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 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.

In the decade from 2010 to 2020 a wave of popular uprisings swept over the globe. Starting with the Arab spring , social media and the internet brought images of injustices to a wide audience. The resulting indignation brought people out in droves and established political systems fell. In his book If We Burn Vincent Bevins writes "it felt like something had shifted in the nature of time itself. They had cracked open the structure of reality, and with each step, with each victory against police defenses, with every movement, it felt as if they were literally moving history forward. " But most of the gains were undone. IF WE BURN asks a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

The Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade has allowed states to restrict access to abortion. Adoption has been presented by anti-abortion advocates as a way to solve the problems created by these restrictions. Gretchen Sission interviewed hundreds of women who gave up their children for adoption. The impacts of those decisions are outlined in her book Relinquished.