 Hi, so very, very warm welcome. It is my pleasure and delight to be hosting this Q&A today with the author of Breaking Together, Professor Jem Bandal. Today marks the launch of the free e-book version of Jem's new book, Breaking Together. And it's released today to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, which is appropriate because Jem's book is published by the Schumacher Institute and so recognising that lineage, that heritage. Professor Jem Bandal is best known for his viral paper on climate change called Deep Adoptation, which was released almost five years ago now, and the influence of that paper on the growth of the early growth of Extinction Rebellion. He formerly worked for the UN, for WWF, and for many corporations on sustainability issues before shifting five years ago to focus on adaptation to unfolding, societal disruption, and even collapse. So we're joined here by people who have been, some people here have been following and supporting and influenced by Jem's work since. Since before the publication of the Deep Adoptation paper. Yeah, and those who have joined the Deep Adoptation forum and have come across his work from elsewhere. So it's a really, really great pleasure to be here with you all. And Jem, thanks for joining. Thanks for all you do. How are you? Thank you, Katie. So I was a bit nervous. This is the first online Q&A that I'm doing about the book. And I say that it might actually be the only one I'm going to do. But seeing very familiar faces and also this format, which I know quite well in the sort of emphasizing Deep Adoptation and the Q&A dialogue, I'm having some nostalgia. So feeling good to be here. Thank you, yeah. Nostalgia here as well. Having accompanied you through the Deep Adoptation forum and part of this journey. So you've spent the last two and a half years researching and writing, breaking together. And it is quite a weighty tome. I haven't quite finished it. I have been, the EPUB is available, but the audio book is also available. And I have been kind of jumping between the two and I have found taking breaks in between. So it's a powerful book. It's a powerful message. I'm wondering what you hope that the impact of this book is going to be. So I had to plug in my headphones as I got a message that my audio wasn't loud enough. So I missed the back end of your question because I was there. So please just repeat that. Sure, the question is what do you hope that the impact of this book is going to be? Yeah, and you mentioned the time it took to do it. So wow, so my intention for this book is completely different from when I started on this project. So two and a half years ago, I got funded by a foundation when the idea was about how do we bring more people into a conversation about societal disruption and collapse? And when I say more people, there was an interest from the funder and me at the time about more sort of senior ranking people in civil society, business, government, international organizations and so on. And because it had been quite a taboo subject and then when it had exploded, it had sort of been effectively demonized in mainstream media. And yet we knew so many people who it was their sort of their personal private secret truth that publicly they would talk about technological change and market mechanisms and hope, hope, hope. We can do this and privately, they were scared and but they also didn't know how to talk about their private truth publicly. And so the original idea was I was gonna do research that would help me write a book which would help more senior leaders engage in this professionally and publicly. However, as we, I work with a team of people in a variety of different disciplines and over time I discovered that actually maybe my deep adaptation paper and ideas and framing wasn't radical enough because I discovered that actually there's a good case to make that modern societies, industrial consumer societies had already started to break down since around 2015 and that there are already a lot of regressive responses underway from authorities, basically panicked authorities. And I discovered there's a lot of psychology and sociology on why that happens. And so suddenly I was discovering sort of more of a anti-elitist, anti-authoritarian sentiment that I wanted to communicate. I really wanted to help people who were a bit suspicious of how global elites were responding to the growing sense of crisis. I wanted to share that there's a different way. We don't have to just rely on billionaires and technology and senior bosses to somehow come to the rescue. In fact, that's not gonna work. And so the book has become about a people's environmentalism, a freedom loving response to the situation as a result of all that, my own journey over the last two and a half years. So what do I want from the impact? I don't actually care about senior leaders responding positively to this agenda or this book. My aim is quite different now. I'm wanting to help affirm the doubt suspicious suspicions of a lot of activists, a lot of people who want to see a more collaborative, dialogic response to what's going on. And I, yeah, I'm actually quite excited about how some, for example, some of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion are responding. And other people who I know quite well, I think it's really helping them understand what's going on. Thank you. You're not an uncontroversial figure. That's double negatives. Yeah, you haven't shied away from speaking truth. And there is a really, really, there's a really strong message to the book. I have really, really appreciated some, particularly some of the parts that I think it's some of your most powerful writing that I've read so far. So well done. And there is also, there's a kind of ferocity in this book. You did mention that some of the positive response, particularly from some of the founders from Extinction Rebellion, but I'm wondering about, yeah, more broadly, how is it being received so far? Do you feel like it's hitting where you want it to, yeah, landing where you want it to land? Yeah. I'm really excited about how it seems to be a shot in the arm in a good way for people who get it already, who already have an instinctive sense of fairness and justice and defense of human rights along with a deep concern for the environment, along with a suspicion that monetary and economic systems as the modern manifestation of deeper systems around patriarchy, for example, people who have all that already, how they are, yeah, I'm seeing a confidence in the way that they communicate either in articles or on social media using some of the terminology and ideas in my book. I'll give you one example. Matthew Slater, who was a colleague with me in the Deep Adaptation Forum, has just written an article on lowimpact.org and he knows my book because he's the audio book narrator. So he had to read the whole thing, poor guy, closely. But yeah, his most recent article, I think came out just yesterday, critiquing the rise of green authoritarianism in the British environmental movement. There's a lucidity there and a sense that this needs to be said. We need to invite people to a more bottom-up environmentalism rather than a top-down one. So I'm pleased with that. I don't see this as a book which is likely to be a bestseller. As you said, Katie, it's pretty heavy going. It's a long book. So what I'm looking for is like more people to really get a sense of, wow, okay, yeah. This affirms what I thought I knew. It puts it all together in one framework, in one place and they're gonna go for it. And I am, I'm hearing that from people that, as I mentioned, Stu Bazdin, Gail Bradbrook and other people who've been key in the contemporary British environmental movement. I hope this book has an impact beyond that. Perhaps even beyond environmentalism because so many people who haven't been involved in environmentalism are waking up to the severity of the climate crisis, but they're also a bit spooked with the nature of the COVID, the mainstream COVID response. And so they are seeing these concerns grow that we might see an authoritarian response dominating for climate change. This shows that you can be an environmentalist in a different way. And so I hope it reaches some of those people too. Yeah, thank you. I get the impression, I got the impression as I've been reading it, that there's genuine fear in you around the emergent authoritarian or proto-fascist responses. It feels like a kind of call to action or yeah, is that right? Is that part of your motivation? Yes, there is a genuine fear in me. As the response to COVID seemed to be quite authoritarian, and even just discussing what may or may not work seemed to be demonized or hidden, I did worry that people might become alienated from messages about public threats. I did worry therefore there might actually as a result of that be a backlash against environmentalism per se. And we certainly are seeing that. And that was very predictable. And it was why I was pained to not see more environmental leaders and top commentators speak out about, well, maybe we need to check what the science is rather than just accept what the pharmaceutical companies say the science is. And we need to look at more holistic responses, proportionate responses. We need to keep talking about this rather than just having this sort of rather weird polarization. So yes, there is fear in me possibly because of the COVID period and this sense of intense polarization over the last few years. I personally experienced a lot of people who've been quite vitriolic towards me, who've sort of been a person in private and in public. So yes, I do worry that as panic grows, as anxiety grows about real problems in the world, the environmental crisis and the climate crisis being front and center, but also all sorts of problems with poverty. And as anxiety grows, people can be open to manipulation to the very simple kind of there to blame. And so I talked about that in my speech when I launched the book in Glastonbury that we seem to have, on the one hand, a real ecological crisis. And on the other hand, there's a sort of a fake, green, globalist response. And a lot of people are just screaming in either of those two directions like crisis, wow, or fake, green, globalist and my book is inviting people to move through that and beyond that kind of emotion of just blame and hatred. And actually, well, it's can we can we find something more constructive to do together? And I call that a freedom loving response to collapse and very deliberately so I recognize some people would be alienated with that. From that subtitle, because over the last 40 years, freedom has been sort of assumed to be somehow the preserve of the right. But that's a particular affliction in the West. I mean, if in countries where they've more recently shaken off colonial power and still struggle against colonial power, no one thinks that freedom is just about consumer behavior. Now, you know, I care about me and not about my neighbor. That's just a nonsense that's emerged in the West through neoliberalism in the last few decades. Thank you. I want to I want to join some dots before I do. I want to send give a reminder to people here that you can submit. You can send in if you have a question that you'd like to ask. Gem, you can send a direct message to Stuart. Yes, please do be good to hear from you. I'm very happy we have about eighty five eighty five on this on this Q&A today. So I do hope we get to hear from some of you. Thank you. Yes, and I wanted to connect with what you were saying with about the response to in that you're proposing in this new book as a kind of an antidote to the the effect of growing fear and the, you know, how it how it's bringing about increasing polarization. And and the kind of the the global trauma effect of the pandemic and we're, you know, we it's we're going to see more of the similar kind of collective trauma events. And Nadine Andrews is here. We spoke to Nadine maybe a couple of years ago about the trauma in the context of adaptation to climate chaos. And your approach or the approach that mainly you put forward in in the deep in deep adaptation and in the forum has been maybe we could generalize the same is about exploring methods of co-co-regulation through connection and community. And I'm curious about the extent to which this book is a development of or a departure from that approach in deep adaptation. Yeah, I do see that as the most important part of the deep adaptation paper message and community. And it is the most important part because that's the bit that people picked up on and really went with. And it's also what I needed at the time. I was also, I think, in a bit of an emotional mess with all my old stories of self and the future and professional identity all being messed up. And so I had a real desire to serve that moment to help connect people, provide a framework for dialogue and invite people to realize that rushing to have some kind of answer to this, whether that's a technological fix or a bunch of people to blame. That's not actually, that's all just emotional version. That's not staying with the pain. So yes, I'm happy with that characterization. However, I always thought that we might see a lot more in terms of an emerging political agenda around this from people who are collapse aware or collapse accepting. And that's been slower to emerge. And also I realized that the political scene is dominated by messaging through mass media and through by politicians. And therefore, I noticed that quite a lot of people, despite being very active in this co-regulation thing, were still, I thought, sometimes saying things which I thought were politically unhelpful. And I thought, well, rather than just wait for a political philosophy to emerge, kind of like a politics of compassion, solidarity and fairness and equality to emerge for an agenda or an era of collapse rather than an era of assumed progress, rather than just waiting for that to emerge, I'd have a go, you know? Okay, I think I got something to say on this. And I think I had to let go of the idea that I have to somehow be neutral on this. And I just said, these are my ideas. Take them or leave them. This is my contribution to a collapse ready politics. So it's, I like to think that it's not coming from any emotional aversion in me. I like to think that it's what I've gained from the whole deep adaptation way of being the people I know in that field has helped me then do this next thing which is more explicitly political. I often talk, when someone asks me often about the difference between the DA stuff and the book. So it, because it is a question that comes up. I say, well, perhaps the DA stuff was quite yin and this book is a bit more yang in terms of how I'm relating to the situation. Thank you. There are a couple of people here from who are in the deep adaptation community. And I'm going to go to a couple of them who have questions for you. But before we do, I have another question which is, yeah, the book covers so many different topics from banking to spirituality to mutual aid politics. If which of the chapters do you think people most need to read and why? Yeah, thanks. So it depends where people are coming from. I often say that it's funny, isn't it? I've been talking about this down book for two months now but not in an event like this. I'm just realizing I'm talking to lots of people about the book. So I'm often saying, well, the book, the first half is marshalling the evidence for the argument that the collapse of modern industrial consumer societies has already begun. It can't be changed. We can talk about reducing harm and that's very important to do. And the second half of the book is them. So why did this happen and what to do about it and also what not to do about it and what we might be able to resist? Okay, so if you doubt the premise, then we'll get stuck into the first half where I talk about the breakdown in economic systems, monetary systems, energy systems, food systems, the biosphere and then also climate as an accelerator of all that as well as being a problem in itself. And then there's a chapter talking about the various different cracks in various different aspects of society, more on the surface. Reflecting lots of opinion polls about how now people are thinking about government and capitalism and so on. But if, yeah, if you already accept that premise then okay, for those of you who may be feeling kind of ashamed to be part of the human race. So that's quite a thing that crops up with people who are a bit doomy. And you have days where you're feeling a bit misanthropic like, ah, good riddance to the human race, planet Earth will be best without us. Then I recommend chapters nine and 10 because chapter nine I look at how for many millennia, human societies that were very complex but complex in different ways, not only lived sustainably and in harmony with nature but were actually essential to the biodiversity. So for example, the various different civilizations we're now beginning to learn about that lived in the Amazon and made the Amazon what it is today. But I give lots of examples. And so basically, no, it's not that homo sapiens didn't belong here. We do belong here. It's just a particular ideology, culture and then set of economic systems which then took that to extremes, particularly focused on the monetary system which is chapter 10. And I show how it took very alienated and alienating stories of reality and of humans within that reality, took those and made them extreme and took away our freedom to live and think to think and live differently. And so I talk about the unfreedom that comes from that monetary system. So I would recommend chapters nine and 10 and then it can be like, okay, so homo sapiens as a species, it wasn't inevitable that this happened. A lot of people will therefore feel a bit upset with that. I know a lot of people don't want to think like that because then they worry they might feel some guilt and some shame or they may go into just sort of an angry blame mode against the richest people in the world. Well, drop all that. Just drop all those fears of blame and guilt and whatever, just drop it all and just allow yourself to consider this information and then just find a way of living where you're not driven by any of the either aversion to guilt and shame or attraction to blaming others. The other chapter then that I think is really important is chapter eight on something which I'm summarizing with the phrase critical wisdom or the new term critical wisdom. And that's because I think that we need to help each other to be wise in this moment. And for me that involves a blend of lots of different things and lots of different ways of being and knowing. So mindfulness obviously. So we become aware of how our cravings and aversions to different emotions are actually involved in the micro moments of how we perceive the world and what we think is a true claim or not or what's right or wrong. So to cultivate some mindfulness and there's many ways to do that. Secondly, something I'm calling critical literacy but also that's a term in sociology where we become aware of how power works in shaping concepts and narratives and stories in society and how that then reproduces that power. And then unless we're conscious of that we end up just be so easily manipulated. Obviously some sociologists say that's an impossible thing we'll never escape that we're actually constituted by that discursal power. But I think still we should try and cultivate awareness of it to avoid manipulation increasing at this time. And then there's rationality. A lot of people take, I think perhaps, I live in a community, I live in a town where a lot of people might take those two things so far where they drop all interest in logic. And so I think it's very important to be aware of logical fallacies and understand rationality. I'm certainly not, I'm building from science with a critical eye rather than negating it. So I'm quite like rationality and logic. And then the fourth thing is intuition. So there's all manner of ways of knowing the world other than not only through language and maths and so on but also not even through our brains but through and it may even not even be through our bodies. So I encourage people if you've never had it before to immerse yourself in nature, to consider things like fasting, to consider things like micro dosing, to consider things like extended my periods of meditation not just for mindfulness but for transcendent states and not to negate that or think that poo poo that but actually recognize that as one of the four pillars of cultivating wisdom in these times. That's chapter eight. Thank you. Yeah, comprehensive there. And there is, we've got a question coming up later about the, let me just find, I'm going to come to Natalie, not straight away but a question about the specifics. And this is the research, the first half of the book which is your research. So we'll come to that shortly. First, I would like to invite Kimberley, welcome Kimberley, if you're still here will you unmute yourself and ask your question to James. Good to see you. Good to see you too. Hi, Jim. I had an original question and it's kind of slightly evolved since you've been talking. It was, I mean, I love the book. Thank you so much. Brilliant. And I love the bridge and together angle and the emphasis on the we rather than I. And there's still a feeling and a sense in the book for me about naming the enemy in terms of other humans. And I wonder if you feel we can ever achieve a kind of pro-life, any kind of pro-life future if we continue to perceive other humans as bad or wicked rather than the compassion which you've taught me so much about the love and the compassion required to understand that it's a kind of bad and wicked system rather than bad and wicked people. And I'm so struck recently by the, my own shift towards away from the individual and towards, you know, we, towards what we can do together. Yes, I just wondered what you thought about that, that, yeah, that this sense in which if we just changed these individual people, you know what I mean? Yes, thank you, Kim. And I just want to say that I see some people are sending messages into the general chat or even I think maybe messaging me. I won't see those. So if you want to ask a question, send it to directly to Stuart Smith. So find him and do that. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. So I'm a professor of leadership and one of the most famous studies in the 80s on leadership was how when things are going particularly well or particularly badly across cultures, psychology studies find that we, if things are going better or worse than expected than the norm, we tend to blame or praise the senior roleholder, the person with power we perceive, even if we have absolutely no evidence for that. And it's just the fact that the house psychology works. And so when we see things going badly now, yeah, it's a lot easier to say, get super angry at the chairman of the World Economic Forum and say, Klaus Schwab must be an evil man who's in charge of the planet working with Bill Gates rather than look at the complex systems which are destroying the planet. And therefore, if, you know, was it Klaus Schwab is, must be about 19 now. He might even die tomorrow. Nothing's gonna change. Bill Gates could slip up and bang his head and never give a grant or a speech again and nothing would change. So this is key. We need to definitely look at the systems rather than get so fixated on individuals. And there is this tendency, it's a lot easier. It also, it works in a way where we don't then look at our own complicity in those systems. And so I talked about that in my launch speech when I look back on my own career and I spent prior to 2017. So 22 years of my career in sustainability, I spent the whole time basically looking up the tree, looking up the hierarchy of who has power, where's the power, how can I get their ear? How can I be their confidant? How I can get them to do the right things? Thinking that was the most responsible thing to do. And actually, I realized that we make so many compromises about our own curiosity and our own sense of what's reality in doing that. And we stopped looking at each other and we stopped thinking about, you know, how to team up with our neighbors or those around us. And so I'm, yeah, for me, that's quite a big, big, big message in the book. And I wanna, actually I'm gonna hold it up here. So you see, if you get the real one, it's today you can download for free the EPAL, just go to jenbandale.com and there you go, you download it for free. But it's far nicer to hold it because it's got this beautiful piece of art which I did with Derinka Montego. Now there's a reason for this which relates to your question. So this is the Farnese Atlas who's a Titan God. And, but it's been Kintsugi. So Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of when something breaks, you stick it back together again with gold. And, but you're not thinking you can use it for what it once was. So when you, you know, you have an antique mug which you love dearly. I mean, you were using to drink green tea for in your family for a century and you break it. When you stick it back together again, you're not gonna use it for that. It's just gonna be an ornament. But it reminds you of your, not only the object and what it was useful but it reminds you of your love for that but recognizing that it's broken. So I've done that here because the myth of Atlas has the true meaning of it has been lost over time where people think this is the planet when it's not. It's the heavens, the universe in general. And people have lost the idea that Zeus cursed Atlas with the idea that he had to hold up the heavens to stop them collapsing. And so was Atlas, what a lovely, Atlas represents an aspect of our humanity. It's wonderful that we care and we don't want our family and the rest of humanity to die under collapsing heavens. But it's also pure hubris and self-obsession that we think that we have to do that. And so there's a paradox, it's good that we care about people and the world beyond ourselves but also there's a paradox in that that it can go horribly wrong. So we don't resolve that paradox. You don't resolve that paradox by saying, oh, let's everyone be entirely free of any social consideration or you don't resolve the paradox by just hoping that some superhuman ethical dictator can fix it and tell us all what to do for our own good. You just have to recognize this is a paradox of human nature. So that's why it's on the cover. We're gonna still, let's keep caring for each other and the world and the heavens and all sorts but also recognize how that could go terribly wrong because it always does go terribly wrong. So that also connects back, Katie, to when I talked about my concern about green authoritarianism and inviting a different approach. Mm-hmm, thank you. Thanks, Kimberly. Good to see you, Annette. Are you still here? I'm still here, Katie. Lucky third. Hi, lovely to see you and hi, Gem. I asked this question in Glastonbury and felt that I didn't really get an answer to it because Gail responded by saying, oh, that's what I'm talking about in my talk and then she gave a great talk but I didn't feel she really covered this which is related to the one disappointment of the day was that Stephen Wright wasn't there. I really looked forward to hearing from him. I had been to meet him at his place in Cumbria and we talked about all of this and the idea of addressing the cause beneath the cause of really trying to help support people reconnecting to source or God or the divine however you want to name it. Yeah, so I'm wondering what's your take on the kind of spiritual aspect of all this as well as what would you have hoped that he would have said if it's not really your thing? What would you have hoped he just had to say about that? Thank you. Well, I just would have hoped that Stephen would have been Stephen and we could have all just exuriated in his compelling mysticism but one of his closest colleague and friend had a personal tragedy just two days before that event and so he's went to be with her. Yeah, actually Stephen Wright has finished a first draft of a whole book on deep adaptation and spirituality so there's that to come but I'll answer for myself. I'm not going to take you up on what would I want him to say or anything like that. Okay, that's fine. That's fine, you know. Yeah. Back to the paradox. If from 2015 to 2017, if from 2015 to 2016 I hadn't been paying attention to the latest climate news and data and become extremely worried. So worried I needed to take a year out from university to study the climate science again for myself rather than just assuming what IPCC said was correct. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have had my dark night of the soul and I wouldn't be who I am today and I therefore probably would have been still a corporate sustainability workaholic still working from the idea that it's good to get people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons and one just has to keep pretending and behaving according to what's expected of me as a someone who's a high ranking professional successful guy. So the weird thing is that me coming to that awareness not just of my own mortality, it's kind of like multi-dimensional mortality is the extent of the loss of other life and species, the extent of suffering of humans now, the extent of how much is to come, the biological annihilation which is already beginning which is going to continue, we can't do anything much about. The very possibility of human extinction caused by ourselves. All of this was huge for me and melted my or fractured my old stories of self and identity that even revealed to me that I was operating from a story of self where I need to have self-worth and I get self-worth by being a smart guy who cares and works hard and it smashed all of that and what was I left with? I was left with something else which is and many spiritual teachers talk about that where you have that disintegration of self and then what are you? Your consciousness, your part of, you're just a bit of something infinite and there's a core truth of just being loving and curious. That was what dominated for me, being loving and being curious. So it's a paradox because would I have wanted everything to be fine in the world or for me to not have known about it? So many in the world, most people in the world perhaps don't know about this stuff and don't face it. It's a weird one because I think liberation can come through facing this reality and let it change you and lots of people talk about that too and I talk about it in chapter 12 of the book I talk about a few people where it really did change them in that way and they would describe it in terms of it of being an awakening moment so the spiritual thing being quite big for them. I talk about Zori in chapter 12 for example where it was crucial in her evolution I haven't got that far yet so I'll make sure to get there. Thank you, Gem, I've found that so let's move into that. Thank you, yeah. As I'm listening to you speaking, Gem, then what I noticed is the energy shifting from like it's possible to engage in this topic in a cognitive way. We're talking about chapter 12 on this and chapter 7 on this and how it's impacting and what people can do and then dropping down into the more personal like remembering this is real and every single one of the 89 people here today are holding it in our hearts and in our bodies in different and challenging ways and in a few minutes we're going to pause with the Q&A and going to break our rooms to connect in a kind of more intimate way and share a little bit but before we do that, Jessica's back. Jessica, let's see if the weather at your end is going to let us hear your question. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Gem, for your book and for creating the space for us to discuss these critical ideas and yes, I'm in the Caribbean so it's windy hurricane season so I might lose connection. In your chapters, I found them really obviously critical but the one that seemed to be missing for me was one on education and especially education in the global north. I have a 19-year-old daughter who's going to be attending her first year of university at University of British Columbia. She's chosen to be in the north and I wanted to know your thoughts maybe two or three points on what you think that post-secondary school institutions should be doing to equip our young people to meet these unbelievable challenges and this very uncertain and worsening future and do you feel in your heart of hearts that these institutions are even capable of supporting and meeting the needs of young people so anything you have on that would be great. Thank you. Yeah, wow. 19 you said, yeah. Yeah, the Deep Adaptation edited book had a chapter on education and you're right I don't talk about it in this book I don't really get specific about any I don't get specific about policy areas more it's political philosophy rather than that. I am well there's two ways of going one is live life to the max and that's different for whoever else whoever it is so your 19-year-old living life to the max might be you know she's passionate about certain subjects and wants to go to a certain place in the world and have that experience then great but I think it will do nothing to help her I'm not a parent and if I was I'd be I'd be choosing a very different I'd be encouraging my child because it depends on what age but to to buck the traditional education system entirely because yeah you talked about in my heart of hearts no I think there's a few schools some forest schools and stuff and they're very focused on not training people just to be little hard workers in industrial systems and you know tidy consumers but I want wild revolutionaries in the world and that's what young people are and let's help them be that way in constructive ways and so yeah people should be all of us actually every one of us here I talk about it as a great reclamation of our power from the systems of imperial modernity I popped that guitar there it was actually slightly further out of view I just put it in there and the t-shirt I had made it says we grow our own food we make our own music we use our own currencies and we have more fun and there's all manner of ways we can reclaim our lives aspects of our lives from imperial modernity which also therefore means let's make our own music let's look at all ways that we can have fun and be productive together outside of industrial consumer society the vast majority perhaps all of the education is training people up to salary labour within industrial consumer societies so I reject it all now and I guess I'm saying that because today marks the day where my line manager wrote back telling me that my leaving the university has been confirmed so I'm leaving academia so professorship should be for life and I'm quitting I'm going to focus on writing music and developing my organic farm school and other sorts of stuff so I'm not just saying this I've had it with a lot of academia so I don't know what you should do I'll say to you maybe your 19 year old might be interested in my book well thank you Jim and she actually read The Collapsologist Another End of the World is Possible she took that on her trip to Costa Rica and she grew up in the rainforest in the Caribbean so now she wants to try to see what what the north is like I wanted to experiment and to be free to make choices after that too I totally understand and that's what I was saying is living life to the max as people feel at that time and that's where she's at so good luck thank you thank you for that yeah so that's like beautifully connects with the invitation that I want to yeah that offer you right now are you going to just a thought experiment maybe for fun listening to Jessica talk about her daughter listen to Jim talk about kind of what one aspect of freedom means and so you're going to be in a breakout room with two other people most of it is going to be you might find yourself with three other people and this is the question I'm offering you that you had a year of life left what would you be doing so it's a thought experiment you know we can assume that these 12 months are not going to include a long and increasingly debilitating illness you have 12 months left all the people watching this on YouTube are going to miss out on everything we're reading here aren't they they are going to love to experience nature caring for the earth connection love and care some playing and fun leaving a viral legacy of love for humans in the more than human world so yeah I actually I know this isn't you're the host but I just want to say something is that it's just reminding me of there are rare conversations which are deeply meaningful nourishing and can help resource us with these difficult times I don't have it much in my life because I've been busy so stupidly busy for the past year writing a book but I found these sorts of things happening in the deep adaptation forum so I know lots of good lovely stuff happens there online as well increasingly again in person so for those of you don't know about it check it out deepadaptation.info Thanks Gem we're a little bit past the top of the hour so I would like to say thank you to each of you for showing up joining this event also thanks to each of you for showing up in all of the other ways in your life in your work on this topic Gem thank you for your huge generosity I know that not everything that you do on this topic in this work is joyful for you and I'm really grateful and I know that thank you is on behalf of a lot of people, people who are here and also people who haven't been able to join us today the recording of this Q&A will be on Gem's YouTube channel. Gem where can people get a copy of your book including the paid for copy if people can afford to buy a copy then There's a pinned post on gemvendell.com which then links to UK Paperback Direct from the Publisher Schumacher as well as Amazon Paperback and Amazon Hardback also the audio book and for purchasing but also if you go to SoundCloud and type gemvendell then you'll arrive at my SoundCloud account and there's about six of the chapters audio for free and about every two to three weeks I'll write a blog and I'll release another chapter audio there until they're all out so that's another way of consuming it in chunks there's a free ePub it's there today gemvendell.com you'll see a link to download it and have it on your eReader please tell people about it it's yeah people are telling me this can be life changing by helping in personal transformations so and it's not something that will necessarily get written about in mass media other than to slag it off because it's too frightening a political scientist I know told me what you're doing is probably the most counterhegemonic thing didn't even know I pronounced that right counter hegemonic hegemonic thing that he knew from political scientist shakes things up a bit this society this culture became suicidal didn't it we're working out to that thank you gemvendell.com you won't get a follow-up email from this event so please do take some time to have a look at the link yourself and until next time thank you so much thank you Gem thanks Stuart for your support