 Welcome to the 20th Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Big round of applause for Jen and me. For each other, let's hand it to the American professor, Jim Vendell. We're all here to celebrate the launch of Breaking Together, a free and loving response to Gladys. And I'm going to introduce Jim. We're going to chat for about 40 minutes, and then we'll have plenty of time for audience Q&A. And we're actually, I said this before, but for those people who just arrived, we're actually going to do an extended directives type edition, and so we're going to blow right past six o'clock and go to about 6.30. So if you can stick around, stick around. If you need to leave at 6.00, that's fine. Just kind of quietly spit out. But there'll be a lot of time for audience Q&A, and in what we also want to do in the end, spend a few minutes just sitting with our feelings and processing all of this stuff, because this clap stuff can be pretty intense and it can bring up some big emotions. So we want to sort of like all of that and integrate that. So I'm going to just introduce Jim, and then we'll dive into it. So Jim Vendell is a world-renowned scholar on the breakdown of modern society due to environmental change. He's just retired from the University of Hungary in England, where he was a full professor. He's had the most well-known for his 2018 paper on de-adaptation, which is being downloaded over a million times, as long as the social movement and the de-adaptation are forwards, and was highly influenced when the establishment and the growth of the worldwide extension rebellion grew. In the past life, Jim was a self-destruct day boss and cop out. But most importantly, and definitely most importantly, for a day, he is the author of Creation Together, which is the fruit of three years of work with an interdisciplinary team of scholars, and as an update to the de-adaptation thesis, which, to devolvedly summarize, could be described as societal collapse is imminent and inevitable, which is now updated to societal collapse. There's already a gun, and there's no way out of it. But yeah, before I jump into the questions, Jim, do you have any opening statements for the audience? Yeah, I'm honored so many of you have come for such a tough topic. So I just want to say that before we dive in. You've given up a glorious afternoon in Bali near the end of the world to come and talk about these things. And so lots of respect to you. Thank you for coming. Awesome. Should we have the fan for the sake of the calling as well? For now, yeah. Yeah, is there any panic? Could I just spend a minute? So just stay hydrated, people. All right, so maybe let's begin at the beginning, right? So before there was breaking together, there was a little paper you wrote called Defectation and Math for Navigating Climate Threaty. And when you wrote it, I don't think you expected to go the way that it did. But do you want to maybe take us back to that origin story of why you wrote it? How and when, what your response to it was, and what brought you to write this new book? Yeah, so I've been an environmentalist since I was 15 years old. And so then that influenced what I studied at university. And so it meant that when I started to see news coming in about 30 degrees in the Arctic Circle in the summer, or forest fires in the tundra, or the melting of permafrost, I thought these were the kind of scenarios that we were speculating on back in the 90s about what might happen. And if I lived into my 80s, I might get to see some of this beginning. And at that point, people might actually realize that climate change, man-made climate change, is happening, and it's a problem. So that was the way we thought in the 90s. I was paying attention to the climate news. 2013, 2014, I really started to worry. So by 2017, I took a year out of university, unpaid leave to actually study the climate science for myself. And I realized that my conclusion was my whole career working in corporate sustainability was based on a false premise that we had time in order to transition the current way of life into a more sustainable way of life. And so then I put that together in a paper. It was a bit of a whole scream of pain, that paper. And I did it to make sure I couldn't go back to my old job. I was deliberately burning bridges with a whole field of corporate sustainability and saying, guys, we've been lying to ourselves. We have to prepare for massive disruption, and we have to accept that an expansionist monetary system, an expansionist economy, and an industrial consumer way of life, none of that can continue within these constraints, these ecological constraints. And yeah, I was surprised how it took off. So it ended up being something that only people in my field read, but it became a bit of a phenomenon, including amongst people who hadn't even thought about climate change before. So you had people like bankers in London who read it and then decided to quit their job and become full-time activists in Extinction Rebellion. So it was quite an unusual response. And also, I didn't think that it didn't occur to me that once you realize that modern industrial consumer societies are going to crumble, that you decide to go out and glue yourself to a pavement to get arrested. That didn't occur to me. That's a response. I'm not going to go, but suddenly people were responding in that way. And I thought, well, OK, you better try something. And so then what inspired you to write this much larger, longer, and we could say, well, yeah, where did that start? Did you read it for a different set of years now? Yeah, I talk about it in the book. So basically, it's about two years after the deep adaptation paper took off and then for Extinction Rebellion took off and also the deep adaptation movement took off, which basically means the people who anticipate the breakdown of societies, as we know them, who want to actually approach that in a curious, kind, creative way rather than just saying, where's my gun? Where's my tin of baked beans? Help me build a bunker. You know, people who want it will be their best selves in the face of the crisis. That was the deep adaptation ethos and movement. But come July 2020, there was a very coordinated backlash involving some of the most famous climatologists, famous environmental journalists who decided to try and cancel this topic, cancel the idea of a collapse of the possibility, the plausible case to be made, which we should actually look at it and think what to do about it, cancel deep adaptation as a paper, cancel me as an academic. And I had never experienced that before, so I didn't really know what to do about it. I was advised to do nothing about it. Looking back, I'm not sure, because what's online stays online forever. But yeah, I was very close to the founders of Extinction Rebellion, and one of them said, Gem, how great it was, Gem, you need to get on the front foot. You need to, you could just go off and live and strum guitar and meditate and learn and teach Buddhism, and all those things you've been talking about to me, Gem. But there aren't that many people who have your following and have your skillset and could actually explore and possibly augment your understanding of what's happening in the world, environmentally, socially, economically, politically. So she said, Gem, I'm on the front foot. And so I ended up responding to a Danish foundation that said that they would fund me to put a research team together in order to actually help scholars speak out, so we would do training courses, and we would do research reports. And the stupid thing I said in the application form at the end, oh, and I'll write a book. So it's probably like one pound an hour in terms of the reality of getting this book done. And so when you actually got stuck into the research with you and your team, I think it might be fair to say it was worse than you thought. But can you, I mean, you can tell the name of the broad brush story to what you discovered, but it's a 500 page book with 70 pages of book notes. So if you need the full story, via copy, with a lot of solver there are pretty sort of, yeah. But yeah, were there any particular findings that were particularly shocking or disturbing, especially in terms of being more hard on people than there might be? The two things have come to mind. So the first part of the book is an integrative analysis from a range of scholarly disciplines on what's crumbling in our modern industrial consumer life. The second part of the book is what to do about it and what not to do about it. But yeah, what stands out for me, OK? Three things. The first is I didn't realize how eco-modern I was. I didn't realize that I was wrong to think that we could transition on fossil fuels to renewable, a renewable, hallowed society. I used to work at WWF and I produced a report in 2007 celebrating the launch of Tesla Motors and saying, this is evidence that we're all going to be driving electric cars and they're going to have electric dream futures. And actually, it's impossible. It's completely impossible because of the International Energy Agency has analyzed the amount of rare earth metals and also things like lithium that we need to create the batteries that actually have a fully electric economy just to transport and household, not including heavy industry and agriculture. And they calculated you need between 700% and 4,000% increase of all these different metals. And those metals, unfortunately, are under the feet of indigenous peoples in the most pristine environments around the world. So just to help a few people in America and elsewhere drive some Teslas and feel good about themselves, we're going to destroy the last remaining wildernesses. Wow, that was great news to find out. So that was one thing. And then I'm looking more into it as well, just the incredible fossil fuel dependence of our way of life. The second thing was in climate science. I didn't realize that actually those climate skeptics who said it's all a hoax. Actually, in the past, when temperatures went up like 100,000 years ago, then carbon dioxide increased two to four to 500 years later. So in the past, carbon didn't drive the heating. It amplified the heating. The thing is climate skeptics therefore then say so there's no carbon dioxide driven warming. It's illogical. There is. We know there is. It's a gas which traps in for a radiation. So therefore, more carbon dioxide needs more warming. But what I didn't realize then is that it means that things are really bad already because we've already warmed the earth up. So last September just gone by 1.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, decades ahead of past projections. That means there will be more carbon released from the biosphere. There's going to be loads more carbon coming from a hot to ocean released into the atmosphere. That's already going to, no matter what we do. So actually, I discovered it's actually way more depressing. And we're not in control. We can do lots of things to try and help, lots of good things to do. But we don't know what the future holds. It looks very scary. The third thing I didn't realize is that there's really good evidence that the hydrological cycle matters massively and the amount of clouds matters massively. And actually, the devastation of the world's forest that's happened over the last 200 years is possibly as important as the amount of carbon gases we've built in the atmosphere. There's forest seed clouds through pollen and bacteria globally. So you'll have pollen and bacteria from the Amazon actually seeding clouds in Tibet. This was through mainstream climatology seen as a minor localized effect. It's not. So what does that mean? That means that we should be doing a hell of a lot to repair, to protect and regenerate forests and also promote agroforestry. So more trees mixed with our agriculture. So those are the things that really stood out for me because I thought I knew what I was talking about. I'm a professional environmentalist for decades. But these things I had not paid attention to. I just assumed kind of what was the mainstream knowledge on them. I get the sense, having read the book and some of your personal information on this, that this could have been a very difficult book throughout the times. Quite a few long diagnoses of the soul and many of the personal collapsing and disintegration as well as positive disintegration along the way. So could you talk a little bit about the sort of the personal, not just the personal quality, but also the kind of the transformations that has seen them as well? That's an easy question. I couldn't approach doing this book unless it felt like a validatory thing. Like, this is it. I'm going to have a nicer life after this. So there were lots of nights of working until 1am because I set myself deadlines to get chapters done. I was looking back. It's a weird thing to say it, but I was lucky that I went back to the UK to spend time with my dad, who was bedbound with terminal cancer. So for over two months, it was just me in the lounge writing and then going and making him a cup of tea and watching a bit of TV with him and then him saying, How's the book? Imagine my dad on his death bed. How's the book? It's a bit of a motivating thing. And yeah, so that was pretty important. Also, Kraton works really well. So I think it wasn't criminalised at the time. So thanks, Dan, and thanks, Kraton. But yeah, it was... I actually got very excited after I'd done the first half. It's like, OK, it's worse than I thought and also there's good evidence that things have been breaking down since 2016. It's not like it's an editable thing. It's a process of some sort of sudden event. We don't know when the breakdowns will lurch forward and it will be then more of what we took for granted has gone. We don't know. But after I got over that, it was actually quite exciting to think about what would be a new political philosophy, a new way of organising together in that reality. And I was excited by it because I saw two false narratives taken hold amongst my friends and colleagues. One was technology will fix it, billionaires will fix it, governments will fix it. Just keep working, keep saving, keep believing, keep hoping and we'll get through this. Humans always do that now. So you come up and actually... And then the other narrative, which has emerged from very big over the last two years, was to scan the globalists trying to control you and make money and it doesn't exist. The fact that globalists have a bad agenda also means that the problem itself doesn't exist. So these two narratives have become very dominant and therefore I wanted to offer a narrative which I felt was more authentic for the people who were doing really good stuff at local levels, people doing regenerative farms, people doing local currency schemes, people re-localising trade, people ditching their careers and becoming spiritual guides or counsellors and doing amazing work, all kinds and I thought that's a people's environmentalism and we don't hear enough about it. We don't. The mainstream media will just keep telling you about Bill Gates and I don't know, new technologies and Tesla cars and then the alternative media through Telegram will just keep sending you stupid videos from people from the oil industry recycling, climate frameworks and so I thought let's offer... So I got quite excited about the potential of a different narrative which would actually bring attention to the people doing amazing things already. Nice. I think that goes to... I think you've done a good job of kind of that. I'm articulating the title Breaking Together as an opposition to breaking apart because the idea that things are breaking but it doesn't have to become this and very much in that sense that new coalitions and new users form from there. Do you want to talk a little bit about the fabulous cover art and some of you may have noticed a resemblance between this cover art and some of the photos on the wall and explain the lifting Japanese name for this and also maybe shout-outs as well. Yeah, sure. I think what these images are on the wall and what's on the cover is mainly because I just love working with drinkers so I just cooked up an idea like let's do something funky for the cover. I want to serve the drinkers over there. You've got an amazing t-shirt on. We did the t-shirt together as well. What does it say? Grow our own food, make our own music use our own currencies and have more fun. Thank you. And let the nurses decide on this. Oh, you can buy the t-shirts, yeah. So I... Yeah, so there's two bits of iconography on the cover. Classic Greek ancient myth and also kinsuki, the Japanese practice of so has anyone heard of kinsuki in Japan or what they do? So basically it's something that you love maybe the plate you used to already you pour it out of as a kid and then your mum may be made has been ailing with a family and it breaks and you stick it back together again with gold. It doesn't mean you use it again the way you used to but you've commemorated the whole experience around that object and you turn it into something beautiful and it might just be on a mental piece now. That's the practice of kinsuki. So you don't go back to what was but you honour what was lost you make something new you make something beautiful out of what was broken and the Atlas myth is widely understood misunderstood. That's not the world on his back that's not other people on his back that's Zeus cursing Atlas with the notion that unless he struggled to hold up the heavens and keep life in order he would collapse and kill life on earth and his loved ones. So for me there's a paradox in that group myth that actually it's quite nice that humans care for each other in nature and it's completely manned. Because we're not the centre of the universe, we're not the centre of life on earth and this can become delusional and destructive when we think it's all down to us. So this anthropocentrism this centeredness about humans being in charge, needing control is the origin of so much destruction and has led us to this awful point but we don't want to throw it all away it's actually still nice for people to think about the people and nature so the image there is that of recognising that that impulse has broken the world but also there's something good in the impulse how can we honour and learn from it and move forward so that's in that. And then we did Kinsuki everything the exhibition is called Kinsuki World and so each chapter has an image and it's not in the book but I'm doing a little follow up sort of coffee table book which all have like each image because I got this new idea of sort of subversion so that if you do a coffee table book just leave it sort of in the dentist's or in the Como Resort opposite in the reception and people open it it's like what the world's collapsing what happened to my Tesla? Why is my Tesla all tangled? Is it all two Tesla? Do you know so after I published that image of a Kinsuki Tesla so basically a Tesla that's all into pieces and stuck back together again which is basically to illustrate the idea that everyone's lying about net zero it's not actually possible and we need to power down societies and so we can't just have rich people driving around in electric cars it's not going to work we need to drive less we need to consume less we need to change our whole way of life basically to reduce harm and get through this better about a week after I published that I was banned from twitter without any explanation three months ago and I appealed three times and nothing so I'm sure it's got nothing to do with me pissing off Elon Musk I mean weird choices like that we have to tell you where for instance the story of Elon I want to ask you Jen just a little bit to sort of like unpack the way that you're conceptualising collapse in this book and maybe help the audience see it and recognise it in their own lives because I feel like for myself personally and maybe for a lot of you as well they're sort of like that instantaneous sort of dramatic collapse that you recognise for disaster movies or if you live through a flight or a fire or a disaster where you're like terrible then they sort of got all not quite as better but sort of back to normal and then there's the slower idea of the collapse process that's like things change over decades centuries ago like there was a room in high then it collapsed but that's hard to see at a speed of day day so I sort of feel like one of the really important things that your book is doing is giving people collapse literacy and that feels to sort of see collapse in the world even if it's not always so obvious or so yeah I talk about it in the book as the creeping collapse of modern societies everywhere basically the first half of the book I look at the foundational systems of modern societies energy and food and healthy biosphere and a stable climate but also the monetary system and the economic system and I show how all those foundations are breaking but what was also new to me after I did the research is I found this very good data to suggest that the majority of modern societies on all populated continents have been breaking down since before 2016 so 90% of countries have a declining human development debt since 2019 and because rich OECD countries have joined the decline by 2019 and some of the data in those indices is two years old so this means that the decline could easily have been happening by 2017 and I'm talking about your rich country, the so called rich country it's not just oral so we all assume that life is progressing we might, many of us do but actually the data shows that there's been this systematic decline and so in the book I connect those cracks on the surface as I call them with these cracks and foundations and because this is a global phenomenon that points to the fact that a global set of factors driving that and then I argue that it's a very credible conclusion that we're not going to fix this if you look at why it's happening and I point to the fact that it's normalcy bias in a culture that assumes progress that scientists will think I am the one who has to keep defending myself when all I'm doing is extrapolating from existing trends they're the ones who are doing magical thinking about technology and policy and everything changing overnight and fixing everything when it hasn't ever yet so far but they can just say oh we'll fix it and there's no falsifiable theory you say what data would prove you wrong when you say we're suddenly going to fix this then the kind of scientific abandoned scientific method in order to avoid the understandably to avoid the pain of being honest about the situation of themselves and each other and us so I mean in the second half of the book when you get into the what can't we do about it there's a lot of really fascinating stuff here and I think oh yeah I've just realised something how are all you going to experience collapse you were pointing at that weren't you sorry prices basically it's other people who've suddenly got a third of their country under water or they're living on the coast of Libya and got washed away into the sea or my friend who lives in Greece where this whole area where he lives has been trashed and they don't quite know how they're going to repair the agricultural systems there that's a localised collapse but more broadly for the lucky people like yourselves who live here if you're very lucky if you're not so lucky and don't live here so you can get in you're privileged like me you can if for some reason there's something not for sale in the supermarket because it's not made anymore because there was an environmental disaster in that area you just buy something else from somewhere else we're super privileged at the moment so the way this experience at the moment by people who are privileged like us is through prices there it's going up and up and up and only part of that is to do the stupid hydrogen policy an increasing part of it is to do the fact that the economies are getting ecological limits and also we've hit peat crude oil in 2015 and therefore all these things are flowing through and there's prices thank you so inflation is not going to come down it will continue to be about it will offer and then it will go up and food inflation is way higher than the inflation of the things so it's slightly massed in so many countries in Europe food inflation has been about 14-15% so higher than for a few years and then you talk in your book about theory real and it's actually quite near term possibility of multiple great basket failures which can sound like quite N9 but it's like weak crops failing to cross multiple continents it's kind of a big deal right long enough to eat weak so this is key this is the biggest yes so this is the most rapid way our lives could be super disrupted because the poles, north and south pole have been heating up more than the equator and therefore that reduces the temperature gradient which makes the jet stream less powerful therefore like a river when a river gets all bendy when it loses its energy well that's what happens with the jet stream and when that happens in some regions it pulls down colder air in other regions it pulls up hotter air and there's this blocking effect and therefore you get intense precipitation or you get intense droughts longer and worse than previously and the problem is that all the grain producing areas in the northern hemisphere cannot be affected at the same time by this way in the jet stream so Russia, Ukraine parts of Europe, North America China the grain producing areas for wheat, maize and barley particularly could all be hit badly at the same time and certain models predict that because of this impact of climate change on the jet stream on extreme weather in the northern hemisphere statistically speaking what's called a multi-grade landscape failure so a number of those key areas really important for exporting grains onto the international markets they could all be hit and experienced 25% drop and what happens, as we've seen it some of you may already know that countries have banned exports India for example has banned exports 3 weeks ago, this all happened and so I am far happier living in a country and living my way of life where I'm getting closer to food I'm getting closer to the farmers I actually now every time I go to a big western city my body feels nervous I know things could snap overnight because I know the way of life is entirely dependent on incredibly extended complex supply chains and they're all under stress and they could all snap at any point so I'm far happier living closer to farmers and closer to food and just for people who aren't aware of exactly how close to farmers and how close to food you are can you just tell us all about now that you're sort of transitioning away from academia what kind of farming are you doing there are loads of ways people are responding to their sense that things are breaking down and I don't want to be prescriptive so what I've always said is take the time you know you may decide that what was in your heart was to be a musician or to be a Buddhist monk or to set up an orphanage or to, if you're really smart adopt 20 cats you know whatever's in your heart do it now that's for me that's the big thing with realising, oh this idea that everything is stable and will continue and will have the conveniences and capabilities we do today realising that's not the case that really invites you to think what's in my heart what do I want to do and another thing that happens is totally understandable there's a little bit of survivalism a little bit about hey what do I want to do that I love but also how can I wouldn't it be stupid that I write a book about this and then I'm one of the first ones to die you know it just seems a bit stupid I think it's the sales team so I decided I wanted it would be lovely to do a regenerative farm it would be lovely to actually to make food in a way which is non-toxic and which restores biodiversity and do it in partnership with the community and then of course that's all a bit still a little bit preparatory so actually what would be much better is to do an organic and regenerative farm school so we're going to focus on Balinese smallholders and how we help them to go back to them to go back to the methods they used to use but using some of the local some of the latest innovations and the people who know about syntropic agriculture, acroforestry and the culture so one of my members of my research team Papya, who's here tonight he was he'll say so himself I think but I'm going to speak for you Papya he only worked with me on this book because he wanted the money what he really wants to be doing is growing things in ways where suddenly there would be wasps nests in the money I still remember the day when he pointed to a banana park with a wasps nest and he looked so happy I was like oh great there's five universities coming back and so we worked together and he's helping advise on how to do that we're doing a partnership with an NGO called MSHIT we've got a lot of experience in working with Balinese and up Indonesia and regenerative farming and yeah so I'm basically just an observer and a champion of the project that's it, I don't get my hands dirty I mean Indonesia doesn't need white foreign farm laborer there's quite a lot of stuff here no more things to do with the white maybe some more could I ask you as well there are a couple of things that you've mentioned here in terms of like majority of our country is potentially suddenly stopping in sports and then also the idea of empowering youth and empowering the young generation and some of that can come together in this term youth which is neo-protectionism what could that mean when I hear you talk about it it sounds pretty rake or something I would like to get behind but it's not exactly discussed on mainstream discourse at the moment yeah so has anyone here heard of the degrowth yeah so there's quite a lot of people now intellectuals in the west particularly in Europe when they realize the limitations of the story of transitioning to renewables and living like we do today they then think yeah okay we need to contract the economy consciously we need to degrow the consumption of resources and they come up with all these ideas about how that might be done voluntarily I think that's so silly they think that they're going to have a politician in an election by saying I'm going to make you all a bit poorer but you'll be happy and even if they won that election and did that wouldn't there be a massive backlash with the incredible cost of living crisis already and the inequality and the mad anger about mad inequality so no I don't think it's going to happen at the moment the way many people live is dependent on exploitative international trade relationships and financial relationships which are a legacy and heritage from colonial relationships so I believe that there is already beginning and a rise in anti-imperialism in many parts of the so-called majority world the famous bits of West Africa with the revolutions that are occurring but that's only one manifestation there's bigger movements now campaigns against French multinationals in French to be Francophone Africa has been not going for about five years and within that there is a new sentiment around environmental damage climate change looking toward a very disturbed future and we can make this a problem by so many of the poorer people in the majority of the world are the ones that created this problem so in the polite world that I used to live in but I used to be polite in western green you don't want to talk about like blame and shame and you don't want to talk about what the poor people in hot countries will start to blame us for destroying their futures and they might therefore not want to export cheap goods to us like let's just talk about something else however more people are beginning to realise that this might actually be the way that there could be external pressure for the richer countries to de-grow in that context there would be legitimate demands for more equal redistribution of the smaller amount of resources that are in the same like country Britain so yeah I talk about it a bit in the book I even talked about it in the Navara Media podcast but also it's some of the founding members of Extinction Rebellion are talking this way as well they're realising that if we're going to do anything to help this predicament then the others in the west need to move into more active solidarity with people in political movements in the global south excellent now I hope you get the sense that well this is some pretty heavy stuff then James you are a funny guy and we're actually out of a lot of very funny lines in this book and I think one of the things that makes it such an interesting unique read is that there's a whole lot of very deep swell research but you break the fame and make it it's a very sick burn to a number of different people and it's a very witty and kind of like cheeky kind of writer so I thought I might just read a couple of key sentences and then if you wouldn't mind treating the audience to a reading for a couple of minutes and then we'll throw that audience questions so this is just a small sound I never responded well to wild-eyed preachers and just because the preachers of the progressed religion happen to work in business charity or academia doesn't make them work um and then whereas AG Hidsters might find that maybe smashing everyone close to home will soon cost more than it did in a cafe today's boomsters like to grow their own and cause and then if I can get to that page this is a sick burn on Davos Davos apologies I've never been used on this quick get this I won't take it seriously what I didn't realise is the one thing worse in the world of elites not taking climate change seriously we'd be then taking climate change seriously so with that would you be able to give me a short reading yeah and then they go to questions is that right yeah okay yeah when when Tom asked me to do a reading I didn't say well again choosing what to do so this is something that I read to my dad in hospice um cause uh cause it's kind of not so depressing it's bit um it might have been the reverence trifle particularly the sloshings of sherry under his lashings of cream or perhaps it was those first glasses of red wine after three years all tasted great after a day of cumbrian air but I also remember keeping my head down beneath my knees before sliding down onto the floor and rolling onto my side get some cushions and a blanket the reverence said to the other guests the rest is a bit of a blur but I recall the pleasantness of lying on an ancient tiled floor I was sitting embarrassed about spoiling my friend's dinner and this calm matter-of-fact demeanour of my host as he checked my vital signs collapsing under the reverence Stephen Wright's dining table was full of surprises within about half an hour I was back on my chair staring at what was left of the extreme trifle to see if my nausea had passed Stephen's calm checking of everything worried looking friends or with tasks with the acts of a nurse with decades of experience a palliative nurse in fact so I was in good hands of things to return for the worse after an episode like that the inquest begins even as the cheeseboard came out I was listening to Stephen about the vagal nerve and how it can shut down shut us down when too exhausted especially when eating a lot in this case I was finally taking a moment out of the rush and gaining some perspective on my situation and the body said no put a line through anything you don't absolutely need to do in the coming months said Stephen simplify things and prioritise yourself care I took him seriously so seriously that I even watched Queen Elizabeth documentaries in the afternoon yeah I mean more than one I was a bit rattled nevertheless the following week I climbed up by Blaine Catherine the coast's mountains the Reverend's nicely tall floor because I wanted to feel alive in nature again not stifled and defensive in front of my laptop calculating how much bad there was in the world before arriving at Reverend Wright's cottage for the weekend my day job for the previous 18 months had been researching the most worrying stuff anyone could research not just the natural science on ecology, energy and climate but related fields in economics, politics, philosophy and more what I learned with colleagues in those 18 months worsened my initial hypothesis it removed many of the things I still felt positive about and despite the promises I made myself at the start it didn't remain a day job the collapse of our way of life is rather all-encompassing topic it touches everything so what should I say in a book what should I leave out why are so few people saying it why so many journalists attack people like me for saying just some bits of it how can I share ideas into a public space that have become so hostile to non-conformism and as I'm identifying problems people will expect answers on everything under the sun otherwise I'll be seen as negative defeatist, pointless and disgusting I wanted to share some ideas as I don't want my analysis to accidentally energize those who have good ideas that do not support I wanted if offering a framework for talking about these ideas would be enough like I'd done with deep adaptation five years earlier I had all these questions and more bothering me 24-7 as I delayed beginning writing the book until I knew exactly what might be worth saying and I dreaded the choice I already felt compelled to make to spend the next nine months writing detailed synthesis of evidence on the unfolding collapse of modern societies and my analysis of why this is happening and how to react people wouldn't like it I thought they'll reject it, including people who previously welcomed my work I would have spoiled years of my life when I could have been enjoying music and farming and so I had my personal collapse in the big scheme of things a rather trifling matter boom boom but it showed me I needed to put a red line through lots of things which I did, I put a red line through the ideas of this book, other than reporting on what I had found and the situation why I believe it's occurred and what is an important philosophy for our response I put a red line through the hope this book would become a best seller all that I avoid vilification I put a red line through most of my potential plans for the coming nine months instead this writing was going to be my cross to bear I reluctantly accepted the necessity of returning to the combative world of scientific analysis and dissemination because that way of being was something I'd begun to leave behind after my previous deep dive into scholarship on the state of the world in 2017-2018 that smart guy with the intellectual contribution to make was an identity I had now begun to pathologize as an addiction but I was going to be back in that role deeply for the foreseeable I'm writing these lines in March 2023 and the light at the end of the tunnel is distracting because I already know what kind of life one can lead once embracing the kind of analysis in this book it's not the kind of life spent refining one's academic argument it's a life of greater freedom to follow your passions in this chapter I want to share with you some examples of people who've been transformed by concluding that modern societies will collapse I want to share how they then pursue activities which relate to the eco-libertarian ethic I described in the last chapter and in so doing I will point to some of the areas of partial responses not answers or solutions to the predicament that I have outlined in this book thanks for your attention James Taylor and Cassie so this will be the roaming mic now so yes, are you being a big driver there so I guess just hands up to the first strict father and I'll be like we're after questions not comments and you know what's the difference between a question and a comment is that the end of a question your voice goes up and the comment goes on for quite a long time but James actually said it was quite open to comment questions so let's just go for it alright thank you Pelogen my name is Dan, former general vice for our vice at CRP currently working as a marketer and I have a couple of questions for you so you mentioned earlier that you moved to Bali to start a regenerative farm why did you specifically select compoxiering I just want to bring a mobile perspective here because I am based in Jakarta I've noticed that a lot of the faces in the room are non-local and very privileged I would assume so what are you doing in your farm I guess to have a narrative of say colonialism or imperialism and not repeating the mistakes of people past fantastic question thank you I'm very aware of the situation of privilege, now privilege is always relative meaning obviously there's gradations so in the UK because I was an activist for so long and to my house when I was young I didn't have the opportunities in the UK to even consider doing a farm I would have to borrow millions and maybe they wouldn't have even lent it to me and that would have been a big stressor and it would have shaped the project to be all about paying back the debt also in the UK it's not very normal to lease land on term it's really all about free hold so here in Indonesia I've I've signed the lease for 15 years from a family just outside Tampak City for about a third of their spare land 3,000 square meters so it's a small demonstration farm and our intention is to work with local ISMs to help promote the restoration of Balinese farming practices that have been overridden by the green revolution so it's not like Bali exists without foreign influence over the last decades there's been a trashing of Balinese environment because of foreign influence whether that's tourism or just through agricultural extension projects through the green revolution so it needs to be done in partnership we're very much conscious of trying to make sure the temple, the bancha the soup act we talk to everyone and we're doing everything with them we're really just investors and advisors in my case with the actual the way the numbers work in terms of we don't make much money through a small holding like that it's almost like a tiny holding I have to accept it's more like philanthropy I'm never going to see my money back but to do the dream of a proper farm school I have to raise philanthropic money to do that because my dream is to not just train local small holding families but actually do projects with school children across Bali if there's a demand I would love that to then teach them these methods and then more like use the focus on regenerative and organic farming to stimulate conversations about what is progress what is a contemporary way of honoring and living Bali's culture in terms of relationships with the divine, with nature with each other, with self just to stimulate that a bit more would be a wonderful way for me to spend my time here I chose Bali because I was already here I came here a few years ago because I love it and but also because it's got gravity-fed irrigation fertile volcanic soils year-round growing season it's got a population where the families are all small holders and they're forked and actually if there's an economic disaster as they've had they can all actually go back to feeding themselves and as climate change gets worse you mentioned white and bacteria that's 300 meters so right now you're a bit hot imagine a big 3 degrees cooler so I was a deliberate choice to be starting this farm where it would be a bit cooler because I'm anticipating getting hotter these are these are my I'm a bit conscious about whether I'm just being defensive on an individual level so what I want to say is I I believe my answer is not enough I want to hear from you and I want to hear from people who really don't want a neocolonial thing going on to hear what we should be doing because I'm just doing my little thing and trying not to be colonialist about it but you tell me and other people here who've got ideas about what I can do to help being more non-colonial more anti-curious I'm all ears yeah, no I totally agree and I understand your point I understand that unfortunately it's a 3 degree cooler but there are other cooler areas involved too for example in the new world I used to work at a farm-to-team restaurant and I actually worked with some of the farms in the new world I want to talk to you after you want to? yes, in the new world as well why? because we wanted to be able to get there driving so it's 45 minutes for me and the half an hour from my business partner and our staff as well we've got two staff so we wanted some way that we could still get to for now but also in Tampax Syrian there's a broader range of things that we could grow if we were saying vertical also because MS Hintan encouraged us to go there so MS Hintan has managed to get 27 families in Kedisam to convert to organics so here as we're hoping that we're doing it there in Tampax Syrian with MS Hintan success would be in a few years 20-odd families, small-olders in that area would convert to organic farming that was the other reason you took their advice a lot of trend lines in sciences and economics and other disciplines show ups and downs given that we've recently had a pandemic displacement if you like that may or may not be easily related and the significant all was going on how can you be sure that the downturn in many of the world's economies are not just a reaction to these events as opposed to the beginning of global economic collapse yeah thanks so in chapter one of my book I use the biggest data sets that I could get my hands on and my colleagues could get their hands on human development index U.N. reports on progress to the sustainable development goals the Numbio quality of life index and so we crunch the numbers and things like life expectancy literacy disease burden all these indicators are going in the wrong way in the majority of countries non-OECD majority of non-OECD countries since 2016 so there's been a widespread decline in super basic indicators of standard living and quality of life in 2016 and in OECD countries the majority of OECD countries since 2019 and when you look at the details you get really geeky about it so oh quite a lot of this data is even two years old probably before that they published the official stats so I talked about it in the book I talked about it as there's probably a picture you can find online of the world leaders on stage in New York and the U.N. 2015 all announcing their 2030 sustainable development goals and for the majority of leaders on that stage their societies have already begun their steady decline when they signed that so yes I agree with you there are setbacks which we can recover from so collapse I see collapse more like a staircase but where the steps in the staircase are not flat they're actually tilted back up so you go down and then down it's going to be like that and there are scholars who look at societal collapse and try and actually map that there are scholars who look at ecosystem collapse and try and show that too so if you're into that I got really into it I geeked out on some of this stuff so there's some geeky stuff in the book in chapters one and four on how you see collapse in data sets thanks it's a question it's a comment to add to that you mentioned the pandemic you mentioned wars and I know from the perspective that James explored in his book they themselves are indicators of cups indicators of the cups of public security of democracy ecosystem collapse which is in the book thank you there is this whether or not covid-19 was engineered deforestation and climate change together increases the likelihood of so called zoonotic spillover of disease but loads of people I know in the UK got Lyme's disease and no when I was a kid no one got Lyme's disease so the medical doctors when my mum was going back to the doctor in agony for weeks well you can't have Lyme's disease you're an even garden in your back garden that's impossible and it had to be me and my brother faxing the GP to say unless you test my mum for Lyme's disease we're holding you responsible and we think you should do presumptive prescription I think it was deco-doxing cycling and then when the results came back from course and down Lyme's disease so my mum had two weeks of bad like a real nasty urological damage because the GP refused to think well we don't have Lyme's disease so that's an example of how understanding is not catching up so there's not this adaptation of that level to understand the kind of diseases that are spreading because of climate change it's all electrically I think so, thanks for your talk today sustainability has always been a catch word for me it's always drawn me to read more but now I'm confused by the word sustainability just wondering if you could give me what your definition of sustainability is now or the first thing that came to mind is is your worldview is your sense of reality and yourself in relation to reality tenable like sustainable okay if sustainability is meant to mean the longevity of human society where the longevity is in harmony with not trashing the biosphere because if you can't have a society that's long term with that then sustainability was the general condition of many indigenous societies and ancient societies lots of them collapsed but lots of them learned from collapse and also the history of civilizational collapse tends to put us on urban societies when actually there were very complex societies just living in the forest and staying there and had no interest in actually moving into cities so those were sustainable we wouldn't be here to get today would we homo sapiens wouldn't exist unless we'd actually managed to find a way to get here through hundreds and thousands of years but if you want me to be precise about point to something somewhere that community is sustainable I find it very difficult to do that and the main reason for that is because we don't know how fast the ground climate change is going to be so you could have a wonderful circular economy regenerate regenerate the soils not relying on foreign supply chains gain wasps back into whatever and then suddenly it doesn't rain in Bali for five years at all for example and then it came over so I'm not motivated by sustainability I'm motivated without doing beautiful lovely things with each other and in nature and if it helps it helps and if it lasts it lasts but I don't find sustainability as a use I tend to work with regenerate use and regenerate words resilient and regenerative now but if something can answer this question better than me I just am so alienated with the sustainability I'm a professor no I'm a narrator's professor now do I have a narrative that flows through sustainability so if I understand you say sustainable park we need to find a sustainable place of park sustainable place to live in terms of our heart which therefore means really as much as we all ever know we can be adjusted to our mortality and the mortality of all those we love and the ultimate disappearance of anything we can have any legacy over just be okay with impermanence if you're okay with impermanence then that can't not be sustainable thanks Jim this is a more macro question I guess if you're talking about the need for massive reforestation to combat these issues with the city of the clouds talking about degrowth from the major economies these things are unlikely to occur by themselves about some sort of government leadership so I'm interested here if you think democracy is up to that challenge and if democracy isn't what will be required so we don't live in a democracy we live in a corporal autocracy we are all under the tyranny of global finance it's an entire illusion that there's any democracy elaborate I believe I believe in the human race I believe in you, I believe in me let's look at everyone we're all about to swear we're all we're all delightful loving humans who want to do good in the world but we've grown up in a system that makes ourselves really insecure competitive that makes us numb to the pain of the life forms and other humans that suffer because of the way the systems are that's all coming from an expansionist monetary system that creates demands on corporations and states and all markets are all government policy we can't have a stable state economy where the expansionist monetary system because then as debts get paid off the money disappears and something we can't transact with each other it's called unemployment it's called recession it's called bankruptcy so we are not free a big message in my book is that it's not human freedoms that led to this crisis it's our unfreedom the fact that we have been the worst and manipulated and rewarded for behaving in certain ways not others now of course some people can say that's naive but that means you're choosing to see human nature a particular way and we have no evidence we have little evidence of how humans would live outside of what I call imperial modernity with an expansionist monetary system in industrial consumer societies um we do actually have some evidence of how indigenous people live um so yeah we do have evidence of our ancient societies actually lived in harmony we now have evidence that this attitude that ancient societies all trash their environments and therefore somehow humans are necessarily bad for other like that's actually purely racist and archeology the most latest analysis shows there was incredible positive relationships between ancient humans and current indigenous humans with nature for example the amazon is not wild the thousands of species according to some studies in the amazon are entirely because of millennia of human settlement working to encourage biodiversity in the amazon so we were a wild gardening species before we became an agricultural one so there's a whole big thing in my book about restoring that pride and love of being a human and how that's all being trashed by living in the society we have so democracy we're not in democracy we need to reimagine what democracy means I actually think that the state and the corporation will continue to crumble and therefore we need to turn to each other and we need to build from below but I totally understand that we say no we also must have tactics for taking some more power at government level and to governmental power level I appreciate that that used to be my bank I used to work at the UN but now I'm just exhausted with all that so I'm more interested in turning to my neighbor and saying what can we do locally to improve things but with a political consciousness can I just say that's a really good summary of eco-libertarianism which is about your terms that you use then one question first thank you so much for writing this book because you've put on paper something I've been recognizing my entire career but I couldn't possibly bring myself to write down so thank you I was wondering if you had any ideas about along the lines of what I've been for my life calling the crisis of values is there any way and I understand you I'm not the term crisis sorry is there any way that you think we can address the values that we have to change the I guess trajectory we're choosing well thank you so much those of you I know buying a book is just one step doing something like joining a gym so you've actually got to read the thing so there we are someone who's read it now see it's good to read it so unless you've bought it don't just leave it on the shelf read it and then if you're troubled by it then you might want to talk to other people about it and so I recommend the deep adaptation forum which is deepadaptation.info and then you can talk to people who are on a similar journey to which you might be on trying to find a new way of being in the world and therefore that is the start with rethinking, checking it on what's most important to me so this term, values so I'm choosing to respond to your question by first let's just give ourselves time and space to think about what are my values and therefore if I no longer believe the future is going to be as it is today then things are going to get really tough and we don't know how tough, how fast but like how do I want to be in that situation, what's important to me and that I think takes personal private reflection but also it helps to be in dialogue with others in that dialogue with others then you're adding to something with ripple effects how to change something more at scale okay it's coming no matter what we do this strange dividend of societal collapse is that we're going to see a lot more of all aspects of humanity the band and the goods some people will respond with ego defense ego affirmation some people will respond with ego transcendence like you know being broken out and by their grief being broken out and by the full weight of the situation and wanting to be loving and kind and all of it's going to happen so I think like we don't necessarily have to be super tactical and strategic it's almost like these things are coming to us conversations with friends, family and colleagues so as long as you're all trying to be mindful and like choose conscious how you wish to be the calm in the storm in future then opportunities will arise and I'm all ears to how we sort of do something more at scale and obviously therefore we can start thinking about how to get religious institutions to take this on that was going to be my next project if I could stand sitting in front of my laptop for another few years or be to work with interphase communities on how to integrate this awareness in what they do I'm not going to do that but I think that's really important work if you want to think about having these conversations at scale then some of the institutions to work through obviously will be religious institutions Thank you One of your workshops in your book is about critical wisdom and I haven't heard you talk about that yet I like to and maybe particularly in why is such a strong call from you and in the context of how imperial modernity needs us to not have criticalism So although the book reading I did is kind of approachable the book is also a bit heavy and scholarly in places There's a chapter where I'm a sociologist and I draw on my sociological training and that's where I talk about the need for critical wisdom Okay Because of the predicament I believe we're facing our whole worldview and identity will be challenged what we use to esteem what we use to look up to institutions we're used to trust whether that's like I don't know the CDC or BBC or whatever all of this will be challenged How do we navigate? How do we find meaning? How do we know what's true, what's wise, what's good if we're losing our bearings in a world that's breaking down and with it all the difficulties that we had before breaking down with it There is a real possibility for complete derangement manipulation and therefore ultimately us turning on each other and there are also institutions of power that want us to turn on each other because that means we won't turn on them So therefore I think it's really important that we try and develop what I call our critical wisdom So it's one thing to talk about wanting to be loving and kind and calm in the storm but if we say that and then we spend our lives watching CNN it's probably going to be quite difficult So critical wisdom is three, four parts to it, they're really simple ones mindfulness so creating this complex of where stimuli thought, feeling, thought choice, communicate there's so much that goes in on in milliseconds inside of us with stimuli whether we choose to reject an idea or adopt it and that's to do with our mind states and our cravings to affirm our ego and our current story or not we need to become more aware of that just to notice that oh we're pushing away an idea or we're grabbing an idea why? So just become a bit more of a watcher mindfulness I also talk about rationality we don't want to chuck out rationality with everything else we need to be good at logic and be aware of logical fallacies we need to apply our critical thinking in a logical sense Intuition, there are different views different views on what intuition is it could be the subconscious complex processing in multiple stimuli and pattern recognition and pattern disruption recognition as one view or it could be an aspect of us which is a sixth then somewhat telepathic and connected to a collective unconscious or an akashic field and transperson or we space understanding or even universal consciousness you can, we're in a boat to make the latter view if you want what people do and there are ways to cultivate that for example just emptying the mind and connecting with nature and suddenly you get some wisdom, you get an insight you get a clarity, did that come from the tree? I'm not joking it's easy to joke but it may well have come from the tree or from inside you but the fourth thing that I really bang on about in the book is critical literacy and to understand how we don't think of it as thought, we think cultures thought so we need to be aware of how framing works, narrative works and discourse works and how that's shaping us and making us conform and then if we have that critical faculty and recognizing how the way things are told to us is actually serving some people and power others maybe disabling our possibility for action if we don't have an awareness of that then we're not going to be free to choose wisely as things get more troubling so I talked about that in the book Katie if you want to give an example of critical literacy and action, go for it you have one more question in the mind here is there one? Hi, thanks so my question, I want to come back to how you don't really believe in governments or larger institutions and the response seems to be going back to the individual and just adapting to things but my question would be what if we wanted to be kind and compassionate and loving and help others but those larger institutions prevent us from doing so for example we know for the fact that there will be billions or even billions of climate refugees around the world but then we can't really do anything as an individual if they can't enter the country and that's not really on call so what would be your response to that? Thank you, sorry I didn't want to give the wrong impression so my main aim for the second half of this book is to elaborate on a political philosophy of solidarity for an age of collapse and that was because I thought the right wing they've got their nostalgia politics let's put the clock back let's vote for the dictator's son let's take back control let's make America great again it's all nostalgia politics the centre and the left doesn't seem to know what the hell to do in terms of the fact that people are sensing that they're not progress anymore they still call themselves progressives so I wanted to offer a political philosophy and framework for solidarity based politics in an age of collapse I therefore like all good left libertarians I am therefore anti-authoritarian and therefore I am anti-government institutions as they exist today I am anti the charade of democracy as it exists today I am anti the direction of the inter-governmental agencies I used to work in them but I see how they've completely become wedges to global corporate interests and I'm scared of what they're going to do next so I'm comfortable being in opposition to state authority because I see there's a corrupt merger of state authority with global corporate power my choice is to encourage that we turn to each other to build from below but not stay below so it is actually an explicitly revolutionary sentiment but we've got to look after each other first because more people are not going to get anything from either the mainstream market or the government that's all going to break over time so we need to work with each other more and that's my philosophy and I don't demand that people share that philosophy other people can try and do more with government right now if nobody was trying to campaign to change government policy on refugees I would probably want to do it if nobody was trying to get some renewables energy policies on government level but I'm choosing to put my attention elsewhere so if you're doing this other stuff keep going for it but what I'm saying is what I'm inviting you to think is that maybe you might be being motivated by some stories about future but to know about it to really reconsider that and you might find that makes it even more radical or it might mean you just stay exactly as you are that's a great rest of your great answer