This Interview Might Save Your Life

How the coming crash of industrial civilization will impact everyone, and what we can do

This is what Jem Bendell says about himself on his website:

Before the summer of 2023, I was a full Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria.  I was also the Founder of the Deep Adaptation Forum and the co-Founder of the International Scholars’ Warning on Societal Disruption and Collapse. A major transformation in my career began in 2017 as I took a year out to study the latest climate science, and released the Deep Adaptation paper which went viral. A reasonable profile of me appeared in GQ Magazine in 2023.

After the release of my book Breaking Together in May 2023 (available as a free download), I decided to leave employment as a full Professor in the UK. At the age of 50, I am entering a new phase in life, where the development of a regenerative farm school in Indonesia and playing devotional music for groups will become my main focus. In addition, I write essays on collapse readiness and response, while giving the occasional talk, course, or interview, and publishing newsletters. If you could support my time to continue writing such essays, I’d appreciate it.

Despite misrepresentation of me by reformist environmentalists, who unfortunately marginalise attempts to soften the breakdown of industrial consumer societies, I have never predicted near term human extinction, and have continued to support carbon cuts and natural drawdown for over 25 years. I have pushed for a wider agenda of harm reduction, beyond either giving up on social change, nor sticking to failed tactics, policies and ideologies. In 2020 I articulated this approach to staying with the total trouble of our times, while being creatively engaged in positive change, in a joint article with a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. Neither am I an anti-vaxxer. Noticing the failures of the orthodox response to the pandemic, my arguments and advice since October 2021 have been for a smarter approach that empowers citizens to make responsible decisions, rather than only relying on passive consumption of pharmaceuticals. My book Breaking Together elaborates on these issues.

You can also listen to this interview as a podcast.

Daniel Pinchbeck

Hi everybody, I'm here with Jem Bendel, author of “Breaking Together,” for our long-awaited conversation. We've been trying to get to this point for a couple months now, I think. Jem originally came to my attention with – what was the name of that earlier paper, Deep Adaptation?

Jem Bendell

Yes. It came out in 2018, over five years ago.

Daniel Pinchbeck 

Deep Adaptation really had an impact on a lot of people that I knew. It got shared around a lot and made more people aware of how severe the ecological emergency was. Now, five years later, you have followed that up with Breaking Together, which is a terrific book, definitely not for the faint of hearts.

But yeah, definitely something that people need to know about and read and think through. I want to start with a number of immediate data points.

I've been in New York this weekend, which is the end of October, Halloween. It was like 80 degrees last night. At 3 a.m., girls were out on the sidewalks in thongs and bikinis, not even shivering.

I've never seen it being this warm this time of year. It feels like the warming curve around the world has taken off on a vertical at this point.

Another data point is the Israeli-Gaza war happening, with all the parameters of that ancient history. As I think about your work and other people who've been studying global warming and climate change, I sort of wonder, they're fighting over these pieces of desert. They're all hating each other for these thousands of years. But what happens when that area becomes just unlivable, which could be 10 to 15 years away.

Then what have they been fighting for? So that was on my mind. And the last little data point of my weekend was reading Mark Andreessen’s Tech-Optimist Manifesto, where he basically argues that tech is the most positive thing in the world that we should not try to limit its development, including AI. Actually, tech is our only hope for progress to save the world. He even looks at people who are into topics like sustainability as his enemies: Anyone who might be against this type of hyper-progress that could bring about beneficial progress for everybody.

Jem Bendell

Wow, I'm so surprised. I've never heard those ideas before.

Data points from my side: I'm back in the UK. This is actually my father's lounge. This is where he passed away just a few days ago, and that's why I'm back here. Iit wasn't a surprise. He had terminal cancer for twenty months. I owe him quite a lot because I left my normal life to come and live with him for a bit in this flat where I know nobody in this town. If it wasn't for my dad, whenever I bring him a cup of tea because he was bed-bound, saying, ‘How's the book going?’ Because he knew I had the deadline. He was basically saying, Don't stay here and watch Telly. gGo back and do the book. This really drove me on so I'm sort of back here and I'm thinking wow, if it wasn't for dad perhaps I never would have finished the book. It was a hard slog going through all the scholarship on on know what's breaking in societies. So i am back here and I’m feeling a bit proud of myself. I'm actually oddly grateful that all these things came together – that the book got done partly because of my dad's terminal cancer, really.

Daniel Pinchbeck

In Breaking Together, you talk about the path that led you to write the book, and how it was basically the last thing you wanted to do. As I read this, I felt tremendous empathy for how ridiculous, what an awful position, to be spreading this message that most people don't want, that costs you money and position, and yet feeling that somebody has to push it forward.

Jem Bendell

For a long time, after that deep adaptation paper went viral, I didn't really want to shout from the rooftops about this stuff. I was very nervous about bringing this message and how to do it, and I was concerned about the emotional impact. But a lot has changed in five years. Opinion polls show that people no longer believe that their kids are going to have a better life. Many people think that climate change is going to collapse societies. But all this stuff is kept taboo in mainstream media and is only found in the alternative media really.

We have to stay positive somehow. Otherwise it's somehow disgusting and disgraceful. And yet the suppression of the anxieties that people understandably feel can lead to all manner of derangement and manipulation. That's probably why nostalgia politics has taken off worldwide in the last seven years. Everywhere, not just ‘Make America Great Again’. Or ‘Take Back Control’ in Britain. 

Everywhere, people are electing dictator’s sons and that kind of thing. The Right Wing has tuned into this because all they're into is winning power and keeping power. But the so-called progressives, liberals, Leftists, are still wedded to old ideas about progress, assuming that we can, somehow, if we get the right policies, the right people in power, fix all the problems. And I wanted to encourage a solidarity-based politics for what I see as an era of collapse and an era of breakdown, an era of regress and retraction.

So I felt I couldn't walk away. I couldn't just go do Kirtan and Buddhist meditation retreats and organic farming and all sorts of good, fun stuff. I couldn't do that and anticipate a general derangement of the public dialogue and know that I did not at least try. I don't know if I'll succeed in doing anything, but I felt I had to try. Then I realized to get a good hearing on this, I've got to really study.

Daniel Pinchbeck:

Where are we at with societal disruption, breakdown and possibly collapse? 

Jem Bendell: 

When I went into that more and more, I realized it was far worse than I'd imagined before. There's a good evidence base to argue it's already begun, meaning the collapse of modern industrial consumer societies, which is an ongoing process, slowly unfolding. Ultimately it will affect everyone everywhere. I'm pleased I'm through the other side and I'm looking forward to what some people call more the “post doom” vibe.

But at the moment, I'm still talking to people about the sadness, the anxiety, the grief. Letting go before you can let come, and reimagine. I'll be done with that soon. And I'll just want to live to the max in this new context.

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Daniel Pinchbeck 

All sorts of questions run into my mind, wanting to tumble forward. I’m curious, what's your perspective about whether humanity will actually go extinct, let's say, in this century? Do you think it's probable, possible, or even inevitable at this point?