health – Prof Jem Bendell

A Personal Message on Covid-19

November 12, 2025November 22, 2025 jembendell

I was surprised recently that someone close to me likely had Covid-19 again less than 3 months after her previous infection. She didn’t take a test for it either time, but the symptoms suggested it wasn’t the flu. Fever, headache, lethargy, loss of smell, but no sneezing or phlegm. As the initial symptoms didn’t put her in bed, sick, we didn’t take it too seriously. But this second infection has lingered, and created recurring lethargy and insomnia, while also bringing back some old health problems. That encouraged me to look into the latest information on Covid-19. What I found concerned me. I am sharing about it here for the same reasons I did so in the past. Since looking into it more closely in 2021, I have thought that the policy orthodoxy on Covid-19 has been counterproductive. Additionally, I have been concerned that most commentators in the environmental field are aligned with the orthodoxy and thereby turning many people away from the environmental cause. Thirdly, pandemics have often played a key role in societal breakdowns and transformations in the past, and so the risks of the Covid-19 pandemic, and future ones, is within my field of analysis and comment. Looking back, one sad aspect of speaking out over the last four years has been that many people assumed that questioning the orthodoxy means caring less about this disease, or public health in general. Such prejudice was produced by Big Pharma and their supporters in politics, the medical establishment, and mass media. In sharing on Covid-19 now, I don’t expect to have much influence, but if some of you, my readers, take the following ideas seriously enough to check them out for yourself, then at least a few of you might benefit.

My past essays on the topic were always well referenced, and I provided links to credible sources, such as official data sets or peer-reviewed papers. I wanted to be as factual and precise as possible, and avoid the misleading spin from various commentators. This post will not be like that. I write not to influence agendas but to nudge those of you who follow my blog to act to be healthier than you might otherwise be… that’s if you look into the information for yourself and agree. You could use an AI chatbot to check some of my statements that will follow and look for relevant data. I think if we don’t do our own checking then we don’t convince ourselves enough to change behaviours.

Anyway, here goes, with my personal message on Covid-19…

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Clouds of suffering can have silver linings – reflections on childhood.

February 4, 2024February 9, 2024 jembendell

I know that when I’m anxious I’m not the wisest or kindest version of myself. Because that is the same for most of us, collapse-anticipators fear how people might make difficult situations a lot worse by delusional or aggressive responses. There are multiple ways of trying to help ourselves think and act more kindly and wisely in future. One way of psychologically preparing ourselves that has stood out for me recently is an examination of our deep stories – about who we are and our role in life. Once we notice such stories, we can choose whether we want to continue living by them or not. One way of discovering such stories is to re-examine our childhoods. I decided to share with you my recent process on that, and what I discovered. That’s partly as an encouragement for you to do the same, and partly for my own benefit of healing through normalising something by sharing it. If such reflection is not new to you, then perhaps this essay will encourage you to try again, as new things can be found depending on our current mind-states and exposure to different philosophies.

I recently hosted documentary film makers at a meditation retreat in a Buddhist temple, here in Bali. They are exploring what can happen when people perceive it’s too late to avert the collapse of modern societies. So they were asking questions about how I became the person I am. It’s the kind of reflection on formative experiences that I ask the participants in my leadership courses to do. But personally, I’d not reflected for a while. As Buddhism includes an understanding of the role of suffering in life, being at the temple meant that I reflected on that. So I dived into my past suffering and how it might have shaped me.

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Essentials of Life and Death – part 6 of a #RealGreenRevolution

November 9, 2021December 1, 2021 jembendell1 Comment

This is the 6^thin a 7-part essay on the type of policy innovations that would respond to the truth of the environmental predicament and, also, why most environmental professionals ignore such ideas to promote limited and limiting ideas instead. These ideas on a #RealGreenRevolution provide a contrast to current agendas, with the aim of encouraging a global environmental movement as a rights-based political force. In this part of the essay, I focus on some sensitive issues about life and death, which have become even more polarised due to pandemic policy responses.

To receive each part of the essay, subscribe to my blog, using the box on the right (or right at the bottom of this post). To engage with other people who are responding to these ideas, either visit the Deep Adaptation Leadership group on LinkedIn (where I will check in) or the Deep Adaptation group on Facebook, or by following the hashtag #RealGreenRevolution on twitter. A list of previous parts of this essay is available.

Agricultural Transformation

The impacts of current levels of climate change on agriculture are already scary. The modelling of what could happen when we pass 1.5 degrees global ambient warming is much scarier. Our civilisation is based on grains, which feed us humans about 80 percent of our calories, either directly or via animal feed. With 1.5 degrees warming the risk becomes high for prolonged droughts or unseasonal frosts harming the production in multiple major grain exporting regions around the world in the same year. Therefore, our agricultural and food systems need urgent diversification in ways that do not increase, but reduce carbon emissions.

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