This is part 2 of a conversation with Jem Bendell. In the first half we talked about what collapse looks like and how it might play out. The second half focuses more on how to respond.

Dr. Bendell’s early career focused on mitigating the effects of industrial civilization. He worked with the UN and NGO’s all over the world. Davos deemed him a young global leader. In 2018, after extensive research on the state of life on the planet he published the Deep Adaptation paper which said basically that a collapse of our economy, food production and energy systems is inevitable. In his new book Breaking together he goes one step further and writes that collapse has already begun. The best we can hope for is ways to make the crash less ruinous. And the only way to do that is change the how we live and how we view our relationships with each other and the rest of the natural world.

Derrick Jensen is the author of many books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. We’ll be talking about his book “Bright Green Lies: How the environmental movement lost its way and what we can do about it”

Dr. Jem Bendell’s career centered on how to mitigate harms caused by the excesses of our consumer culture. He was a Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability which had an MBA program with over 2000 students online from around 100 countries. He gave talks all over the world to leaders in business and government on tackling critical global challenges. In 2012, the World Economic Forum appointed him a Young Global Leader.
In 2018 he published a White Paper on Deep Adaptation. The research for that paper changed his life. He came to the conclusion that tinkering around the edges of how we live won’t save us from the catastrophic effects brought about by the degradation of the natural world.
His new book Breaking Together examines the scope of the crisis and advocates for creative responses. There is so much in this book that I felt I could have built an entire series around it but I had only an hour of his time. In this first half we talk about what collapse looks like and how it might play out. The second half focuses more on how to respond.