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Deep Adaptation by Jem Bendell & Toni Spencer

Dr Jem Bendell is a Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria (UK). 

Several months ago, he coined the term deep adaptation in a paper called ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’, in which he draws consequences from current climate studies, offering a very grim perspective on our future reality.

Ever since, he has been advocating for actual adaptation to climate change, rather than hoping for miracles and mitigation. How will we deal with:

Mass migration

Massive food scarcity

Immensely more frequent and more extreme weather events

The sixth mass extinction event (the last killed the dinosaurs)

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Scientist’s Warning on Deep Adaptation

This presentation from November 5, 2018 was delivered to the 'Foresight Group' of the EU Commission in Brussels, Belgium. The assessment of our global prospects is extremely severe.  The conclusions may be upsetting and perhaps life-changing for many.  But the conclusions should not be taken in lightly.

http://scientistswarning.tv

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How can 100 committed human beings, working as a network, positively transform a social system of 100 million, which is locked in self-destructive vicious circles?

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Disruption from the Social Sector

Commons Building: Towards a Longer “Normal” With the use of technology, various industries have to change and adapt to the society of abundance. In this sense, Nathaniel presents several examples of cooperation initiatives that encourage participation and change, created by and for citizens, with the aim of improving the lives of the populations. 

By Nathaniel Calhoun at SingularityU Portugal Summit Cascais

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Introducing Sol Nascente

Fostering Communities of People and Trees

For the last several months, me and Diego Reimondez have been building up to a concrete implementation of the vision underlying the Decentralized Society Research Project: a broad vision for replicable, scalable, decentralised, autonomous and sustainable communities.

Concretely, we intend to found an intentional community based on sustainable co-housing, voluntary redistribution, economic viability, rural rehabilitation and forest ecology. For months, we have been building plans and forming a strong team to get our initiative off the ground.

It will be a challenging and complex project; although many of the components have been attempted separately, we will be pioneering the synergy amongst them. Nonetheless, the potential is immense. 

We demonstrate and share the practical means to gain resilience against economic, climatic and social changes. Doing so, we offer people a narrative empowering them to both acknowledge and act upon climate change, directly. An antidote to the utter sense of powerlessness and political misrepresentation that they feel today.

Concretely, we are forming an international community of 3-8 households who will share the land and common spaces, who will each have their own house, their privacy and co-ownership of the project. We are looking to build natural, comfortable (warm, near-passive), affordable (partially self-build) wooden houses and to plant a commercial food forest around them. Besides that, we will have a co-working space, a shared kitchen, living room, quiet space/performance room, workshop/atelier and guest quarters.

Roadmap

In the next couple of months, we will be:

Founding a cooperative (or similar structure)

Purchasing land, most likely in Paredes de Coura, Portugal

Documenting our hopes, goals and ambitions

Establishing principles and a vision for our community

Inviting and conversing potential community members

Co-creating an architectural plan and a forest design

Kickstarting a crowdfunding the for the forests implementation

Donate

In the meanwhile, we have already started a Dutch ‘foundation’, ready to receive donations. Stichting Sol Nascente has the statutory goal of transforming deteriorated landscapes into flourishing productive forest communities. Donations will be spend solely on forest management, education and related expenses - the funds will not be used to pay for people’s houses or communal facilities.

Any contributions, ahead of our crowdfunding later this year, will be immensely welcomed! You can donate using iDeal/SOFORT through https://bunq.me/solnascente or wire to IBAN NL16 BUNQ 2207 9045 04 to the name of ‘Stichting Sol Nascente’.

Scrawbale construction, photo by: Ziggy Liloia

Invitation

We intend to create a business ecosystem around the forest, so that we can process, market and distribute the raw products ourselves and, hopefully, get by doing it. However, we only expect to provide income for 2 of the households. Because of that, we are looking primarily for people with external income (e.g. remote or seasonal work), with particular skillsets required by our community.

Our core team consists of Diego, forest designer and writer, and Mathijs, mycelial connector and community architect. We are looking for a second forest designer, and a natural communicator (PT/EN, pref. identifies as feminine), who aids in community building and coordination, remediates conflict and gains happiness interacting with people all day long. We are also looking for:

Advise on cooperative legal structures (specific to Portugal)

An experienced film maker to document our efforts and for our crowdfunding campaign

People with experience in natural construction, (bokashi) composting and payment for ecosystem services.

We have a limited budget available, we don’t expect people to work for free. However, enthusiasm and a deep understanding about our project is a must.

If you are interested, please read through the project description on our website, and: contact us! We’re happy to hear from you!

Read more: solnascente.eu Receive email updates

Follow us on: Mastodon | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

We planted a recently burned hilltop with lots of different native trees!

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How to Grow Distributed Leadership

by Alanna Irving at New Econony Network Australia’s conference 2018

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Climate mitigation potential

From: Natural climate solutions in PNAS (2017)

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The people and the trees

A discourse, an essay

Source: Valeriy Andrushko, Unsplash

Before there were people, there were the forests.

And then the Romans came.

A very flat, one-sided,[Mann91] but strongly illustrative metaphore of how short-sighted, colonializing cultural habits have bereaved the environment of its natural resources. Here, in Southern Europe, we have yet to learn what autochthonous forests looked like. For all we have left are the species that recolonized after the fall of the empire.

Which is an interesting period. Dark, because there was little to no written history. One thing we do know, is that in parts of Europe, the forests took back. People learned, again, to live with and from the forest. Imagine oaks as far as the eye could see, less than two centuries ago, in this region.1

Until the next wave of centralized, hierarchical, extractive dominance set in. While, at first, newly emerging urbanities, in the form of independent trade posts or city-states forcibly extracted resources from the neighbouring lands, the continuously growing demand for resources led to the beginnings of the globalised trade culture that we live in today. [Lambda] [Mann93]

Note that it was not until the forests were destroyed until we started building strone houses.

Facing our downfall

Source: Parsing Eye, Unsplash

These times, we are facing another collapse. This one more global and likely more disastrous than the ones we've know from historic accounts. There is a certain amount of resilience built into any sufficiently interconnected complex system. But ours is currently optimized for efficiency, not resilience. [Taleb], [Litaer]

We will likely see stronger climatic change and variability than ever, as indicated by our planet’s geographic records. [Bendell] There were and are already massive food and water shortages, having lead to popular uprisings. [CAP] These emergent, collective, flight or fight responses allow for, partially orchestrated, destabilization of whole regions. Millions already risk their lives, crossing deserts and seas to beseige violently defended borders. For the lands left behind have lost their provenance for subsistence.

Meanwhile, assemblies [Latour] of essentially a-political actors have long since anticipated the impending scarcity and have, collectively yet independently,2 devised strategies to try and shield the elites from what is coming.

These are alt-right, the media moguls, the Putin’s and the Trumps and the Bolsonaros. Politicians with a face that’s really not a face at all. It’s a shapeshifting mask to distract us from what is really happening. The power that we, the people, lose when they forge our attention: possibly the most precious thing we have.

You see, money is a mere language and our attribution of value to it is a mere belief. A belief that allows the insanity where we sell our children’s future and the present of our brothers and sisters, human and otherwise. An insanity we can choose to let go, if we collectively take on the sovereignty over our consciousness. [Jensen] [Eisenstein]

Cooperative domains

Source: Helen George, Biofilms are cause of some Hospital Associated Infections and require managing

To create cooperative domains, within a hostile environment, with a shared immune system. [Biofilm] Spheres of interdependence, a parallel believe system and material economic reality [Slater]. The larger these domains are, the more interconnected these spheres, the greater their resilience [ComplexityLabs], the more profound their subversive potential. This is happening, in Basque Country,[Mondragon], in Catalunya [CIC], in squatted villages in the Pyrenees and in small communities in many other places. The cultural shift is happening. But, at scale, still unrecognisable. For exponential growth appears linear, at first.

Yet, this is not gonna ‘save’ us. Materially. The forces that are against us; the immume system of the planet [Lovelock], as well as our own fear of the inevitable,3 will prevent us from ‘winning’ in the traditional sort of sense. But together, suffering is transformed. Connected, we stand as we loose in the eye of our opponents. The way all colonised people have lost their numbers whilst maintaining their dignity and soul. Some of us might remain to tell the story.

Pockets of light

Ecovillage Torri Superiori, CC-SA-BY Mathijs de Bruin

As in the monesteries in the Dark Age. Remote, mountainous, interdependent, yet connected. Solidary self-sufficient. Pockets of light. [Malle] To retain what’s needed, to spark the fire, in a future that might be to come. To recount what we have learned, to warn against what we know.

Mathijs Republication endorsed CC-SA-BY

Follow-up post: Introducing Sol Nascente

Notes

1 Ponte de Lima, Portugal. 2 Presumably uncoordinated, or possibly partly/decentrally coordinated by sheer interdependence and shared interest. 3 Specifically, the fear of the ‘haves’ amongst us.

References

[Mann91] Counterexample in; Charles C. Mann, 1491: The Americas before Columbus (2006, Granta) [Mann93] Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011, Knopf) [Lambda] Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997, MIT) [Taleb] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012, Random House) [Litaer] Litaer et al., Quantifying Sustainability: Resilience, Efficiency and the Return of Information Theory (2009, Ecological Complexity) [Bendell] Jem Bendell, Deep Adaptation [CAP] Center for American Progress, The Arab Spring and Climate Change [Latour] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (2007, Oxford) [Jensen] Dereck Jensen Stephanie McMillan, As the World Burns (2011, Seven Stories) [Eisenstein] Eisenstein, Sacred Economics (2011, North Atlantic Books) [Biofilm] Bacteriality, Understanding Biofilms [Slater] Matthew Slater, Towards perma-circular currencies? [ComplexityLabs] Complexity Labs, Interdependence [Mondragon] Jill Bamburg, Mondragon through a Critical Lens [CIC] P2P Foundation, The Catalan Integral Cooperative [Lovelock] James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (2007, Penguin Books) [Malle] Louis Malle, My Dinner with Andre (1981), Fragment on YouTube

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We live in a time of rapid, wide-scale societal change with technology transforming every aspect of work and life. Just as we begin to see the deeper impacts of the internet revolution, the next wave of transformative technologies is upon us; artificial intelligence, bio technology, 3D printing, green energy and more. If we are to address the growing social, economic and environmental challenges, society must advance to the next stage. The only way forward is to fundamentally rethink, redesign and reinvent how we approach family, work, health, business and community.

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Robert Senftleben: Terraforming Planet Earth

Large parts of the surface of our planet have been devastated by human  activity. Terraforming on a human scale is needed to bring these landscapes back to life. The knowledge and technology is there, and you can learn how to use it and participate. 

https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2015-7025-terraforming_planet_earth

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One of the many big ideas in physicist Sean B. Carroll’s The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself is the concept that entropy can drive increasing complexity. In fact if our universe did not have increasing entropy as one of its fundamental components, we would not have the complex world we see today, including you and me.

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Shell knew

In 1991, oil gigant Shell published this documentary, warning the earth of global warming while disproportionally contributing to it. Ever since, Shell and other oil companies have been strategically seeding doubt and lobbying against climate policies which would negatively effect its interests.

Read more in The Guardian

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Future histories, and hope

Note: this is the follow-up to a previous letter on optimism and climate change.

On April, 19 2018, at 12:52 Timotej wrote: But I cant help to think your pessimistic view stems from a deeper distrust in humanity in general.

Hey Timotej,

Thanks for another great suggestion. You’re helping me write. :)

I suppose that’s true. Due to the way most humans have treated me most of my life, I tend to be less biased against favoring human beings. I’ve known we are unlikely to sustain ourselves since I was about 8 years.

But by now, I truly love and care about humanity, which gives the collective and unnessary suicide of my species a very bitter aftertaste.

I know for a fact that children can be monsters (I was not only on the receiving side), under the right pretence. If even children can act like monsters - normal children, not sociopaths - then surely adults can. Same mammalian group brain.

Context is the key here, the overall modifying factor to our behaviour. Given the right context, the most bitter isolated person can flourish into a warm-hearted beautiful being, within hours. Given several days, or weeks, in such a healing context could allow for a more sustained healing, one that might spread itself.

It is part of my focus and essential to my desires that contexts like this, environments that incentivize and promote loving and sharing, compassion, co-existence, be created and to be part of them.

I would not believe this if I had not experienced it, first hand, several times, in different environments and situations. I’ve also seen it switch from a brighter, open to a closed and darker outlook and vice versa; these are metastable resonant (social) states that can oscillate back and forth.

I’ve often felt that it is our day-to-day lives, our jobs, our economic situations, together with limiting social norms and believes about the self and humanity that are the real culprit here, the decisive factor. It is precisely (but not exclusively) this which I think any ‘healthy’ community should attain; freedom from the labour-wage relationship, newly defined social norms and rituals embedded in the story of a connected self and the economic freedom to join or leave the community.

However, there is a big discrepancy between the aforementioned, utopic, dream and the lives of most people. In cities, due to inflated house prices and related strong sense of private ownership of land and dwellings, most people do not have the freedom to leave their (often senseless and soon to be automated automated) jobs, their houses or their communities. In ruralities, modern farming and forestry has forced farmers to scale up and lower their margins, enabled by credits. Because their margins are diminishing with their yields, they are forced to degrade their own land with ever more intense extraction of resources while the time and monetary investments needed to switch to regenerative, sustainable methods are unavailable.

The overall sense, which pervades through all levels of society, from the rich to the poor, is that of scarcity; we have constructed an economic system poised on an ever expanding monetary realm, but the underlying physical, human and natural resource bases are diminishing as they are exploited. A focus on the short-term is incentivized by the rents payable together with refinancing requirements of debts that span timescales that a mismatch with nature’s regenerative potential.

In short, the challenge here is to translate profits on long (80-120y) and medium (15-80y) to short (2-15y) timescales, when working bottom-up, or to simply change the timescales at which financing is provided to aim for profits at the longest possible scale.

I, personally, deem the latter option most unlikely, although I do think that would be the most effective way to change our society in the most sensible and efficient way. It would require banks to completely overhaul their strategies, which again would force people away from the short-term ‘scarcity mindset’ to dreaming about, realistically achievable, abundance and regeneration.

As I am yet to be surprised by fundamental changes in the structure of our financial industries, forced or spontaneous, my angle is the bottom-up solution. Where groups of people create cooperative, regenerative, structures and financial instruments, parallel and connected to, the existing (financial) infrastructure. Whereas the long-term yields of existing structures tend to decline, those of regenerative structures keeps rising over time. Note that the difference can be very small as this accumulates over time.

This way, slowly but surely, the regenerative cultures will outlast and outperform the destructive ones, in terms of resources, energy and quality of life, which will make it an attractive option for those living within the current, degrading, system.

But be aware that, due to cultural, social and institutional momentum, especially developed countries might have a hard time allowing these regenerative structures to arrive. We are currently living in a very unsustainable comfort that we are very reluctant to give up. Even as many people in many countries will fall below this Western standard of living, possibly degrading all the way down to the poverty line, many tend to hold on to the ‘American dream’; ‘making it big time’, or possibly the centralized socialist ‘the state provides enough for everyone’.

These are the stories our societies still believe in, and it is these stories that need to be replaced. I am working on a better story or, at least, a more imaginative one. One that aligns with the limitations, the border conditions, set forth by climate and systems science. One that aligns with human and natural grace, and dignity.

But it will be a difficult story; the Free Ones, the heroes of this story, will have difficulties to overcome. Vested interests, the rich, living the nightmare of scarcity, will feel that the reclamation of their ‘rightful’ property, the lands, the houses, the money, is an assault on their ‘fragile’ sustenance, their freedom, as soon as larger movements are starting to form.

My best guess would be, to stay under the radar. Implementing a cultural virus, growing communities horizontally, decentrally. Each one connected to the next, all the way to a concentration sufficient for most people to know 1 or 2 friends living ‘outside the system’. That would be only several percents, at most (whereas it’s about 0.01% right now), but it would be sufficient.

As the dominant pattern in our society, the complete colonisation of our environment, will naturally degrade under the weight of the (material, energy, information) costs of its own sustenance, becoming ever more detrimental to basic freedoms as inequality grows manyfold, people are incentivized to grow previously marginalized alternatives. 

Where, even though their may not be ‘enough’ food, people take care of each other. The weak are protected and there will be a dialogue with our environments.

Surely, this is just but one of many alternative ‘future histories’. And, as bright as it might sound, this ‘slow collapse’ scenario involves a great deal of dying, suffering, migration, degradation and poverty. Literally, hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move. Urbanities, especially megapolises, will experience immense resource stresses due to their high population density with regards to the solar surfaces they are exposed to.

Then, we should also allow the possibilities of other scenario’s, potentially in parallel. Solar energy is about to become cheaper than oil, which some say that together with a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, would (temporarily) solve our energy problems, allowing up to remain in a growth pattern until we’re forced to become an interplanetary society. Personally, I think these dreams are far-fetched, but some powerful voices adhere to them. But, as with my vision, part of them might turn out to be true.

Lastly, there is a darker vision and I have, sadly, not been able to shake it off. It is one where a centralized police state is losing over raging plunderers and militants. Where violent gangs rape and plunder the countryside, where no one  is safe, while our planet is scavenged until the last resources are used up. It’s this scenario I often find myself confronted with; so what, if I live in a peaceful community, if there’s men with guns, will I protect my kids?

Anyways, I hope you appreciate my reflection. Consider it an invitation to dream with me.

Mathijs

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Optimism and climate change

On April 17th, at 23:21 Timotej wrote: I wonder if you've gotten any more optimistic since our last conversation about climate change

Dear Timotej,

Is there any reason too?

I do am optimistic, in the sense that I am assuming (not knowing, not even hoping) that some people will survive. I am, I want to believe this, because without humans actively cooling nuclear power plants only cockroaches survive.

However, with regards to climate change, there is no reason whatsoever to assume things will be fine in any way. Even without what I’m now going to tell you, there are suggestions that green house gases are being released at rates greater than those associated with the The Great Dying - the third mass extinction event, where 96% of the species on the planet died.

As a matter of fact, there are more and more suggestions that much-feared positive feedback loops are causing what is called ‘runaway feedback’ - which you might interpret as ‘back to Mars*’, a scenario where only a few bacteria survive, realistically.

To be a bit more precise, here’s some of these feeedback loops;

Increased melting of polar ice increases sea level rice and reduces reflectivity (albido)

Arctic permafrost and sea methane release

Note that methane is about 25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which is also why I  suggest people take it easy on the hamburgers. ;) 

However, recently, I have been approaching things from another angle. Acceptance.

Accepting that we will die, as individuals, embracing and readying for death. That is, not seeing it as a bad thing, just as a natural transformation. From there onwards, allowing the thought that we will likely not make it, that we will be outpaced by the ‘sudden’ delayed feedback from our actions years ago. And that that’s alright.

That is, not making it does not necessarily mean we’re all going to die. It more likely means that we’re heading into a new global dark age. And this is where it becomes interesting; although life expectancy and many other common measures for wellbeing where much worse, some revisionist interpretations of the actual dark ages suggest that it was actually a time of freedom and recovery, of people living in balance with their environment, good health, dignity and social wellbeing.

One movement looking into this is the Dark Mountain Project, coining the term ‘uncivilization’.

In short, I really don’t think our actual wellbeing, our hapiness, needs to suffer greatly under all this. Yes, there will be misery. Yes, people will die.

But if you look around you, in the rich places, in the cities; people SUFFER. Already. Despite their riches. Then if you go to (some) developing countries, you might be surprised at the warmhearthedness and hapiness of the people. (Then again, in some others this is precisely not the case.)

It’s not material wellbeing that causes our hapiness. Although, I do feel if our wellbeing slips below a certain point, it might be much, much harder to attain that. But I do think this point is *way* below where we commonly think it is.

Lastly, I’d like to close off with a great movie I can recommend; My Dinner with André. Note the ‘pockets of light’ fragment. That’s what I’m aiming at. That’s where I want to be.

A (un)monestary. A pocket of light; a conservancy of the good parts of this dying structure.

Mathijs

* That is, a methane and CO2 dominated atmosphere.

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Grow a 100-Year-Old Food Forest in Your Backyard in Just 10 Years

Most of the world we live in today was once forest, our natural habitat for millions of years.

Now surrounded by cities and agriculture, humans are no longer living in their “natural” habitat, argues a forest-building engineer named Shubhendu Sharma.

But we can recreate little chunks of that habitat in just ten years our own backyards, workplaces and public spaces, he explains in this TED talk.

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And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.

1984, George Orwell