations today about how to respond to societies that appear to be breaking down, or are about to. You can read the full article on Resilience, and then join the first open salon of the Metacrisis Initiative. On July 7th you can join us online as we discuss ideas for positive collective action, beyond the pretence that the current socio-economic systems can continue. We will be joined by Helena Norberg-Hodge and other guest experts. Below is a summary of the article.

Summary of “Inspirational Collapses”.

In their article, Professors Jem Bendell and Rupert Read argue that discussions of the relevance of ancient collapses for understanding our current predicament must now evolve from simplistic warnings. They see an enhanced role for historians and archaeologists: helping the public to reflect on how past civilizations softened collapse, by intentionally adapting to contraction, and transforming aspects of life, while maintaining some social coherence.

The authors argue this could help an essential expansion of our imagination beyond two dominant narratives: perpetual progress (the impossible assumption of endless growth) and defensive nostalgia (attempts to fortify power and return to mythologized pasts). What is missing are narratives of intentional contraction, adaptive simplification, and dignified loss. They discuss the concept of “thrutopia”— where visions combine optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect, grounded in a more honest acknowledgment of both tragedy and opportunity.

Bendell and Read offer three historical examples for reflection: the Byzantine Empire after the 7th century, which voluntarily reorganized and localized; the Mayan civilisation, which appears to have experienced urban-rural migration and re-localization rather than outright failure; and Post-Roman Britain, where new forms of social organization and local resilience emerged in the context of collapse of dominant systems. Common themes include scale-reduction, cultural portability, and elite loss with popular survival.

They point to some existing scholarship in the field but argue it needs greater attention and an explicit acknowledgement of a role for prompting social dialogue on the current predicament. The authors encourage readers to approach societal disruption and descent with courage, care, and creativity, rather than denial, defence, or violence. They invite readers to a free open salon.

Note to members of the Metacrisis Initiative: this salon is with a different time and format to the usual monthly meetings. It occurs on a Tuesday and is not suited for all time zones. It will involve a panel and Q&A. The normal salons return in August.

How do we wish to live in a fragmenting world?

May 21, 2026May 27, 2026 jembendell1 Comment

We live in a time when people are justifiably questioning everything, including the reality we thought we knew, and the legitimacy of what or whom we once listened to. Both the global data and news, as well as discussions with our nearest and dearest, tell us that humanity is experiencing more difficulties and disruptions in politics, economics, culture, health and the environment than in past decades. Our questioning is underlain with justifiable anxiety, whether explicit or suppressed. It is true that some fears are overblown or manufactured, but some of our fears are well-founded, such as the extent of ecological destruction and technological control. But questioning life from a state of fear, sometimes suppressed into either anger or paralysis, can lead to poor insight as well as our vulnerability to being manipulated in new ways. Instead of a defensive response, we can explore what personal qualities and approaches we would like to cultivate in ourselves, to live well and helpfully as societies are increasingly typified by limits, loss, and instability. With better ideas on that, we could then encourage positive change in the admired qualities in our societies – or at least in some of the educational and training activities that people experience. With this essay I will attempt to feed into such an agenda, by sharing ideas on positive personal orientations for these troubled times.

Initial awakenings

In 2018 I became convinced that, because of ecological and related pressures, the collapse of modern industrial consumer societies is inevitable — and not in the distant future. After I went public about that, a lot of people reached out to me for advice. My main response was to connect them with each other, and so a ‘deep adaptation’ community and movement was born. I also provided some basic advice, in the form of 14 steps in the process of making sense of one’s life after being exposed to troubling analysis on environmental and societal futures. Immediately, I wanted to encourage more loving responses from people who were awakening to the situation, and warned against some of the ‘maladaptive responses’ I believed I had begun to witness. I also noticed and listed the main ways people were responding to news of impending or unfolding societal breakdowns:

“Some people drop everything and change what they do and where they live.
Others postpone any decisions or life changes.
Others try to transition in a gradual way to a new way of life, not shaped by their previous assumptions and aspirations.
Others try to create options, perhaps a Plan B, while they continue with the Plan A of their lives, perhaps with a little less relish and some growing dissonance.
Others decide to make no changes and live the same way but with an added awareness, gratitude and sensitivity.”

Before taking a year away from my university job to study the latest climate science, my career over the previous 20 years had primarily been on environmental issues. After the shock of discovering the situation was worse than I’d known, my attention switched onto how this could have happened. What drove the destruction of our living home, numbed us to the consequences, and disabled our attempts to fix it? Answering those questions involved both a systemic focus and a personal one: I looked into how I’d been shaped by my culture to participate in the mess. The result was a summary of the deep assumptions in modern life that damage our way of relating to each other, wider nature and the sacred. For each habit of thought, I suggested a different approach. Over time, I began to regard this as liberation from systems of ‘Imperial Modernity’ (Box 1, at end).

What has helped me over the years has been meeting people whose awareness of collapse meant they changed their lives significantly in ways they became grateful for. They aren’t being apathetic because they think modern societies are doomed. Instead, they seem to be brave, caring and creative people. Many awakened to the fragility of life and the redundancy of their past deference to dominant norms. I was moved to write a chapter in my book, celebrating such people as masters, not victims, of ‘doom.’ I went on to produce a fledgling list of “Doomster Characteristics”.

Since sharing those previous reflections, I have noticed that being ‘collapse aware’ is becoming more widespread and mainstream, involving people from all walks of life, all personality types, and situations. In that context, it can be useful to explore positive personal approaches, or orientations, for anyone to adopt in this predicament, whatever their situation. That might help us help others as this way of looking at the world moves out of a sub-culture and into the mainstream.

As part of that move into the mainstream, the terms ‘polycrisis’ and ‘metacrisis’ are increasingly being used by some commentators. I see the utility of the term ‘metacrisis’ in pointing to the interrelatedness of the troubles, and to an underlying crisis in the common assumptions, values, beliefs, norms and habits of our societies. Unfortunately, some social commentators avoid that deeper critique when they use the term ‘metacrisis’ to speak of a degradation of the traditional values and economic structures which privilege people like themselves. Such a defensive reaction can be welcomed by elites, as it avoids a deeper reckoning that could lead to global political movements that challenge existing power structures. I think that would be a massive missed opportunity. Instead, we can dive deeper into what to learn from the mess. Therefore, in recent months, I explored healthy forms of masculinity and authentic forms of feminism, in a world suffering from past patterns of behaviour. Now I want to add to the conversation with ideas on the beneficial orientations towards life, from any of us, anywhere, with any identity. Clearly my ideas emerge from my own cultural and biological context, so I hope they feed into a creative evolution of ideas and approaches.

Orientations for reckoning with fragmenting worlds

Over the years, due to the kind of person I am, I have been attempting to make sense of what it is about some people I meet, which makes them able to face the shit and do something meaningful about it. I have done that as a scholar who is no longer an academic. Professionally trained in methodology, and aware of libraries-full of theories and evidence on what we work on, academics tend to hold ourselves back from sharing insights on what we learn through being reflective in life. And yet, if we are curious, well read, attuned to the nature and limits of any knowledge claims, and interested in systematising ideas, then we have some of what it takes to make sense of our everyday experience. In academia that is sometimes called autoethnography, or living theory, amongst other categories. Those methods involve significant requirements for documentation and analysis. That produces analyses which are too verbose for a non-academic reader. Yes, even more verbose than me. For the following list of personal approaches, or orientations, that I have been observing in many collapse-aware people, I don’t claim extensive systematic research. Instead, they can be treated as hypotheses. I encourage you to reflect on whether you can identify some of these orientations in yourself, whether consistent or not, and whether they feel aspirational for you.

Reality-facing: the willingness to recognise and process difficult truths without denial or premature reframing into optimism. This matters because avoiding painful realities only deepens long-term harm, whereas facing them enables genuine response. Unlike the patriarchal habit of performing our invulnerable control, a personal orientation of reality-facing means we return to the courage to see clearly even when it is uncomfortable. This quality is widespread amongst the collapse-aware movement, which is why I previously described “courage” as a key characteristic.

Emotional appreciation: developing our capacity to allow waves of difficult feelings, such as anxiety, grief, or dread, and to value what they might be telling us, without becoming dominated and driven by those feelings. This sensitivity arises from a sense of ‘compassion’ for self and others that I have often witnessed and celebrated amongst the collapse aware. This is important because unprocessed emotions often leak into blame, denial, or paralysis; learning to feel without always falling apart builds our resilience. This orientation departs from the societal norm that equates emotional expression with weakness, instead treating the full range of feelings as a source of intelligence rather than shame.

Critical wisdom: the ability to let go of past assumptions while not becoming manipulated by factions of power, through integrating four key ways of knowing about oneself and the world. Those ways are logical reasoning, mindfulness, intuition and critical literacy. That last one involves our ability to see how language shapes our thoughts in ways that reproduce systems of domination and exploitation. This is important because modern societies typically privilege a single narrow form of rationality while dismissing intuition or embodied knowing as unreliable. This capability is so important for doing anything useful after awakening to collapse, that I wrote the whole of Chapter 7 on it in Breaking Together. Since then, it has become even more important as AI is used to create manipulative content.

Kinship responsibility: recognising our interdependence – with people, sentient creatures, ecosystems, natural forces and future generations – and acting accordingly. This is vital because no one survives or thrives alone, yet societal structures often reward individual dominance over connection. Replacing the pretence of autonomous mastery with a cherishing of our interbeing and mutual responsibility is a joyful invitation from these difficult times. This shift in understanding of the self, as non-separately interconnected with all, is something I pointed to in my articulation of liberation shifts in patterns of thought (Box 1).

Organic meaning: releasing a personal identity based on assumptions of progress in favour of presence, service, self-expression, and participation in living systems. This matters because the modernist fiction of endless linear progress fuels burnout and exploitation, as well as the denial of our challenging reality. Instead, turning toward presence and participation frees us from the anxiety of always needing to become something else, whether as an individual or collective. That is why in my book I wrote about this as an actual freedom from the ideology of progress.

Numinous adaptability: the capacity to adjust our identity, aims and behaviour in response to changing realities, without losing one’s ethical grounding, and welcoming the opportunities for spiritual transformation. This form of adaptability can include letting go of plans, roles, and expectations that no longer fit, while remaining responsive rather than reactive. What makes this adaptability ‘numinous’ is that it’s not about optimisation or survivalism, but one’s integrity and awakening under changing circumstances. This is important because rigid attachment to past roles, identities and aims can make matters worse when situations change. But it is more important than that, as the challenge of these times is a massive invitation to explore the deepest truths of being. That includes not just exploring ‘how do I wish to be in these times’, but what is the ‘who’ that is asking. The ultimate deep adaptation is therefore numinous, spiritual, adaptation. Something, I will return to in a moment.

It is my hypothesis that these orientations are how we can ‘reckon’ better with metacrisis and collapse: Reality-facing, Emotional appreciation, Critical wisdom, Kinship responsibility, Organic meaning, and Numinous adaptability. I want to offer these six orientations as part of the deep adaptation framework, to complement the six questions for reflection on personal and collective changes (the 6 Rs of deep adaptation). The 6Rs give us a way to talk about responding to collapse whereas the 6 orientations can give us pointers on how, and who, we seek to be as we respond.

Heartfulness as the base

The list of orientations is not comprehensive, as other qualities and approaches to life are important. Various wisdom traditions have pointed to them for millennia. Those traditions ask us to explore a deeper source for positive ways of living in the world. That involves our state of consciousness, so we naturally live with a general ‘heartfulness’. How those heartful ways of experiencing life can occur more widely and consistently is an important question, especially as religions have a mixed record of cultivating positive behaviours in societies.

It is no surprise that as concerns spread about the state and future of the world, more people are asking themselves the deepest questions: what is the nature or substance of my being, does the universe and my physical life have meaning, why do I yearn to know such things, and am I even able to comprehend them? What comes from such searching is not necessarily a new and powerful foundation for pro-social behaviour. In the confusion and rush of life, people can feel drawn to voices telling us to believe a particular story and try to be “good” according to that story. Instead of that, I have seen the truth and benefit of experiencing ourselves as part of the flow of life.

Discussing this topic, as well as my previous essays on the healthy masculine and feminine, Reverend Stephen Wright wrote to me that: “The mystic-contemplative way awakens us to being free of our characters, even if those might be healthier versions of identities we have been given or chosen. Rather than trying to teach our characters to be more virtuous, in general or for these times, the mystic-contemplative way transforms the behaviour of the character through another means. It helps us remember and experience the depths of reality, which are made of love, which then leads naturally to compassionate action.”

Some people have concluded that belief in a divine being, or in all of life being divine, is key to inspiring a heartful approach to life. Such faith can be the way for them to experience universal love. Another way for heartfulness to arise in us is by coming to notice that the way the universe exists is demonstrating universal love. That involves reaching an acceptance and gratitude for who we are, our mortality, the mortality of our loved ones, and our lack of ultimate legacy, within a perpetually changing universe that is both wondrous and mysterious to us. It can take some time to reach gratitude, not just acceptance, for those aspects of reality I’ve just listed. Gratitude for mortality? For the mortality of our loved ones? For our lack of ultimate agency? For a perpetually changing universe? For a universe that is wondrous but by the fact of being beyond our comprehension? Gratitude for all of that? It can sound strange at first, but upon reflection, the way the universe exists, in cycles of life and death, with its joys and losses, contains the gift of vibrancy. If we regard (or experience) the world in that way, then everything about it has an underlying flavour of deep love, no matter how painful, awful, and seemingly unbearable, some moments and thoughts might be.

A key insight from the contemplative strands of the world’s religions on the matter of ‘how to be good’ in these times is that we could focus less on striving to improve ourselves and more on letting go of our past concerns. With this in mind, any positive human qualities or approaches, such as the orientations I have outlined in this essay, relate to innate human qualities that have been suppressed in us by cultural influences. Therefore, our path is not one of augmentation but of liberation. This aspect of our ‘numinous adaptability’, is something I’ll explore further in future essays. Previously, I discussed it a little in interviews, for Buddha at the Gas Pump by Richard Archer, for Reskillience, by Catie Payne, and for WiserNow with Carlota Guedes. A television documentary on my journey also explored similar themes.

Enabling positive orientations to collapse

Not everyone responds well to becoming aware of metacrisis and collapse. Unfortunately, many institutions and people who are taking collapse seriously are seeking their audiences’ allegiance to culturally-specific stories of good and bad in ways that affirm their own identity as good and thus numb their existential pain. With that in mind, our opportunity, if we choose to accept it, is to promote alternatives to such dynamics, at whatever scale, so that more of us can respond in the positive ways we know are possible. Some resources for that exist in mystic-contemplative traditions and persons today. More tools and networks could be developed to help people discover such ideas.

These days, my effort to enable positive orientations to collapse is the design and launch of peer mentoring within the Metacrisis Initiative. For that, I am building on the benefits and limitations of the professional coaching and life coaching methods I am aware of (which I explored in some detail previously).

In our next Metacrisis Salon we will discuss the six orientations I have outlined in this essay. Joining us will be Dr. Josie Mclean, who has recently been recognised among twelve global pioneers of “regenerative coaching.” I will also be asking her how, in general life, she invites herself and others into positivity, creativity, and service, beyond the paradigm of fixing things and progressing. Then we will discuss the implications of bringing such ideas into professional activity as a coach. You need to be a member to join our conversation (info follows at the end). But if you can’t join either the salons or the peer mentoring, please consider helping them to grow, by taking out a paid subscription. This work is entirely financed by people like you who decide to support it.

Box 1: Shifting damaging assumptions: escape to cosmos

The culture of ‘imperial modernity’ shapes the human experience of the world to maintain hierarchies and drive expansion. This culture involves deep assumptions which lead to habits of thought and behaviour. Our liberation is helped by recognising them and considering alternatives. The habit of entitlement involves thinking “I expect more of what I like and to be helped to feel fine…” Instead, a quality of compassion, in this context, involves sensing that “I feel an active responsibility for any of my contribution to your suffering, without expecting to feel right, better, or worse.” The habit of surety involves thinking “I will define you and everything in my experience so that I feel calmer…” Instead, a quality of openness wishes that “I will keep returning to be curious about as much as I can, however unnerving.” The habit of control involves thinking “I will try to impose on you and everything, including myself, so I feel safer…” Instead, a quality of serenity involves allowing the feeling that “I appreciate the dignity of you, myself and all life, however disturbing situations might seem.” The habit of autonomy involves thinking and feeling “I must be completely separate in my mind and being, because otherwise I would not exist…” Instead, a quality of mutuality involves remembering “as this world has produced me and societies have shaped me, I will question all my understandings and ways of relating with others.” The habit of progress involves thinking and feeling “the future must contain a legacy from me, or make sense to me now, because if not, then when I die, I would die even more…” Instead, a quality of oneness awareness involves sensing “what is important is how I live more lovingly right here and now, without needing to believe that I matter or am improving.” The habit of exceptionalism means assuming “I am annoyed in this world because much about it upsets me and so I believe I’m better and/or needed…” Instead, a quality of solidarity involves acting from the part of you that knows “our common sadness and frustration arises from our mutual love for all life and motivates us towards fairness, justice and healing.” Taken from: How do we disentangle from destructive ideology? The cosmos remedy – Jem Bendell (2020)

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Clarity Groups for Peer Mentoring: with thx to Quakers

May 13, 2026May 17, 2026 jembendell

Growing up, I always thought the Quakers were a bit boring. Not the brand of oats, but the Christian group. “What, they sit in silence in a circle? How dull!” That’s what I thought when I was first told about them. I wasn’t that much into singing old hymns either, but I imagined that their silent circles would be “unproductive”. And I imagined I would feel it to be “awkward” silence, and shy about speaking up, or “knowing what to say”. Now I realise that reveals how much I was experiencing my culture’s thoughts and feelings: the assumption that pausing and being still is wasting time, that ‘wasting time’ is bad, and that it is embarrassing to not have something ‘appropriate’ to say. However, recently I discovered that 350 years ago the Quakers first developed a method for peer mentoring that I have been using for years! Learning their philosophy that shaped the development of their mentoring practice is deepening my understanding of it. And it might even heal some of my sense of separation from the Christian culture I grew up within. I will explain the practice first, and then come back to its Quaker origin, and why that matters.

Back in 2018 in Bali, my Bulgarian friend and life coach Zori Tomova introduced me to a practice she called “masterminding”. Zori had been organising a community of people to share various methods for personal connection and transformation. The process was new to me, and seemed so useful that I brought it into my leadership courses as well as the Deep Adaptation Forum which I founded the following year. But “masterminding” had sounded a bit macho and serious to us, so my colleagues decided to rename them “Wisdom Circles”. But as that term is used elsewhere for larger circles with different guidelines, rather than small groups of three (+/- 1), I’ve started using a different name for them.

‘Clarity Groups’ rest on a deceptively simple yet radical philosophical foundation: that the deepest wisdom for any issue or challenge already resides within the person who holds it. The structure is not a problem-solving workshop but a friendly container for generative sharing and listening.

At its core, the method rejects the widespread human impulse to “fix.” In normal conversation, have you noticed how, when someone shares a difficulty, others immediately offer advice, personal stories, or, um, premature ‘solutions’? This reflex, however well-intentioned, often bypasses the speaker’s own clarity and implies their incapacity and dependency. In Clarity Groups, the process inverts that social pathology. The first five minutes of uninterrupted monologue invites personal sovereignty and authority in relation to their lived experience. No interruptions, murmurs, cross-talk, or steering questions are allowed. Even major emotional expressions from the listeners are discouraged.

Then come two distinct layers of reflective mirroring, without advice. First, a paraphrase. This is not mimicry but an act of validation. For instance, a listener might summarise “You said your team resists your leadership because they see you as too directive.” One aim is to show the speaker that the listener understands what has been shared. Another aim is for the speaker to hear what their situation sounds like from another source, without judgement, projection or advice. The speaker is not expected to elaborate anything after hearing the paraphrasing. However, in some cases, the person paraphrasing might need to ask one question of clarification before they attempt to paraphrase what they heard.

Next up, a third participant in a Clarity Group offers some observations about the speaker’s tone, body language, or emotional shifts, which they noticed during the speaker’s monologue. They can also choose to include some emotional impact on themselves, but without further story. For instance, “When you mentioned the board meeting, I think I noticed your voice went higher, and I felt a knot in my own stomach.” Here the philosophy of this peer mentoring method uses ‘phenomenology’: we try to report on observed phenomena, rather than bringing our interpretations. Seen that way, our own emotional responses to another’s truth are neither “about us”, nor “made by them”, but are simply extra data for the speaker to hear. In other words, my fear, sadness, or anger in response to your story is a potential gift you may choose to use or discard.

These steps in the process are not just prelude to advice giving — they are its main benefit. The speaker gains some clarity through the process of choosing what to say and hearing themselves say it. They gain additional clarity from hearing their explanation paraphrased, as well as how they appeared to others when sharing it. With that greater clarity the person sharing might begin to see some provisional answers, remedies, or revalidations.

Only after those steps, and only if the speaker explicitly agrees, does the third round invite advice. This consent transforms advice from intrusion into offering. Without consent, even brilliant counsel can be experienced as a form of dismissal or domination. But with consent, advice becomes a voluntary resource the speaker can sift, accept, adapt, or refuse.

The minimum fifteen minutes per person ensures that no step is rushed. It also means that in a group of three, a Clarity Group can conclude within an hour, with a little leeway for welcoming and concluding discussions. The participants agree to full confidentiality where they won’t share anything they heard with people outside the group. In addition they agree not to follow up with a participant on the nature of their situation other than to offer further availability and support, if that is invited. Therefore, each person is meant to feel emotionally released from the process after participating. The only deviation from that situation is if an urgent risk of harm has arisen; in which case, a participant can encourage someone to seek professional support and provide relevant contact details.

I think this simple method has worked well for centuries because it embodies important values that aren’t always supported in normal life. I’ll briefly describe some of those values before giving instructions on running your own Clarity Group.

What’s really important is that the trio of a Clarity Group is not a hierarchy of smarter peers trying to fix a broken one. There is no hint of the ‘drama triangle’ where ‘victims’ of circumstances need saving. Each group is a meeting of equals. What helps for that is to know that anyone in the trio will accept our general understanding and experience of the world, without prejudice or judgement, and where we don’t risk triggering their own worries or traumas. In our case, it is helpful that we know that everyone participating already accepts we are living within a global ecological disaster with many maladaptive responses. Upon that basis, we can benefit from participants in our Clarity Groups being very different from the types of people we meet in our normal life.

In our era of relentless interruption and quick answers, the slow, mirrored attention in a Clarity Group is not merely polite — it is a philosophical rebellion. We practice supportive listening because we know that being truly heard is often more transformative than any advice could be. That is because we trust in the potential of each other, when supported, to find our inner insight and resolve.

As participants, we trust that every one of us has some level of commitment to become wiser, kinder, happier, less harmful, and more useful, to others, and to all sentient beings. We trust that by making this innate drive explicit in membership of a group, we can affirm and support it. We also trust in the idea that most answers to the deepest questions in our lives lie within us. That is because we hold within us an original wisdom that can be brought out, within the right conditions. Some of us think such wisdom arises from our biology, whereas others believe it comes from a metaphysical aspect of our being. That view echoes the spiritual philosophy which inspired people to use this method well before we did.

Although there may be origins elsewhere in the world, a key source for this practice were the “clearness committees” that have been used by Quakers for centuries. Also called the Religious Society of Friends, they emerged in 17th-century England, with George Fox teaching that direct experience of the divine is available to all people. Today, the global community includes diverse branches. Unprogrammed meetings are common in the UK and parts of the US, involving the silent ‘waiting worship’ that I’d scoffed at decades ago. Most Quakers I know are cautious, or even suspicious, of fixed creeds. Instead, they encourage more contemplative and mystical approaches to faith. They recognise an “inner light” in everyone that can spiritually guide us as our “inner voice.”

Some Quaker scholars have explained that the role of the religious community should be to help each other rediscover our original, yet hidden, wholeness. The use of a circle, or facing benches, is widespread in Quaker communities. That reflects a commitment to equality and shared listening that arises from a deep trust in the potential wisdom of us all. It is this philosophy which led them to naturally create the ‘clearness committees’ which then influenced multiple similar practices around the world including, now, our Clarity Groups.

For years the only experience I had of the Quakers were non-religious events in their meeting houses. In Lancaster, I spoke about climate change and advocacy. Then somewhere in Cumbria I chanted and danced in a circle. Outside of their nice old buildings, I did not know that Quakerism was influencing my life in major ways, including while living on the other side of the world. Yes, those ideas related to deep truths can appear separately around the world. But the truth of such ideas means they also travel through purpose networks to far away lands, and can eventually return home, re-freshed.

Today, my attitude to being in circles could not be more different to how it was. By sitting with the group Circling Europe, I learned more about myself and interpersonal dynamics than in any other setting, or from any book or teacher. I distilled and adapted that experience with Katie Car to design the ‘deep relating’ methodology for use in collapse-aware communities. In addition, I had my first transpersonal experience of melding consciousness with three other people in my first ever authentic relating circle. As I experienced for myself that consciousness is not separately contained in my own head, I did not need to force myself to believe what was written about that. Whenever I host retreats, courses, kirtans, sacred dances, or cacao ceremonies, we gather in circles. When I see people gathering in rows, I think “how boring.” It is funny that is the exact opposite of how I felt decades ago. Clearly the Quakers were on to something!

In the third meeting of the peer mentoring in the Metacrisis Initiative, we will be using this Clarity Group methodology. Therefore, this short essay is the background reading for that meeting. In keeping with the philosophy of Metacritical Mentoring, I encourage you to share any thoughts on the assumptions, pros, and cons, of this methodology. There’ll be space for that in the meetings, and I also leave comments open below.

For members of the Metacrisis Initiative, what follows below is an outline of how to run your own Clarity Group process, as well as the reflection exercise that is part of the prep for meeting three. If you aren’t in a peer mentoring group, but would like to be, then make sure you are a paid subscriber to this blog, so you will receive the invite to apply for the next cohort (in August 2026).

Thx, Jem

Group Facilitation on Societal Disruption and Collapse: Insights from Deep Adaptation (Paper by Bendell and Carr).

An Ancient Quaker Practice Whose Wisdom Prevails Today | Psychology Today

A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life, 20th Anniversary Edition, Edition 2 by Parker J. Palmer

Join the Metacrisis Initiative to get access

Read the guidance for running a Clarity Group, the reflection exercise for the next meeting, and also information on the next Metacrisis Salon.

The Healthy Masculine in the Metacrisis

April 28, 2026 jembendell3 Comments

If it’s a “man’s world”, and that world is falling apart, what are men supposed to do? Be less like the men of our parent’s generation? Be more in touch with our feminine side? Give more space to women in our organisations and communities? Or could there be something more, perhaps of greater potential, for men to explore and to become? Are there healthy forms of masculinity that humanity needs in a fracturing world? I think so. And that’s the subject I want to share some thoughts on. To share publicly on this topic is new for me, and so I’d welcome your feedback (this blog is open for comments).

The ‘metacrisis’ – or early-stage societal collapse – is experienced by most of us as more difficulties and disruptions in politics, economics, culture, health and the environment. However, the utility of the ‘metacrisis’ term is in pointing to the interrelatedness of the troubles, and an underlying crisis in the common assumptions, values, beliefs, norms and habits of our societies. Unfortunately, some social commentators avoid that deeper critique when they use the term ‘metacrisis’ to speak of a degradation of the traditional values and economic structures which privilege people like themselves. Contrary to that view, many of us have concluded that the dominant cultural order where men and qualities associated with men are privileged in society (AKA patriarchy) is part of the problem. I covered some implications of that previously, including the importance of listening and learning more from women leaders and Indigenous elders. But that is not the sum total of the implications for men. Instead, a “healthy masculine” could emerge from the crucible of this metacrisis, and I am already seeing dimensions of it. In this essay I will share thoughts on that, arising from personal reflections and participation in both men’s groups and other support groups.

I’ve written this essay partly as a response to having met men over the last few years who seemed to lose their ‘footing’ when introduced to deep critiques of their identity as white Western males. In some cases they substituted their past certainties by following agendas set by individual women — often usefully, but sometimes involving their uncritical deference to authority. In other cases, I witnessed men rejecting critiques and embracing ‘anti-woke’ calls to reassert their cultural privileges without guilt or moderation. Sometimes that has arrived with vaguely moral assertions that privileging masculinity as we do in patriarchal societies is good for everyone, or the only cultural option available to us. I believe that if there were more ideas about the healthy masculine, and ways to be supported in expressing that, then there could be more positive outcomes from the unsettled feelings that some men experience within the metacrisis. That was one reason for creating a set of Oracle Cards with a friend, Dean Powell, who trains men on how to host men’s groups. It is also some of the thinking underneath the design of the peer mentoring in the Metacrisis Initiative. But now I wish to share some more of that thinking for discussion and development.

Before considering masculinities, we could usefully consider what qualities become more important for all of us as, whatever our gender, as societies become more unstable. Therefore, in my next essay I will explore how any of us might ‘show’ up better in a context increasingly typified by limits, loss, and instability. In this essay, I will focus on what can be regarded as qualities and transformations particularly relevant to men in a metacrisis. At 4000 words, it’s a bit of an ask for you to get through it — but I think the subject is crucial to how we might soften disruptions and collapse, whether locally or wider than that.

Shifts in our understanding of masculinity

Over the years I have experienced some of the ways that male friends of mine have been exploring what it is to be an emotionally healthy man, without accepting the patterns of the past or becoming paralysed by the critiques of those. They easily express their care, receptivity, and intuition, along with other attributes often associated with the feminine. Nor do they express any sense of competition with leadership by women. They have been focusing on how to live their lives in meaningful ways with integrity. The themes that emerge from their experiments in reclaiming a masculine identity for themselves can be regarded as transformations of qualities that patriarchal cultures have associated with men. I will share them here before reflecting on the extent to which they are qualities that could help us within metacrisis and collapse. In doing so, I am not claiming that such qualities are inherently male, nor only male, but are regarded as particularly masculine in the cultures I’m aware of:

From control to stewardship: shifting from needing order and managing outcomes to tending processes – for community and collective wellbeing – without assuming mastery.
From suppression to containment: not the absence of emotion, but the ability to hold intensity (fear, anger, grief) without exporting it as harm. This is a disciplined, grounded presence rather than withdrawal.
From individualism to solidarity: using strength (physical, social, economic, mental) in service of nurturing and protection of the less powerful: children, friends, communities, ecosystems.
From certainty to humility: relinquishing the need to “know” or lead through answers, and instead cultivating an ethical orientation amid ambiguity.

Most of the male friends, within whom I have seen these four shifts, have not been particularly interested in either metacrisis or collapse. But I am a subjective observer with that metacrisis in mind as I identify those shifts. Perhaps, therefore, I am only seeing the shifts that are relevant to easing that bigger situation. Nevertheless, separately from any conversation about societal disruption and collapse, some men are undergoing transformations, and helping each other in that, which could also be useful for the difficulties unfolding around us.

The four shifts I’ve described are ones I like to think I’ve embodied in my professional efforts since the Deep Adaptation paper went viral in 2018. At first, a few people with money to fund projects wanted me to work on research papers on how collapse would unfold and to even establish a think tank. Others wanted me to be a spokesperson for advocacy movements on climate and collapse. Neither approach felt right to me and instead I focused on how to convene groups of people to help each other work out how to live positively with our difficult outlook on the future. Sometimes I ‘hit back’ at misleading criticism, as I mentioned in Grist Magazine. But that was because I thought I had a specific capacity for defending the legitimacy of the new networks and communities, and wanted to do my part. My defence was claimed by some as me being ‘patriarchal’, with the implication my arguments should be dismissed.

In my personal life, I don’t see these four shifts within me quite as clearly. I believe I am increasingly aware of my emotions, and open about them, without acting impulsively from them. I regard my collapse-awareness being key to pushing me in that direction. But if I compare my personal life to others, I am still individualistic, while striving for control and certainty in many areas. I don’t even want to shift such aspects of my character at this time. Reflecting on why, I notice my limited trust in how the world is, and how people are — something which might come from childhood (and I shared about previously). That’s a reminder to me that some patriarchal habits in men can arise from feelings of insecurity. It is something I’ll explore more on my own in future.

Reclaiming masculine qualities from patriarchy

Over the years, the lack of confidence I have felt in how to ‘be a good man’ rather than just ‘be a good person’ has not been helped by a lack of discussion about healthy masculine qualities. I have read books on positive versions of manhood, such as the book of that title by Steve Biddulph, but have not come across a structured assessment of the qualities associated with masculinity that can be reclaimed from the toxic patterns within patriarchy. That seems like it could be a useful exercise – so I will try it here.

Some of the qualities associated with masculinity in many cultures today include strength, protection, courage, rationality, productivity, merit and authority. I am interested in how we could disentangle those qualities from the habits of dominance, extraction, and status performance that typify the culture I’ve termed ‘imperial modernity’ (previously in my book Breaking Together). For each quality, I will explain the potential evolution for the current context of societal metacrisis, and give an illustration from some men I know personally.

True strength: Not force or invulnerability, but load-bearing integrity. This is the capacity to stay present to difficulty (material, emotional, moral) without denial, displacement or depression. It involves the capacity to remain open-hearted in conditions that could invite shutdown, cynicism, or aggression. It includes endurance, but also permeability: allowing grief, uncertainty, and feedback, to inform action rather than harden into rigidity. This kind of strength shows as reliability under strain, not spectacle. I recall a time when a friend’s business failed. He did not rage or retreat into silence. One morning, after tennis, he told me that he had chatted with his teenage son the day before about how he was feeling sad, scared and ashamed. He wanted his son to know that feeling like that, and expressing it is not weakness. He told his son he would try again.

True protection: Not control or paternalism, but attempts at safeguarding the conditions for life. This is anticipatory and relational: reducing harm, buffering shocks, and prioritising the vulnerable (people, species, places) without seeking obedience or loyalty in return. This kind of protection operates through stewardship, boundary-setting, and solidarity, not ownership. Over the years, I have had the benefit of seeing some men facilitate gatherings with this quality. They establish agreements on how to interact and then, without fanfare, swiftly and firmly remind anyone who deviates from those agreements, thereby enabling fair and fluid participation.

True courage: Not conquest or risk-seeking, but bold truth-aligned action under uncertainty. This is the willingness to face social, material, or reputational cost in order to act with integrity, such as speaking honestly, withdrawing from harmful systems, or stepping forward to serve, without guarantees of success. I thought of this when hearing from a friend who had previously worked in construction. Back then, racist jokes were routine, but at one point he couldn’t let it slide. He told them that although he’d laughed along for ten years it had to stop. He lost a couple of friends on the crew, but knew it was the start of a better way of working.

True rationality: Not narrow instrumentalism, but context-sensitive discernment. The ability to reason with multiple ways of knowing: empirical evidence, lived experience, ethical reflection, and intuitive knowing. This kind of rationality recognises uncertainty, avoids false precision, and resists optimising one variable (e.g., profit, efficiency) at the expense of system viability. It might be upsetting for some people to read me write about this, but most of the guys in my men’s group disputed the claims and policies from medical authorities during the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic. They took the time to assess the questionable logic behind some policies, find the relevant data, and learn about existing pandemic response plans. Rather than suspend their judgement to avoid being shamed, they chose personal responsibility and sought to help their neighbours with advice and health support (both physical and mental).

True productivity: Not maximising production or ignoring its consequences, but bringing intentions into reality while leaving relationships intact or strengthened. One’s desire to act and provide is applied to meaningful ends within real ecological, social, and personal limits. This kind of productivity includes ongoing awareness of context rather than clinging to outmoded plans. In my time as a newbie organic farmer, I have met many men who adjust their commercial expectations to the realities of partnering with nature rather than dominating it. There are more risks, and less quick financial rewards, but the outcomes are multiple and important.

True merit: Not credentialism or competitive accumulation, but contribution to collective understanding, healing, and betterment. Worth is evidenced by what one helps defend or regenerate (such as soil, trust, friendships, skills, mutual aid, cultural coherence), especially under stress. It privileges usefulness, humility, and teachability over status signals. This kind of merit can involve commitment to something larger (truth, community, or the sacred) without the need for recognition or legacy. As I considered this quality, I immediately thought of one of my close friends in the UK, who drove a taxi for 20 years. He didn’t have a University degree, and when he chose to study one of my courses, was interested in the learning and the relationships, not the certificate. Driving a cab meant he could discuss all kinds of ideas with people from around the world, and share his wisdom with those who wanted to hear — a kind of guru taxi driver.

True authority: Not dominance or positional power, but earned trust and accountable guidance. Authority arises from demonstrated care, competence, and coherence over time. It invites scrutiny, distributes decision-making where possible, and remains accountable. Its legitimacy is continuously tested by outcomes for the whole, not by titles. When I was a tutor at the University of Bristol, a friend of mine was studying to be a teacher. I still remember a story she told me which seemed ‘far fetched’ but captures this notion of earning one’s authority. She said a head teacher had been asked to consider suspending a student who was often sleeping in class. Instead, he worked out that the boy was homeless and was often sleeping in his car. Identifying that the child was at risk, he worked with relevant services and friendship networks to find the youth accommodation as well as after school activities.

Across all seven of these enacted qualities, a common thread is finding power-within and power-with, rather than power-over. They each require receptivity as much as projection. They involve exercising capacities in ways that ground oneself, maintain relationships, respect limits, and enable others to stand, adapt, and participate. They are qualities that correspond to the biological attributes of men relative to women, upon which male archetypes have emerged across cultures. That does not mean they are only accessible to, or admirable in, men but they are usefully witnessed in men without limiting us to the patriarchal expressions of them.

Why useful, you might ask? I think a benefit of naming some shifts in behaviours, and reclaimed qualities of masculinity, in the way I have done in this essay, is that they help us to recognise ourselves and each other, to then gain support, or provide it. The drawback of listing them is they can come to be regarded as the way we should behave, and thus enable new kinds of oppression and performativity. That risk is greater for attributes associated with the ‘healthy masculine’ or the ‘healthy feminine’, as some of us will want to appear attractive and admired within gendered stereotypes. However, I’ve concluded there is little we can do to avoid people with (perhaps momentary) craving egos from relating to lists of attributes in that way — so that shouldn’t hold us back from discussing them.

Deeper benefits of masculine archetypes for our challenging times

Recently I have been reflecting on the idea that there could be a far deeper benefit from discussing the healthy masculine, as we reclaim the sacred or divine aspect of the male form from religions that are deeply intertwined with patriarchal control. For instance, it is obvious to anyone who looks into it without the blinkers of dogma, that Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have each downplayed, deleted, or pigeon-holed, the feminine dimension of the divine. One example is how the early formation of the Christian Church excluded a text about Mary Magdalene that was guiding groups of Jesus-followers in Egypt and elsewhere, along with the associated emphasis on a direct experiential connection with the divine rather than one mediated by a clergy who we should obey. Throughout the centuries, counter movements to patriarchal religious imposition have often equated a reverence for nature as involving the worship of female and/or feminine qualities. However, that is an incomplete response. Our environment, and the whole of Planet Earth, involve both male and female forms in the processes of creation. Thus, we live as much within Father Earth as we do within Mother Earth. Any hangovers in our culture of the ‘sacred masculine’ being assumed to be separate, remote, and single-minded, actually restrict men today from celebrating the fullness of the male form, and our embodiment of it as male human beings (something noted by other writers on contemporary masculinity). Some cultures have a history of iconography related to this, including images of the ‘Green Man’ across Europe and Asia, and a variety of demigods in animist and Indigenous religions across Latin America and Africa.

Christianity offers us a more ‘upclose’ divine masculine in the form of Jesus, although not explicitly connecting him to processes of the natural world. When the Roman Empire institutionalised the views of St Paul about the identity of Jesus as a demi-God, or even fully-God, for followers to worship, Christianity implied Jesus was (and is) somewhat separate to us humans. Instead, if we regard him as a masculine expression of enlightened humanity, we can more easily celebrate that as a potential for manhood in our own societies.

Outside of an Abrahamic religious context, men can look towards a variety of earthly-yet-divine masculines, in the figures of Lao Tsu, Siddarttha Gotama, and more. Their teachings don’t require a separation between material or natural, on the one hand, and spiritual on the other (despite subsequent distortions). Therefore, I have begun to wonder whether men who cling to unreconstructed notions of the divine masculine are denying themselves a huge part of their own potential spiritual experience of being alive. Instead, we can come ‘home’ to the aspect of divine consciousness within ourselves. Personally, I feel like I am entering a process of liberation by recognising that.

Transforming societies around gender roles during metacrisis

I have avoided talking about it thus far, but I know the field of scholarship and activism on gender is huge, involving strongly-held theories and heated debates. Some readers might regard my exploration of a healthy masculine as a pointless task within patriarchy, while others might see it as essential for dismantling patriarchy. Some readers might see the focus on masculinity as yet another form of male-centrered attention, while other readers might see that it is about time I shared publicly on this topic, after my previous essay on women’s leadership, and more than two decades after I began working on women’s rights and feminist-informed methodology. Some may regard the ideas in this essay as wrongly seeking to stabilise either “masculine” or “feminine” as meaningful polarities of identity, whereas others may see me as not sufficiently exploring how the biological differences between the sexes mean we need greater differentiation in our understandings of healthy identities. I regard some of the aggression in such discussions as reflecting trauma, on all sides, and unhelpful for our attention to positive change. Mentioning that trauma might deepen the annoyance of some readers, but, as I mentioned in my last essay on women’s leadership, sometimes us men need to not shy away from receiving unfair criticism, and not react aggressively to it — as we haven’t been on the sharpest ends of patriarchy.

With all of those lively discussions about gender in mind, I want to reiterate that, for all of us, whether men or women, a useful deconditioning from our upbringing and contexts, must include a steady relinquishment of either the orientation towards, or admiration of, dominance, denial, and disconnection, in favour of grounded, relational, and quietly courageous participation in a world that is no longer coherent in the old terms. Such deconditioning doesn’t need us to drop recognition of biological differences and how to positively work with those.

When I have discussed these ideas with friends, the conversation has often turned to how society might change. Spreading the ‘healthy masculine’ across a fracturing society cannot rely on simple generational replacement, as younger men are also susceptible to retrenchment into patriarchal backlash when anxious. Top down messaging about a healthy masculine is also unlikely to happen in current societies. Perhaps, then, we need to turn to prefigurative politics — enabling and embodying the desired norms within micro-communities first, rather than waiting for macro-shifts. On the one hand, men’s groups can be where the reframed masculine qualities and personal shifts can be supported. On the other hand, community groups, eco-villages, religious associations, activist groups, and peer mentoring circles can seek to embody the kinds of qualities that will help in a metacrisis, whatever our sex or gender. That is something I will return to in my next essay.

Collapse-aware communities are ripe for this work, yet my experience is that some of them default to either male stoicism (practical survivalism) or feminine-coded emotional expression (grief circles). We should not ignore how the groups that focus on emotional processes are mostly populated by women and the groups focused on practical prepping, or on calculations of the risk and processes of collapse, are mostly populated by men. To address that, I recommend that those of us working with the Deep Adaptation framework include the reclamation of masculinity from patriarchy within discussions and projects related to the 5th R of the framework. This can also be something we talk about in our podcasts, blogs, and social media. Conceptual discussions like this essay can be useful foundations, but sharing our examples will be more impactful, along with our participation in relevant initiatives. Crucially, spread will happen not through shaming old masculinities but through making the ‘healthy masculine’ visible, attractive, and useful.

As I covered a lot of conceptual ground in this essay, I did not include much discussion of my own experience. When discussing a draft of the essay with a friend who is a coach with some experience of men’s work, he encouraged me not to leave more personal reflections to a future essay. That got me thinking: is living within and from a healthy masculine identity a priority for me? Rather than it being a joy of my own evolution, I sense it might involve new risks of pain, restriction, and boredom. That feels awkward for me as I learned to be who I am with many privileges. Conversely, such a focus could seem an indulgence when there are other things to do. To prioritise this agenda, I would also need to be more confident about the shifts and qualities I’ve described in this essay, via receiving critique or validation by some experts and elders whom I respect. Perhaps, then, putting this essay out into the world will help that process of building my own confidence in the importance of what I’ve described, and help my own journey into healthy masculinity. Let’s see.

If you are interested in this topic, there are some interesting podcasters exploring such matters. I recently appeared on two of them: reskillience and wisernow.org. In addition, for men, I recommend seeking out a Men’s Group that explicitly seeks to support its participants to express a healthy masculine and doesn’t regard that as being in opposition to feminist concerns. You could share this essay with the organisers to get their reaction. If you want to find a ‘collapse aware’ Men’s Group, you will probably need to start one. Perhaps that could be done under the umbrella of Deep Adaptation. And if you are a woman and have found these ideas to have merit, then I encourage you to share them with the men in your life. Additionally, whatever your gender identity, you would be welcome to join a future cohort of the peer mentoring in the Metacrisis Initiative. I’m looking forward to us discussing these ideas in our next monthly online salon.

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You can listen to my journey via Reskillience, with Catie Payne, or, more extensively, with Carlotta at WiserNow.

Discuss these issues with us by registering for the Metacrisis Salon on May 4th and 5th.

Comments on an earlier draft of this essay were gratefully received from Kaliya Hamlin, Chris Taylor, Ilena Young, and Matthew Slater.

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