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Setting Goals When Facing Collapse
Tag: metacrisis meetings
A dozen disputed but now demonstrable facts about climate change from the consequential Deep Adaptation paper of 2018
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…
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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
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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Then catch me elsewhere…
Metacrisis Salon with Rupert Read, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Will Self, Michel Bauwens and Jem Bendell
The July 2026 salon of the Metacrisis Initiative was open to all, and welcomed around 100 people to discuss whether we could take any inspiration and ideas from how past societies managed their contraction and ultimate collapse (or transition).
The online discussions featured Rupert Read, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Will Self, Michel Bauwens, being hosted by Jem Bendell. The event marked the 5th anniversary of the book Deep Adaptation, co-edited by Professors Bendell and Read, and it built on the article they wrote for Resilience magazine on what we might learn from past civilisations.
Discussions included: the importance of a global relocalisation movement to soften the effects of collapsing complex systems, the need for that to include political resistance alongside community building, whether this period could inspire a cultural renaissance, and whether environmentalists are too marginal by not addressing other drivers of civilizational decay, such as cognitive impairment due to the technological attention economy.
If you are interested in joining the next salon, they happen monthly, and information follows below.
Professor Rupert Read is a philosopher, writer, and public intellectual, whose work explores the implications of climate and ecological breakdown, the metacrisis and societal collapse. A leading voice in both mainstream environmental and specialists Deep Adaptation conversations, he argues for preparing politically, economically and culturally for a climate-disrupted future.
Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder of Local Futures and a renowned pioneer of the localisation movement. Her work examines how globalisation amplifies ecological and social fragility, while stronger local economies build resilience. She reveals how traditional societies have sustained themselves over generations, offering insights relevant to navigating current disruption, collapse and renewal.
Will Self is an acclaimed novelist, essayist and broadcaster whose fiction and commentary probe the psychological and cultural dimensions of contemporary civilisation. Through explorations of urban life, consumer culture and human frailty, he offers deep reflections on decline, mortality and the recurring patterns that have shaped both past and present societies.
Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation and a leading international theorist of the commons and peer-to-peer collaboration. His work explores how new forms of governance, production and mutual aid can emerge during periods of systemic crisis. Drawing on historical transitions between civilisations, he examines pathways beyond today’s metacrisis.
The discussion was hosted by Dr Jem Bendell, who is a recovering Professor of Sustainability Leadership and originator of the Deep Adaptation framework. Since late 2016 that framework, and many associated groups around the world, have been helping people explore how to respond to societal disruption and collapse with courage and compassion. Jem founded The Metacrisis Initiative, which helps people explore the latest trends and how to respond purposefully in their own lives. He promises to get a new webcam and microphone for future videos recordings.
Michel Bauwens / Will Self / Helena Norberg-Hodge / Rupert Read / all joined Jem Bendell for Inspirations from Past Civilisational Collapses – a metacrisis salon.
Join for salons and mentoring
The next salon is member-only, where we will discuss spiritualities, metacrisis and collapse. The background reading for the salon is Living Purposefully within Metacrisis and Collapse. To join us, please make a monthly ($8) or annual payment ($80).
To end a paying membership, please cancel your subscription, not just unsubscribe from the email newsletter. To do that, click “Manage Subscription” at the end of any emails you receive. Sign in, using the email address you used to subscribe. If you never set a password, WordPress can send you an email from which to log in. Then go to your subscription settings to cancel your paid subscription. You will continue receiving free newsletter emails unless you separately choose to unsubscribe from that.
Then catch me elsewhere…
Living Purposefully within Metacrisis and Collapse
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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Studying past civilizational contraction could feed imagination on managed descent
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?
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
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
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
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.
Dear Doomster (if I may call you that)
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