Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse

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Our individual ability to perceive medium-term change is further hindered by the dramatic changes that occur all the time in our personal lives. If you lose your job, or get a better-paying job in a new city, or are involved in a serious accident and become disabled, or find God, or stop drinking, or become a parent, or lose a parent, these events all function as “noisy fluctuations”. We might all adjust to ‘creeping normal’ events like these deadly monsoon floods, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Sohail Shazad/AAP A radical rethink of ‘the entire Western project’ The unfolding environmental tragedy arose from collective human trauma and the response to it has been shaped by that trauma – including COP28. Fortunately, there is a wave of activity emerging to help. Useful strategies: (1) triage, (2) rationing, (3) communal living 2023-05-21T02:51:31Z Comment by Apple Bridge

Bendell, Jem (27 July 2018). "Deep adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy". University of Cumbria: 1–31. Archived from the original on 8 May 2020 . Retrieved 8 October 2021. If the members have spare cash they can lend it to other members, or pay for things in advance. Such groups are very widespread in the Majority World, and have come to be known as ROSCAs (Rotatin savings and credit associations). Changes in your personal circumstances overshadow your understanding of the outside world, with its subtle, slow-moving phenomena (migratory bird populations, sea-level rise). The most obvious example of this is how every single one of us gets old, becomes frail and sometimes enfeebled, and finally dies.So, when world leaders were on stage in New York, grandly signing off on their sustainable development goals, most of their countries had already begun their decline. public, private and civic institutions of incumbent power, and their officers and apologists, are already making matters worse in the early phases of unfolding societal collapse. Participatory Decision-Making: This directly challenges top-down authority by redistributing decision-making power to community members. Mindful Consumption: Advocating for conscious buying decisions can reduce dependence on harmful production systems and promote local economies.

as the research [for Breaking Together] progressed, I discovered the data was indicating things were far worse than I had previously assessed. Indeed, they were already far worse in the years before 2018 than I had known. I had been wrong to conclude that societal collapse is inevitable, because it had already begun when I was reaching that conclusion. My first and last time at a COP summit was in Egypt in 2022. I used the platform of the media room to convey some neglected issues to people following the climate policy agenda. Two of my speeches were warnings. First, that there will be a spike in global temperatures due to the reductions in aerosols. Second, that there is a new and growing kind of climate scepticism that regards any action as motivated by authoritarianism and commercial greed. These issues did not enter the official process nor the conversations of the tens of thousands of people attending to do business. This year it is unlikely those issues will be discussed properly, as the event focuses on an outdated understanding of climate change, not the climate that has been changing rapidly in the months leading up to the summit. Economic Space Agency is designing ‘Post Capitalist protocols’ to support all these ideas and make them interoperable. Restoring the Commons: Effective management of common resources can be seen as part of an alternative political economy. It also led to the formation of an international online Deep Adaptation Forum, which has allowed tens of thousands of people to begin processing their fear and grief about future societal and ecological breakdown.Ecolibertarians believe “modern societies are destroying their own foundations because we have been manipulated to experience life as unsafe and competitive[,] and behave accordingly”. Unlike Silicon Valley-style libertarians, ecolibertarians see “the influence and intrusion of corporations [… and] capitalism more generally” as one of the factors responsible for the destruction of our ecosystem. Barricades & B/oardrooms: A Contemporary History of the Corporate Accountability Movement, SSN 1020-8216, Accessed 20 March 2019 Again, each of these actions can be seen as embodying ecolibertarian principles, though how they represent them can vary depending on context and implementation.

Responding to these kinds of questions is part of the politics of “Deep Adaptation”, a framework as intriguing as it is controversial. Jem Bendell, a former professor of sustainability leadership, launched the Deep Adaptation movement in 2018 by claiming that social collapse is not just a plausible outcome of climate change, but an extremely likely one. In this case, ignorance is not bliss. For if we are fortunate enough to recognise this situation now, as well as understand something about trauma, then we can try to develop our own resilience and that of the people we know. This opens up a huge arena for positive responses, which is something I will explore in closing this essay. A signpost for people made politically homeless by the craziness of the last few years.” Aaron Vandiver, author, Under a Poacher’s Moon. DeMeulenaere, Stephen DeMeulenaere (24 August 2023). "Book review: A new compass for navigating past the collapse". Shareable . Retrieved 11 September 2023. Is he right? Only time will tell. Breaking Together is “unfalsifiable” in that sense: we’ll have to wait for 20 or 30 years to know for sure. Meanwhile, even if contemporary society is still somehow staggering along pretty much unchanged a decade from now, a true believer in Bendell’s society’s-already-collapsing thesis could simply say, “That’s because the breakdown only properly began a couple of years ago; just wait another 20 years, you’ll see.”

Boiling frog, creeping collapse

Benardete, Georgie (23 September 2015). "Why we are all responsible for solving climate change". World Economic Forum. Bendell, Jem (2019). "Chapter 11: Doom and bloom: adapting to collapse". In Extinction Rebellion (ed.). This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. Penguin. pp.73–80. ISBN 9780141991443. [37] Ecological Restoration, Local Food Systems & Mindful Consumption: These actions resist dependencies on globalized, often harmful, systems that typically concentrate power in the hands of a few. Encouraging ‘Being the Change’: Individuals can embody the change they wish to see, thus liberating people from oppressive modern systems.