I made (very) short film about the resilient and regenerative farm school that we recently launched here in Indonesia. The film focuses on the spiritual side to farming in Bali. The script of the voiceover follows below the video. The crowdfund is an essential part of the effort to become a catalyst in the local area. Please consider helping by learning more here.
For most of us, food is the tasty, or tasteless, substance on our plate. Something we need to quell an ache from hunger, or to provide us a moment of pleasure. Some of us buy fresh ingredients and cook. But even then, food is still about consuming. Therefore our food stories aren’t stories that involve a divine living world that is nurturing us within itself.
Every 5 months or so I send out a summary of some of what I’ve been doing. Last weekend I sent the latest. It follows below. If you would like to get the next into your inbox in about 5 months, sign up here.
How is your experience of social media these days? There is quite a lot of stress-inducing news and modes of interaction online. In my case, being kicked off Twitter a month ago with no explanation has had an upside – and not just less screen time! It has given people the opportunity to express their views on dialogue and censorship. Friends and colleagues have sent me messages from all kinds of people who are saying my account should be restored, as well as senior-ranking academics who are actually celebrating me being censored. That’s quite revealing, isn’t it?
Psychologists know how our fear of feeling painful emotions can lead to us suppressing them by directing our anger at people whose existence reminds us of the reason for our painful emotions (they call that response ‘experiential avoidance’). If you disagree or deny that environmental disruption is already so severe and self-reinforcing that the breakdown of industrial consumer life is unavoidable, then you may feel more uncomfortable as reality hits home. The world is witnessing major disruptions, ocean temperatures are freakish, and the month of July was globally 1.5C degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, indicating that many self-reinforcing feedbacks are likely [see endnotes]. As I describe in my book’s chapter on the food system, a ‘multi-breadbasket failure’ with huge implications for grain markets has been calculated as near certain within 3 years of such a global temperature rise. In response, many senior ranking climatologists are doubling down on criticising those of us who warned 5 years ago, or more, that the current situation was the most likely scenario. In my book chapter on climate, there is a section where I revisit the claims in my Deep Adaptation paper of 2018, and show that 2023 observational data and climate science corroborates what I concluded back then (you can listen to the chapter for free, or get the whole audiobook).
As it is coming up to a month since I was suspended from Twitter, without any explanation or any response to my immediate appeal, I went into my account and looked at what I tweeted just before I was suspended. It might have been a complaint, or a hack, or an algorithm… but someone didn’t want me tweeting. It had been an uneventful day online, with limited visibility and only a few reactions to my tweets on corporate irresponsibility, radical environmentalism, wise women, climate data, military profiteering and US government involvement in online censorship. What has surprised me since the suspension is that all my past tweets, since 2009, are no longer visible to anyone but me. All the immense wisdom and verifiable foresight, distilled into tweets like botanical gardens into essential oils.. all gone in an instantaneous digital bonfire! I jest. But some of what I shared was a bit nice. For instance, my very last tweet before suspension was on the short talk at my book launch, by the wonderful Satish Kumar. It read:
I recommend you see his magical 5 minute talk. I have screen shot that tweet along with the other essential oils from that fateful day. If you feel like using them as pictures in your own tweets, that would be great. And I shall pray that you don’t get banned. In the meantime, I recommend subscribing to this blog, where I intend to keep sharing ideas on collapse readiness and response. As I am now leaving my employment, I would also welcome any financial support to encourage me to keep writing essays on such topics.
Update: as there is some amusing projection happening on twitter by folks who don’t know me (unlike how they know their inner repertoire of human characters) at the end of this blog I append a screenshot of my updated appeal, where I ask for any info on why this suspension occurred.
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As I have been suspended from Twitter, I’d like to ask your help so that a Q&A on my book can be heard about. I was heartened that over 80 people joined me to discuss “Breaking Together: a freedom-loving response to collapse.” The event was hosted by Katie Carr of the Deep Adaptation Forum. The video follows below.
Why have I been booted from Twitter? Short answer: dunno. I received no warnings and no explanations. The text on my account says “After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules.” Although I can be radical and forthright, at times responding to what I consider unfair criticism, I aim to be civil. Without further information, I’m curious as to the reason. Possibilities include some censorship code from old Twitter being triggered by a recent uptick in attention to my account. Or perhaps new Twitter doesn’t like my views on the unfortunate limits of renewables and electrification to transition humanity to sustainability. Another possibility is that the account was hacked in a sophisticated way so Twitter suspended it. I have submitted an appeal.
After another week of frightening temperature anomalies around the world, I gave a talk to supporters of the MEER project, which is trialling various means of locally-led climate adaptation that involve reflecting the sun’s rays. The video and transcript follow below. References for all the factual statements made in my presentation can be found within Chapters 1 and 5 of Breaking Together, which is available in all formats and regions, including a free epub download. Free audios of those chapters are also available. In the talk I am critical of mainstream climatology, as well as BigTech censorship of science-based analyses of the climate crisis that lie outside their preferred view of a manageable problem with technological solutions. From the talk:
“The so-called ‘fact checking’ group ‘Climate Feedback’ didn’t even consider two top climatologists worthy of a reply when they complained to them about helping Facebook to shadow ban an article that concluded we are inevitably heading for over 2 degrees global warming that will likely set off feedback loops. My understanding is that Professor Will Steffen died without even the courtesy of a reply from Climate Feedback. Dr Wolfgang Knorr still awaits one. So, we need to reclaim environmentalism from elites and officers of the establishment. We must stop pretending we are on the same side and instead build alternatives from below.”
Lancaster University academic, John Foster:“Forcefully transformative government… would have to be authoritarian…”“…if [Dr] Bendell wants to send GH [the Green House UK thinktank] an argued objection to what I said in my piece, GH will publish it along with a response from me. This is too important an issue not to encourage responsible debate on it.”
The following in an edited excerpt from the chapter “resisting the fake green globalists” in the book “Breaking Together: a freedom-loving response to collapse.” I am sharing it here in response to the Green House think tank supporting the views of the academic John Foster, which I quote further below. They invited a more substantive dialogue than possible on twitter. That seems appropriate as the thinktank claims to be “leading the development of green thinking in the UK” and has influential people on its board. The concepts I mention in this excerpt, and the evidence for them, are argued in detail elsewhere in the book, which is currently available as paperback/hardback/kindle, and will be available as a free epub download from The Schumacher Institute (TSI) from July 10th 2023 (as TSI always notes, these views are the author’s not the institute’s).
Combativeness and moral disdain pervades recent public discussion of environmental problems. It is not just one ‘side’ that resorts to such tactics. Take food and agriculture as an example. Some people speculate that eco-totalitarians will successfully force us to eat bugs and goo, whereas others oddly claim that anyone defending farmers is a far right extremist, obstructing the technological salvation of humanity and life on Earth. The AI generated image above is poking fun at the piety that’s in an unnecessarily binary discussion – as if we must all be steak lovers or steak haters, food tech fanatics or small farm purists. The famous climate activist Greta Thunberg has not descended into those silly binaries. Which is good, as they are unhelpful when we need a plurality of ideas on what to do about the unfolding breakdown of global food systems, as I chronicle in detail in Chapter 6 of my book “Breaking Together”. This blog coincides with the release of that chapter as a free audio (it is also available free from my University).
“This is a prophetic book.” Satish Kumar, founder, Schumacher College
“This book shows that instead of imposing elitist schemes and scams, regenerating nature and culture together is the only way forward.” Dr Stella Nyambura Mbau, Loabowa Kenya
“This book is part of a healing movement that extends beyond what we normally think of as ecological.” Charles Eisenstein, author, Climate: A New Story
This is the text of a newsletter sent to people who receive my irregular updates (that go out once or twice a year)
As you registered for my irregular update, a good guess is that you are interested in sustainable development – the concept for social and environmental progress that took off since the 1992 Earth Summit. So, in opening this update (my first since March last year), I’d like to clear up something: sustainable development is a lie. It has been a successful one because it helps middle class professionals earn salaries while pretending that’s for them caring about the world. Not only does all the recent data point to the failure to improve the world by spreading one economic model, but that failure was widely predicted decades ago. People like me ignored such critique because we wanted to believe something else. Why? Not because it was good for wildlife, landscapes and the poor. We wanted to believe because it was convenient with our careers to develop, consumer lifestyles to lead, houses to buy and kids to bring up. Ouch. But I’m tired of the mix of pseudo-concern and pseudo-professionalism that surrounds me in the sustainability field. Fortunately, many of us won’t pretend anymore.
The COP27 climate conference announcement of a new fund, of unknown quantity, for the loss and damage occurring due to climate chaos, means it might appear that politicians and bureaucrats are finally getting real about how bad the situation is. So could they be catching up with the ‘Deep Adapters’? Unfortunately, no fund will ever be able to recompense the loss and damage that is being suffered – and will be suffered – from the impacts of climate and ecological breakdown. No international currency, bank, or payment system will likely survive the extent of disruption when impacts of global heating really kick in. I am just back from my first and last climate conference, and not only experienced it as an exercise in denial but one that is made impenetrable by the numbers of people and resources maintaining it in myriad ways. Even critics of COP27, and climate policies more generally, have their budgets, wages, skills, and status tied to the story of ultimate salvation from climate chaos. A consequence of this denial is not looking at the root causes of our predicament. Which might also be a reason for the denial. So let’s go there…
Prof Jem Bendell 
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