 Welcome everybody to another Deep Adaptation Q&A with me, your host, Professor Jim Bendell. And I'm very pleased this month to welcome Professor Rupert Reed from UEA, he's a professor of philosophy and has been doing a lot of work to stimulate conversation about how very, very difficult our climate predicament is and to really encourage us to talk about adaptation. But also he's been well known, particularly in the UK in the last couple of years, as one of the lead spokespersons for the Climate Action Group Extinction Rebellion. And so Rupert, thank you very much for joining us today for a Q&A with members of the Deep Adaptation Forum. And it's great to be here, Jim. It's good to see you. I, when we reconnect like this, I like to think back to the early days of, so I met you in September 2018 at a conference I was organizing just after my Deep Adaptation paper came out. And so you came up to the Lake District and spoke and it was, yeah, it was really confirmation that scholars and people who are really leading in the environmental movement, because of course you're quite important in the Green Party as well, that you could actually respond wholeheartedly to this sort of anticipation of disruption and collapse and incorporate it into your narrative, into your work. So that was knowing you since then has been quite important for me. And obviously I'm very pleased that we've just finished co-editing a book together on Deep Adaptation Quality is producing next year. So very pleased to have you on. I'm conscious also that we had to delay this. So I was wondering if you just wanted to say something about the context, because I mean, we've chatted privately about it, but I think it might be helpful for people to hear about sort of the realities of doing the work that we do. Yeah, indeed. So yeah, excuse me. Yeah, basically like many people, I've got my own share of personal psychological difficulties in my life. And that's been the case for a long time. And certainly in the last few years, while I've been working hard on climate reality, facing up to climate reality on potential collapse, anticipation and so forth. The last 20 years or so have been sort of balanced for me, really, between the academic work I've done and the work increasingly in recent years I've done on facing up to climate reality and so forth and the work I've been doing with Extinction Rebellion, which has completely changed my life, being balanced between that on the one hand and my personal and psychological issues on the other hand. But this summer, things took a good turn. And the good turn was that I really felt like my private problems, et cetera, I'd kind of dealt with them. They were no longer pressing on me. And I found that I had full attention for the problems of the world for the first time, really for the first time in my life. And I thought, wow, this is great. I'm gonna be able to absolutely focus 100% on the climate emergency and the ecological emergency and so forth. I'm really looking forward to this. So what actually happened? Well, what actually happened is that I found that when there was no balance anymore, it wasn't so good. Basically, I found myself thinking and sort of feeling the emergency and the crisis the whole time because I wasn't needing to spend any time looking after myself, et cetera. And it was invading my dreams more and more as well. And basically by the end of the summer, I reached a point where I started to have personal, psychological, spiritual, et cetera problems again because of this. In other words, I found it was unsustainable. It was untenable to be with this stuff the whole time. And well, that's kind of where I've been for the last couple of months. And that's why we had to delay because I was really in very poor shape last month. I'm still struggling now, but not as much. And well, I just think it's something I want you to share it with this audience because I wouldn't be surprised if it resonates with some people. And in any case, I think it's a sort of quite interesting kind of cautionary tale. I mean, one of the lessons I take from this is that we have to be really clear that this is a marathon and not a sprint. This is a condition of our lives that we're talking about and dealing with here. And we know that, but we sometimes don't practice it. And especially sometimes thinking of it as an emergency, if we're not thinking of it as the kind, the special kind of emergency it is, namely a unique long, basically permanent emergency. If we think of it in a sort of old fashioned way, crudely as an emergency and sort of move into a kind of mode of sort of full attention and indeed to use Gretcher's wonderful but difficult word panic, then that can have costs. And I experienced those costs at the end of this summer and I've been experiencing the impacts of them since. And yeah, it's really brought home to me how somehow in the midst of this crisis, even those of us who want to face up absolutely resolutely as I absolutely do to this crisis, we have to find some way of making that sustainable and livable. And we have to keep some kind of balance in our lives. Otherwise we will really suffer for it. And of course, if we're not in good psychological condition because we've been done by the emergency in a sort of eco-psychological way, then we can't really contribute fully. So I'm delighted to be here today talking about it. And I'm still battling through et cetera, but yeah, I thought it would be perhaps interesting and perhaps resonating and perhaps sort of a kind of a warning to people to hear that little version of my story at the last few months. Thank you, Rupa. And it does resonate and it resonates in a number of ways with me. One is my own experience over the last few years as I immerse myself more at times in what's happening in the world. But also it resonates with the conversations I've had with other people and with the original rationale for creating the deep adaptation forum. It's been called by some people like a crash pad for once you really hit the wall when you wake up to what's happening. But it's also, yeah, it's become a real supportive network for people to show up with their difficult emotions in their vulnerability, knowing there aren't simple answers, knowing, as you say, it's a permanent emergency. It's not like we get through this out the other side and we say, well done, this is an aspect. And these difficult emotions will be bubbling up from the background every so often. So how have you, what helps you? What has helped you the most? I mean, I can see that you've been incredibly active, productive, industrious, a real spokesperson for this moment. And obviously that level of activity can be one way of, one way of addressing this, otherwise these very difficult emotions. But now that you've taken some time and you don't work with XR right now, you've left. So yeah, what are the other ways that you sustain yourself? Yeah, well, so as I say, I found that the attention, the kind of constant attention was making me ill, it was making me anxious. So what I've been mainly trying to do, Jim, is restore more balance to my life, which I've been trying to do already, but I've had to go further. And what does that mean? It means things like, I've been seeking to take more time in wild nature. It means I've been simply taking more time doing kind of therapeutic work on myself, et cetera, meditating. And it also means that I've been doing things which I haven't done before, I haven't done much before, which are literally nothing to do with anything if you see what I mean. Things like, for example, I've been watching old episodes of Friends. You know, and yeah. And it's just a kind of timeout. And what I found was that this summer was that, like I say, I was just stuck absolutely fixated on the crisis and the potentiality for color hats. But one of the things that I think is so important to remember is, and here, of course, there's a potential difference between us, which we address in the Deep Adaptation Edition book we've got coming out, is that part of what I mean when I say this is a marathon, not a sprint, is that we don't know how long the marathon's gonna be and it could be decades, in my opinion. John Michael Greer is someone who's looked at this and very fascinatingly. And he argues that typically collapses take decades or even centuries. So whether we've got a collapse coming or some kind of civilizational transformation that doesn't involve collapse, my view is very much that we don't know how long it's gonna take. We have to be in there for the long haul. And for me, that means various things, but one of the things it means is things like, I need to have some things in my life, like friends, which are just pure timeout and just enable me to not get stuck in obsessive thinking and worrying about the direness of the situation. And that's the paradox of the awesomeness of the depth of emotionally connection that we get with people through waking up to climate reality. And so for example, all the people who joined XR and how brave and amazing that they've all been and how they've supported each other, because then of course, that means that you're always talking to people who are the basis for which is the climate crisis. So I can see how it can become quite dominating. And of course, if you meet people who aren't aware, it can feel like, well, you wanna let them into your world and you wanna help them to understand your world, but also their world. And therefore it's tough, isn't it? It's tough to introduce people to this perspective on the future. So are you giving yourself some, you're letting yourself just hang out with people who don't know or don't care and not trying to persuade them? Well, yeah, I'm doing that a little bit more. Yeah, I'm basically looking after myself and it has various dimensions and among the dimensions are exactly doing stuff and being with people, which is not connected with this thing. By the way, I should say that's nothing to do really with the reason why I'm stepping back from XR. Well, it's maybe a little bit connected. I'm stepping back from XR initially because I wanted to run this campaign against the Murdoch press. And I didn't want that to be too deeply associated with XR who are continuing to talk to the Murdoch press. Because they talk to everybody. But there are other dimensions too to my decision to step back from XR and you've sort of alluded to one of them, which is that I think that XR has been not as focused as it could have been and as it perhaps should have started to become upon the need for adaptation. And I think that XR is a little too stuck in the groove still of thinking, oh well, 12 years to save the world or five years to save the world or something like that. And part of what has been happening to me over the past year is becoming more convinced that things are gonna get very bad and there's no way around that. The way that we're missing mostly the opportunity for a better building back from COVID, the dismal election result in the UK, the general election last year. Okay, we've had a less dismal result in the US now. But anybody who thinks that Joe Biden is going to stop our trajectory towards climate collapse is not really living on planet Earth, it seems to me. There are a number of reasons I'm afraid which point in the opposite reason, in the opposite direction, I'm sorry, to the excitement that I've totally been a part of and has been so fantastic around XR and around the school climate strikers. There's a number of reasons for finding this story of XR to be on the one hand a heroic and fantastic one and on the other hand, a kind of a sad story in the sense that, not surprisingly, the results that XR was pushing for have mostly not been eventuating. XR had the extraordinary success that I was so proud to be a part of last year in terms of negotiating with the government and the symbolic declaration of climate emergency and getting a net zero target into law and all these things that we could talk about. But what has actually changed? What has actually changed on the ground? How much are we slowing down our trajectory towards collapse? The answer is hardly at all. So with all that, my view, like your view obviously, is we need to be talking about adaptation more, we need to be doing adaptation more and to the extent that we're not, it's hard not to get anxious about it. Yeah, so just quickly, just before we move on, staying with XR, is there a possibility that there could be a set of demands or new demands or some other way that adaptation, fair green adaptation, maybe not even deep, could that could be part of what XR do in future? And also then more clearly, what do you think that flavor of adaptation should be for XR? Yeah, so I talk about this in my recent book, Extinction Rebellion, Insights from the Inside, which is available from all very good bookshops, but also available for free download online, which I hope might be attractive to people. And the short answer to the question is, yes, there is some room for hope that XR could adapt itself to the changing context in which we find ourselves. It's two years now since XR was launched. That's two years out of the seven years that XR said we had to reach a zero by diversity loss and zero carbon emissions. That's a quite high percentage. It's time for there to be a change of focus. I've argued for that within XR without much success to date. Now I'm moving on. There are other people in XR who are still arguing for it, and I think their hand will grow stronger. My view is that we need to be doing a deep adaptation. And that's why I've done the book with you. Not because I believe that collapse is absolutely inevitable, but because I believe it is probable and that even if it's only possible, we have to be preparing for it. Because if we're not prepared for it, it'll be even worse if it comes. My view also very strongly, as you know, is that it's time for transformative adaptation. And that's gonna be an increasing focus of mine over the next year. I'm working with a bunch of people on that, mainly from the sort of activist world. Many of them in XR or who used to be in XR. And yeah, my hope is that XR will pick up this vibe and start to move more in the direction of taking deep adaptation and transformative adaptation seriously. I think it will happen sooner or later, but it ought to happen sooner. Can you give us an example of what transformative adaptation looks like and why that's worthy of the word transformation rather than just standard climate adaptation? Yeah, yeah. So one of the things which is nice about your term, deep adaptation, Jim, is that the natural contrast is with shallow adaptation, which I think is a fair description of the way that the concept of adaptation normally gets into discourse, into academia, into policy practice, et cetera. Of course, they don't call it shallow adaptation. They call it incremental adaptation or terms like that. That's the UN term. And well, I think it's absolutely clear as day that while it's good to have people talking about and doing any kind of adaptation to some extent, there is a real danger that incremental adaptation or shallow adaptation is worse than nothing because it's an attempt to keep the current system staggering forward, right? Because it means things like building higher levees and higher seawalls and basically not engaging in any systemic change. And that could just lead to us going further and building further and further out over the cliff, if you see what I mean. So we need deeper visions of adaptation and transformative adaptation is one such vision. It originally comes from one of two colleagues of mine and from the UN and it's been developed to some extent in the academic world. In terms of on the ground stuff, the kind of example which I sometimes like to discuss is in relation to flood defenses, et cetera. If you're gonna transformatively adapt rather than building higher seawalls, et cetera, what you're gonna do is you're gonna try to restore mangrove swamps, you're gonna try to restore wetlands, you're going to move with nature rather than trying to fight against nature. You're gonna do stuff which is mitigational at the same time as it involves creating the kind of serious changes, systemic changes that we actually need. And that's why I think it deserves to have the term, the wonderful term transformative applied to it. Yes, thank you for that clarity. So where do you think the opportunity, if it's not gonna be XR necessarily, where's the opportunity for activism of any kind? It could even be within the professional class doing things in their own organizations or in the UN system rather than necessarily on the street or it could be trade union activists, whatever. Where is there kind of the possibility for action towards transformative adaptation and deep adaptation? Or who's having that conversation? Should we be having it, for example? Yeah, well, I think we should. I think it needs to happen at every level. I think we need to be trying to get governments, international organizations, et cetera, to take transformative and deep adaptation a lot more seriously. But I think we can't afford to wait around for that. So that's another aspect of the sort of more activist-y drive that I'm starting to pursue now towards transformative adaptation. That we think of this as something that we try to do or at least to midwife ourselves. And what that's gonna look like is the kind of thing that say the Transition Towns movement has been doing or permaculturalists, but with the dimension and hopefully of scale and certainly of a kind of refusal to take no for an answer. In other words, often the Transition Towns movement has been hobbled by running up against the law, regulations, et cetera. And when that's happened, typically the Transition Towns focus or we've got to try to find another way then. It seems to me that we're reaching the point now where if we're gonna pursue these visions seriously beyond talking shops, which are super, but not obviously a solution, then what we need to do is to get more serious about being willing to take the actions necessary to create transformative adaptation, et cetera, whether or not it's within the prevailing paradigm, whether or not it's within the law. So one might imagine things like guerrilla gardening at scale, pop up allotments that get defended against attempts to take them down, eco-villages likewise. And that would be a really kind of exciting bold vision which would build on the kind of achievements of say the landless peasants movements in South America, but bring that home to places like the UK as well. So yeah, I think it needs to happen at every level, but I think we can't afford to take no for an answer anymore. Now, in terms of what's gonna bring about change at scale, I believe that there's a strong case as I've just implied for nonviolent direct action to make transformative adaptation possible where necessary. But I also think that what we've seen over the past few years with the school climate strikes, with Extinction Rebellion, that needs to be and can be just a small foretaste of what is to come. I think there probably will be and that there needs to be much wider and deeper and bolder nonviolent direct action civil disobedience. My next book appearing in January is called Parents for a Future. And this is a book which imagines the sort of popular philosophy book that imagines the kind of movement that we will actually need if we're going to create civilizational transformation or even really to stem significantly the collapse towards collapse, if you will. Because what I think is that there is the possibility for a movement that would be a sort of counterpart of the youth climate strikers, but among the older generation and that would be far bigger, maybe a bit less spiky then and maybe a bit more mainstream then, but still pretty radical, far bigger than Extinction Rebellion. So the book's called Parents for a Future. And if we're gonna have a game changer that will actually change what gets done rather than just change the discourse in the wonderful way that the movements of the last couple of years have succeeded in changing the discourse and moving over to window, if we're gonna have something which actually changes what gets done, I think essential to it is gonna be a much larger scale civil disobedience approach. And my hunch and my belief and my prayer is that it will be focused around the idea of intergenerational solidarity. In other words, it will have at its core parents, so grandparents, aunts and uncles, et cetera. So you heard it here first, everyone, or at least I heard it here first for me. Yeah, I'll be very interested to see what you say in that book and also the invitation that that book is part of then for parents to really think what can they do in solidarity with the youth activists? Yeah, and I think that there is, I'm convinced, I'm absolutely convinced now more than ever. And after my experiences of the last few months, you know, the intense psycho-spiritual time that I've been having in the aftermath of what started happening to me this summer, I'm more convinced than ever that there is enormous potential power here once parents really get it, that they can't outsource the crisis anymore to scientists or politicians and so on. And they get it that no one's riding to the rescue and they get it that they can't safeguard their kids anymore by getting them into a nice school and all the sort of usual stuff, that the only way that we're gonna have a better future or a less bad future is by mass solidarity and transformative system change. Then I think a new kind of passion and authenticity enters the scene that we haven't seen at any kind of scale yet. We've seen very clear glimpses of it from Greta. We've seen glimpses of it at times, I'm proud to say from Extinction Rebellion. But to see if we could see it on mass, if we could feel it on mass from parents, God, I think it would be transformative. Yeah, so it's probably a theme that will come up in when we go to the wider Q and A. So I invite anyone who's a parent of a youth activist to ask a question of Rupert when we come to that. I'm about to come to Steve for a question, but before that Rupert, you're quite well known for talking about how this civilization is finished. You have a book called that. I think it might be helpful for people to hear what do you mean by this civilization being finished and how deep does that go? And therefore is it inviting something, a real shift at a foundational level around philosophy about cosmology, worldview, all sorts. Yeah, so yeah, well thanks for mentioning that book of mine which has been quite a lovely success. It's had a lot more success frankly than anticipated. When we did it, I've just put a link to where you can get a free e-copy of it in the chat. And why has it had so much success? Well, I think it's because of the time when it appeared which was basically around the time when extinction of value was really kicking off. And because I was saying some stuff that hadn't been much said before, obviously there are real connections with stuff that you've been saying, German, a few other people, but it was pretty new and it was pretty stark. So what was it that I meant when I said this civilization is finished? Is this civilization is finished? So I did not mean by that that collapse is absolutely inevitable. But what I did mean is that anything that looks like this civilization is not very long for this world. The only question is how does it finish? Does it finish through collapse which is completely the route that we're headed on? And as I said earlier, events over the last couple of years have made collapse on balance look more likely rather than less. They've been really hopeful developments but the broad trajectory has been on balance negative. Does this civilization come to an end through a rapid or slow collapse, a permanent collapse or a collapse that gets somehow recovered from eventually some kind of civilizational succession? Or is there a chance that we can intelligently transform such that the energy descent, the system change, et cetera that we need does not occur by collapse, does not occur unevenly, does not occur with significant mortality, et cetera. So yeah, the book and the YouTube, the viral YouTube talk on which it's based is very stark in its message but continues to keep open a little window of hope for a happier ending than you yourself tend to envisage, Jim, which is obviously one of the interesting parts of the discussion again that we've renewed in the deep adaptation edited book that's appearing soon. Yeah, and it's been interesting. I assumed that my certainty on collapse meant that I did have a more bleak view. So then I've been reading more and more stuff from indigenous scholars and indigenous activists who sort of point to the awfulness of the so-called normal system and the normal lives that we benefit from. And so actually a collapse of global capitalism for them may not be such a bad thing. Yes. So that was interesting to come across that. But yeah, no, I still worry about just how bad it will be. And isn't the point you're making about the way that there are aspects of collapse that could be necessary or good? Isn't that kind of borne out by some of what we've seen in relation to COVID this year? What I mean is that something which has really depressed me about it is the extent of the momentum towards getting back to normal. The strength of the desire to return to the absolutely crazy ways of living that were completely normalized up until about February of this year, including things like jet travel, the very thing which spread the virus so quickly. It doesn't appear that we're very good at learning from these things. Of course, there've been some positive developments, the upsurge in cycling, the fact that air travel actually still is in real trouble around the world. A lot of people reconnecting with nature. There's lots of good stuff that we can talk about, the research of care, the potentiality for intergenerational solidarity. This is a crucial good thing coming from COVID. A lot of what we've done in relation to the coronavirus crisis has been for the sake of the old. It seems to me that there is a possibility, still a real possibility now, for us to kind of say, right, well, that has to be turned around now. We did the maybe sacrifices for the sake of the old. Now the older generations have to look to the younger generations in the greater crisis of which the coronavirus crisis was a part, i.e. the ecological long emergency. And that, again, is partly behind my sort of parents for a future type idea. So various kind of very real positives, but something deeply depressing about the desire to return to normal when, and the failure to recognize just how dire and hierarchically unequal and productive mental illness, and most importantly of all, literally unsustainable normal was and is. So we're going to go to questions now. Do you think, and COVID has thrown this up as well? You know, suddenly the supermarket shelves were... Can I just summarize the question, Steve, and we'll... So a question about life post, does it mean localization? Does it mean clubbing together now, preparing your thoughts on that, Rupert? Thanks, Steve. Precisely. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think you're on the right track very much, Steve, in understanding what I was trying to say. The point is that if, as seems very likely, governments, et cetera, are not going to adequately prepare, not going to transformatively adapt, not going to deeply adapt, then we have to make that happen at more local levels, community levels, neighborhood levels, street levels, house levels. Anything is better than nothing, although we're not going to get very far if it's not at minimum at some kind of neighborhood or community-type level. So that's the kind of thing we have to do. Now, people sometimes object to me or others saying this by saying, oh, you're abandoning the global south, you're abandoning the poor, this is selfish, et cetera, et cetera. My reply is to say, well, look, do you have a realistic strategy for converting the whole world and getting adequate action to defend everybody and transform our entire global civilization? If you do great, show it to me, but I'm very, very skeptical of most of the attempts to argue that so far. And it's just increasingly clear that we have to have a plan B, right? I mean, I wouldn't take lectures from anybody about making efforts to get governments to wake up, et cetera. I've been absolutely doing that myself for Donkey's years, but especially for the past couple of years. But as I say, we have to be honest about the very limited extent to which that is working. We have to have something of a plan B. And the plan B, it seems to me absolutely clear, has to involve transformative and deep adaptation. Now, the thing is, how do you do that? We've already been talking about that, but to say one more thing about that, James mentioned the word fair earlier. We can try to build in to the efforts that we make to transformatively adapt as much fairness as possible, as much equality as possible. We can try to make sure that we, whatever it is, create pop-up allotments, et cetera, in ways that reach out to working-class communities in working-class areas, et cetera. We can make alliances with people on the HS2 route. There are many possibilities here. And one more point, if things do go fairly pear-shaped, then it won't be much used to be able to say to people, well, you know, at least we did our best to try to create a fair society at the global level or whatever, of course we've got to try to do that. But we have to, meaning it when we say that we have to have some kind of plan B, means that hopefully those of us who are seeing what is likely to be coming and doing something about it and genuinely preparing in the ways that we've just been saying, that we get to carry on. What we really don't want is for things to go pear-shaped and for those who make it through that, to be only survivalist militias and the alt-right and some of the super-rich in gated communities and so on and so forth. If it is gonna come to a very, very difficult future, then we need to make damn sure that there are people moving into that future who are decent people, who are community-minded, who are fairness-minded, who are serious about agroecology, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems to me that the lifeboat idea is essential and defensible. We just have to make sure, and I always said this in my work on this, we just have to make sure that the lifeboats maintain a strong sense of ethics and are trying to bring people, if you will, inside the lifeboats and not just keeping people out. Yeah, it's important, it's good to hear you to step back as well and talk about, so localization and lifeboats isn't turning away from global solidarity, it's part of it. And of course, therefore, those lifeboats can seek to prefigure the regenerative cultures, the cultures of post-patriarchy and such like, real alternative ways of being day-to-day in their governments. We're already getting a little sense of that from, well, sometimes from the Deep Adaptation Forum, and certainly sometimes from Extinction Rebellion. And again, I would invite Extinction Rebellion to think about how can that direction be moved in further? How can we have more regenerativity? Can there be a sort of alliance with transformative adaptation and with all the groups that that could create a kind of broader alliance with? That seems to me an exciting possibility and the challenges that we're moving into. So we have a question from Talia. I don't know if I've pronounced your name, right? But please unmute and I'll be here. Yeah, Talia. So I just wanted to very, very quickly just say that my vision that I come back to the whole time is if I've been thrown out of the boat and I'm just about to sink and there's five of us holding onto the life ring, I want to be in a good relationship with those people. And so that's what keeps me going is that kind of that commitment to the love and compassion between people. So that's my little vision. And if it helps anyone else, cool. But my question was you talked about incremental mitigation, incremental adaptation as not really being really worth it. And I just wondered if that would be what you would say about incremental mitigation as well. So let me first say something about your vision of the five people holding onto the life ring together because I think it's very moving vision. Yeah, I totally agree. And what it brings to mind for me is some words of Joanna Macy's. So Joanna Macy is a teacher of mine, someone who's been very important to me for many years in, I've worked with her and she's helped me through eco despair and so on and so forth. She, like me, has become more pessimistic in recent years about our chances of getting through what's coming without some kind of collapse event or events. And she was asked in an interview not that long ago, and she talks about this kind of thing, by the way, in her piece in the book that Gemini are doing with quality press on deep adaptation. She was asked in an interview not that long ago. Joanna, how do you manage to keep on going given that you've become quite pessimistic about our chances of getting through this without collapse? Why do you still do what you do? Where do you find the energy and the passion? And what she said was, look, the real reason why I'm doing this now is so, if and when this time that I think is likely comes that you won't turn on each other. I just think that's so moving and so deeply kind of important and true. So yeah, we need to be working now to create the relationships and community and the attitudes and the spirit such that we won't turn on each other in the times that are coming. And now on your question, basically my answer to the question is yes. I think it's self-evident that incremental mitigation is no good either, because the best that that will do is keep an unsustainable system staggering on a few years longer. So we really dialy desperately need transformative adaptation, which as I say includes mitigation. We need system change to the extent that we are unlikely to get it. We need also to be thinking very intelligently and seriously about plant bees and plant seeds and the way we've been talking about. Just want to follow that up, Rupert, in terms of the concern you have that we don't just sort of stumble on and say, well, aren't we doing well with these incremental steps to cut to carbon, but also to draw down carbon. And I was wondering what your thoughts are on the, sort of the new buzz term of climate restoration, which seems to be an umbrella for both super stuff, conservation, rewilding, agriculture and all those good things, but also includes negative emission technologies, direct carbon capture from the air and such like. What are your thoughts on, because it seems to be that's going to be the big thing of next year as the IPCC tell us that we're in a really difficult situation. Is it just grasping at techno straws? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think it is grasping at techno straws. I mean, I'm all in favor of genuine restoration. We absolutely need restoration of wild, biodiverse ecosystems that's fundamental. Although we should be cautious, given recent research results in assuming that they're going to succeed in bringing down as much carbon as we would like. But the great thing about them is that they're safe and they move in the right direction in all sorts of ways. I'm very concerned about negative emissions technology so-called, which are basically just a form of geoengineering because of the potential recklessness of them and they go against the precautionary principle. And because of the potential moral hazard in that there is a very real danger that they will give people an excuse for pursuing merely incremental mitigation and adaptation policies rather than the kind of transformation that we need. So yeah, I think there's going to be more and more talk of negative emissions technologies and we'll see some implemented. I think it's good that we talk about them partly because it brings home the reality of just how dire the situation is and maybe that some of them are workable. We have to have an evidence-based attitude here as well as a precautionary attitude. My fundamental attitude is one of skepticism and of nervousness that this is going to point us in the wrong direction and it's going to be an attempt, again, to just keep the current system staggering forward. You know, that's the real worry. This is the problem, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's not that the individual things themselves might be bad, but if they're part of a narrative around, you know, modernity continues in its current form, global capitalism can keep on in its current form, then of course it means that we're not really facing up to what's got us into this mess. But on this issue of where we're at scientifically, Robert, you have a question for Rupert. My question really is sort of linked to the Charles Eisenstein idea from his climate news story. My question is, the achieving of collective solidarity, as you mentioned, is that an aesthetic challenge? And I just segue into a recent article in The Guardian where teachers, and I'm a teacher, secondary school teacher, were told that they mustn't do anything which could be deemed to be anti-capitalist. And I'm wondering if the aesthetic challenge there is something which, you know, we're not going to be able to achieve unless we address things which I guess it leads to what Jen has just been saying about capitalism and all of that. So do you feel that the mindset change that required to achieve that level of solidarity as we transition into this transformative adaptation is an aesthetic challenge? And if so, how do we go about achieving it? If we think about, you know, the Adorno idea of the culture machine and how that sort of props up the capitalist regime and so on, that's my question. Thank you. Am I back? Yeah, yeah. So, well, very interesting. Obviously, absolutely huge question. So I can only take on one or two aspects of it really in the short time that we have. Thank you for your kind words at the start of the question also. I would say in reply to those, please don't leave me and my colleagues alone in this, right? What we need is far, far larger numbers of people who are trying to do the kind of thing that I've been trying to do and that XR has been trying to do in the past couple of years. And hopefully, you know, a lot of people on this call, a lot of people watching this video may get involved in appearance for a future type, type movement, et cetera. So look, yes, I think it's clear, absolutely clear that we need a system change, that we need transformation. And in fact, I can put the point more strongly. The reason why I say this civilization is finished is that we're gonna get a system change. The question is, are we gonna get that change through some kind of more or less intelligent voluntary process? Or are we gonna get it through a chaotic collapse? Or are we gonna get it through something in between? So vast change is coming. Most of what the current system is trying to do is to hold off that change. And it is not going to succeed. It's not gonna succeed. So yeah, sure, there is an aesthetic dimension. There is a cultural dimension. One of the things I talk about in parents for a future is the way that some films have got quite close thinking well about this in recent years. I'm very interested in the success of Avatar, for example, which I've written about, which I think it's very exciting that that became the biggest grossing film of all time. And I'd love to talk all day about this, but I feel you don't have the time for that. I will just mention another book, if I may, which is, I wasn't really expecting to mention, but it seems you brought it up. This is just out of paperback, a film philosophy of ecology and enlightenment. And this is a more academic book, but I'm hoping it's popularly accessible. Where I talk about exactly this aesthetic and cultural dimension of the challenge before us. And I urge artists generally and writers to kind of step up more. I think we need a much deeper engagement, for example, in television with the emergency, which is now our more or less permanent condition. And then if we had that engagement, if we had a hundred avatars all across the arts, all across culture, then our situation would be more hopeful than it is. Thank you, Rupert. We've got the final question from David, David Bent over to you. Hi, Rupert, hi, Jim. And thanks very much for, as ever, very stimulating, very thorough, rigorous, and so on comments. My question in a way goes back to your opening situation and what you described. So what would you say to those who say that, yes, there is a massive challenge of climate change, but the threat of collapse read of the evidence is driven more by the psychology of those who come to that conclusion than it is by read of the evidence. How do we know that the full dioness of the situation is not just in our minds? Okay, yeah, and certainly there are lots of people trying to say that. My view is that it's very likely that the opposite is the case, that actually we're trying to stave off the dioness of the reality. By we, I mean, even like us on this video call, I'm continually looking for hope to technical development, scientific developments, the success of what my friend and colleague, Greta, has started, the successes of extinction rebellion and so on. And then periodically, I sort of get brought up with a kind of reality check and this is what happened to me this summer and realize, my God, what we've achieved is so minute compared to how things are grindingly getting worse and now our attention is so strongly on the coronavirus crisis without seeing it usually in its proper context as part of the ecological emergency. Just wouldn't have happened without cruelty to animals and habitat destruction and above all jet planes all over the place, et cetera. And our attention is so taken up with the coronavirus crisis now and time is passing, again, time is passing. Another year goes by as a vaccine gets rolled out and maybe a successful, maybe not, et cetera. It's another year that we don't have to address the eco and climate emergency seriously. So I honestly think that the boot is on the other foot. I honestly think that it's more likely that someone like me is underestimating how bad things are than overestimating it. And that's why we need to look after ourselves, right? That's why we need to make sure that we don't end up getting burnt out, that we don't end up getting thrown into a state of sort of constant anxiety and being able to unable to sleep well, et cetera. And partly because there still isn't nearly enough broad awakening to this situation. But look, the real answer I have to your question, and I'm not gonna attempt to go into the facts and so on and Jim has done wonderful work in kind of bringing together material that shows some of the very difficult trends now facing us. I'd also recommend strongly the work of the collapseologists, which is now being translated into English and has been in some cases. For me, the real answer to your question comes down to the precautionary principle, which is at the heart of much of my work. Yeah, that's very nice, thank you. Yeah, that's the collapseologists key work, How Everything Can Collapse by Savine and Stevens. For me, a lot of this comes down to the precautionary principle, right? Even if it's only possible, merely possible means merely something that's reasonable to worry about that we're headed potentially towards collapse. Then we ought to be investing so much more in really seriously guarding against that, trying to stop it from happening.