Stevens is an independent researcher, author and lecturer. He studied business and environmental management before taking an MSc in holistic science at the Schumacher College and Plymouth University. In 2006, he co-founded Greenloop, a consultancy offering support and guidance in circular economy. Associate researcher at the Momentum Institute (FR) since 2011, he is co-author of several books, including Comment tout peut s’effondrer (Seuil, 2015, with P. Servigne), translated into six languages (published by Polity in 2020 as How Everything Can Collapse) and Another End of the World is Possible (Polity, 2021, with P. Servigne and G. Chapelle).
Rene Suša is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on critiques of modernity and the modern subject based on postcolonial, decolonial and psychoanalytical thought. More specifically, he is interested in the educational challenges of generatively engaging with the unconscious modern/colonial desires, projections and affective investments that prevent us from expanding our imaginative, cognitive and relational capacities.
Adrian Tait worked for 26 years as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, also teaching and supervising MRCPsych trainees in Devon. In 2009, he undertook a visiting fellowship at the University of the West of England to help develop and coordinate a global psycho-social response to the climate crisis. This led to the formation in 2013 of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA). Adrian has written extensively for the CPA and is active in bringing climate psychology perspectives to a wider audience.
Charlotte von Bülow, PhD, is a senior lecturer in leadership at the Bristol Business School, University of the West of England. She is the Founder of the Crossfields Institute Group (UK) – a state-recognized awarding organization for integrative education, a higher education institute and a consultancy. Charlotte has worked as an educator all her adult life; as a social entrepreneur, consultant and executive coach, she has served individuals, organizations and communities the world over. Her research and publications focus on integrative approaches to education, leadership in uncertainty and complex times and attentional ethics.
Introduction What Next, Now That the Limits Have Been Breached?
Jem Bendell and Rupert Read
Are you confused and concerned about what seems like the disruption or even breakdown of normal life? Do you worry about becoming stuck, not knowing what to do? Do you want to explore with others how to respond creatively at this difficult time? If so, then you share that intention with the contributors to this book. Until recently, most people in modern societies have not had much reason or opportunity to explore what an anticipation of greater societal disruption – or even collapse – might mean for their life choices. It has been a taboo subject, policed by the argument that to even discuss it would be unhelpful to individuals and society. To have any level of anticipation of societal breakdown or collapse, whether from a range of environmental, economic, political or technological factors, has been labelled as pessimism, alarmism, doomism, fatalism or defeatism. Such negative dismissals can discourage us from engaging in this topic any further. Unfortunately, such avoidance could lose us all precious time to explore what can be done and learned at this difficult moment, especially if our aim is to reduce harm while saving more of society and the natural world. It might mean we postpone the opportunity to rethink what is most important to us and align the rest of our lives with that. Therefore, we consider it would be defeatist to not even begin exploring what we can do to help in the face of massive societal disruption.
That is why we believe it is time for a book that discusses various implications of anticipating societal collapse. 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 change and environmental degradation. With the term ‘societal collapse’, we mean an uneven ending of industrial consumer modes of sustenance, shelter, health, security, pleasure, identity and meaning. Rather than an environmental, economic or political collapse, the word ‘societal’ is important as these uneven endings pervade society and challenge our place within it. The term ‘collapse’ does not necessarily mean that suddenness is likely but rather implies a form of breakdown in systems that is comprehensive and cannot be reversed to what it was before. The word ‘deep’ is intended to contrast the agenda with mainstream approaches to adaptation to climate impacts (Klein et al. 2015) by going deeper into the causes and potential responses within ourselves, our organizations and societies. People who engage in dialogue and initiative for deep adaptation believe that societal collapse in most or all countries of the world is likely, inevitable or already unfolding. Typically, such people believe that they will experience this disruption themselves or have already begun to do so, while recognizing that the disruptions may be first and worst in the global South. Deep adaptation describes the inner and outer, personal and collective, responses to either the anticipation or experience of societal collapse, worsened by the direct or indirect impacts of climate change.
The vulnerability of our normal ways of life was highlighted in 2020 when a virus triggered a series of cascading effects beyond its initial health impacts. To begin with, there were shortages of medicines, protective gear and food, then a slowdown of economic activity, domestic political upheavals, diplomatic and geopolitical conflicts, and the creation of large amounts of national debt to reduce, or postpone, economic shock. The sprouting of volunteer-led mutual aid in many locations is an indicator of the capacity of people to respond positively. While Covid-19 has posed a stress test for the globalized economy, it is also a stark reminder of what deeply matters in our daily lives and is a real-time dress rehearsal for future disasters and psychological unease (Read 2020: ch. 26; Gray 2020). When some people consider societal collapse to be an abstract and theoretical matter, it is worth noting that the United Nations has warned us that outbreaks of coronaviruses, including potentially ones more serious than Covid-19, are more likely because of both environmental destruction and climate change (United Nations 2020). That analysis means that disruptions from the indirect impacts of climate change are already being felt by most societies around the world.
To assess the probability and processes of societal collapse is a complex endeavour, as described by expert ‘collapsologists’ in chapter 3 of this book. Such assessments can draw on many disciplines of scholarship, including sociology, economics, politics, psychology, philosophy and agronomy, as well as composite fields such as climate science, environmental studies, futures studies, catastrophic risks, emergency management and disaster reduction (Servigne and Stevens 2020). This complexity therefore means that any commentary on the likelihood of societal collapse will derive from the specialism, mentality, identity and lived experience of the scholar. Most scholars are not experiencing the climate-worsened hunger and displacement that hundreds of millions of people are at the time of our writing (FAO 2018). Despite the inevitable bias towards normality within the many fields of scholarship that could give us an assessment of the likelihood of societal collapse, in recent years more experts have come forward with warnings. One of the fields where such warnings are now coming from is climate science (Moses 2020).
In November 2019, seven leading climate scientists published a review in the journal Nature which said that a collapse of society may be inevitable because nine of the fifteen known global climate tipping points that regulate the state of the planet may have already been activated (Lenton et al. 2019). Soon after, an opinion from five scientists on our climate situation was published in the journal Biosciences and signed by more than 11,000 scientists worldwide as a warning to humanity: ‘The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected . . . It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity . . .’ (Ripple et al. 2019). The reasons why climate change is so dangerous to humanity are described in chapter 2, and the reasons why climate scientists have been conservative in their statement of that risk are explained in chapter