“So do you write profiles a bit, or did you just think you wanted to write about doom?” Jem Bendell said. He had picked me up from Totnes train station in a car, and we were on the way to Babbacombe Beach. It was the right weather to spend a day talking about the end of the world: the winter cloud was thick and duvet-like, blocking out most of the light. One of those gloomy weeks when you wonder if the sun will ever rise properly again; if this might be it.
Bendell is perhaps the most controversial person I’ve interviewed in 15 years of journalism. In 2018, he published an academic paper warning that, due to climate change, our society faces inevitable and imminent collapse. In response, Bendell called for what he termed “Deep Adaptation”. I’ll quote his description verbatim: “Deep Adaptation is an agenda and framework for responding to the potential, probable or inevitable collapse of industrial consumer societies due to the direct and indirect impacts of human-caused climate change and environmental degradation.”
Or more succinctly: it was time, Bendell wrote, to “consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.”
Lots of people liked it. Over a million people downloaded the paper (an extraordinarily high number for an academic publication), and it has now been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Hungarian, Greek and Russian. It inspired and fed directly into the vision of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and led to the formation of a Deep Adaptation social movement, with a network of thousands across the world. Suddenly, Bendell became a kind of climate celebrity, appearing alongside Greta Thunberg and Roger Hallam – a founder of XR and Just Stop Oil – at events and summits. Some people, inspired by the paper, decided to quit their jobs entirely to devote themselves to the environmental movement. As hard as “Deep Adaptation” is to read, it was a tonic for those exasperated by the failure of urgent climate action, by green-washing, by broken promises by governments, by the enduring hope in techno-salvation when it is clear that something is broken in a deeper sense. That life on earth as we know it is in grave danger.
A lot of people also hated the paper. Bendell was mocked, vilified and even demonised by a number of well-known and respected climate scientists. It was called dread porn. Fatalistic. Doomist. Irresponsible. Displaying a “tenuous grasp” of science. (However, some climate scientists, such as Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading authority on sea ice, supported Bendell’s work.)
Since the backlash, Bendell now rarely talks to the media. He even left the Deep Adaptation Forum a couple of years back, and now lives in Indonesia, farming seaweed, writing, and playing music. When we met, Bendell was back in Totnes to care for his father, who was nearing the end of his life. “Dad’s family always lived in this area,” he told me as we made our way to the beach, the place of his earliest memories. He was smartly dressed, with a boyish face and owlish eyes. He had been awake until three that morning – sleepless about his next book – but didn’t seem tired. He has a soft, almost dreamlike way of speaking, often pausing for a while to think, often circling back. But his answers were quick, and filled to the brim with ideas, opinions, song lyrics (his own), jokes (a dry, dark humour) and big laughs. Not, perhaps, what I expected of the leading doomer-in-chief.
I might be being a bit defensive. Trying to deploy some lightness. This is because I don’t know how to write about collapse, or the end of the world. It frightens me. I have young children, and while I can sometimes stay with the trouble – I even wrote a book about losing our relationship with the rest of nature — I’m ashamed to say I often just want to block it all out. I imagine you might want to block it all out too, if, indeed, you are still reading.
And of course the horsemen of climate breakdown are already here: droughts, floods, fires, melting ice. The last year alone has seen catastrophic floods in Pakistan (8 million people displaced) and Bangladesh (7.2 million affected). Droughts in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. The “megadrought” in the American West. A devastating heatwave in Europe. Extreme wildfires in Argentina, North America, and Russia. Floods in California.
So, yes, I was interested in doom. I was also interested in delusion, in people who have certainty in an uncertain world, and how they get to that point. I wanted to know why a paper rejected by several climate scientists had become so powerful and influential. I was interested in different capacities for denial and hope. I wanted to see how a person could look at the darkness and suggest a way through. I was glad someone was speaking to the horror and urgency of the earth crisis when most of us find it easier to turn away – I had a sense that it was worse than most of us thought. And, truthfully, I wanted to figure out how a person should live in these transitional times, what a person should do, and how I might protect and prepare my children if what he was saying was true.
We walked down the beach towards a pier. The waves were crashing and it was freezing cold. Bendell was telling me about a time in 2007 when he was working in luxury sustainability with the WWF. The task was: “How can we make sustainability sexy in Asia, fast?” He and a colleague analysed and ranked the 10 largest luxury brands – including Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent (now known as Saint Laurent) and Louis Vuitton – according to their environment and social performance, and published what he called the “Deeper Luxury” report. It received a lot of press coverage, and luxury brands took notice.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“It planted the seed of an idea,” he said. “Did it work? That’s a much bigger question. Did it work by blocking biodiversity loss? No. Changing the emissions curve? No. Questioning or unpicking the underlying economic and cultural systems that lead to this level of destruction? No.”
The project was a classic case of well-meaning failure. And over time, Bendell grew suspicious that many of our efforts to avert the climate crisis were similarly failing – and that in many cases, they were designed to do so.
Bendell had wanted to save the world since he was 16. As a child, he lived on naval bases – Sydney, Virginia, Plymouth – travelling for his father’s job. After graduating from Cambridge, he pursued a successful 20-year career in corporate sustainability “before it was normal – when it was weird for a company to work with a supply chain on deforestation.”
He worked in senior management in WWF UK, as a client for NGOs such as Marine Stewardship Council, on the boards of investment funds, and for the United Nations. He spent much of his adult life living abroad – in India, the Philippines, and Switzerland. Those years made him aware how little change was actually happening behind corporations’ sustainability promises and goals. “My first job in 1995 was to source all wood from sustainable forests,” Bendell said. “[That organisation] still hasn’t done that today.”
In 2012, the World Economic Forum honoured Bendell as a Young Global Leader. That same year, he founded the Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria, where he became Professor of Sustainable Leadership.
While researching his inaugural lecture in 2014, Bendell sat down to consider how the last two decades of his work fitted in with his original motivation. But as he looked back over the previous years, it tipped him into an existential crisis.
He had started to notice an ominous “drip drip drip” of news about events he’d only expected to see when climate change had reached an “advanced and dangerous” stage: forest fires in Siberia; permafrost melting; an area of ice the size of India missing from the Arctic. “This was the kind of thing I had learned at Cambridge would be a dangerous feedback [loop] that I might see if I lived into my 70s or 80s,” he said.
He started to look at what was actually happening with biodiversity loss, deforestation and climate change. “Some of it was just too scary and I remember thinking, ‘Well, I’ll look at it afterwards.’”
“You were working in sustainability but you didn’t know what was going on?” I asked.
Bendell explained that he was wrapped up in the minutiae of his work. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the leading authority in the field – had warned of climate catastrophe, but the events it described were always seen as decades away: 2080, 2100. “I didn’t realise my assumption that we had time was so influenced by mainstream climatology and how it works,” he said. “If there was no consensus [on something], the IPCC would exclude it entirely from their assessment and their recommendations.”
By March 2017 he couldn’t silence the “not knowing” and took a year off from the university to find out. “You see something really ominous – lots of signs: an article about permafrost, fires in the forests of the Arctic, 30 degrees Celsius in the Arctic Circle – but I didn’t know what it meant.”
He went back to the climatology he had studied as an undergraduate, researching methane and ice and tipping points. He based himself in Indonesia and explored Buddhism, shamanic journeying, breathwork, inner dance, Adlerian psychology and, most importantly, improv theatre, which he teaches. “It was massive,” he said, to be away from British culture. “I couldn’t have done the paper if I wasn’t in Bali.”
Eventually, he concluded that social collapse of industrial societies would take around 10 years. He defined “collapse” as “the uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity and meaning.”
He submitted the resulting paper to the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal. But the peer reviewers asked for major revisions, arguing that the paper relied on past studies and did not include any “new or significant information”. Another claimed that Bendell’s language was “not appropriate” for an academic paper. Bendell responded that their attitude was “wilful blindness” and argued that the situation we are in requires emotive communication. He withdrew the submission, and instead published it himself as an occasional paper for IFLAS, his department at the University of Cumbria, under the title “Deep Adaptation.”
In 2018, after the paper came out, Bendell gave a talk at a now-notorious environmental conference in Ambleside. Audience member Skeena Rathor, who would become one of the key voices of XR, said, “It was like that scene when smoke is coming under the door and you’re looking around and no one’s moving.” She had to sit on her hands because she was shaking. Afterwards she threw herself into XR, which launched a couple of months later. I asked her why “Deep Adaptation” had had such an impact.
“There’s a lot of pushback and shaming of the work for being doomerist,” she said. “But there’s deep compassion and deep reverence in it. There’s a soulfulness. He’s not afraid of universal language and different ways of making meaning, which include the sacred.”
When the paper went viral, Bendell himself didn’t want to talk to television broadcasters and frighten people with his message. “A lot of people, elderly people, live at home alone, and how does that come across? ‘Yeah, so I’ve concluded we’re fucked.’ I didn’t want that. I wanted more serious ways to convey the idea.”
In 2019 he set up the Deep Adaptation Forum, a place for mutual support and collaboration for people observing, anticipating and experiencing social disruption and collapse. (Recent topics in the Facebook groups at time of writing include building rocket stoves, climate-resilient foodstuffs, and the running of seed libraries.) And he talked to psychologists and psychotherapists in order to help members become “doom-aware” and avoid pathologising fear of the climate breakdown to come.
We walked past big cliffs of maroon granite, streaked with other aeons, and watched a couple of oystercatchers, their orange beaks bright in the gloom. Bendell told me that his dad and grandpa once fished for mackerel here. People could pay a bit to take rowing boats out. One or two dozen mackerel would feed the street; they had no way of keeping the fish, so would give it to extended family and neighbours. He pointed up. “There used to be a house there,” he said. “It fell down. The whole cliff fell down.”
Bendell is not the first to sound the alarm. The term ‘collapsology’ – for the modern study of collapse – was coined by French academics in 2015, but the idea has a long and colourful history. In the 1970s, the infamous Club of Rome report “The Limits to Growth” predicted society would collapse in 2040 (one study recently looked at the report again and suggested we are on track). It is widely accepted that we are living through a “sixth mass extinction” event caused by human activity. The UN Environment Programme itself says “there is no credible pathway” to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level, as was agreed at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. Other environmental writers and thinkers, such as Joanna Macy, Bayo Akomolafe and Paul Kingsnorth, have been talking about adaptation and endings for some time.
Still, despite a growing number of end-times memes and mainstream pop culture references – “It’s like we’re all entertaining each other while the world burns,” says Aubrey Plaza’s character, Harper, in The White Lotus – talking about societal collapse is still taboo. As President Orlean says in Don’t Look Up, “You cannot go around saying to people that there’s a 100 per cent chance they’re going to die.”
The week before I met Bendell I was in a meeting with our local council – which declared a “climate emergency” a while back – about its progress in reaching net zero by 2030. There was a lot of optimistic and hopeful talk in the council’s presentation – “hopium”, as DA-ers would put it. Then, an audience member asked a question that went something like this: “Running the numbers, the actions you’ve given add up to 0.1 per cent of the emissions cuts that are needed, so where will the other 99.9 per cent come from?” No one could answer.
Critics of “Deep Adaptation” worry that talking about potential collapse will lead to inaction. Climate scientists have expressed concerns that it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy – that saying doom is inevitable could make it inevitable. That people might give up putting pressure on governments to meet targets, even though every fraction of a degree saved equates to a significant reduction of suffering. (This, Bendell argued, doesn’t quite follow, as his thinking has shaped and influenced groups like XR.)
Bendell said he could see why people were annoyed with his paper: the previous version of himself would not have wanted to hear it either. “I would be saying, ‘We need to do this amazing project, we need to do biochar, we need a new wind farm,’ and then someone says, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great, but shouldn’t we also look at everything collapsing around us? Monetary systems? International trade? Droughts that are going to wipe out our harvests unless we do something about not just stopping it, but also changing how we cope with it?’”
Bendell has said that while he believes collapse is inevitable, that is not necessarily the opinion of other people engaged in the movement: it’s more a philosophical ethos. What defines people in Deep Adaptation is taking collapse seriously enough for it to affect their lives. They are “collapse-aware”.
Rupert Read, a former spokesperson for XR who co-edited the book version of “Deep Adaptation” with Bendell, considers DA an insurance policy. “If we don’t prepare for potential collapse, we’ll be far worse off when it actually happens,” he told me, speaking from his “tiny-holding” in rural Norfolk, where he grows food. (Self-sufficiency is big among DA-ers.) “Any reasonable person should think that collapse is possible.”
What about the argument that DA leads to inaction? “Adaptation is a mind bomb. It makes it real to people. One point five degrees, net zero; it’s all abstract. When you start saying, ‘Because of the weather this summer, we have to change how we farm,’ then people are like ‘Fuck, it’s real. I don’t want to be left behind. I want to be part of that.’”
Bendell and I headed into a pub that overlooked the sea. Christmas songs were playing on the radio. After fish and chips and flat whites arrived, we talked about the word “doom”. Bendell hadn’t even known there was a doomer community before he wrote the paper. Later, he would send me the Bo Burnham track “That Funny Feeling” for its apt doomer lyrics (“That unapparent summer air in early fall / The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all”).
I saw Bendell’s work often silenced by the “doom” label when the framework is, I think, more generative and creative than its critics allow. Some people like the word doomer as a self-description, he told me. “I’m conflicted. On the one hand, part of me thinks – take it. Define it your own way and be proud. There can be some fun in that. Yeah, I’m a doomer, and doomers have more fun, and doomers do more to help kids live in the horrible future that’s coming. Why not just own it?”
But there is a downside. It’s a little schlocky, a little silly. More associated with cult leaders and weirdos with sandwich boards. When I say I’m researching doom or the “end of the world”, some are quick to point out that people have always said the end is nigh. We used to have a nuclear war bunker underneath a house we once lived in, my father reminded me. A friend shuts it down: what’s wrong with being in denial? Civilisations always fall, said another. Another told me that she avoids explicit collapse conversations to protect her mental health.
Among all the “doomer-bashing”, Bendell believes his paper has been vindicated. “The IPCC 1.5 report said that if we go past that threshold [for global heating], it’s really, really bad. And unless we do something that’s not going to happen – cut emissions 45 per cent in 10 years globally – and get a bit lucky around the tipping points not kicking off, even though it looks like they already have, then we’ll have a 50 per cent chance of staying below it. Everyone goes, ‘50 per cent! Well, what about the other 50 per cent?’ And that’s not going to happen, anyway.”
Bendell calls his life now “post-doom”. In Indonesia, he does agroforestry and seaweed farming, writes songs, co-leads meditation retreats, and lives in a house overlooking rice fields with a kitten that he adopted from a Buddhist temple.
When he mentions his kitten I wondered if he was concerned about its survival. I was wondering, really, about my children’s survival. I felt an urge to ask him what to do. I had been thinking about whether we should move in with extended family, or grow food seriously, or learn more practical skills. Where, I had thought in the middle of the night, is the nearest spring?
“If my cat is dead before I go back then we had an amazing time together,” he said. (He was worried that it wasn’t being fed enough while he was away in England.) “How long does a life need to be for it to be meaningful?”
I mentioned that often I feel stricken about bringing children into this world. He paused and said that when he was researching his paper, he saw from the balcony where he was working two little girls in white dresses, aged three and six or so, running around a field.
“I thought, ‘They’re having a glorious time; if they don’t live till 40, it doesn’t change this moment right now.’”
Things suddenly felt surreal and vertiginous. “But it might be violent and painful,” I said. I was thinking of a part in his paper when he wrote: “You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.”
“There are lots of people who’ve had amazing lives and horrible ends,” Bendell said, “and that’s just one moment in a life. It’s not the length of living to be fully alive. If I were you, if I had young kids, I think I would be prioritising where I can live where they’ll have an amazing time if they don’t live as long as we would normally expect in modern societies, and where they might live longer.”
“I have wondered if I need to teach them how to shoot rabbits,” I said.
“With a crossbow?”
“Oh, good point,” I said: there wouldn’t be bullets, even if we did own a gun. I asked him if he would still be surprised to be alive in the 2030s, as he once wrote.
“Would I be surprised?” There was a long pause. “Yes, I would still be surprised.”
Bendell chose the word “deep” in “Deep Adaptation” to contrast with “superficial” adaptations to climate impacts. The essential framework is what he calls the “Four Rs”. Resilience: what do we most value that we want to keep, and how? Relinquishment: what do we need to let go of so as not to make matters worse? Restoration: what could we bring back to help us with these difficult times? And Reconciliation: with what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality?
At the heart of the paper is the notion that we need to focus not only on the impacts of climate change, but also its root causes – the social injustices at the heart of the crisis. But I noticed Bendell seemed frustrated with a lack of political activism within the Deep Adaptation Forum. “The focus seems to be mostly on emotional support between participants,” he wrote in a newsletter at the end of 2022. “But guess what? Licking your wounds eventually makes you sick.”
“It’s one of my biggest disappointments that a lot of privileged middle-class people have read my work, joined the grief circles – all the lovely stuff – supported each other in the way I was hoping, and that became the end of it, the sum total,” he said. “A lot of them became activists for climate change or started doing stuff you could call degrowth… but a lot seemed to say that having impact at scale is pointless, so all they’re going to do is be nice to each other and their neighbours and that’s about it.
“It’s not enough. I don’t think it’s enough. I am saying it is not enough.”
Bendell had wanted “Deep Adaptation” to be the “cosmic trampoline” (he has a good turn of phrase) towards bigger actions, rather than a comfort blanket. He talked about the absence of climate activists undertaking adaptive action, rather than the mitigation attempts of XR and Just Stop Oil.
“Like what?” I asked.
“You could have guerilla gardening where you find parkland, set up camps, make allotments. People would say, ‘Why are you doing this? This is a nuisance.’ That’s what these actions are for. We’ve got a food security problem coming; we need to adapt.”
He was disappointed, too, with politics. “I want to see new radical politics that come from a point of ‘Oh wow, this is society destroying itself: now what?’”
He believes that in fact this destruction has already started, and that it had started in most industrial consumer societies by 2016. As an example, he points to figures that show reduced standards of living in OECD countries for the first time in recorded history. This argument forms half of his next book, Breaking Together, published in June.
One of his major concerns is that societies will become more authoritarian as our existing ways of life start to break apart. “This is a revolutionary moment and, unless we recognise that, we will be manipulated and coerced to behave during collapse in ways that won’t help, because we have so much evidence of elites forcing population to do things ‘for their own good’ that make things a lot worse.”
Before we left Babbacombe Beach, I asked if we could try some improv. I was interested in how powerful it was for his thinking, in breaking patterns of his cultural conditioning.
He taught me the “magic box” game, in which we had to imagine a box between our feet and, without any delays or thinking, go back and forth giving each other presents, announcing and reacting.
It was incredibly uncomfortable for me, a self-conscious control freak. He gave an example that there might be dog poo in the box he was giving me. “There’s no safety,” he said. “You might say something extremely rude.”
I gave him a box of dog poo back. “How embarrassing,” I said, “I copied you.” Why is this getting so scatalogical? I was thinking. Next it was a mouldy pumpkin. He said it was filled with maggots. Then a puppy. The puppy was dead. It exploded.
“It’s about spontaneity and emotion,” he explained. “There’s nothing right and wrong.” I could see, although it was brief, how a practice like this might break down someone’s defences and allow them to say what they believe without fear.
As he drove me to the station, Bendell touched on one of the reasons I think his work is both popular and disliked: it is fundamentally spiritual. It challenges the very paradigm of our society – of limitless progress and growth – which is baked into our minds, our bones, the air that we breathe. He is shining a light on the ugly consequences of our industrial consumer lifestyles, when most people would rather stay in the dark.
“This is actually an unavoidably spiritual or metaphysical challenge and invitation,” he said. “When people come to the conclusion I’ve come to, which many are, it pulls that rug from under us – that humans are always progressing. That really is the secular religion of our times, and then people like me are taken as heretics… I have to be seen as an evil person rather than someone with an interesting idea you disagree with. It’s an indicator that something quasi-religious is going on here.”
I still don’t believe that, as Bendell has said, near-term human extinction appears to be a possibility. I simply can’t get my head around the idea of everyone being dead in the next decade. But clearly industrial fossil fuel-powered civilisation is finishing, whether it will end through our own positive choices or the effects of climate and biodiversity breakdown. And isn’t it better to face the uncomfortable discussions rather than indulging our human propensity to imagine everything will work out fine?
This is the end, anyway. After his new book is done, Bendell plans on ditching the scholarship of doom to focus on practical endeavours, such as agroforestry in Bali. “The only way I could keep going for the last two years was knowing that I’m calling it a day,” he said.
He dropped me back at the station, and said goodbye. On the train ride home, there is a stunning stretch where the track hugs the seafront; you could imagine surf from the waves spraying up and onto the windows. In 2014, a section of this sea wall collapsed during a big storm and left part of the railway suspended, swinging in the wind.
One day in the future, the land on this stretch of coast may be underwater, as sea levels rise and extreme flooding increases. But not that long ago – in planetary terms – this land was desert. It’s dusk, but I can just make out the red sandstone cliffs formed from wind-blown sand 250 million years ago in the Permian period, when this patch of crust was closer to the equator.
But for now, I can see curlews and ducks in the gloom, cranes and diggers, and across the bay, the twinkling lights of people’s homes are starting to appear. People who can do so much, and so little.