Here’s a short excerpt from this week’s episode of Team Human, a conversation with ecolibertarian and regenerative agriculture school founder Jem Bendell.
Unlike his former peers in the “scale of impact” community, Bendell offers no amazing science fiction fantasy technosolutionist fix for the climate crisis. Instead, he offers a set of strategies for how to adapt to the inevitable.
Jem Bendell was a Professor of Sustainability Leadership at University of Cumbria, who came to realize that climate change was inevitable, and the collapse of modern industrial consumer societies was already underway. However, by fully experiencing the sadness and despair, he realized he wanted to “live to the max“ in this new context, and wrote a controversial paper in 2018 called Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. He followed that up with a book called Deep Adaptation, and the brand new book I read for this conversation, Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse.
What’s coming is bad, but it’s not all bad. A combination of realistic acceptance along with hope and resilience could help inflect the quality of the experience ahead. Think of it like the serenity prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Here’s a snippet of my conversation with Jem Bendell. You can hear the whole thing by clicking on the link.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Part of what interests me about your story is your move away from both the university as well as the top-down, official, global United Nations type organizations for sustainable development. Would you describe the process as growing disillusioned by these globalist efforts that just weren’t working, or being inspired by more local bottom up possibilities?
Jem Bendell:
Oh, it’s definitely despair at the former. I’ve spent decades — probably 25 years of my life where it was all about learning about the environmental predicament and ways of pulling the existing levers of power — whether that was business banks or big NGOs or, you know, going to work for the UN or becoming a professor and then teaching “exec ed” to try and influence the top people.
I was always driven by this idea of “scale of impact.” And I kind of turned my nose up at the local stuff because I thought, “well, we’ve got a world to save. Haven’t we?” So it was despair at the lack of change that came from that strategy. I began to see that the one thing that was worse than Davos elites not taking climate seriously was them beginning to take climate seriously and thinking that they had all the answers, and simply had to force the rest of us to do what they think we should do.
All through that time, I knew people working at the grassroots doing cool projects. And I gave some money to some of them. But finally I’ve reached that point where I’m really focusing much more on, on the bottom up.
Rushkoff:
Right, the big top down global thing doesn’t work for a few reasons, and it’s controversial to even suggest it. We just did Climate Week here in New York and one of the events I spoke at had as its theme, “Solutions at Scale.” And so I got up there and I said, “Well, what if scale itself is the problem?” And they got so upset at that idea. They think that the crisis is so bad that the solutions will have to be at scale: either sulfur in the air or throw something in the ocean to de-alkalinize it or go massively solar and and blah blah and green new deal and change employment…. Where I’m out telling people simply to borrow a drill rather than buy one, or look at your retirement plan. Where is it invested? What if you’re willing to take a third of it and put it in renewable agriculture?
And I got accused of buying the Exxon propaganda that we people are responsible for this stuff when it’s actually the big corporations that have to be responsible for it. So I wonder, is personal responsibility itself really a red herring? Somehow I don’t think it is
Bendell:
I’m really pleased to hear you went in and caused trouble there. Great. I hate to think that they’re all showing up at New York and giving themselves some kind of moral backslap for their ambition, given the fact that we’ve achieved nothing through those sorts of tactics. Nothing in terms of the biosphere or the atmosphere. I mean, they can point to a few wonderful initiatives and projects and corporate sustainability reports and all manner of this, that, and the other, and, you know, “renewables revolution.” Fine, but we were actually not doing anything in terms of what that actually means in the environment.
I’m glad you went and did that because my whole career in corporate sustainability was driven by the idea that we need to change things at scale. And I then realized that we were just sucking up all the talent and attention of the world, of people who care, into things which weren’t really achieving very much. And I just wonder what would have happened if more and more people had thought decades ago, “wow, we just need a totally different economic system. We need a different paradigm.” And just got working on that with each other rather than trying to have the ear of the elites.
So I’ve changed because of this issue of accepting the collapse of industrial consumer societies. I used to think it was inevitable. And now I think this kind of process, this creeping process of collapse of modern societies is already underway. So that changes everything for me. That then means these big structures that have been so impervious to change with all the brilliant, amazing, driven people showing up, trying to change them a bit — they’ve been impervious to that. They’re breaking up, they’re breaking down. And so over time, they’re going to become less important to how people fulfill their basic needs or find joy and meaning in life. I actually think that’s what’s going to happen with big government as well. So we’re going to have to turn to each other.
We’re going to collapse into community and what we can play for is what we find there when it’s all we have.
Rushkoff:
One of the problems with top down is that people who think they’re really smart make really big decisions and implement them with a whole lot of money, but that they don’t actually do much, right? Or they do wrong. There’ll be a Davos meeting for the “Great Reset” and we’re gonna throw every coffee bean in the world on the blockchain. Or we’re going to buy, you know, mosquito nets for Africa that end up poisoning the water. Some tech bro zillionaires have a well-meaning big idea for how their SimCity simulation is supposed to apply to complex real world systems. This is why I kind of never saw technology or industry or capitalism as the ways to solve for technology, industry, or capitalism. Do you know what I mean? Would agree that twe can’t grow or technologize or capitalize our way out of this?
Bendell:
Yeah, we can’t. And this was a big shock for me. I was a big fan of Tesla in 2007 working at WWF, I decided to include Tesla in a report I did on the future of luxury back then. So yeah, I was a big fan. But then when I looked at it more closely, I realized that electric private vehicles are not the future of mobility. We just can’t do it practically in terms of the critical minerals that are required for the world to decarbonize and only be using electricity, renewable electricity.
And I then learned about where all these critical minerals are. And it’s basically yet another case of people, rich people, powerful people in the world deciding that they want what is underneath the pristine environments where other people with no power live. Elon Musk himself said, I think, “Oh, we’ll just coup whoever we want” if they get in the way of getting the critical minerals we need to pursue this vision of the green new deal.
So it was painful. I also hate this conclusion. I really was a bit of an eco modernist. I thought we could do this with ingenuity. But we can’t. Sadly, we are a hydrocarbon civilization, both in terms of energy usage, but also in terms of say, fertilizer production. And we’re going to have to power down and that will only happen if the rich go first. Otherwise it’s illegitimate. And they won’t. They’ll just fly around the world to go to big summits and say, “Hey, let’s do big things to save the world!”
So things will keep on breaking. Breaking down. and within that context, we’ve got each other.
I mean, we, we focus on these zillionaire billionaire people at the moment. They dominate our lives in terms of their tweets and whatever they’re doing, but it’s kind of just a smoke and mirrors. It’s a mirage. It’s not real life.
You can hear the rest of this discussion on Team Human.
Great to see that the two of you are conversing. The conversation/action curve is accelerating, and will one day match the challenge.