Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation as Anti-Perspectivism
Discussion
Eric Schaetzle:
"The term "adaptation" means "adjusting to current or expected climate change and its effects". It requires us to ask "for who?" or "for what?" is the adjustment made. So in the context of a global market economy, "climate change adaptation" often means making the adjustments necessary to keep the extractive economy (and the wealthy class it benefits) going for as long as possible. "Mitigation" means "actions to limit global warming and its related effects". Again, for whom or what is mitigation done? Crucially, even if mitigation were only done for an extractive economy, it would still have benefits for others, even for indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, and this is because the effects of mitigation are distributed more or less equally. Adaptation can very easily be local and particular. This is what David Roberts was talking about when he said adaptation and mitigation are not morally equivalent, it has to do with the relative difference in the scale of action. Mitigation is global, planetary. Adaptation can be as small and local as one wants it to be.
Jem Bendell didn't have anything to say about these distinctions, as it seems that he was more interested in resolving the existential anxiety he and others felt concerning the future by means of a faulty argument. His paper "Deep Adaptation" (2020 revision to his 2018 paper) states: "For many years, discussions and initiatives on adaptation to climate change were seen by environmental activists and policymakers as unhelpful to the necessary focus on carbon emissions reductions. That view finally changed in 2010... the mainstream climate policy community now recognises the need to work much more on adaptation." But this was not enough, it was still "nearly all focused on physical adaptation" and not on producing the psychological and cultural shift in perspective he thought was necessary. He was right about this. The humanities and social sciences still have much to teach us about our interactions with the global community of life. But rather than a better understanding of psychology, he had one particular perspective in mind. What he saw necessary was a need to overcome our "implicate denial" of "inevitabile near-term social collapse" (and presumably human extinction). For Bendell, this necessarily framed adaptation as being opposed to the utter hopelessness of mitigation efforts. And whether recognized or not, this sort of framing has become implicitly accepted for many. It resonates very well with the Western black-and-white view of the world. You may recall the recent "Planet of the Humans" film by Jeff Gibbs, which was similarly reflected a dismal view of mitigation, and was quickly taken to task for its omissions in numerous reviews. These are all recent tangents of a long, ongoing dialogue between advocates of differing future pathways (see also degrowth, ecomodernism, etc.).
Now adaptation is a culturally loaded term. But if we set aside the overt "doomer" framing it has taken on, it still does have a standard, usefully limited definition as used within the scientific community. We can recall that the IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change. The recently released IPCC AR6 Working Group 1 SPM states: "If global net-negative CO2 emissions were to be achieved and be sustained, the global CO2-induced surface temperature increase would be gradually reversed..." Mitigation may not be utterly hopeless under all scenarios. This is a point Michael Mann has been trying to get across recently as well, in part to overcome the tendency people have to fall into either the illusion of human invincibility or (more recently) that of human extinction. In our polarized culture, little room is allowed for doubt and nuance, for the reciprocal interaction of multiple perspectives, and the consequence is that the uncertainty of the future and the possibility of change is often unrecognized and underappreciated. So why might Bendell, or anyone else, want to eliminate uncertainty? There are definitely some psychological advantages to doing so. If we can prematurely foreclose a pathway for mitigation then we are released from the anxiety of uncertainty, and free to fully commit ourselves to the only remaining perspective on the future. Anxiety is a major theme within existential psychotherapy, and it is unsurprisingly increasing today. Bendell, as existential therapist, is giving us permission to stop fighting climate change, start accepting "inevitability", and this gives us a clear focus and purpose. Although he uses the language of social change and personal transformation, it is in the service of this single, inevitable, and unscientific point of view he promotes.
There have always been dogmatic pronouncements regarding the future. The activist community has been done a grave disservice with the advocacy of relinquishment to a narrow perspective on climate change. This group is particularly vulnerable due to preexisting high levels of existential anxiety. As has been mentioned before, mitigation and adaptation can be viewed on a continuum, or represented with a Venn diagram, with various actions forming numerous points of overlap in the middle. Preventing causes of climate disruption, and responding to the effects of disruption, are not always distinct processes. "Deep adaptation" is not so much a scientifically supported course of action so much as a psychologically motivated response to existential anxiety, and an unhealthy one that operates by claiming absolute certainty (or close to it), and ignoring important context and the counter-evidence provided by reputable sources. But these dynamics are not new, nor will they cease from occurring in the future. While we can learn a great deal from paleoclimatic evidence, we also know that the future will not be a repeat of the past due to substantial contextual differences, and that a realistic assessment will allow room for uncertainty and divergent pathways. For this reason it is important to contrast Bendell with the views of those like Mann and the IPCC, who acknowledge more than one perspective on an open future, while being aware of the current dangerous trend. We must identify the faulty reasoning that contributes to a closed future and a subsequent narrowing of our scope of action from the planet (Gaia), where globally coordinated adaptation and mitigation are functionally identical processes, to that of isolated nations, communities, or individuals, where adaptation is often conceived as a local phenomenon in response to the impacts of a climate system whose trajectory is largely outside our scope of action. Action must be on all levels, acknowledge all possible pathways, and advocate for those that accord with a multi-perspectival view of climate justice. At the same time we must work to identify and distance ourselves from those regions in the "adjacent possible" that could lead to greater harm. It's a tough job, and activists should be very cautious regarding any person or organization that would try to undermine it. There are better ways to relieve existential anxiety. Returning to David Roberts, he ended his article stating: "In short, mitigation is fighting for attention and dollars against much mightier foes like Indifference and Narrow Self-Interest. It needs all the help it can get." In a world feeling increasing existential anxiety, self-interest motivated by fear is rising, this serves to constrict our circle of empathy, reduce the scale of action at which we think and operate. Ultimately it narrows our perspectives, making it much more difficult to transform our society and confront the economic system that brought us to this point.
If we look at the social media presence of Deep Adaptation, their Facebook group has a pinned link to the "DA rules and guidelines". These clearly state "We discourage posts about “mitigation” – such as cutting carbon emissions or the drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere – as our focus is on adaptation." No matter what our opinions may be about this distinction, and whether drawing such lines should steer the course of discussion, their group leaders and moderators have already taken their cue from Bendell. That doesn't invalidate some of the very useful information and collaboration efforts that gets shared and engaged in by most of the well intentioned, very intelligent people who frequent these groups. And I would say the same thing about any social organization that serves multiple community needs. (Religious organizations, for example, may promote many false ideas while still serving important community functions.) The climate of the Holocene will not return within the lifetime of anyone around today, and for many regions there may be no feasible adaptive response that would permit habitation. This has long been the accepted reality for activists, who are well aware that "perfectionism" is not the name of the game. Such a view was recently put into words by Claudia Tebaldi, a lead author of the sixth Assessment report of the IPCC (in Working Group 1). As she said, “Things are going to change for the worse. But they can change less for the worse than they would have, if we are able to limit our footprint now. Every little bit counts.” Paleoclimates are extremely useful metaphors (we must make use of these!), benchmarks to compare our current changes with, and have enormous rhetorical advantages for persuading action on mitigation and adaptation. Nonetheless, we need to maintain awareness of the cultural context in which we live today, specifically the tendency to narrow perspectival scope and reduce contextual depth in response to anxiety. This subtle influence still goes largely unrecognized.
A 'new language' can help to provide additional ideas, and there are certainly some concepts, such as 'ghehds' as described by Glenn Albrecht, for which words do not exist or are not yet widely known. But if we want to transcend distinctions and resolve specific relationships among concepts that remain obscure, what is needed is the ability to think more in terms of the conceptual structuring of ideas, using integrative levels, spatiotemporal depth, prioritization, continua, and network visualization (Venn diagrams, to cite an earlier example). That way, rather than seeing a loose collection of ideas, we view how our existing ideas, such as adaptation and mitigation, are related to each other and build upon one another. We can then see them more easily in their proper context, provide the missing perspective, and identify where there may be a need for new concepts and words to fill gaps. Recall that Donella Meadows was talking about just these processes when she referred to levels of "intervening in a system" and an "order of effectiveness" in her leverage points paper. This is obviously important. Taking action at a more effective level, with a greater scope of action, might save more lives than when intervening at a lower and narrower level. Such tools are indispensable for assessing our available choices for action. Novelty in language has its advantages, but it can also be a stumbling block for reaching broad audiences and lead to confusion. It's here where the advantages of structuring ideas may be most clear. It allows us to get more mileage out of our existing 'plain language' without the need for adding neologisms, technical jargon, reappropriated terms, etc. unless absolutely necessary."