Permission to Go Wild
Jem Bendell's Advice for Living in a Collapsing World
Embracing Our Emergency starts in a few hours. I still hope you will join us for it.
I thought, as inspiration, I would offer you free access to one of my favorite presentations from our last seminar, Building Our Regenerative Future. Jem Bendell, author of Breaking Together, explains why he believes the extreme nature of our current situation gives us the right to “go wild.” This means rejecting traditional career paths, seeking deeper fulfillment, doing what we love with the people we love, now. He offers some tangible advice about how to do this — for instance, he discusses his own decision to move from the UK to Bali, where he currently owns a small farm and teaches permaculture to local farmers.
Here is access to his talk (which really gets going around the six minute mark).
Bendell won’t be joining us again for Embracing Our Emergency as he is suffering from long Covid. But the roster we have put together is extraordinary. We have just added new amazing people to it, including Frances Moore Lappé, renowned author of Diet for a Small Planet, and climate scientist Rebekah Jones. Notes on Complexity author Neil Theise will be speaking today (we start at 1 pm EST). We will have opportunity to learn from some of the greatest current movement builders and thought leaders, including Bill McKibben, Marianne Williamson, Jane Fonda, Jamie Wheal (Recapture the Rapture), and Nate Hagens (The Great Simplification animated series and podcast).
We have set a full price for the seminar at $300. We feel this is very reasonable, considering the time and effort to put this together. Course proceeds support Josh Fox’s new documentary on the refugee crisis, The Welcome Table, and my efforts to launch more ambitious media and educational projects. But we don’t turn away anyone for lack of funds. You can write to us at hello@liminal.news and let us know what feels good to you to contribute. We want to bring community together around this and not bar entrance to people due to finances. Also, some of you may have sacrificed considerable financial reward for your political and ecological activist work. If that is your situation, we are offering an Activist Special: $100 for the course. Here is the link.
Let’s go wild together!
-D
Hi Daniel -
Looking everywhere for the recording from yesterday to no avail - on Liminal, on Hylo, on email, etc. Please send it as an email and make it really easy to access going forward.
Stoked!
Hmm. I am excited to hear how this event goes. Thankyou for putting such a gathering together! I am a bit weary of this rising trend however to go "wild" as Mr. Bendell calls it. I wonder, did he ask the Balinese people and land spirits permission before he flexed his privilege and moved there with all the other beautiful uber spiritualized, ice bath obsessed, Burning Man bred digital nomads? Does he speak the local language? How is he going about "teaching" permaculture to the locals? This sounds a bit too close to white savior BS to me. I am sure he has good intent, just like Michael Franti and all the other gorgeous cacao drinking warriors who have "empowered themselves" to relocate to beautiful places like Ko Phangan and Bali. But how is this not yet another form of colonization? Seems better to stay put, grow roots and help heal the world around you, right where you are. It's one thing to be invited somewhere, to marry into a place, on its terms, but I seldom see this in this context. It usually winds up being another gentrification game with outsiders telling the locals how to be better, without learning to see the world from their eyes. But what do I know? Just curious. I'm sure Jem has a lot to offer Bali. https://gregorypettys.substack.com/