Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy

Available freely is the public, the article Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy is a heavy read. As Vice reports, there is a growing number of people going to therapy over the latest scientifically backed scenarios regarding climate change.

As has been written on this blog, the future is bleak at best, apocalyptic at worst. And, it's probably going to lean towards to the latter.

Perhaps most disconcerting is the possibility of near-term collapse. Of short-term, cataclysmic events that trigger positive feedback mechanisms in the Earth's atmosphere, like the release of methane deposits in Siberia. These triggers could cause a domino effect, launching us into a whirlwind of weather patterns and atmospheric collapse, which in turn can end society as we know it.

The Deep Adaptation paper presents the following argument. Basically, climate change is going to happen, is happening now, and can't be stopped. So the best way to ensure our survival as a species is to begin a 'deep adaptation'. This means changing our social relations, the way we produce food and energy, and what habitats we live in. We need to do this now, before its too late. It's kind of like an environmental prepper, and eco-anarchists have been around for quite some time doing just that.

The writer of the paper, Professor Jim Bendell, has this to say,

The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war," he writes in the paper. "Our norms of behaviour – that we call our 'civilisation' – may also degrade."

"It is time," he adds, "we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today."

Should people start building bunkers and buying bulletproof vests? "There's no way of getting through this unless we try together," he says. "We need to help people stay fed and watered where they live already to reduce disruption and reduce civil unrest as much as we can." Of the Silicon Valley financiers prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand, he says: "Once money doesn't matter anymore and the armed guards are trying to feed their starving children, what do you think they'll do? The billionaires doing that are just deluded."