Tag: deep adaptation

Deep Adaptation in the Caribbean

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In this month’s Deep Adaptation Q&A, host Katie Carr speaks with Jessica Canham about Deep Adaptation in the Caribbean and possible implications for elsewhere.

Jessica is a member of the Deep Adaptation Forum, a film-maker. She is based in her ancestral island home of Dominica, in the Eastern Caribbean. She shares about her experience of ‘deep adaptation in action’ during and after Hurricane Maria hit the island of Dominica in 2017, when communities responded by sharing food, shelter, practical and emotional support – in ways that Jessica sees are virtually non-existent in modern western societies.

Along with her partner Tim, she has created documentaries from the Caribbean and South America, for international broadcasters with an emphasis on culture, environment and social justice stories. Her current documentary film project, “LOVE In Action”, focuses on the stories of revolutionaries working on the front lines of our climate and ecological crisis.

Having survived the devastation and collapse caused by Hurricane Maria hitting the island in 2017, Jessica continues to work to strengthen and maintain resilient, healthy local communities. On her mountain rainforest property, she has created and manages a transformational retreat centre Caapi Cottage Retreats where the focus is on nature connection.

Other recent videos from the Q&A series include the coordinator of the Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF) sharing her journey from sustainability to DA and also a socialist politician on his engagement with DA. The Forum is also hosting interviews with people either from or who identify with communities that have already experienced societal disruption and collapse – including indigenous peoples. More discussion of a less-or-non-Western approach to DA included Vanessa Andreotti in discussion with me – Jem Bendell. If interested in this theme I recommend reading about Deep Adaptation in India or listening to a talk I gave in Glasgow in 2019 as I engaged with local groups on climate justice ahead of COP26. You may also be interested in the growing arguments from activists and scholars that we need to ditch the ideology of sustainable development and become more realistic about the deteriorating situation – something I wrote about for the United Nations here.

To receive invites to future Q&As then subscribe to the Deep Adaptation Quarterly.

Grateful for Meg Wheatley

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I recently gave a talk to the Climate Coaching Alliance about how to support people, professionally, who are beginning to integrate an awareness of the bad-to-worse scenarios of climate chaos into their work and lives.

In the coming weeks I will share the insights I gained from engaging with business and life coaches on this topic. But for now I want to give a shout out to the coaches, therapists, facilitators and guides who are already aware of how much has already been lost, how difficult things are and are set to become. Understandably, most business coaches and life coaches are not yet alive to these issues. They need to go through their own journeys on this issue for themselves. Which makes a network of coaches who are ‘collapse aware’ so incredibly necessary. The professionals you find in this network will not pathologize your outlook and you won’t need to worry about traumatising them! If interested, have a look at  http://guidance.deepadaptation.info

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Don’t be a climate user – an essay on climate science communication

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“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” – Saul Bellow

Jem Bendell, for the Deep Adaptation Quarterly, August 2022. 

As the heatwaves swept across Europe this summer, mainstream Western media gave some more attention to global heating. With 40+ degrees Celsius in the UK, for instance, many people were unnerved. They wanted to know more about what is happening and how bad it might become. This meant climate scientists were featured in the media. Then a curious thing happened. Some of those scientists began to ‘cherry pick’ the science to promote a particular narrative that the danger will cease to increase if specific policies are pursued. They presented their view as following science, and some experts then admonished people who pointed out the scientific limitations of that perspective. Does this mean there is now an ‘establishment story’ on climate change? If so, why, and what does it preclude?

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It’s time they heard from you on societal breakdown

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EDITORIAL for the Deep Adaptation Quarterly, Issue 10, April 7th 2022.

Over the past months, a few new terms have appeared in the news as pundits seek frameworks to explain what is happening around the world. I have read that we are in a period of polycrisis, or permacrisis, or even World War 3. There are various reasons offered for why more of us are experiencing tougher and increasingly anxious circumstances. Since the pundits work for legacy media organisations, the explanations we hear are anything other than the death throes of global capitalism as it hits natural limits. And since they speak from within the ‘Overton window’ of respectable conversation, neither do we hear that our situation can be described as the beginning of the breakdown of industrial consumer societies. Instead, a superficial, distracting, and sedating hope of returning to something more ‘normal’ is a compulsion for them. So I am pleased to greet you here in this Quarterly, outside that narrow scope of perception. 

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Where Wisdom and Geoengineering Meet

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More climate scientists say emissions cuts are not enough and we face imminent catastrophe unless deliberately altering the climate. What are the options and challenges? I interviewed Dr Ye Tao who is proposing we use massive amounts of mirrors to reduce harm in the short term.

By Jem Bendell

In 2018, Dr Ye Tao was a Harvard engineer working on nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging. He read the Deep Adaptation paper on climate disaster, then cross-checked it with over a thousand peer-reviewed papers across several climate-relevant fields, and realised the growing existential risk to modern civilisation. So that included everything he was working on. He wondered what would be the point of continuing with his engineering work in such a scenario. Instead, Dr Tao decided to repurpose his expertise to try to give humanity a better chance of reducing the catastrophe ahead. Dr Tao has since been developing and promoting what he argues is a scalable, safe, green and flexible form of climate engineering. It proposes using mirrors to reflect the sun, mostly from the ground and over coral reefs at sea, to cool agricultural land, save fresh water, and preserve ecosystems. He arrived at this idea after analysing and debunking the science and economics behind other approaches to geoengineering (which is also known today as ‘climate repair’ and ‘climate restoration’). 

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Hoarding Green Righteousness Will Not Get Us Far – dialogue will

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Looking at how some people in the West use the term ‘climate justice,’ I wonder if we are seeing the latest in middle class Western instrumentalization of the suffering and injustices of the world, for the purposes of further self-appreciation. That can occur because of the way commentators within the contemporary Western environmental movement have been inculcated in the hierarchical ideology of the Professional Managerial Class. Within that ideology, there is an instinct towards what Professor Catherine Liu calls ‘virtue hoarding’ where any issue of moral consideration is material for adding to one’s story of being an ethically superior self, who needs to impose one’s ideas on other people, particularly the working class. As decolonial scholar Professor Vanessa Andreotti explained in her Q&A with me, there is a lot more ‘composting of our shit’ from modernity that we need to do first before being useful in promoting either justice or healing after centuries of colonial domination.

Perhaps an example of this phenomenon is the discussion emerging around a rather ‘uppity’ damning of the Deep Adaptation movement that was published in The Ecologist Magazine. In an open letter by one of the authors on the receiving end of their ire, Matthew Slater wrote the following to the author:

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The Wisdom of Play in Times Like These

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I first met Zori at an Improvisational Theatre workshop. I set up the free weekly gathering as I had recently discovered Improv and knew I needed it in my life. It is the perfect therapy for a perfectionist, for someone who feels they need to know and calculate everything before doing something. Because you can’t do that with Improv. After the workshop a group of us went to dinner and I told Zori the paper I had been working on. As a former IT entrepreneur and someone exploring the possibility of starting a business, she was interested in the environmental theme. I explained how during my year unpaid sabbatical from my University job, I had returned to reading the scientific literature on climate change, and had concluded that it is too late to sustain the industrial consumer societies that we depend upon. I had also concluded that this scenario was not in the distant future, but that many of us would suffer and die as a result of the breakdown of the systems that feed, cloth, house, protect and motivate us. 

“How long do we have?” asked Zori, as we waited for our dinner.  

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A Positive Song in a World Gone Silly

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During the pandemic many people appear to have had their capabilities for logic and ethics vaporised in the heat of fear and the distortions of reality from elite interests.  Consequently, from a serious public health perspective, the conversations about the pandemic are mostly silly. That does not mean there are really serious and damaging outcomes for individuals and societies. Millions of lives were lost and many might have been saved with smarter actions and more free flowing information. Now millions more lives are being risked due to the impacts of policies on supply chains and the cascading impacts on the poor worldwide. But given how much misinformed piety and pseudo professionalism is on show, it can be helpful at times to simply laugh at the orthodoxy on the pandemic. Here are some examples. 

Medical officials ignoring early outpatient treatment from their frontline colleagues? Arrogantly silly. 

Bigtech firms suppressing such information that might save lives? Ruthlessly silly. 

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Thoughts On Pandemic Response

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Since April 2020 most media corporations have encouraged hostility towards open scientific dialogue and normal policy scrutiny. That has been accentuated by the way domestic partisan politics in North America has influenced media content globally and provoked censorship from Big Technology platforms. The sad result is that misinformed and emotionally activated people share misinformed and outrage-inviting commentary on the analysis of people who are demanding more open scientific dialogue and normal policy scrutiny. That creates a barrier to people discovering what is actually being said by people like me. Therefore I am listing my key writings on Covid in one place so it is easy to access them.  

It’s time for more of a citizen’s response to the pandemic – for a real #PlanB – where I explain how a different agenda to the current orthodoxy could be pursued that allies with our fellow citizens to remove barriers to us all making responsible decisions and how the Left has failed to articulate this agenda due to having lost close connection with the low paid workforce. 

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The Benefits of Africa Evading Western Panic

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Africa has fared far better than the West in the direct impacts of Covid-19. With 16% of the world’s population, Africa has had only around 5% of the world’s Covid cases, with only about 7% of the population double-jabbed against the virus. Half of African countries have Covid mortality rates lower than 1 in 10,000 people – less than one-twentieth the rate in the USA.

So what can people in the West, of any political leaning, learn from the pandemic response in Africa?

Tragically, the impacts of policies against Covid have put tens of millions of people into poverty through their disruption to economies and supply chains. That shows how ‘Western panic’ may be exerting severe collateral damage around the world. So what can people outside the West learn about the dangers of ‘Western panic’?

In an invited contribution to the ‘Existing Otherwise’ art exhibition in Ghana I share reflections during a 15 minute ‘walk and talk’ video.

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