DOOMSDAYWhat to Expect When You’re Expecting the End of the World
Jem Bendell predicted that society would collapse because of climate change. Then he tried to get on with his life.
This story is part of the Grist series Doom/Mood exploring what the rise of doomerism means for our personal lives and the prospect of climate action more broadly.
em Bendell had postponed his personal crisis long enough. For years, he’d been setting aside the worrying news about climate change he came across in a folder on his computer, waiting until he had the time (and emotional capacity) to look at it. In 2017, he took leave from his job as a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, in the United Kingdom, to finally dive in. He read that melting permafrost was releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that speeds up warming — which in turn, melts more permafrost. It was a dangerous feedback loop that he had learned about as a student at Cambridge in the 1990s and had been told would likely start in 2050, if climate change went unchecked. Unfortunately, it arrived early.
Bendell read more and more about unprecedented floods, devastating forest fires, and vanishing Arctic sea ice. It was all happening too fast. He became convinced that the rich world’s way of life — year-round strawberries, next-day delivery, flights across oceans — was nearing its end. That meant his life’s work had been, in his words, “all a bit deluded.” He’d just spent two decades arguing that businesses could help fix environmental problems and heal the flaws of capitalism, writing books, organizing international conferences, and teaching MBA courses on corporate sustainability. That had left little time for his family, his health, and, you know, having fun. All those sacrifices, and for what?
“I felt raw, cracked open by all of this,” Bendell said, “and I had lost my previous sense of identity and purpose.”
So he tried to fill the cracks with something else, searching for meaning in a world that felt like it was coming apart. Bendell channeled his thoughts into a paper he self-published online in July 2018, titled “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” Normally, when people talked about adapting to climate change, they’d been looking for solutions that would allow their current way of life to continue. Bendell, instead, started from the premise that people will have to give up a lot, posing the question, “What do we value most that we want to keep, and how?”
