 Thank you, everyone, a very warm welcome. My name is Marisa Goulden, and I have the great pleasure today of introducing our speaker, Professor Gem Benderle. He's going to talk to us about deep adaptation and perhaps other things. Gem Benderle is a Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria. In July 2018, he published a paper entitled, Deep Adaptation, A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. This paper has since been downloaded from his website more than half a million times and reached audiences far beyond his initial expectations. He's also shared many interviews and talks online, some of which you may have watched or heard. In March this year, Gem launched the Deep Adaptation Forum. This is a space to connect people to foster mutual support and collaboration for the process of facing societal collapse. Until recently, my own work was researching and teaching on adaptation to climate change at the University of East Anglia. I found this a difficult subject to research and I really came up against my own numbness and grief. In response to that, I turned towards Joanna Macy's work that reconnects some of you may have heard of. I now offer this in workshops. What caught my attention most about Gem's work is his willingness to deliver an unwelcome message that we face societal collapse due to climate change and most especially his rare willingness to explore the emotional and spiritual dimensions of this for himself and for all of us as human beings. He talks about needing to make space for despair, grief, anxiety and other emotions that arise. Today at Green Earth Awakening, we have a theme of turning towards. So we're inviting you to turn towards your own experience while listening to this talk, to notice your own responses. At the end of the talk, Diogethe will invite us to take a short pause and connect with ourselves and then Gem will take a question and answer. To follow the thread of turning towards this afternoon, Sachemuni and I will hold a space for you to gather in small groups to explore your thoughts and feelings specifically in response to this talk today. We've called that deep listening for deep adaptation and that's in workshop space 2 at 230 to 345. It's just over there. There are also other workshops today that continue this thread of turning towards what is happening in our world. You can attend a grief circle hosted by Extinction Rebellion also at 230, check the board for the location. Then at 415, Claudia will be leading a truth mandala from Joanna Macy's work that reconnects. This is an opportunity to come together to give space to the difficult and painful and by doing so open ourselves to more life, joy, love and compassion. A space to explore embodiment of the themes of today in workshop space 3. Thank you. Now let's turn towards why we are here right now in this tent and give a very warm welcome to Professor Jem Mandel. Is this on? Yes it is. You can hear me okay. Good morning. Thank you for that. It's lovely to hear about the way this topic is being held here at Green Earth Awakening. I don't do very many talks on this topic now and a couple of events in the UK I've been to. One was Sacred Arts Camp and this is the other one I'm at and it's because both are quite explicit in terms of the spiritual dimension and the open-hearted loving dimension of their gathering. So that's really good to hear you're doing all that holding on this topic after my talk. Because it's funny as I walking around the field this morning three people said to me, oh Jem I'm really looking forward to your talk. I felt a bit flummoxed really because I never want to get numb to this or blasé and I know I really could because it's a way of coping and there has been a time earlier this year when I think I really did get carried away with how much was happening and how many calls on my time and how this was exploding into a global social movement and therefore I perhaps wasn't really feeling it. So I don't want to give too many talks and therefore I want to really sink into the topic because every time I do a talk like this I check the latest news on our climate situation and it stuns me. I can't live with that constant attention on climate news I actually deliberately detox from it in order not to be walking around with a tear in my eye all the time but I did that yesterday and this morning and it's tough. I also know that one way of reacting to that to that shock, fear, anger is to want to get up and do something and I have that in me and I admire that in other people but I also can see how that impulse can also be dangerous to ourselves and to others and so I've had this dilemma of the balance of the inner and the outer work ever since the deep adaptation paper started to become famous and so for me I had, you know, Extinction Rebellion has been a revelation and I spoke at the opening of the International Rebellion in Oxford Circus by the Pink Boat of Truth and there was this, seeing thousands of people there this sort of sense that I wanted to say with this activist energy that I wanted to say something less bleak but the first message of Extinction Rebellion and the reason why people have paid attention to my work is this idea of allowing yourself to consider what might be true no matter how that might make you feel or how that might challenge your future or how that may disrupt your sense of belonging the concerns you have there so the way I did it there was to say we rebel not because we have a vision of a fairytale future where we have fixed climate change but we rebel because we want to reduce harm save what we can and learn from this so to return to truth and love this isn't an accidental thing that we've trashed the planet we threaten our own civilization and indeed our own species this century and we have to recognise that so the climate predicament is like this like a severe mirror on our collective consciousness we have to look into it and see why has this happened because otherwise that panicked response could lead to us just doing yet more of those same ways of relating to what's inside us and same ways of relating to each other we could see blame and hatred it's natural isn't it when you're under threat to say well who's to blame and where should I run and who should I run from and all that sort of stuff and so we need to support each other to turn toward this predicament in a way that is more open minded open hearted to find solidarity in that situation rather than withdrawal so it's because of that feeling that perspective that I'm drawn to be here less to give a talk more because I want to be in spaces like this for myself because they're still quite rare in my life it's growing definitely but I still find it's quite rare but for you to I think what I should do is just have a little bit of a few words on the climate predicament because I shouldn't assume that everyone's on the same page so there's debate about when we should measure climate change from but if we go for 1750 which is before the industrial revolution rather than 1850 which is what the intergovernmental panel on climate change uses then the world has already warmed globally by about 1.5 degrees and that doesn't seem much does it and that's always been a communications issue but that's on a baseline of about 13.5 degrees global ambient temperature in 1750 so that's about 11% more energy in our world atmosphere before humans started burning coal and that's not that's not just distributed evenly the far greater heating at the poles for example and so that is already destabilising our weather systems as everyone now knows but the problem of course is that so much of the effect is already locked in over the coming decades no matter what we do because 90% of all that additional energy from human activity has been absorbed by the oceans and so that will warm the air over the coming decades so there's that already locked in and then you think well why are we seeing arctic fires now it's because of changing weather and changing temperatures seeing the polar vortex destabilising and the jet stream destabilising it's because of these changes and the problem is then there are feedbacks and the most shocking feedback is what's happening in the arctic and so some of the most latest research published in a geophysical journal is saying it's quite probable now that there will be no summer arctic ice by 2030 some outlying scientists writing on blogs or giving speeches are saying it could even be in a year or two but they've been saying that for a year or two but there's one published study that says by 2030 and one of Britain's preeminent polar scientist Peter Waddon has with his team calculated that if all of the arctic ice were to go then that would warm the planet by half as much as all human caused anthropogenic emissions so you can see we're already at 1.5 degrees over 1750 so then 50% more forcing and that's because of the retreat of the ice means that the sun's rays go into dark ocean rather than being reflected back into space as well as the loss of the ice so it takes up a lot of energy to melt ice so we're in a terrible situation and extinction rebellion has been amazing in helping bring that situation to the masses and also to point now towards what it means not just for, I shouldn't say just it means a lot, people are suffering right now across the majority world Mozambique, Guatemala and so on both by the tragedies of natural disasters but also droughts and just general food price rises and therefore migration so this is happening to people right around the world already and of course you may have heard the statistic that 200 species are going extinct every day and again climate change being one of the key driving forces on that but what's really changed in the last year is this idea that we're in danger that we saw that weird weather, extreme weather damaged European food production significantly last year with grains and vegetables down by around 20% in many European countries and we've had pretty weird weather this summer as well and I don't know what the latest data is on that Britain imports 60% of its food and unlike places like Spain and Netherlands where our domestic agriculture is very dependent on rain so we've got some particular risks in the UK and the British government hasn't done a review of food security for over 10 years so that's the part of the message from Extinction Rebellion which is really cutting through which is we are now in danger, our way of life and I think that's, for some people that's quite a problem that it seems that we only seem to care when it's like us rather than the majority of people around the world being badly affected but I think it's an essential element to our awareness that this is coming home to us now and we don't know how quickly I make a prediction, it's not a prediction I make a guess and I say it's a guess in my paper that I predict that societal collapse is likely, actually inevitable in nearly all societies around the world within 10 years because of extreme weather impacting on agriculture now we could do a lot to slow that down animals eat twice as much grain as humans on the planet today so we could actually cope with quite a major collapse in the key bread baskets of the world but that would take a massive change in our political system and our economic system to adapt in that way when we have multi-bread basket failures around the world so the problem is also we have such a fragile system I mean I depend on supermarkets for my daily calories and probably most of you here do too and that is a fragile global supply system with just in time supplies that could break overnight so we are very vulnerable with our current way of life and of course even our ability to pay and buy something even made locally is dependent on a global confidence and a global financial system that props up the banking system which issues our money as debt and so that could go first the actual pace of disruption to our way of life from the environment might be something that we may possibly be able to respond to but our systems that we depend on are so fragile that our financial system, our ability to transact with each other is very fragile and so that may collapse ahead of any actual environmentally environmental direct impact on our food supply of course when I talk to people like this there is the question of who to believe and I understand that I have the privilege of time but also a training in methodology and going into lots of different academic disciplines both a natural science one and sociology and then taking very critical stance on my own profession and the way that we think but that is a great privilege that most people don't have and so I always say to people you need to make your own mind up and I invite people not just to agree with me but I wouldn't have agreed with me if I just heard me a few years ago so I invite people to look at the deep adaptation paper but also that's a year old now so I produced a compendium of peer reviewed research or UN reports over the last 12 months which I published in July so you can just type in a compendium in my name and you will be able to download that as well and that's over 20 peer reviewed publications which lend weight to what I'm saying and perhaps even suggest that it's happening even sooner than I thought but who to believe well I'll give you a quote from 10 days ago it is abundantly clear that climate disruption is happening now and everywhere now you probably haven't heard that before it's not being written about in any mainstream publication the only place I could find it would be a clip on Bloomberg but for people who are interested in this topic so that was the UN Secretary General 10 days ago Antonio Gutierrez it is abundantly clear that climate disruption is happening now and everywhere so also I point to that as an indication of if our systems of social organisation and communication were a bit less stupid, a bit less mad then that would be sort of in the world's media we would be talking about this but all kinds of other things take up our time come across our screens and television sets now a lot of people when they hear this not a lot, some people and maybe not people here they think that this is counterproductive to talk like this is defeatist it invites nihilism it invites apathy it may even invite depression and I realise that when I talk to people who say these things a lot of people say these things in articles or in blogs or in speeches but when I talk to people we manage to get somewhere because they'll tell me things like Jim people need hope but I'll say well can we talk about you do you think you need hope let's talk about that so let's explore that what do you mean by hope is it an active or a passive one is it this wish for something to be better or is it some sense of plan that you're involved in let's actually look at that and secondly do you need it if you didn't have that hope what would be important to you and the conversation often then leads to a place of there are things that I fundamentally believe in no matter what will happen and so also what I'm finding is that people a lot of people are not discovering apathy or nihilism or depression but absolutely people are experiencing some kind of positive disintegration of existing stories of self and identity and that's tough of course it is but perhaps it has to be so it's a question for me of how how to hold each other in those moments and how for me to invite people to hold me in those moments of positive disintegration where old stories of self and old assumptions about the future disappear and we just try and look for new ways new ways of finding meaning in this context and I think that there's amazing power in it that despair can burn away those old stories and make you an uncompromising loving rebel and I think that's what we're actually seeing quite a lot of with Extinction Rebellion but I also find that a lot of people don't seem to want to go there unless they have a framework to be held to talk about this and that's why I came up with a deep adaptation framework deep adaptation is basically saying I mean my view is inevitable but you don't have to believe it's inevitable but it's probable now and actually it's happening already in some places that societies will collapse because of disruption from climate change and when I say collapse I mean an uneven ending of our normal way of life our normal forms of sustenance shelter, pleasure and identity and meaning our normal forms of security as well and how that will happen I don't know I mean a lot of people are now asking me to spend time with others to work out how and where but I'm less interested in that in the kind of stuff I've just talked about already so the deep adaptation framework doesn't provide answers because I think it would be misleading to suggest there are simple answers in this context and instead I offered four Rs resilience, restoration, relinquishment and reconciliation and resilience is simply the question of given this situation, this predicament what is it that we most value that we want to keep the second question is about restoration what is it that our way of life our busy civilisation what is it that we've lost that we could bring back to help us cope with what's to come relinquishment is the question of what is it that we could let go of so that we don't make matters worse by trying to hold on to things that we just can't and maybe shouldn't keep and reconciliation wasn't in my original paper so forth are and it was because I realised that some people were reacting to this with the narrative of we must do whatever it takes to try and slow this down or stop this and that was coming from an energy which I realised was understandable and could be productive but also could be highly destructive and so I was inviting people to consider well what is it that I need to make peace with and with whom given that now we realise that our mortality is a much more felt present thing my own and yours so that we're not doing all this stuff in the world just to somehow cope with the unbearability of sitting with this pain and this uncertainty so that's the idea of reconciliation and that blog that I wrote about that was very much then my connection with the Buddhist community worldwide because Joanna Macy picked it up shared it with her network the work that reconnects and that then really helped connect me with the Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist practices and I finally decided that my friend in Dupreet was right when 15 years ago he said Gem, you should do the passenger and then when my partner Katie said for the past year, Gem, you should do the passenger and so I finally did and so I am on my own journey in this and so for me quids in, you know it's been really good civilisation or collapse has an upside for me and my spiritual growth so yeah, meaning and purpose from this perspective a lot of people are saying where's meaning, where's purpose and therefore where's a vision so yeah, if I'm pushed I could say I have a vision of a liveable world so a liveable planet in a more loveable world but that can all just sound a bit a vision perhaps that's more down to earth would be a vision that's real which is that we can sit like we are now and we're in a place like this and we can hold each other and explore and explore what this might mean without wanting to prove ourselves right or wanting to get a quick answer that we can be open-hearted and open-minded in working out what to do and that through that we will make the best of a bad situation we will reduce harm and we will find love and joy in the process a more material vision about how society will be or how Britain will be at the moment it doesn't really quite feel right for me but therefore I think perhaps part of my vision is that we will, more of us will recognise that this wasn't just an accident we will realise that our systems failed us our systems of thought our systems of belief our systems of economy our systems of relating they failed us and this is a massive invitation to rethink everything together so that's perhaps part of my vision and I also think we are going to do a lot of amazing things and I'm going to say them out loud even though it's a bit controversial I've been talking for about 25 minutes I believe we probably will geoengineer the Arctic in ways that are fairly safe through marine cloud brightening I believe we will transform agriculture as if we were in war and get ready to manage distribution when our grain imports collapse I believe we will create truly alternative exchange systems so that when global financial systems collapse we can still swap and trade with each other I believe we will transform banking and stock exchanges in a coordinated way so that we don't rely on an ever expanding economy in order just to have employment and have a functioning society I believe we will restore our soils, seagrass, meadows, forests so we will draw down carbon from the atmosphere in natural ways we will migrate our nuclear wastes to safer places as sea levels rise we will organise to be able to shut down nuclear power stations safely in states as they fail we will avoid blaming whoever we are told to blame by the servants of elites or people who have wounds and need to express their anger and have an audience for that we will host climate refugees we will provide peer-to-peer psychological support as our old stories of self and place progress and purpose all crumble I think this will all happen but I don't think that will be universal I don't think that will therefore mean that humanity in Britain or worldwide at scale achieves some sort of maintenance of what we call normal today and I think it's right to debate all those things dialogue about all those things I just mentioned both if they should be done and how but it shouldn't take us away from that severe mirror on ourselves and our consciousness and why we got into this situation so I do also believe that this will be a time of spiritual enquiry and evolution so the question I'm here with why I've come is that I know bugger all about that and should we and if so how do we help people awaken fast and how explicit as climate activists should we be about that being our agenda I'm going to be very interested to hear what you think both here and in conversation over the next couple of days just before I close a few words on XR because I know XR are here and that's great and also Extinction Rebellion is something I'm involved in and I want to return to that initial dilemma I talked about that inner work versus outer work and it's this issue I think about how do we find some sort of calm, engaged surrender to our predicament so don't withdraw but stay engaged but with a passion for all these actions but an equanimity with what actually comes about in the end I think Extinction Rebellion before the rebellion in October should adjust it's three demands so tell the truth well the truth is people are suffering already we're in danger there is trouble ahead no matter what that our systems have failed us we must learn as much as we must act and we must change fairly which means we must adapt fairly and that has to be really talked about so act now well declare a climate emergency but include fair adaptation to what's coming it's not truthful to just say let's act now to stop this it's already upon the world so it's ignoring the suffering that's happening around the world it's ignoring the food price rises that the poor in Britain are already experiencing and across Europe and it's ignoring what's coming when the current harvest problems feed through into market prices as well so this is happening now so act now must be about fair adaptation as well as cutting carbon and drawing down carbon and therefore beyond politics look at adaptation how are we going to adapt fairly to this as much as we can as best we can so I'm hoping that both at the grassroots of XR this is how people talk and think but also the people at the centre of XR I wouldn't say at the top but at the centre of XR also recognise that this is what we should be talking about now so thanks for listening we've got quite a bit of time for reflections and questions can I just say one more little one just one very short little thing it's not like a question really it's more of an agreement as well with everything but okay it's just to say I think it's really good that you've expressed the necessity to look at ourselves first because obviously if a person doesn't change themselves they can't change society isn't it? if we carry on being the same internally this will carry on externally but it's also the thing of linking the action like I didn't get your name but you know to move the thing as well because it feels so one feels so impotent seeing it all going on and not being able to do it but obviously it's like a balance isn't it between having the inner work and the outer work inner work and outer work and previously that often that kind of perspective suggested we sort of just take individual action in terms of maybe not eating meat and dairy and not flying abroad when actually we are political beings as well so what I like about Extinction Rebellion is invites us to take personal responsibility in collective action as well as individual changes of consumption and so on thank you thank you