I wanted to see how a person could look at the darkness and suggest a way through. I was interested in different capacities for denial and hope.
I wanted to know why a paper rejected by several climate scientists had become so powerful and influential. I was also interested in delusion, in people who have certainty in an uncertain world, and how they get to that point. Extreme wildfires in Argentina, North America, and Russia. The last year alone has seen catastrophic floods in Pakistan (8 million people displaced) and Bangladesh (7.2 million affected).
Not, perhaps, what I expected of the leading doomer-in-chief.Īnd of course the horsemen of climate breakdown are already here: droughts, floods, fires, melting ice. But his answers were quick, and filled to the brim with ideas, opinions, song lyrics (his own), jokes (a dry, dark humour) and big laughs. He has a soft, almost dreamlike way of speaking, often pausing for a while to think, often circling back. He had been awake until three that morning – sleepless about his next book – but didn’t seem tired. He was smartly dressed, with a boyish face and owlish eyes. “Dad’s family always lived in this area,” he told me as we made our way to the beach, the place of his earliest memories. When we met, Bendell was back in Totnes to care for his father, who was nearing the end of his life. He even left the Deep Adaptation Forum a couple of years back, and now lives in Indonesia, farming seaweed, writing, and playing music. Since the backlash, Bendell now rarely talks to the media. It was time, Bendell wrote, to “consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe.” That life on earth as we know it is in grave danger. As hard as “Deep Adaptation” is to read, it was a tonic for those exasperated by the failure of urgent climate action, by green-washing, by broken promises by governments, by the enduring hope in techno-salvation when it is clear that something is broken in a deeper sense. Some people, inspired by the paper, decided to quit their jobs entirely to devote themselves to the environmental movement. Suddenly, Bendell became a kind of climate celebrity, appearing alongside Greta Thunberg and Roger Hallam – a founder of XR and Just Stop Oil – at events and summits. It inspired and fed directly into the vision of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and led to the formation of a Deep Adaptation social movement, with a network of thousands across the world. Over a million people downloaded the paper (an extraordinarily high number for an academic publication), and it has now been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Hungarian, Greek and Russian.
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