“So do you write profiles a bit, or did you just think you wanted to write about doom?” Jem Bendell said. He had picked me up from Totnes train station in a car, and we were on the way to Babbacombe Beach. It was the right weather to spend a day talking about the end of the world: the winter cloud was thick and duvet-like, blocking out most of the light. One of those gloomy weeks when you wonder if the sun will ever rise properly again; if this might be it.
Bendell is perhaps the most controversial person I’ve interviewed in 15 years of journalism. In 2018, he published an academic paper warning that, due to climate change, our society faces inevitable and imminent collapse. In response, Bendell called for what he termed “Deep Adaptation”. I’ll quote his description verbatim: “Deep Adaptation is an agenda and framework for responding to the potential, probable or inevitable collapse of industrial consumer societies due to the direct and indirect impacts of human-caused climate chang and environmental degradation.”
Or more succinctly: it was time, Bendell wrote, to “consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.”
A father and his children cool off in Jacobabad, Pakistan, where temperatures regularly exceed 50 degrees celsius.
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Lots of people liked it. Over a million people downloaded the paper (an extraordinarily high number for an academic publication), and it has now been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Hungarian, Greek and Russian. It inspired and fed directly into the vision of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and led to the formation of a Deep Adaptation social movement, with a network of thousands across the world. Suddenly, Bendell became a kind of climate celebrity, appearing alongside Greta Thunberg and Roger Hallam – a founder of XR and Just Stop Oil – at events and summits. Som people, inspired by the paper, decided to quit their jobs entirely to devote themselves to the environmental movement. As hard as “Deep Adaptation” is to read, it was a tonic for those exasperated by the failure of urgent climate action, by green-washing, by broken promises by governments, by the enduring hope in techno-salvation when it is clear that something is broken in a deeper sense. That life on earth as we know it is in grave danger.
A lot of people also hated the paper. Bendell was mocked, vilified and even demonised by a number of well-known and respected climate scientists. It was called dread porn. Fatalistic. Doomist. Irresponsible. Displaying a “tenuous grasp” of science. (However, some climate scientists, such as Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading authority on sea ice, supported Bendell’s work.)
It was time, Bendell wrote, to “consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe.”
Since the backlash, Bendell now rarely talks to te media. He even left the Deep Adaptation Forum a couple of years back, and now lives in Indonesia, farming seaweed, writing, and playing music. When we met, Bendell was back in Totnes to care for his father, who was nearing the end of his life. “Dad’s family always lived in this area,” he told me as we made our way to the beach, the place of his earliest memories. He was smartly dressed, with a boyish face and owlish eyes. He had been awake until three that morning – sleepless about his next book – but didn’t seem tired. He has a soft, almost dreamlike way of speaking, often pausing for a while to think, often circling back. But his answers were quick, and filled to the brim with ideas, opinions, song lyrics (his own), jokes (a dry, dark humour) and big laughs. Not, perhaps, what I expected of the leading doomer-in-chief.
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I might be being a bit defensive. Trying to deploy some lightness. This is because I don’t knw how to write about collapse, or the end of the world. It frightens me. I have young children, and while I can sometimes stay with the trouble – I even wrote a book about losing our relationship with the rest of nature — I’m ashamed to say I often just want to block it all out. I imagine you might want to block it all out too, if, indeed, you are still reading.
And of course the horsemen of climate breakdown are already here: droughts, floods, fires, melting ice. The last year alone has seen catastrophic floods in Pakistan (8 million people displaced) and Bangladesh (7.2 million affected). Droughts in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. The “megadrought” in the American West. A devastating heatwave in Europe. Extreme wildfires in Argentina, North America, and Russia. Floods in California.
So, yes, I was interested in doom. I was also interested in delusion, in people who have certainty in an uncertain world, and how they get to that point. I wanted to know why a paper rejected by several cimate scientists had become so powerful and influential. I was interested in different capacities for denial and hope. I wanted to see how a person could look at the darkness and suggest a way through. I was glad someone was speaking to the horror and urgency of the earth crisis when most of us find it easier to turn away – I had a sense that it was worse than most of us thought. And, truthfully, I wanted to figure out how a person should live in these transitional times, what a person should do, and how I might protect and prepare my children if what he was saying was true.
Jem Bendell on the climate crisis societal collapse and how Deep Adaptation will help us survive the end of the world
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We walked down the beach towards a pier. The waves were crashing and it was freezing cold. Bendell was telling me about a time in 2007 when he was working in luxury sustainability with the WWF. The task was: “How can we make sustainability sexy in Asia, fast?” He and a colleague analysed and ranked the 10 largest luxury brands – including Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent (now known as Saint Laurent) and Louis Vuitton – according to their environment and social performance, and published what he called the “Deeper Luxury” report. It received a lot of press coverage, and luxury brands took notice.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“It planted the seed of an idea,” he said. “Did it work? That’s a much bigger question. Did it work by blocking biodiversity loss? No. Changing the emissions curve? No. Questioning or unpicking the underlying economic and cultural systems that lead to this level of destruction? No.”
The project was a classic case of well-meaning failure. And overtime, Bendell grew suspicious that many of our efforts to avert the climate crisis were similarly failing – and that in many cases, they were designed to do so.
Bendell had wanted to save the world since he was 16. As a child, he lived on naval bases – Sydney, Virginia, Plymouth – travelling for his father’s job. After graduating from Cambridge, he pursued a successful 20-year career in corporate sustainability “before it was normal – when it was weird for a company to work with a supply chain on deforestation.”
He worked in senior management in WWF UK, as a client for NGOs such as Marine Stewardship Council, on the boards of investment funds, and for the United Nations. He spent much of his adult life living abroad – in India, the Philippines, and Switzerland. Those years made him aware how little change was actually happening behind corporations’ sustainability promises and goals. “My first job in 1995 was to source all wood from sustainable forests,” Bendell said. “[That organisaton] still hasn’t done that today.”
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In 2012, the World Economic Forum honoured Bendell as a Young Global Leader. That same year, he founded the Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria, where he became Professor of Sustainable Leadership.
While researching his inaugural lecture in 2014, Bendell sat down to consider how the last two decades of his work fitted in with his original motivation. But as he looked back over the previous years, it tipped him into an existential crisis.
He had started to notice an ominous “drip drip drip” of news about events he’d only expected to see when climate change had reached an “advanced and dangerous” stage: forest fires in Siberia; permafrost melting; an area of ice the size of India missing from the Arctic. “Thi was the kind of thing I had learned at Cambridge would be a dangerous feedback [loop] that I might see if I lived into my 70s or 80s,” he said.
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He started to look at what was actually happening with biodiversity loss, deforestation and climate change. “Some of it was just too scary and I remember thinking, ‘Well, I’ll look at it afterwards.’”
“You were working in sustainability but you didn’t know what was going on?” I asked.
Bendell explained that he was wrapped up in the minutiae of his work. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the leading authority in the field – had warned of climate catastrophe, but the events it described were always seen as decaes away: 2080, 2100. “I didn’t realise my assumption that we had time was so influenced by mainstream climatology and how it works,” he said. “If there was no consensus [on something], the IPCC would exclude it entirely from their assessment and their recommendations.”
By March 2017 he couldn’t silence the “not knowing” and took a year off from the university to find out. “You see something really ominous – lots of signs: an article about permafrost, fires in the forests of the Arctic, 30 degrees Celsius in the Arctic Circle – but I didn’t know what it meant.”
Eventually, Bendell concluded that social collapse of industrial societies would take around 10 years.
He went back to the climatology he had studied as an undergraduate, researching methane and ice and tipping points. He based himself in Indonesia and explored Buddhism, shamanic journeying, breathwork, inner dance, Adlerian psychology and, most importantly, improv theatre, which he teaches. “It was massive,” he said, to be awy from British culture. “I couldn’t have done the paper if I wasn’t in Bali.”
Eventually, he concluded that social collapse of industrial societies would take around 10 years. He defined “collapse” as “the uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity and meaning.”
He submitted the resulting paper to the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal. But the peer reviewers asked for major revisions, arguing that the paper relied on past studies and did not include any “new or significant information”. Another claimed that Bendell’s language was “not appropriate” for an academic paper. Bendell responded that their attitude was “wilful blindness” and argued that the situation we are in requires emotive communication. He withdrew the submission, and instead published it himself as an occasional paper for IFLAS, his department at the University of Cumbria, under the title “Deep Adaptation.”
In 2018, after the paper came out, Bendell gae a talk at a now-notorious environmental conference in Ambleside. Audience member Skeena Rathor, who would become one of the key voices of XR, said, “It was like that scene when smoke is coming under the door and you’re looking around and no one’s moving.” She had to sit on her hands because she was shaking. Afterwards she threw herself into XR, which launched a couple of months later. I asked her why “Deep Adaptation” had had such an impact.
“There’s a lot of pushback and shaming of the work for being doomerist,” she said. “But there’s deep compassion and deep reverence in it. There’s a soulfulness. He’s not afraid of universal language and different ways of making meaning, which include the sacred.”
When the paper went viral, Bendell himself didn’t want to talk to television broadcasters and frighten people with his message. “A lot of people, elderly people, live at home alone, and how does that come across? ‘Yeah, so I’ve concluded we’re fucked.’ I didn’t want that. I wanted moreserious ways to convey the idea.”
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In 2019 he set up the Deep Adaptation Forum, a place for mutual support and collaboration for people observing, anticipating and experiencing social disruption and collapse. (Recent topics in the Facebook groups at time of writing include building rocket stoves, climate-resilient foodstuffs, and the running of seed libraries.) And he talked to psychologists and psychotherapists in order to help members become “doom-aware” and avoid pathologising fear of the climate breakdown to come.
We walked past big cliffs of maroon granite, streaked with other aeons, and watched a couple of oystercatchers, their orange beaks bright in the gloom. Bendel told me that his dad and grandpa once fished for mackerel here. People could pay a bit to take rowing boats out. One or two dozen mackerel would feed the street; they had no way of keeping the fish, so would give it to extended family and neighbours. He pointed up. “There used to be a house there,” he said. “It fell down. The whole cliff fell down.”
Jem Bendell on the climate crisis societal collapse and how Deep Adaptation will help us survive the end of the world
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Bendell is not the first to sound the alarm. The term ‘collapsology’ – for the modern study of collapse – was coined by French academics in 2015, but the idea has a long and colourful history. In the 1970s, the infamous Club of Rome report “The Limits to Growth” predicted society would collapse in 2040 (one study recently looked at the report again and suggested we are on track). It is widely accepted that we are living through a “sixth mass extinction” event caused by human activity. The UN Environment Programm itself says “there is no credible pathway” to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level, as was agreed at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. Other environmental writers and thinkers, such as Joanna Macy, Bayo Akomolafe and Paul Kingsnorth, have been talking about adaptation and endings for some time.
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Still, despite a growing number of end-times memes and mainstream pop culture references – “It’s like we’re all entertaining each other while the world burns,” says Aubrey Plaza’s character, Harper, in The White Lotus – talking about societal collapse is still taboo. As President Orlean says in Don’t Look Up, “You cannot go around saying to people hat there’s a 100 per cent chance they’re going to die.”
The week before I met Bendell I was in a meeting with our local council – which declared a “climate emergency” a while back – about its progress in reaching net zero by 2030. There was a lot of optimistic and hopeful talk in the council’s presentation – “hopium”, as DA-ers would put it. Then, an audience member asked a question that went something like this: “Running the numbers, the actions you’ve given add up to 0.1 per cent of the emissions cuts that are needed, so where will the other 99.9 per cent come from?” No one could answer.
Critics of “Deep Adaptation” worry that talking about potential collapse will lead to inaction. Climate scientists have expressed concerns that it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy – that saying doom is inevitable could make it inevitable. That people might give up putting pressure on governments to meet targets, even though every fraction of a degree saved equates to a significant reductionof suffering. (This, Bendell argued, doesn’t quite follow, as his thinking has shaped and influenced groups like XR.)
“If we don’t prepare for potential collapse, we’ll be far worse off when it actually happens. Any reasonable person should think that collapse is possible.”
Ruper Read, former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion
Bendell said he could see why people were annoyed with his paper: the previous version of himself would not have wanted to hear it either. “I would be saying, ‘We need to do this amazing project, we need to do biochar, we need a new wind farm,’ and then someone says, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great, but shouldn’t we also look at everything collapsing around us? Monetary systems? International trade? Droughts that are going to wipe out our harvests unless we do something about not just stopping it, but also changing how we cope with it?’”
Bendell has said that while he believes collapse is inevitable, that is not necessarily the opinion of other people engaged in th movement: it’s more a philosophical ethos. What defines people in Deep Adaptation is taking collapse seriously enough for it to affect their lives. They are “collapse-aware”.
Rupert Read, a former spokesperson for XR who co-edited the book version of “Deep Adaptation” with Bendell, considers DA an insurance policy. “If we don’t prepare for potential collapse, we’ll be far worse off when it actually happens,” he told me, speaking from his “tiny-holding” in rural Norfolk, where he grows food. (Self-sufficiency is big among DA-ers.) “Any reasonable person should think that collapse is possible.”
What about the argument that DA leads to inaction? “Adaptation is a mind bomb. It makes it real to people. One point five degrees, net zero; it’s all abstract. When you start saying, ‘Because of the weather this summer, we have to change how we farm,’ then people are like ‘Fuck, it’s real. I don’t want to be left behind. I want to be part of that.’”
