Abstract
This chapter examines the politics of adapting to the ecological catastrophes caused after decades of pursuing higher levels of economic growth by indulging in ever higher rates of fossil fuel consumption. Despite the caution flags waved by dozens of environmentalist critics and conservation organizations about the threat of rapid climate change for decades, it is apparent in the 2020s that most of the Earth’s ecological systems are disrupted to point that their degradation will be permanent. Modern environmental politics and theory have always assumed ecological degradation can be managed, manipulated or mitigated through technological interventions and/or policy changes. Other critical groups question those assumptions. In particular, this analysis reconsiders the work of Jem Bendell and other proponents for “deep adaptation” to these new unprecedented environmental conditions, like Paul Kingsnorth, Dougald Hine and their associates in the Dark Mountain Project. Such thinkers entertain the proposition that contemporary human societies must confront the realities of coping with a general collapse of the biophysical, sociocultural and technoscientific systems that enable human civilizations to thrive by asking whether or not the forms of human life as many enjoy it today can survive.
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Notes
- 1.
See Jem Bendell, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy,” Institute of Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) Occasional Paper 2, University of Cumbria (July 27, 2020). https://www.cumbria.ac.uk/research/centres/iflas/ Plainly, the organized responses of mainstream educational, governmental and scientific institutions in the 1970s to such troubling environmental news were focused on the research imperatives of defining, and then actually discovering “limits to growth” by developing large-scale, data models to predict how and when environmental crises would become most threatening (see, for example, Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Second Edition (New York: New American Library, 1975). Bendell and others concede merits of the earlier research by the Club of Rome. Yet, to respond to contemporary challenges, they also advance new recommendations for “deep adaptation” as a pragmatic approach for building a broad-based consensus about how to live today. The comprehensive study of the limits of growth today. The studies from the 1970s saw the bottlenecks becoming more severe decades out. Yet, those decades now are here. We are living through those times, and they are a mix of better and worse conditions. Decisions had been postponed then “to make later,” no longer can be avoided. Before, they were still distant predictions about possible conditions of ecological and social collapse. In the 1970s, their plausible ill-effects were downplayed. Today, these choices and their potential downsides no longer are distant abstractions. Instead, they have become concretely threatening material realities. See Pablo Severigne and Raphael Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020); David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books/Random House, 2020); and, Brian T. Wilson, Headed into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time, and the Future We’ll Face (Swampscott, MA: Anvilside Press, 2019).
- 2.
Bendell, “Deep Adaptation,” https://www.cumbria.ac.uk/research/centres/iflas/ For additional insight, see C. N. Waters, et al.”The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene,” Science 351, aad2622 (2016); and, Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2015); and, Dipesh Chakrabarty, (2009) “The climate of history: Four theses,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 197–222 as well as Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009) https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
- 3.
See Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (New York: Harper, 2020): Timothy W. Luke, Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2019); Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017); and, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016).
- 4.
Bendell, “Deep Adaptation,” https://www.cumbria.ac.uk/research/centres/iflas/ Such full and frank discursive claims about the unanticipated and unintended consequences of such complex coupled social/biological systems too often are deflected by Panglossian taxonomists, creating neat little boxes to mystify the variation and intensity in the development of environmental debates, by presuming to be the most highly sophisticated observers of Humanity and Nature as they slog toward the deliberative democracy they are certain lies beyond the expert ministrations of ecomanagerialist sustainability studies. Yet, their pragmatic textbook vignettes of democratic theory all too often occlude dramatic everyday episodes of antidemocratic practice in what so many regard as the workings of “Earth System Governance.” See, for example, Frank Biermann, Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014) or John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses, fourth edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
- 5.
Working Group III (AR6), Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change: Working Group III contribution to the WG III Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York: United Nations Environmental Program, 2022), 10–11. https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg3/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FinalDraft_FullReport.pdf
- 6.
Return to review, for example, Al Gore, Jr, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York; Houghton Mifflin, 1992) as well as his two follow-up documentary films, “An Inconvenient Truth” (2007) and “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” (2017).
- 7.
See Working Group III (AR6), Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change: Working Group III contribution to the WG III Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York: United Nations Environmental Program, 2022). https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg3/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FinalDraft_FullReport.pdf
- 8.
Bendell, “Deep Adaptation,” https://www.cumbria.ac.uk/research/centres/iflas/
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid. Bendell does not put in these terms, but “deep adaptation” involves what others would see forsaking most underpinnings of fossil capitalism, modern everyday life, the basis of existing civil society as well as the state of nature that are all amalgamated together in urban industrial civilization and its once reliable environmental foundations. See Fabian Scheidler, The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization (Atresford, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2020). As Kingsnorth and Hine define the outlines of “uncivilization,” they proclaim, “we believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves…the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality and the myth of our separation from “nature,” because they are now altogether “more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths,”” Uncivilization. https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
- 13.
Bendell, Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Kingsnorth and Hine, Uncivilization.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid. In fact, the managers of carbon-intensive, endless industrial growth, like the highest corporate officers in today’s major fossil fuel companies, largely have signed on to advance the decarbonization of global economy. Through carbon taxation or CO2 sequestration incentives, the research and development divisions of these firms are now producing plant-based bio-fuels, scrubbing greenhouse gas emissions off their books by pulling CO2 out of their refinery operations to pipe it out to depleted gas fields to stabilize extracted cavities, and/or capturing more methane, once flared at well-heads, to mix with other contained methane stocks to sell as another “natural gas.” See Timothy W. Luke, “Caring for the Low Carbon Self: The Government of Self and Others in the World as a Gas Greenhouse.” Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change, Devices, Desires, and Dissent, eds. Harriett Bulkeley, Matthew Patterson, and Johannes Stripple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 66–80.
- 18.
Severigne and Raphael Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse, 3.
- 19.
Bendell, “Deep Adaptation.”.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
For studies that arguably anticipated how to answer Bendell’s call to make hard choices about resilience, relinquishment, restoration and reconciliation 50 years ago, see E.F. Schumacher’s path-breaking 1973 study, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper Collins, 2010); Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Vernard Eller, The Simple Life (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1971); Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (New York: Harper, 1980); Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).
- 25.
These dilemmas were discussed in considerable detail by James Howard Kunstler 15 years ago, see his The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Grove Press, 2007).
- 26.
Bendell, “Deep Adaptation.”.
- 27.
See Jem Bendell and Rupert Read, Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) to follow more of the aspirations of this new environmental politics and theory circle as it works to put its programs into motion.
- 28.
Remarkably, Bendell maintains this acceptance of precarity during a general collapse will cheerfully be welcomed by many with whom he has crossed paths: “In my work with mature students, I have found that inviting them to consider collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable and extinction as possible, has not led to apathy or depression. Instead, in a supportive environment, where we have enjoyed community with each other, celebrating ancestors and enjoying nature before then looking at this information and possible framings for it, something positive happens. I have witnessed a shedding of concern for conforming to the status quo, and a new creativity about what to focus on going forward. Despite that, a certain discombobulation occurs and remains over time as one tries to find a way forward in a society where such perspectives are uncommon. Continued sharing about the implications as we transition our work and lives is valuable.” See Bendell, “Deep Adaptation.”.
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Luke, T.W. (2023). Earth Breaking Bad: The Politics of Deep Adaptation. In: Jay Kassiola, J., Luke, T.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory. Environmental Politics and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14346-5_5
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