“You can’t handle the truth”
You may not have heard of Deep Adaptation. Not many of us scour the internet looking for academic papers to read, and the truth of our current environmental and social situation is a lot harder to digest than a cute cat video. If you were to read the freely available paper, you might be interested to know what sets the Deep Adaptation paper apart from other academic texts. Authored by Professor Jem Bendell in 2018, it was rejected for academic publication during the peer review process. As is standard academic process, the writer must reference other academic research in the form of a literature review, with which to validate and strengthen their hypothesis. In other words, without giving a shout out to your peers, you can’t be in the club.
The German physicist Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. That makes advances pretty slow, just when it appears we don’t have time to lose. The purpose of the Deep Adaptation paper is exactly this: to face the truth. We are already experiencing social and environmental collapse. This collapse will continue to increase global impacts. Impacts such as increased food scarcity, conflict, extreme weather, forced migration and biodiversity loss. As Bendell states in the preamble to the paper, ‘a reviewer’s request not to dishearten readers with the claim of “inevitable near-term social collapse” reflects a form of censure found amongst people working on sustainable business.’ In non-academic speak this means you, the general public, can’t handle the truth.
Can any of us actually handle the ‘truth?’ Because of course, you don’t want to feel ‘disheartened,’ right? Or maybe not...Has there ever been a time in your life when someone withheld the truth from you because they thought they were ‘sparing your feelings,’ and you wish they hadn’t? Deep adaptation wants to be the friend that tells you the truth. A friend who is also there to offer you a shoulder to cry on and ears to listen with. Bendell gives acknowledgement to his own ‘friends’; the people that helped him to “prioritise my truth.”
In writing this paper he perhaps gives us all permission to step forward with the courage to tell our own truths, and cultivate the compassion with which to listen to each other’s. Could there be such a thing as compassionate truth, a truth that we know will hurt in the beginning, but will save us from much longer lasting and deeper pain in the long run?
“I can’t collaborate with someone until I fully listen with love.” - Skeena Rathor
No pain, no gain
It was with the knowledge that I was going to have to face the truth and my own pain that I applied to the Radical Resilience programme. Run by St. Ethelburga’s, a peace and reconciliation centre based in London, the programme will take 16 people on a deep adaptation learning journey from January - May 2020.
The purpose of the first Radical Resilience event was to ask the question - what does it mean to hold spaces for holding uncomfortable truth? Clare Martin of St Ethelburga’s was joined by a panel of three speakers: Toni Spencer, artist, facilitator and lecturer; Skeena Rathor, Vision Coordinator of Extinction Rebellion Movement, Labour Councillor and mental health champion at Stroud Council; and Justine Huxley, Director of St.Ethelburga’s.
Our starting point is the deep adaptation paper, which sets out to shatter what might be seen as a taboo - that there isn’t time to stop climate change. Science tells us that the world is far further down the line in climate breakdown than many people, globally, are willing to admit. Given the catastrophic start to 2020, with the wildfires in Australia and rapidly accelerating ice melt in Greenland, it might not be much longer until we are all on the same page with this thinking.
For Bendell, it is not a case of stopping the climate crisis, but adapting to the new world that it is going to inevitably create. This is indeed a very painful truth to face. Panellist Toni Spencer described deep adaptation as a ‘permission slip to talk about things that are heartbreaking.’ To enable conversations to explore this painful truth, its aftermath and potential futures, Bendell outlines in his paper a framework based on 4 Rs. The first 3, Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration, are outlined in the original paper. The 4th, Reconciliation, has been added by Bendell as a response to feedback and exploration since the paper has been made public. This new addition aims to provide ‘hope and vision in the face of collapse.’ After all, we cannot act well, and think long-term, from a place of pain and despair.
Toni went on to provide an outline of the purpose of the 4 Rs in her own words, and contained within her words are some quite difficult questions you may wish to ask yourself.
Resilience - this asks what is it that you love, want to keep, take care of and is of value to you?
Relinquishment - what are you ready to let go of? As Toni says, maybe one of the most important and challenging questions, it includes those things that not only give you pleasure and comfort such as, money, nice homes, holidays etc, but also things intrinsically linked to your identity, like status. So you may need to explore the question of relinquishment in terms of your own identity, how you make meaning and how you make sense of the world.
Restoration - what is it that you want to bring back, not because you necessarily value it right now, but because your very future depends on it? Good relationships, healthy soils, ways of exchange, Indigenous wisdom. What makes sense for the world of your future?
Reconciliation - to move to a place of active and radical hope you need to reconcile with the facts of the ecological devastation happening, which include the social justice issues and history that have got us to where we are now. In Bendell’s words ‘this is a time for reconciliation with mortality, nature and each other.’
Toni views the deep adaptation framework as an invitation to have a conversation. Panellist, Skeena Rathor had a much more visceral reaction when she first heard Bendell present his paper, one of physical shock and anger. She admitted that more than a year later she is still stuck in shock, horror and heartbreak. However, Skeena has since become friends with Bendell and moved at least parts of her thinking onto a more contemplative place. As part of the Rising Up! Movement and Extinction Rebellion, Skeena has been able to channel her experiences and pain into substantial action and community.
“Being of use frees up a lot of energy and space.” - Justine Huxley
The final speaker on the panel was Justine Huxley, and for her, it was a transformative moment when she first read the paper. For Justine, what was different about the presentation of science and ideas was the articulation and a freedom from denial. On reading the paper, Justine took herself away to the forest for a few days, to question what no longer makes sense. She explored what it means to let this thinking in, in such a way that we can know it with our whole body, mind and heart. For Justine, these questions, free from denial, are liberating. For her they mean that it is no longer about us as individuals, but about serving something beyond that. If your compassionate truth friend were talking, they might ask you how you would feel if you stopped running away from the truth or fighting your pain and faced the problem head-on.
Brave spaces are an evolution of safe spaces
Central to much of Toni’s work is the issue of climate justice. Developed by the formidable Mary Robinson, climate justice reframes the issues of climate change to include human rights. Climate justice acknowledges that those doing the least environmental harm are suffering some of the worst consequences of climate change impacts. This is the moment when your compassionate truth friend points out that your actions are harming other people, and in your rage/self-pity, you say you don’t care about other people. Your friend will probably say something like, you don’t really mean that, you’re just saying it because you're scared and you can only think about yourself right now.
As hard as it is to think about others in times of personal crisis, social justice issues have to be central to the conversations of the climate crisis and deep adaptation. Skeena reflected on her recent time at the Climate Change Conference, (COP) Madrid, in December 2019, and the picture of separation it presented to her. ‘The first thing we need to do is recognise and name the division tactics that are being used, (mainly class and race.) The first responsibility we have in our privileged echo chamber is to speak to the people who are being targeted that way and say I won’t be divided from you, I’m withdrawing my consent from this division.’
For Skeena this division and separation is caused by the scarcity and competition stories created by patriarchy, and modern capitalist systems. What is needed now is collaboration. It is competition and greed that got us into this mess in the first place. We need to collaborate is easy to say, but much harder in practice. First we need to ask what is needed to undo the narratives and embedded cultures of competition that infiltrate our business, education and political systems. If we are constantly forced into echo chambers where people agree with us, we might be lulled into a false feeling that we are collaborating. For real change to happen we need to be able to collaborate with people that we might initially or permanently disagree with. So what does it mean to practice radical truth telling in these contexts?
Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable
So you’ve told your friend all your woes, and in the process uncovered some challenging truths. You might be hoping for your friend to give you an answer or be complicit with you in the denial story you have created for yourself. But your compassionate truth friend tells you that they don’t know what you should do, and perhaps it is going to take more than one conversation/cry/gym session/bottle of wine to come up with the answer or take away the pain. They say you should continue to seek your truth anyway, painful and lengthy as it may be. As Toni rightly said, ‘we need enough space to digest and have conversations, so we don’t leap quickly to fix it. We don’t know how to get out of this mess. The thing that really matters to me is that we let it be messy, and sit in the fire of not knowing what to do.’
That doesn’t mean that you have to do nothing. There are other things you can do, besides ‘fixing the problem.’ For Skeena it comes back to the R of Reconciliation: to enter into vulnerability, mourning, and our grief from the feelings of separation. From here we can start to reconnect in the most meaningful ways we can - with our truth, our power, ourselves, each other, the earth. Or you could explore the R of Resilience. Belonging to the Sufi tradition, Justine shared that she gets a huge amount of resilience from faith, belief and community. An R that isn’t yet part of the deep adaptation framework is Reciprocity. For Toni, Reciprocity includes an understanding of an interrelated world. ‘We are only one species in an ecosystem, we need a decentralising of ourselves as the one species that counts. There are many human beings still alive that know how to be part of a healthy ecosystem.’ By this Toni is referring to the communities of Indigenous people around the world, who comprising less than 5% of the world’s population, protect 80% of global biodiversity. Indigenous knowledge and wisdom has much to teach us about living with the sacredness of all life.
“I have a profound and deep relationship with the sense of mystery.” - Toni Spencer
Sacredness, spirituality, mystery. These words might not hold much meaning for you. In fact, this whole article might have filled you with an overwhelming sense of denial, confusion, despair, anxiety or apathy. You might be asking yourself what we achieve by accepting our current reality. Whatever it is you are feeling right now, I ask you to take a moment of silence to allow yourself to fully feel it. Close your eyes, bring your attention to the centre of your chest, your stomach, or wherever it is you feel any sensation in your body, as you think about social and ecological collapse. Stay with your feelings. Then go and find your most compassionate friend and talk to them about it. We might not have the answers yet, but together we can find the courage to face our truths.