 Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today this webinar organized with together with the Center for Development Studies and the Center for Business, Organization and Society at the University of Bath. This webinar is also organized to go together with the special issue in the journal sustainability that we're organizing around the topic that Jim will be addressing today, system-wide disruption of organization for sustainability. And what we're looking for here is really for contributors to bring in new ideas for change to move from mitigation to adaptation and changes that are needed at the organizational level in terms of corporate governance, but also in markets, economy, society, more widely production processes, but also ways that need to be taken into account for nonlinear environmental changes. So really welcome authors and researchers from different disciplines across sciences, broadly speaking, to contribute and bring a paper that while bringing rigor, academic rigor and robustness in the findings also have some ideas about how to mitigate and manage the problem that you're discussing in your own field of expertise. So the purpose of this special issue and the link is in the chat function is to help authors to bring these creative ideas to light. So inviting us to think and reflect on what changes are needed and bring new ideas to light. Which is why Jim, Professor Jim Vendel here is our main contributor in helping us to think and reflect on his really famous for ours resilience relinquishment restoration and reconciliation that you will be talking about today. What can the deep adaptation agenda bring in terms of bringing new ideas to light. And that transition towards adaptation. Professor Jim Vendel is professor of sustainability leadership and founder of the institutes for leadership and sustainability at the University of Cumbria, as well as being the founder of the deep adaptation forum. So really over 20 years of experience in sustainable business and finance and diverse roles such as a researcher educator advisor and entrepreneurs, working with various international agencies, the one, the WWF, and was quarter of the sharing community report at the World Economic Forum so really over 25 years experience in terms of supporting carbon cuts and in terms of bringing and trying to articulate a deep adaptation approach to think creatively and engage in positive change. So the question here now for you, Jim, is really how can the deep adaptation approach be really developed into a broad set of integral protocols for facing social and ecological fragmentation in the near term so that's the first question that had been put before by Michael James. Thank you, James. We look forward to hearing from you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you already for the invitation and to your colleagues. It's good to see also it's interdisciplinary event today, and also good that you've you've thrown the virtual doors open. I'm very pleased to be here. We've got an hour, and I'll probably talk for about 40 minutes and then we'll have Q&A. I'm just going to do a screen share and start to share my slides. Oh yeah, the title of my talk today, Sustainability, Climate and Deep Adaptation. And I, it's been, yeah, it was July 2018 when I, the University of Cumbria published the Deep Adaptation paper, which went viral, and like a million downloads and which therefore changed my consolidated the change in my own work. And I have recently, just this year, really try to make connections back to my previous work in management and leadership and corporate sustainability. And it's been difficult. I've given a few lectures at business schools on management degrees where just as a standalone rather than a whole course on this. And I found that when we got to the point of questions, people were still asking me from a paradigm of normality, where you assume that society as we know it continues assume capitalism continues assume notions of organizations and professionalism and identity and progress. But it all just somehow continues and then I realized that to engage this topic properly, you can't skip straight ahead. You need to actually be invited to look again at what the latest sciences with climate and its impacts on societies and ask yourself, some of these, if not worst case but bad case scenarios are coming true and coming true in our own lives. So, I realized it would maybe more helpful for for yourselves. If you engage in what does this mean for management, what does this mean for policy, what does this mean for economics, you know, to actually consider the full depth and scale of the critique that the deep adaptation is connected to. So what I'm going to do is start with that. So I'm going to talk also about my relationship to this topic. Just check in on what we mean by sustainability and how it was the framework for most of my professional career until the last couple of years. There's a lot of influence on the climate and the emotional impacts from that then introduced deep adaptation the idea in the frameworks and how it is to be with that, and then discuss the implications for organizations, and then invite your questions, mostly on that final part, as we sort of sense into what this might mean for people in their professional lives. To tell you right from the start I have been an environmentalist. I first started calling myself an environmentalist in 1988. And that was, that was when in the UK environmental awareness reached a peak. The Green Party did really well in the elections that year. Tropical deforestation was in the media a lot. To maintain that interest, I started become very aware of anti roads protests. And I was, I thought back to this earlier this year when I was writing my mom a letter because I wasn't going to be able to see her on Mother's Day. And I was thinking about, well, it will be lovely to just check in on what, what do I remember of things which are sort of formative in my life. It took me and my grandma to go and protest at Twyford Down against road building in Southern England in 1991. This is a picture I found on the web. I think it's from 1992 it's a Friends of the Earth demo. You can see, I mean Friends of the Earth were there earlier, but obviously at this point in time the road has been well and truly started. It's important to, it's important I think that we invite each other as scholars, scientists to actually talk about where we're coming from. And therefore, as sort of as a prelude to talking about how we feel about what we're working on. I then, after going to Cambridge and doing a geography degree I left immediately and went to work for WWF on helping develop the Forest Stewardship Council. I was very, very keen on market mechanisms and the opportunities for businesses and financial institutions to work together with agents, organizations in civil society and act where governments were failing to act. So then I went off and helped create the Marine Stewardship Council to do certification for fisheries, and then wrote a book about it in 1997 called in the Company of Partners which was celebrating the May civil society was trying to hold corporations to account and therefore leading to innovative partnerships were beginning to promote change. So this was this work was for me very much framed in terms of sustainability or the longer form sustainable development. And it was really key for me that in 1992 as a very young environmentalist that then suddenly there was this International Summit. I was talking about sustainable development and therefore it made me gave me a sense that Oh, this is going to be taken seriously and I can have a career in this. So that was very important to me that 1992 Rio Earth Summit. And it's, it's been the framework I'm talking about this now because it's been the framework for so many of us working in this field including the, the journal that already just mentioned, because sustainability really is sustainable development, which is this broader framework. The original definition is there which most people know, but the, the way the UK government and most other governments of the world interpreted it was to then flip the economic issue into growth. And okay some NGOs would like to talk a bit more about aspirations and not be so growth centric or economic centric but generally sustainable development has been about trying to not only balance but also integrate social environmental concerns where often the economic one has been a non negotiable. And what is interesting in that is that actually it's a very different way of looking about the relationship between economy society and the environment that's sustainable development paradigm or ideology has invited us away from. And that's something that's within the environment. And, okay, even within the sustainable development framework, you do have these debates, you have the sort of the technocratic technocentric reformist view, which believes that we can decouple growth and from environmental destruction and, and you also have the deeper green view. But still the it's within this framework of believing that you can somehow meet social environmental and economic thing objectives at the same time. And that in some way we will progress. There's an assumption of progress within the sustainable development paradigm. So it's actually wedded to modernity. And that also therefore means that it's part of our identity as citizens and scholars within modern societies to actually think about that we need this mental construct for our world view and for our sense of who we are. And that's why it's very troubling when that's shaken or challenged. That's why many people are reacting badly as it is shaken and challenged. So sustainability is like a secular summary really that's what it's because of all kinds of concerns cultural environmental economic ethical. And as such it's been a very interesting lively meeting place of ideas, but I think it is also dangerous that it suggests the implication is that what what is normal now can be maintained rather than urgently replaced. If we just look at emissions of fossil fuels and land use for emissions from fossil fuels and land use change. Since 1850 this is a diagram, a graph that climatologist Wolfgang normal put together, he shows that it's roughly an exponential curve of about 1.65% increase of total emissions a year. No matter what has been done within the framework of sustainability and sustainable development. So he's quite provocatively put a bunch of all the different sort of highlights in climate international policy there. I think one of the biggest statistics which is basically a total condemnation, like it's a verdict on on sustainable development is that since that Rio Earth Summit in 1992 60% of all anthropogenic climate carbon emissions have been produced. So, it's not been working. And I'm not inviting blame or suggesting blame that I'm just inviting us to recognize that it's not working. And so yeah in 2017 I took a year off university to start looking again at the climate science, because I was starting to doubt what was happening. And, and yeah, I read papers to find out that permafrost was melting at a rate 70 years faster than had been predicted just a few years ago. I realized that the intergovernmental panel and climate change had been very much underreporting the nature of the risk we face. There were new papers coming out for example one one in 2019 estimating we could lose Arctic summer ice by 2030. That's even beginning to look a bit conservative now. And I read studies that suggested, for example, one climatologist who's quite senior in the UK calculated that if we lose summer. Sorry, if we lose articles all year round. And that reflective reflective effect from from the ice means that the warming could be 50% equivalent 50% of all anthropogenic carbon emissions ever which puts us way through the two degree barrier and therefore suggests we would see very destructive levels of warming. And that's when people talk like this you think we'll have isn't the consensus that we do have time and yeah the IPCC put a report out two years ago saying if we cut emissions like 7.5% a year and stripped out huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere using technologies which don't exist yet at scale, nor economically then we would have a 50 50 chance. Now that means we have a 50 50 chance of not staying under that broad target, which has been set in terms of to help us see to help us see what to think about the problems of how warming then leads to impacts on human society and ecosystems but also can trigger feedback loops self reinforcing warming so this is a emissions path if you take out the the the car so called carbon unicorns you get to see here what the imagined emissions reductions pathways are. And my question, my point is that well, I don't think the burden of proof that we can follow that blue line for example, should be on people who are saying no it's not going to happen. Because that's quite. Well, it is a very surprising route that we would would be taking if that is what's going to happen with also incredible impacts on on society if we were to. When climateologists come out and say such things they're quite quickly shut down so there was a paper out recently and which used a simplistic model called the estimate model that said even if we stopped all carbon emissions now. The heating effect would mean that we would blast through the two degree barrier anyway. So we were criticized for being over simplistic and therefore reckless in its presentation in the scientific journals and subsequent media, but actually even the very latest models that are being used by the IPCC have found very similar things, such as this paper that was published a few months ago which I just quote there, saying that well, it's a 1.5 84% chance of going through 1.5 degrees anyway even if we just had 2019 radiative forcing. So, climatologists are saying now we may have already triggered the self reinforcing tipping points, these feedbacks. And when this is written up in the media. We see an extra add of. It's watering down. So Fred Pierce for example covered that story from from the climatologist and said the world may almost be out of time. No, that's not what the climatologist said in the paper they said we might all we might already be out of time, nine of the 15 self reinforcing feedbacks might have been triggered and it's very difficult for science to say exactly whether they have or not because of the nature of complex systems, but we may have already triggered them. So it's not that we may almost have is just we're now in a situation where that might be our future. And therefore we should look at it, we should allow that possibility into our into our reality into our conversations. The problem is is that obviously climatologists tend to work in silos and they don't draw dots it's often the financial world who do that. So for example, a big bank did this. Yeah, almost well, almost a year ago now the year flies doesn't it February 2020. And here's some quotes from it that they're saying that we cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened. So this isn't like, you know, wacky wacky people who you could just label do missed. And they're not, and they weren't saying in that report like most people don't say when they conclude such things that we should somehow give up. It's just that we need to recognize how bad things are, and it may not be in our power to stop catastrophic impacts on not only ecosystems but on human societies. Of course talking about it in terms of the implications for business and finance does seem a bit like we're missing the point. But if humanity is now in this situation will then impacts on the economy at the least of our worries. But talking about the future in this way can be distracting from the impacts right now, we can start splitting hairs over different different theories or different philosophies or epistemologies or ontologies and what can you claim and what that exists and so forth. And actually, we, we could have wake up to the fact that how how damaging it already is. And also, how the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense and others are already treating these as a very credible scenarios, where we may actually have very damaging impacts on food security, and with all the turmoil that that can lead to. And Wolfgang Norrigan who did that graph earlier he's saying that we really need to start focusing on what could happen tomorrow or next year. We must better understand and appreciate and acknowledge the vulnerability of modern societies and address this vulnerability at its core. It's an invitation to actually look very deeply at the cultures the systems, systems of knowledge systems of economic systems of politics systems of the identity of self that have meant we've got ourselves modern humans into this total mess. And it's it's coming from all over the place I know because some people like to pick apart one person and one paper, but it's more and more scientists are saying that we face global systemic collapse and we need to take it seriously. We're calling for interdisciplinary work in order to better understand that risk and saying that too many of us are just working in silos. When I produced the deep adaptation paper, I didn't know that there was a whole field of what some French scholars had already started calling collapse ology. There's a whole range of other stresses other than just climate. So reaching the limits of non renewable resources loss of biodiversity soil and ground water depletion, and of course, all of our increasing reliance on a fragile global financial system. For example, if the banks, if the bank banking system, stop working, you know, who would keep paying the zoom bill for us to be meeting here right now, or the electricity bill that I'm using here or that you're using where you are. We are very reliant on complex and fragile financial systems now for our core infrastructures. And of course, those of us who are curious about this know that the UN itself has confirmed that biodiversity loss habitat destruction and climate. Excuse me climate change have made synotic diseases more likely, and therefore covered 19 was made more likely by environmental degradation including climate change. The pandemic is having a devastating impact already on many people's lives and many economies and so this is, this is something which we need to understand that it there's, there's aspects of the climate chaos that's very much happening everywhere right now. And of course the shadow overall of this is the fear of what may be happening in the Arctic with not just the methane on land but the methane that's in frozen methane deposits on the Arctic sea floor, where geologists have concluded that the last mass extinction of 96% or so going extinct on planet Earth was triggered by a massive methane release in the Arctic, and also potentially in the Antarctic area too. Now, when I looked at this, the science I thought was inconclusive. So that's not reassuring. Some people think, oh it's inconclusive therefore it's uncertain. Therefore, it's somehow reassuring. I think that such a cataclysm as this means that the uncertainty is not reassuring, and it really invites us to look at it and keep our eye on the latest science and the latest measurements. So for example at the end of October when scientists on a ship in the Arctic said that they have measured methane release just off the coast of Siberia that was unprecedented in their experience in their careers. It got reported, but it was immediately shot down and dismissed by many top climatologists working, so the head of NASA or some of the most famous people who are sort of advocates and climatologists. And for me, I thought, well, this is really concerning we need to double check this information very quickly obviously we need to wait for peer review but this is a matter of this of existential risk. This is a matter of humanity so we should immediately be have mobilizing people to go up there and have more tests and measurements and also allow this into our conversations. But of course, we don't want to do that. You know if you allow yourself to consider that it's too late to prevent catastrophic climate change, you know what might happen for you, and this was my question to myself. For years, I had that question in me subconsciously and I was worried that I would fall into despair. And I wouldn't know what anyway, like what to do with myself. As I said I've been an environmentalist since 1988 so much of my identity and sense of purpose my professional identity to is bound up with sustainability and sustainable development paradigm. So, I thought, I don't know what's going to happen am I just going to like give everything up and go wild. Am I going to descend into a depression, might I become more strategic or maybe no maybe more bold. Maybe something else might happen and I could discover a new me in the pit of despair. I could question assumptions of self. And so, obviously you can't, you can't let despair do its positive disintegration of identity. If you're like only going in there wanting a life or after get out of it. We'll only find that by allowing our despair and the problem with academia and the problem with sustainability is we're also into our heads we want to immediately fix and find a way out or, or, and so much of that intellectual power can be focused on, or what's the hold in that argument, but it's all defense from actually the full emotion of this information. For me, turning to some spiritual teachers has been very important where they actually talk about the via negativa the the despair being a process of force letting go, and then life can begin again you can discover the other realities of self and world through the despair. And in my case, I decided to write a paper. That's why it was a bit of my, ah, and also to hold myself to account in future not let myself go back to the old stories. And it went viral. And I ended up speaking at the launch to launch the international rebellion of extinction rebellion, speaking in front of the pink boat of truth. I never imagined that people would react to a growing sense of catastrophe, and, and their own despair by deciding that they would prioritize it enough to go and get arrested through nonviolent direct action. But that's also shown me the, you don't know what's possible before you allow something in yourself and start talking about it. In the adaptation framework. I offered it as a way to help people talk about this. And it's based on the premise. It's, it's, it's, it's for people who think that societal collapse is likely or inevitable all has already begun in most or most societies around the world. And, but who want to stay engaged. They want to reduce harm save what we can try and find some meaning and joy in the process. So we talk about it in the deep adaptation forum is embodying and enabling loving responses to this predicament. And yeah, I posed for questions which were deliberately not about what can we create this new. I wanted a framework which wasn't based on the ideology of progress. But which was actually post sustainability. And so it asks for questions what's it that we most value that we want to keep. What is it that we should let go of otherwise will make matters worse. What can we bring back to help things that we've lost you know because of the modern hydrocarbon civilization, and also recognizing that this may no longer be in humanities control. Well, and therefore, we shouldn't avoid questions of impermanence and death. So our mortal mortality and those of others we love and everyone, and anyone who would remember us with all that in mind with with what and with whom could I make peace with. So that was the, the framework. So we've decided to talk to you about this for 25 minutes to begin this, because I think it's not primarily an academic topic, let alone a topic of management and organization. And I think it would be a form of denial to dive straight into a discussion of how it fits with, you know, development studies or management studies. I think instead it's, it's important to allow this perspective of what if this is our situation to sink in and allow the associated emotions and support each other with that. And then think well what's most important what is it I most value right now. And it may be that you decide to quit what you're doing, you quit academia you quit your PhD you quit your job it might be. But once first that depth of reflection. And only then perhaps asking well, what is part of that depth of reflection what could I do, what could I work on who with, and how do I want to live, how do I want to spend my time. And for me working in this now for the last couple of years we've found out that facilitation of group processes is really important to help those that reflection. People process their emotions and find a place of sort of empowered surrender. So not just surrender in terms of giving up but surrender to not knowing surrender to knowing that you can have difficult emotions for the rest of your life. So if you're going to surrender to the idea you're not definitely going to have an impact as you thought you might. But empowered surrender, like what is, what is it you stand for now. What is your truth. So if you're interested in that I go to if last info there's a paper that we just produced last week on facilitation for deep adaptation. Well, if this is new to you or even not this will be troubling and so it should be troubling. So, before I dive into organizational implications just want to say that I'm going to put when I finished talking I'm going to paste in these links climate psychology Alliance offer therapeutic support for free. The deep adaptation forum is effectively a bit of a crash mat for people who discover how bad things are who actually do have their own anticipation of collapse in whatever way they understand it and then they, they go there and they find other people who then support them and help them process that and find a new way of being, being okay in the world and in many cases like half cases that people who did a survey with us said they're actually leading in ways they hadn't before in their community or in their organization. And so also I recommend you don't just avoid the emotions and your work together in Bath University implications for organizations, what you thought I was going to talk about. So let's do a little bit of that before the Q&A. So yeah, mainstream adaptation, as I already mentioned, it's been around quite a long time. I mean, and a study done in 2013, just looking at one sector higher education, founded all sorts of things, you know, burying power lines to avoid storm damage, purchasing emergency generators because of storm damage possibilities. Looking at local water provision, readying buildings for extreme temperatures, precipitation, winds, storm, landscape management with focus on flooding and heat, emergency measures plans, you know, how to manage volunteers in crises, situations, disasters, how to keep main key facilities going, also how you might use your buildings to offer community refuge for people in the local area, all sorts of stuff being being worked on for quite some time and, and is all good stuff to do. Also, what's really interesting to note is there's been a shift over the last couple of years into beginning to look at this in terms of the employer's responsibility as an extended notion of employer responsibility for health and safety. So, people are like trade unions at the international level, and also at the ILO, the International Labor Organization, they're articulating this notion of an employer responsibility to provide a climate safe working environment, and that seems to be really clear if you're talking about people picking tea in the fields, for example, or working in factories where they're exposed to extreme heat. But it's actually, it can be a much broader concept as we begin to look at the levels of disruption that are coming to every society everywhere over the coming years. So, just to say the, the teams in, in your organizations that are working on adaptation, where they exist, and in most organizations, they don't. But where they exist, they, they are multifunctional, but they're not strategic. You know, you'll have the buildings and estates management, you'll have business continuity and risk and supply chain risk and so forth people there. If you're talking about health and safety, you might have the sustainability and corporate responsibility people, but you generally don't have the strategy people that the the heads of the whole organization or the finance department. And so, um, yeah, people working in this field of reporting they experienced being siloed, and they can only work on minor changes adjustments to buildings not strategic questions such as the purpose of an organization if you're anticipating societal disruption and collapse in the next 10 years. Yeah, so it's often got a lot of people involved in the technical side rather than the softer skills as well. And so they're not being empowered to help the organization, all their staff. We think well what what is it that we want to be working on if this instability is coming to our country and our community, let alone our organization. I'll offer in my last few minutes, some tentative suggestions for managers beginning to anticipate this trouble ahead. First is kind realism, which is to recognize, and when I say kind realism it's because quite is to avoid this idea that. Oh, we are f you see Kate. I'm sorry for Saudi I don't care. But actually there's another kind of realism which is, we're probably not going to fix this harm is coming. But unless we are blinded by the ideology of progress and our old stories of self. It's an invitation for us to be more radically present to what is, and seek to do what we can to reduce harm. And so being human in that way is first and foremost being an employee and whatever really comes second I mean it's this is becomes a matter of life and death. And so yeah we should question everything. So I say that work caring for each other as humans and care and as people with relatives at home and all of us facing this very disturbing future. So I say that because there are, there's a lack of other. There's a lack of other places in societies today, where people show up in dialogue, trade unions have been demolished church doesn't really play the same role. So our organizational lives are sites of dialogue. And I think it would be good to use them for conversations which just aren't about oh how do I kind of pretend that I'm really interested in the bottom line of this organization more than anything else in the world. But safety I mentioned earlier it's growing it's a very useful framework to actually bring adaptation to an organization to say well, this is the future there was going to there's a growing sense of the employer has responsibilities. So what kinds of disruption are coming and how can we as an organization help. The third thing is, I call fair influence at the moment. Despite corporate sustainability being around for decades. We still see lobbying groups trade associations, arguing against government intervention to try and promote sustainability or promote adaptation or anything. There's still this this this redundant neoliberal ideology. And so corporations can't really address this, this matter very much on their own. And so it's still a question I published a paper on this it would be one best paper at Academy of Management 2006, although, and the call it the political bottom line. And still I don't see very much being done on this. The fourth one is the most difficult. Not because it's the most wacky, but because people who've ended up in charge have often been very good at talking, I think, touch around the importance of growth growth growth of the organization and even in our own sector the higher education all about growth. And if I hear any corporate leader or even Vice Chancellor talking about growth, I know they're redundant, they're anachronistic they do not understand what's happening in the world right now. We need to find ways of organizations to be staying in business and ourselves imposed without an expansion of the organization or increased profitability of the organization, because we're entering a time of great disruption. And so this win win stuff is nonsense now as well, we need more honesty, and we need climate action and being kind to each other to become the central organizing principle in all of life including organizations, and to be above profits, or dividends, or even organizational growth. That's not very easy. And perhaps the biggest acts of leadership will be to ask questions, even if you're feeling nervous in meetings, when you hear the same old same old story of growth of organizations growth of market share and increasing of profits. What you need to do now very quickly is take your questions will not take your questions quickly. I think we've got a system for it as well but what I'm going to do is put a few links into the chat box. I'm just going to stop sharing. And where are we chat here we go. So this is in the chat box I've just given you links to the emotional support things I mentioned and the deep adaptation forum. But also, if any of you feel like it there's a little questionnaire about what's your, what are your views on sustainability, and on the climate predicament and on deep adaptation and right at the end I'll go and have a look and share what you've all said, or really back to you for questions. Thank you very much, Jim. I think we have one question at the moment in the chat box from Yuko Nakahata was graduate from university and a member of a class. So what do you suggest to organizations as very first step to solve the climate change issues can share some practical examples. And maybe, what do you suggest to organizations as very first. When did this question come in just recently. Yeah, halfway through your talk. Yuko, thank you for the question. I would backtrack a bit and invite you to reflect on how you feel about the situation with climate change. And how, if what I've talked about is a credible plausible outlook for you credible to you. Then, then what does that what might that mean, and where can you go to have conversation dialogue about what it might mean for you in an organization but also in your own life. So, organizations, I mean, we let's put that under a razor. How on earth, do we compare, say, Bath University with a small business in India, you know, doing tailoring. It's, it's a nonsense. And so the idea that we can come up with generalizable advice on that on and also you say climate change issues will, you know, which, which, which ones there's, there's emissions. There's draw down natural and artificial, and there's adaptation whether you if you think we can maintain industrial consumer society on. There's also deep adaptation which says no we're not going to we need or at least we need to be looking at if we might not. And then what do we do. So it's that deep adaptation approach invites as much inner work as outer work to begin with. It's how do we allow this into our world and learn how to be with very difficult emotions. As if we immediately go into, well, I want to know how to fix this, I want to know how to, what we were doing is I want to know how to get out of this bad emotion. And if that's driving us then times that by billions of people and then we've got a horror show on planet Earth. We need to learn to be okay with feeling shit about this when there's no escape from feeling shit about this. And let's also therefore try and help each other be okay with that and find useful things to do. So it starts at that level. So I'm, I think I on principle I won't answer your question about what should organizations do on climate change issues. So generic and it's also, I think, displacing the focus on the self and the inner world which is where I've invited us to start at. That's why I chose to do the talk the way I have. Thank you. And we have a question from Paul Bodin on resilience. Okay. Yeah, resilience is now commonplace as an objective of public policy. The government seems to be using resilience to shore up the kind of assumptions of purpose which Jim says are no longer sustainable. And even as an implicit blocking strategy to deep adaptation so how does resilience and the deep adaptation critique the prevailing public sector definition of resilience okay. I'll come to the second bit of your question, Paul. So yeah resilience is one of those words which is already out there a lot. So relinquishment when I chose it isn't a word that sort of is out there a lot with a whole bunch of ideas around it restoration, I suppose so if you're a religious historian which probably poor you, you know a bit about reconciliation is also an idea with quite a bit in terms of it's a concept in spirituality in certain religions, particularly. And also of course it's out there in terms of peace making. So resilience is out there already in the sustainability world and in a way which yes you're right could be a bit misleading. I'm not talking about trying to help current systems. They're trying to help themselves. The question is, what is it we most value that we want to keep. And some people are implicitly answering that question without realizing it. They are answering it is, I want to keep food for myself, my family and my neighbors. And that is more important than anything else or anyone else anywhere. So we treat that as common sense, and they're being invited to, as well by mass media and so forth. I'm inviting with that question people to ask that well, well, are you sure. Are you sure that's what you most want to keep. Imagine if everyone else in the country everyone else in the continent is also deciding that that's what they most value over and above. Things like, yeah, kindness, solidarity, compassion. We're going to have a lot of difficult times ahead, lots of us, and we're going to be asking those really difficult questions. At the moment, as you probably know, Paul, humanity has been answering those questions really badly, you know, millions of people died in the global south from preventable diseases. Just, just happened. And so many of us have pensions, which are in pharmaceutical companies, generally. So we benefited from a racist form of globalization and international property law, which has let millions of people die. Now, it's now coming for all of us. It's going to be millions of people, including people who look a bit more like, like, like me and you. And yeah, we have been asked answering that question what we most value really badly as humanity. And so that's why I'm wanting just to talk about this. If we don't, and if we just let the banks and the militaries of the world in their behind closed doors scenario planning talk about it. Then things could become really bad earlier than they might have to. So it's very different. My question resilience is a question of what is it as the question is. So, um, I think maybe with COVID and the pandemic response. And the disruptions from that people may be willing to have those conversations about about what we most value what Paul your next great what professional purpose do we now have to propose to government employees. And what depends where in some countries, there has been citizenship education in school, which can which communicate notions of personal sovereignty and human rights and legitimacy of government being founded upon that that that starting personal sovereignty and and in such countries I presume civil servants might be more adept at looking at the current politicians in power and wondering about whether to help them if they consider them to be themselves crooks and liars. Now in many countries, I'm doubting how the civil servant will civil service will manage the excesses of corruption and stupidity. So, so my invitation to people in in government anywhere who's in the civil service is to tune back into those core principles because generally we've been lucky in most countries of the world the core basics of personal sovereignty and freedoms, and the meeting needs haven't been in question and therefore we've been able to tolerate the stupidity and narcissism and schemes of politicians but now we're getting into really problematic waters. And so it might maybe we need some more courage coming from civil servants to Okay, a question. So you must welcome to vote on the question that I put forward that will bring the question up so we can ask the question that order. One is one is looking at where do we stand here in terms of being in that normal paradigm. We were trying to see with that special issue to offer trying to offer a space for researchers to talk about how we deal with issues where they are and how they see that from that normal paradigm perspective. So I suggest we start asking the right kinds of question in your view. Thank you, Krista. Yeah, it's a really, really important issue which is that I also want to invite people to move to the how, and the what, and the what. And I'm finding it very difficult. There are people in the deep adaptation field who are having those conversations. And a lot of their work is focused on the inner stuff rather than on how to lead change in organizations or communities, let alone thinking about macroeconomics or big political projects. And that's probably understandable there needs to be some of that in a work first. For your special issue and for your work in this I would invite you to ask people to include first person stuff and ask people to not hide their subjectivity, hide how they're personally struggling with this. Yeah, that would be that would show a different way of approaching this topic, because what happens is otherwise we kind of you pretend that it's kind of just a night so much. The problem is we could end up pretending that this is a technical exercise and then that's sort of somehow lying to the reader that there's no emotion and there's no pain in this process. So I would that would say that. Also, I would invite people also to be clear on their subjectivities in order to not over generalize so for example my my response to the first question was that I'm not going to offer what should be done by organizations everywhere on all climate issues. So there's that invitation to humility and curiosity, and I think if you could invite people in your special issue to better refine questions. Like what, what, what, what, how could we be asking important questions of each other rather than sort of coming up with new proposals of what needs to be done. It's very early days and so it's amazing that you're all working on this brilliant thank you and you can answer your own questions come back in a year and you can, if we still got zoom and and you can tell me what you come up with. Thank you Jim. A question from Peter Harper was want to know about your view on the deep prevention movement that is kind of equal and opposite school. And so if some people do think that that can still be made a reality. And they are bound to criticize many of your stances what's your view on that. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, deep prevention why not. Yeah, I often to call a bit about as I'm, I talk about bold mitigation. So using the, the jargon of mitigation which simply means emissions cuts. And I talk about natural drawdown. So taking carbon out of the atmosphere but using natural means. And I say bold mitigation is because so much has been incremental and not had an aggregate effect on either emissions or atmospheric carbon levels was just not worked. So I am very supportive of, and also the surveys that we've done of people who work in the deep adaptation field and participate in the deep adaptation forum. They are very supportive and not only that very engaged in efforts towards bold mitigation. So I don't see it as, what did you say in your, in your question, Peter, equal and opposite school equal and opposite. So that's just wrong. We are working. It's a false binary. We're working for reducing harm slowing societal disruptions, slowing collapse. Some people think that collapse is inevitable. Some people think it's probable something. Some people are still hoping we may somehow manage a transition and therefore it won't, you know, maybe the word collapses inappropriate. But there's a, there's a, there's a, your question says, and perhaps something about where your own binary thinking, or the binary thinking that you're seeing other people who are criticizing deep adaptation. It's not the binary thinking I am experiencing through working with people who anticipate collapse and are remaining very active on both mitigation and drawdown and exploring what adaptation means. So, the problem is, I often see a lot of people who are criticizing and anticipation of collapse whether it's deep adaptation or collapseology or whatever. Falling back on the evasion of certain data and on techno optimistic fairy tales of negative emissions technologies. And so there's quite a lot of stuff that's been shown that it's not going to work. But we see this we see for example climatologists who signed the Copenhagen diagnosis in 2009 this was world's top climatologists in 2009 said that unless carbon emissions have peaked and are coming down by 2020 we face catastrophic change. And now a bunch of them are signing up to climate restoration, which is a rebrand of artificial means of taking carbon out of the atmosphere. And it's rebranding it by fitting underneath the broad umbrella of really good things like mangrove forestry and seagrass planting and soil restoration and agroecology all super amazing super good things. But now it's all been put under one new nice umbrella it's kind of like greenwashing negative emissions technologies. Yeah, and I'm sorry the burden of proof is on them and juries out on on on that. And so I am saying we also need to talk about possibilities of massive disruption and collapse to civilization to societies everywhere including our own. Okay, we'll take a last question we're reaching the end of the hour from Professor James cobs takes director of the Center for development studies. How far do you allow yourself to anticipate and explore responses to catastrophic failure based on more violent and authoritarian strategies. Yeah, so thank you I, I haven't myself created time to think about what could be done by an authoritarian state or coalition states or five eyes working as deep state. You know I haven't given myself time to for myself or to sit down with others and talk about that so you know if they if we could imagine a benevolent authoritarian to decide how to best manage this crisis, this predicament. I haven't. And I also realized there's, there is fear amongst many that that we will see the rise of authoritarianism and even even fascism justified on the back of an increasing awareness of just how bad our climate predicament now is. And we're also beginning to see some conspiracy theories rising around the coven pandemic and that maybe this is just a precursor for eco fascist methods of control. It's interesting. It's a bit scary. The militaries of many countries have been looking at what does it mean that we it's a plausible scenario if everything continues as it is now the catastrophic climate change is what will happen. So, I wonder where they're going with that I'm not involved in their conversations what I'm arguing for is that we just don't leave it to them to have the conversations. We just have, you know, people with other mandates and other values like, you know, have broad civil society multi stakeholder dialogue about if collapse is coming what do we do about it. Yeah, so I haven't gone there myself. It may be worthwhile because then we in order to guess at what might be coming from people who do have power, who are coming at it from a militaristic mindset. For example, you know, pick any country of the world they met, you know, if the militaries have got together and got a plan that they think is good for humanity or just their own country what might involve. So I think it's a it's something which people should look at. It'd be interesting and weird to say. Okay, I think we'll close it here for Q&A. Thank you very much, Jim for this deep thinking that you're triggering I think in all of us. We'll leave the Q&A open if you want to keep the conversation going as a way to think that maybe you might be having more questions. Yeah, could I go really sorry to interrupt. Can I just say, I know this is super tough stuff and some of you may understandably feel feeling a bit like whoa. And so, I don't know if any one of you has a zoom account and is willing to hold space on this topic. Then it's possible you can just pop it in the question box now yeah a zoom link and just say if you're going to be there for an hour. Just, I recommend you just just listen to each other, not not so much of use on what should be done but just share how you're feeling. You know after that, I feel just share because I think it's a it's tough stuff and if I was giving a talk like this in with with people on my course then then that's exactly what we do we go into a sharing of emotions before to now using our thinking cats like you know how does this relate to my my theories my research my practice my profession.