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Jem Bendell
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Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse Kindle Edition

by Jem Bendell (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 46 ratings
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“This is a prophetic book” Satish Kumar, founder, Schumacher College

The collapse of modern societies has begun. That is the conclusion of two years of research by the interdisciplinary team behind Breaking Together. How did it come to this? Because monetary systems caused us to harm each other & nature to such an extent it broke the foundations of our societies. So what should we do? This book describes people allowing the full pain of our predicament to liberate them into living more courageously & creatively. They demonstrate we can be breaking together, not apart, in this era of collapse. Jem Bendell argues that reclaiming our freedoms is essential to soften the fall & regenerate the natural world. Escaping the efforts of panicking elites, we can advance an ecolibertarian agenda for both politics & practical action in a broken world.

"This book is part of a healing movement that extends beyond what we normally think of as ecological" Charles Eisenstein, author, Climate: A New Story

"This book shows that instead of imposing elitist schemes and scams, regenerating nature and culture together is the only way forward" Dr Stella Nyambura Mbau, Loabowa Kenya

"A signpost for people made politically homeless by the craziness of the last few years" Aaron Vandiver, author, Under a Poacher's Moon

“The mother of all 'mic drops' on the myth of sustainable development” Katie Carr, Deep Adaptation Forum

"A new compass for navigating collapse” Pablo Servigne & Raphael Stevens, authors, Another End of the World is Possible

"If you want to save some of the world but hate being told what to do, this book is for you.” Clare Farrell, co-founder, Extinction Rebellion

Contents
Introduction
1 Economic collapse
2 Monetary collapse
3 Energy collapse
4 Biosphere collapse
5 Climate collapse
6 Food collapse
7 Societal collapse
8 Freedom to know
9 Freedom from progress
10 Freedom from banking
11 Freedom in nature
12 Freedom to collapse & grow
13 Freedom from fake green globalists
Conclusion

"Breaking Together constructs a comprehensive, compelling yet nuanced argument that societal collapse is well underway. Professor Bendell skillfully and seamlessly integrates personal reflection and hard data from virtually every domain to provide a unique vision of catagenesis - the creative renewal of post collapse society. He advocates for an ecolibertarian rather than the ecoauthoritarian world that is beginning to emerge. While It’s often a cliché if the reader has but one book to choose to read this year, it should be Breaking Together. That said, please center yourself as you engage with this brilliant, heartfelt, disturbing and often heartbreaking story of the possible futures that will touch everyone of the 8 billion of us." Herb Simmens, author, A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

“Our societies are breaking because of damage to the living systems of our planet. It's time to face this reality and this book helps us do just that. As further collapse unfolds we need a practical alternative to global panic. Jem Bendell has got one - restoring community self-reliance as a global effort." Pooran Desai OBE, CEO, OnePlanet

"Breaking Together provides an impressive and sobering analysis of what is happening in societies and the biosphere, why ‘we’ (in modern cultures) didn’t know sooner, and what realistic choices remain, both individually and collectively. Jem and his team didn't just stare into the abyss - they spent two years mapping it for us. This book provides essential wisdom on the necessity of staying engaged politically and socially, whilst attending to the toxic psycho-social patterns that need healing if we are to retain dignity and justice in the coming years." Katie Carr, Deep Adaptation Forum

Epub from 17/6/2023

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  4. Publication date
    May 9, 2023
  5. Reading age
    15 - 18 years
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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0C1JLL45V
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Good Works (May 9, 2023)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 9, 2023
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2768 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 340 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B0C481H26X
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 46 ratings

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Jem Bendell

Jem Bendell
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Professor Jem Bendell is a world-renowned scholar on the breakdown of modern societies due to environmental change. Downloaded over a million times, his Deep Adaptation paper is credited with inspiring the growth of the Extinction Rebellion movement in 2018, and created a global network to reduce harm in the face of societal collapse. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol and his Geography BA (Hons) at the University of Cambridge. For decades he worked on Sustainable Development as a researcher and NGO manager, as well as a consultant to businesses, political parties and UN agencies. One of his specialisms since 2011 is pro-social currency innovation, with his TEDx from that year explaining reasons for Bitcoin and similar. In 2017, he co-led the development of the UK Labour Party’s communications plan for the General Election and co-wrote speeches for their top politicians. Although recognised in 2012 as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Jem has been increasingly critical of the globalist agenda on sustainable development. Away from that work, he is a syntropic agroforester and singer-songwriter, releasing an EP with the band Sambiloto.

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4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
46 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Wole
5.0 out of 5 stars Not perfect - but comprehensive, well-written, and courageous
Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2023
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I gave 5 stars even though “not perfect” because the book’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, and because the author’s clarity and intellectual honesty make his biases clear, so that even when one suspects he has a faulty perspective on an issue, he can’t be accused of trying to mislead.

His data and logic on climate change and whether we can “succeed” in our efforts to “control” it are rock-solid and the best (recent) compilation of information I have come across. Spoiler alert: the conclusions are sobering.

His views (and data) on the specifics of how the “elites” managed the COVID crisis may be questionable in part, but his broad thesis about the dangers of “elite panic” and how those behaviours play into management of the climate crisis is worth thinking about.

He spends a great deal of time, too much in my opinion, on critical literacy and similar themes. That gets tiring, but the book picks up steam again later.

Some reviews have questioned the author’s analysis of economics and banking. I was initially a bit dubious, and so I read one of his references, a paper he co-authored on the so-called monetary growth imperative (MGI). It was very sound and lent a great deal of credence to his arguments.

In summary, I don’t think you can go wrong reading this book. The book is packed with interesting insights and facts, and the first part (the core climate-related data and arguments) alone is worth the price.
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dougout
4.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, beautifully written, timely and important book, with some significant flaws
Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2024
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This was a challenging book, not because of its ideas which are all clearly, even beautifully written, but because in addition to so much that's powerfully good, there are also some serious problems. Are the problem areas Achilles' heels that sabotage all the rest, or standalone topics that don't really impact the main theses? I'll weigh in – and the bottom line is I find it worth 4 stars, but first the excellent parts, then the problem areas.

The excellent
----------------
It's a huge book, 500 pages of text except for a very few graphics, and then after the 500 pages, 873 end notes, most of which are reference links, but there are plenty of quarter- or half-page notes that expand on the text. The scope and scale of the text are huge. Chapters are:
- Introduction - Recognizing and responding to collapse
- Ch 1 - Economic collapse: a time of limits and contradictions
- Ch 2 - Monetary collapse: it was made inevitable
- Ch 3 - Energy collapse - and problems with net zero
- Ch 4 - Biosphere collapse - killing our living home
- Ch 5 - Climate collapse - cascading failures
- Ch 6 - Food collapse - six hard trends
- Ch 7 - Societal collapse - recognising reality and cultural decay
- Ch 8 - Freedom to know - critical wisdom in an era of collapse
- Ch 9 - Freedom from progress - humanity is not on trial
- Ch 10 - Freedom from banking - how the money-power drove collapse
- Ch 11 - Freedom in nature - a foundation for ecolibertarians
- Ch 12 - Freedom to collapse and grow - the doomster way
- Ch 13 - Freedom from fake green globalists - resistance & reclamation
- Conclusion

The main thesis is that major collapse of civilization as we know it has already begun, it comprises an era rather than an event, and it's inevitable. A follow-on thesis is that while collapse means enormous change, it doesn't mean that everything good will be gone forever.

The author makes a compelling case that humanity is in grave trouble. The Intro and chapters 1 through 7 detail the causes and our general as well as specific perils. The remaining chapters and conclusion offer tools not necessarily to survive collapse personally though one's odds should be boosted for example by knowing how to grow your own food, but rather how to prepare and live in a world that's collapsing, such that if the opportunity arises for a new world order, you'll be ready for it and ready to help design it.

We often hear how global warming of 2°C will ravage the planet. Here, that's just one collapsing system described in one chapter. All the other areas of collapse not only worsen each other, but underlying all of them is the global need to grow forever, grow population, grow food supply and energy supply, grow wealth. He answers in Chapter 2 "Why growth became God."

The writing is a joy to read, well crafted, almost musical, even as it covers so much ugliness and destruction we see in the world. Bendell has obviously spent a huge part of his life preparing to write this book, both as a corporate sustainability advocate and now as someone who totally refutes the paradigm of corporate sustainability. He's been there and done that to a huge extent, and it shows. He has and offers a great deal of wisdom. Also, he's a philosopher, can describe and juggle and synthesize ideas well and clearly. Also, he's psychologically attuned to the impact of collapse, including acknowledging the sorrow and anger and hopelessness it induces in all of us, sooner or later. And he's a scholar, citing sources for everything.

The problems
----------------
There are a couple of undercurrents that percolate through the text, roughly stated, a bias toward conspiracy thinking, and arrogance which tends to quash the possibility of alternative outcomes. Together they produce several wrong conclusions.

Conspiracy #1: We're in the mess(es) we're in because of banking elites. That's certainly not a new claim, and bankers are certainly responsible for their share of the messes, maybe more than their share. But to lay the blame for the world's ills on bankers is to ignore how economics have evolved over the century, including huge changes just in the 20th century. Keynes, who envisioned and strived for a world where wealth-inequality was minimized, was possibly the century's most influential economist, and certainly one of them. Even Milton Friedman, in some ways the arch-antagonist of Keynes, said we are all Keynesians now (and Pres. Nixon echoed Friedman). Bankers are important players, but our political leaders choose the bankers rules, not the reverse (OK, at least not always inevitably the reverse). In the US, in the late '70 and '80s, the US dropped usury laws, cut taxes on the wealthy and shifted the country from decreasing wealth-inequality to increasing. Electing Ronald Reagan president empowered most of these changes. They could be reversed if voters chose to, regardless of what the banks want.

Conspiracy #2: Elites are the problem. This is similar to #1, but it reflects a somewhat different worldview. While #1 says the world is the way it is because of the bankers, whom we can trust and not trust is based on what we think of other experts. A couple of glaring examples are climate and the covid vaccine. Bendell does report that climate change is fierce and imminently terrible, but he fails to understand and portray the dominant role of fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions from human industry. He attributes carbon loss from deforestation and agriculture which are certainly legitimate, but also from solar irradiance fluctuations (associated with sunspots and occurring in cycles of roughly every 11 years). He excoriates the IPCC and the majority of mainstream climate scientists for perpetually minimizing the risks of climate change. This is completely wrong, a failure to read the blistering headlines the IPCC has endlessly reported and communicated as best it can. It's also a strange brew indeed. Climate change deniers often point to sunspots as the dominant factor in - as they phrase it - climate which has always changed (they're completely wrong, solar irradiance fluctuations account for less than 1% of our climate change). But the deniers claim the opposite of Bendell, that is, that the IPCC is "alarmist," blowing everything about climate change all out of proportion. The deniers also demonize climate scientists, but for overplaying climate as being venal shills for advocates of socialism or world government. Bendell seems to internalize the faulty conspiracy-laden reasoning of the climate deniers to arrive at opposite conclusions! I do not recommend beginning Breaking Together by reading Chapter 5.

Bendell claims he's not an anti-vaxxer, but he definitely appears to be anti-covid-vaccines, supporting natural and repurposed remedies instead, claiming the vaccines were untested and unsafe (especially in children who were relatively unimpacted from covid), the product of the elite organization that found the ways and means of profiting off the pandemic. His inclination toward conspiratorial thinking seems to have precluded the realization that the world was racing chaotically in every direction trying to find our way through a pandemic the likes of which we hadn't seen in 100 years when the so-called Spanish flu killed 50 million people (of about 1.5 billion total population). We were terrified. One example of the chaos: the US CDC requested that no one try to obtain an N95 mask. Reason 1 was that they weren't effective. Reason 2 was that they were extremely effective and desperately needed by front-line workers because of supply shortages. Reason 1 and 2 are absurdly contradictory, a lie delivered to individuals for public health to protect front line workers. It was a dreadful mistake that potentiated all the following political polarization, but it was chaos, not a conspiracy. Bendell's failure to distinguish between N95 and non-sealing masks stains everything he says about masks. How can a scholar not distinguish between N95 masks that protect against virus infection and virus spread, versus weaker masks that do a partial job at best of either?

Bendell also gets renewable energy wrong, saying humanity's total energy use is the problem, not how it's produced. This is a more nuanced argument than his climate and covid errors. It's arguable that the mining and supply chains required for enough energy to support 8 billion people anything like how the wealthiest 1 billion live, isn't possible. But there are two big flaws in that conclusion. One is that once built, renewables need no fuel, no mining, and can be almost entirely recycled at the end of their system life. That is, their value accumulates forever, versus burning coal or oil or fossil gas, which depletes those resources as well as wrecks climate (and pollutes land and water and air). The other flaw is that individuals in wealthy countries are usually vastly inefficient in their energy use. Drive a 3-ton SUV to the store to buy 50 lbs of groceries, use an inefficient furnace to pump heat through ducts that waste 50% of the warmth. We're not generating and distributing energy very well or fairly now, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

Getting climate change significantly wrong, getting covid vaccines completely wrong, possibly getting renewable energy fundamentally wrong, all suggest an arrogance borne of ideological certainty. Bendell couldn't have had a climate scientist review Chapter 5, nor an epidemiologist review the book for covid myths (a task that would have been difficult, because unfortunately Breaking Together lacks an index). For renewable energy, we have a clear path revealed in great detail, in the 2023 book No Miracles Needed by Stanford Engineering Prof. Mark Jacobson. Breaking Together was also published in 2023, but not only has Jacobson been prominent for many years, No Miracles was preceded by Jacobson's 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything, published in 2020, which covered the large majority of the same material. Experts, instead of being castigated, could have been accessed and used to review, and fix, significant areas of the book.

What's the verdict?
----------------------
That's the good and the bad. The burning question is begged: If several of the analyses purporting to prove how and why we're in collapse are faulty, does the conclusion that collapse is inevitable still stand? Some serious statistical logic says no, it's not inevitable. Bendell tries to prove that it's certain we're winding into collapse. But what if our future is instead uncertain, or hugely uncertain? What if his errors in nailing climate and energy and covid as black and white, open and shut situations, mean instead that a giant lack of certainty prevails? Take a step back and it's easy to see the future as vastly uncertain. Kim Stanley Robinson painted a future in his Ministry for the Future, where a huge heat-wave disaster shifted the world toward aligning around solutions. Maybe that could happen. The amazing reduction in the price per megawatt and megawatt-hour of of solar energy over the last couple of decades has made solar power the cheapest of all energy sources (in some sunny areas). Maybe renewables will rapidly replace dirty energy. The mRNA covid vaccines were near-miracles, just the beginning of new, rapidly developed vaccines (and new therapies for a huge variety of maladies). Arrogance may lead one to certainty, but it's misplaced. Bendell acknowledges that he/we have no idea just how and where and when collapse will crush civilization as we know it. So it seems close to evident that uncertainty prevails. And if uncertainty prevails, then so does possibility. The statistical "fat tails" of uncertainty mean even if our odds are low, they're not zero. For the nerds, leptokurtosis (fat tails of a probability distribution) preclude impossibility because there's a meaningful chance out there at the 5% or 2% or 0.1% likelihood. Can the banks and bankers be regulated or reformed? Maybe. Can we shift to renewables fast enough to prevent 3°C of global warming? Maybe. 2°C? Probably not, but maybe. A world of possibility - even if slim - is a very different world than one of certain, inevitable collapse.

Of course, things do look grim. 2023's global climate was famously called "gobsmackingly bananas," and 2024's is starting even hotter. We may be in the middle of "The Sixth Extinction" taking biodiversity and a lot of our food supply with it. Wealth inequality is degrading huge swaths of humanity. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may arrive and destroy us. But maybe not. Can civilization be improved without collapsing first? We don't know, but to presume we do is arrogant and unwarranted.

Bottom line: this is a wonderful, informative, beautifully written book that's well worth a full read. It draws the conclusion that global collapse is certain and inevitable, but from factual errors as well as conspiracy-tinted ideology running through the book, as well as application of some statistical common sense, a better conclusion is that humanity's future is uncertain and therefore it admits a wide variety of possible outcomes for us to continue to strive for.
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Kevin J. Mongrain
5.0 out of 5 stars Sobering but Realistic
Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2023
Jem Bendell does not sugarcoat things. Our civilization is in trouble and big changes are coming. Read this book to begin thinking about how to deal with what is coming.
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Katie Carr
5.0 out of 5 stars Jem Bendell writing at his best on the topic of our time
Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2023
Jem Bendell burst onto the scene of 'post-sustainability' (in fact, he may as well have invented that term) in 2018 with his Deep Adaptation paper, which quickly became the most downloaded paper on sustainability. That paper has been so influential because it was courageous, clear-sighted, and direct to the point of extreme discomfort. Since then, public opinion on the climate crisis has shifted dramatically - the idea that we are, globally and collectively, beyond 'the point of no return' and that collapse of what we know of as civilisation is within sight, is no longer a marginal or extreme view. In this new book, Jem provides analyses of many of these systems, and concludes that the point of no return is already far in the rear view mirror, and we are witnessing unfolding multi-system collapse right now.

This book is Bendell writing at his best, combining clear-sighted research and analysis, excoriating social commentary, with a tender, personal - almost optimistic - call for a humane and wise response. The invitation is for us to support each other in bringing the best of what's possible as humans - love, courage, solidarity, keeping our eyes wide open to the reality of what's unfolding and why/how it has happened, in order to minimise harm and maximise dignity.

On a practical note - the book is a bit of a beast at 600+ pages. It's also got 800 endnotes, providing references or further context. The Amazon page count is misleading: to allow hyperlinking back and forth with the text, each endnote has it's own page in the ebook. Amazon appears to have counted those 800 endnotes as pages. Thankfully, it's not 1400 pages long!
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Top reviews from other countries

Anthony Hendriks
5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read about the Truth of Our Global Decline
Reviewed in Canada on June 6, 2023
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I could say so much about this book that is positive, but please read it to find out for yourself. It is not an easy read, but one that Jem Bendell seeks to share the truth in. That truth is eye-opening, sad, infuriating but not without hope. Yes, the 'elites' have been lying to us. Sadly, societies as we know them are on the decline and not likely to recover. A new, more challenging world is now facing all of us. The best that we can do is to love and care for each other, hence the title 'Breaking Together'.

The book touches on the Biosphere and how the trend is negative when we consider it's renewal. It also touches on the social breakdown in our societies. And financial systems including central banks don't escape Jem's searing light of exposure. The bottom line is that very little 'out there' looks good.

Jem shares examples from the past and present where people working together make positive changes in their lives. This is where I found hope to reside in the book. Sadly, societies in general, are not going to make that leap.

Jem brings many years of research and interaction with environmentalists, the elites and governments in this book and also draws on a multi-disciplinary group of researchers to present to us the most sobering picture of anything I've read when it comes to our future on this earth. While this future will not be rosy for most of us, I believe it's better to know the truth than digest a sugar-coated survivalist view that will ultimately disappoint.
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Ady Danger
5.0 out of 5 stars Paradigm Shifting Insights
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 13, 2023
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Essential reading for the collapse aware.
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James Beadle
1.0 out of 5 stars Great on Climate, but a disaster on economics and health
Reviewed in France on October 3, 2023
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Be careful reading this book. It should have been peer reviewed. Not for the climate stuff, Bendall gets that excellently.
The rest of the book, on the financial system and covid is very selective in its evidence, and as a result misrepresents reality. As a result, his authority on climate misleads people in important topics, and the misrepresentation of those topics undermines his authority on the climate.
Deep Adaptation was great, this book is a tragic follow up. It's dangerous.
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Renaee
5.0 out of 5 stars Humanity was a wild gardening species...
Reviewed in Australia on May 27, 2023
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As someone already living with a collapse accepting world view, the real juicy parts of this book came into play for me from Chapter 8 onwards.

Starting with the introduction to the concept of Critical Wisdom - “the elusive capability to understand oneself in the world that combines insight from mindfulness, critical literacy, rationality and intuition”, the reader is given a brief intro to the limitations of mindfulness (for example the difficulty of sustaining a meditation practice without a community of support) explaining that those drawn to mindfulness practice have a desire to not only experience life but to ‘know’ life or reality to some degree which I very much resonated with in my own experience. He says it is useful to question why we wish to know life, as our motivations can arise from various attempts to control life (for which he gives examples which result in delusion) rather than accept the impermanence of life and face our own mortality.

With an understanding of mindfulness in this way, and the drawbacks of ever really overcoming our delusions and desire for control, critical literacy is demonstrated as a powerful adjunct to understand our aversions, impulses and just our selves in general embedded in our cultural context.

There are a couple of examples of critical literacy given and it can be summed up from the book as “symbols and language are not the phenomena they refer to but are phenomena in themselves. They can be described in the following way. A simple concept relates to other concepts through a frame (a constellation of concepts), which relates to other frames in a narrative (a sequence of frames), which relates to other narratives in a societal discourse (the totality of interrelated ideas communicated with symbol and language within a cultural group).

And as Bendell adds - “For me, the most salient point is that if we are not aware of how symbol and language operate in shaping us, we are vulnerable to manipulation.” And that “Critical literacy also enables us to notice how Imperial Modernity spreads and exerts its power in myriad ways that connect the symbolic and material.”

The art of critical literacy as it is explained seems to be a practice, in much the same way as meditation would be, as a way of continually bringing more awareness to ones thinking processes - to question everything and to gain greater freedom from the potential hooking of culture on our sense making. I really enjoyed the in depth analysis and examples of critical literacy and having been exposed to the ideas before, it was a timely reminder to bring this practice more into focus in my life.

With a firm understanding of the skills of critical literacy under our belts the reader is then in invited to see how the modern day environment movement is captivated by an ideology of reformism and is upholding a narrative of ‘not too late’, with an example of communications from The Guardian Newspaper where existing frames are repeated by journalists.

“Professionals will be paid to lie to us all as we die prematurely from the direct and indirect impacts of the destruction of the biosphere. And people like you and me will be blamed along the way. I share the analysis in this chapter with you, and what follows, simply so that some of you will be encouraged to find more of your own freedom from discursive violence to yourself, to others and to nature.”

And he continues, “I offer my suggestions as a way of getting up from the metaphorical floor to live meaningful and helpful lives in an era of collapse. It includes why this happened and what to learn from that, what is core to humanity and society going forward, what are inspiring examples of people’s responses, and what is it that we will need to resist as elites respond in bad ways.”

Then to chapter 9 where we are given a critique of the idea of the inveitablity of collapse due to humans being no more smart that algae in a petri dish, who, with an influx of energy, explode their population and die off. This simplistic rendering of overshoot and exhausting carrying capacity is dismantled by the examination of First Peoples who lived in sustainable ways over millennia on various continents before European invasion. It is shown that older cultures already had access to fossil fuels and used them in moderate ways, and that did not mean the inevitable progress towards living in cities as the hallmark of ‘civilisations’ which are bound to fail/collapse.

I greatly resonated with this chapter and specific examples of arguments that people use to say that all humans are inevitably destructive are refuted, such as the idea of the loss of megafauna due to humans or deforestation during the stone age.

Before reading this book I had read Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta and he also does much the same as Bendell in his chapter called ‘Romancing the Stone Age” and also invites the reader to engage in what he calls a ‘thought experiment’ which is actually an experiment in critical literacy as Bendell has described, to see how the language, symbols, frames and narrative have shaped our perception of stone age people to automatically bring up an image in our mind created by our culture which is false and maintains a power over paradigm of modernity.

Bendell explains how the modern environmental movement is now clinging to “the story of progress within modern societies, whereby we must become more civilised, more modern, in order to protect the planet….That view embodies a misanthropic assumption that humans are inherently bad for nature, and only by heroically using technology and social control will nature have a better chance, along with our species. It ignores the real causes of our predicament, while encouraging the ego of the modern saviour.”

And one more quote from this chapter to close:

“The future of both humanity and life on Earth is not threatened by people over-romanticising past or indigenous cultures, but by people defending the ideology of the establishment institutions that oversee global ecocide. The fact that Indigenous peoples now live on lands where 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity is concentrated, while only accounting for 4% of the global population, can invite some humility, respect, curiosity and solidarity.”

This is a long chapter and there is much evidence to show how humanity was in fact a ‘wild gardening species before we became an agricultural one’ and this phrase warmed my heart, as someone who has found so much meaning and solace in being a wild gardener as a way to connect to my ancient roots and the feral, if not wild, part of may nature - recognising that I am still a civilisation addict as well.

In this chapter, with the examples that Bendell gives of how various cultures used fossil fuels in a restrained way, it also made me think of an example given by Paul Kingsnorth in his substack writing on ‘the Machine’, that showed how other cultures in a similar way ‘restrained’ their use of technology.

“ fairly advanced technological knowledge can be traced back to the earliest civilisations. The difference between us and them was that they often chose not to use it. The early Egyptians, for instance, built their culture around the gods, which were themselves entwined with the natural cycles and the seasons, and the rise and fall of the Nile in particular. This was a world in which the realm of the Forms, the heavens, the spirit world - whatever terminology is used - was entwined intimately with the material realm. And societies built around a notion of the sacred have an immunity to the gravity of the purely material. 

In this understanding of reality, says Naydler, ‘logical thinking was not regarded as an appropriate mode of consciousness with which to approach the gods.’ That in turn meant that even relatively simple technologies like the shaduf - a lever for lifting water from the river more efficiently, as illustrated above - was not much used, even though it was known about. The issue was not a lack of technological knowledge: it was a concern about what its use might do to the shape of reality”

This writing on ‘The Machine’ together with the conclusions from chapter 9 of this book, overall emboldened my view that Collapse was not inevitable and that our role as a custodial species was wounded deeply at some point in history. Bendell also tackles the often cited “parable of the tribes” theory and the ‘maximum power theory’ with illuminating logic that I welcomed, as having been exposed to these ideas many times in my reading around collapse.

I have honed in on just a tiny amount of the ideas explored in this book which provides enormous meaning for the Collapse Accepting reader and I know I will be revisiting and studying much of this work again in order to guide my actions going forward as collapse continues to unravel and to live with more joy, freedom, purpose and solidarity with earth’s creatures and first peoples.
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warren lockie
5.0 out of 5 stars Crisis Co-operation
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2023
Verified Purchase
Realistic pointing out of our predicament. Wise and compassionate response options.
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