Tag: collapse

How People Get Ready – building the commons in working-class communities is key to collapse preparation.

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The one talk that I’m scheduled to give in the UK this year is at the Festival of Commoning in Stroud. My reason for that is my support of what Michel Bauwens describes as cosmolocalism [0] in the face of collapse, and what I term the ‘Great Reclamation’ of our power. It is best explained and illustrated by one of the organisers of the Festival, Dave Darby, in a guest article…

“All civilisations collapse in the end. The Roman Empire is long gone, along with the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Sumerians. Will the global civilisation of corporate capitalism buck the trend? Of course not, but how long does it have left? In such a complex system, it is impossible to predict when there will be a sudden shift, but there is good evidence that the process of breakdown has already begun. Damage to soils, water tables, forests, the oceans and climate is occurring alongside economic and political upheaval. No longer is this a theoretical matter about the distant future, but something we should be preparing for today. But how? 

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Collapsis – a public health emergency of international concern

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There is now significant evidence of an ongoing breakdown of industrial consumer societies, worldwide, due to hitting natural limits and internal contradictions. As this is a painful realisation, many experts avoid saying it publicly, while the mainstream media have been ignoring it. Nevertheless, opinion polls reveal that most people know something is seriously wrong, as we have been experiencing years of disruption, degradation and decline. Consequently, a new epidemic is taking hold, which offers a distraction from the worry and pain. As this ‘Collapsis’ may soon become a ‘public health emergency of international concern’, here I’ll describe what is currently known about it 😉 

Collapsis is the novel psychological condition of believing illogical ideas to explain the unfolding breakdown of modern societies. Collapsis spreads like an infection, leading to disorientation and counterproductive responses, which might then accelerate the unfolding actual collapse of modern societies. There are already many variants of Collapsis, which will be superseded by new ones, due to the susceptibility of human hosts and the economic drivers behind spreading infection. In this blog I list fifteen variants I am already aware of.

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Let’s meet in 2024?

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Although I resigned my academic position to increasingly focus on local resilience efforts in the country I have now emigrated to, Indonesia, during 2024 I will continue to share thoughts on collapse risk, readiness and response. I will do that in four ways – essay writing, podcast interviews, public lectures, and short courses. As long as world systems hold together until March 2025, and I stay fit and well (!!), then I will be speaking and teaching in Australia, Belgium, Hungary, Mexico, Switzerland, Germany, UK and the USA. In Belgium in March, I will be joined by Satish Kumar and Pablo Servigne. In April in Budapest I will be celebrating 5 years of the Deep Adaptation movement in the country with the largest national group.

My keynote talk Mexico in October will mark the launch of the Spanish language version of Breaking Together. Then I will head to Oakland (California) that month to teach. In November I will present at some international NGOs and the United Nations, in Geneva, which will also include the launch the French version of the book, before I head to Berlin to present there. I will conclude my book tour in Brazil in early 2025, to launch the Portuguese translation of the book.

Aside from events in those locations, I will teach an online course “Leading Through Collapse” twice a year, scheduled to be suitable for any time zone. Any income from these activities already has a destination… the regenerative farming school I’m co-developing here in Bali.

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My aim with these events around the world is to support people who are bringing collapse-awareness to their professions and public, in different regions and languages. This is the first international tour I am doing for 7 years, and I don’t intend to do another for many years, if ever. Therefore, I don’t feel guilty about the flying involved, as, like me, I still encourage people to fly less and fly effectively i.e. we should think about what we are trying to accomplish. Of course, that is how we can reflect on why we do anything that has an impact on the environment. Having a better reason to travel than the largest polluter in the world, which is the US military (not including proxy wars), probably isn’t a high enough bar to set for ourselves, although puts things in perspective 😉

If you would like to receive information on my events or courses in one of the countries I just mentioned, then please sign up to the relevant notification list below.

Jem in Brussels, Geneva, Berlin, and Budapest, 2024

Jem in Mexico, October 2024

Jem in California, October 2024

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Getting more serious about food system breakdown

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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). 

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The Worst Argument to Try to Win: Response to Criticism of the Climate Science in Deep Adaptation

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As fears about climate futures and implications for societies have become more widely expressed, some climate scientists have responded by criticising some of the predictions and conclusions being made, either by other climate scientists, other scholars, or general commentators.

An example of this pushback can be found in the views shared by some climate scientists on the July 2018 Deep Adaptation paper, in a Vice article. Those comments were not specific enough for me to assess or respond to, and so I invited the individual scientists to comment directly on the relevant text of that paper. I am grateful for climate scientists Gavin Schmidt (Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, USA) and Dr. Wolfgang Knorr (Lund University, Sweden) for providing such feedback. In this blog I summarise the comments made and my response. As a result of this process, I have identified two minor corrections and two clarifications I will make on the paper. Continue reading “The Worst Argument to Try to Win: Response to Criticism of the Climate Science in Deep Adaptation” →