#deep adaptation

[doomsayersunited]

Required reading.

[drift-hobo]

How The World Drifts Gently Down

A new issue of Gentle Decline, in which I set out my expectations for exactly how the decline will go. Vaguely, and with many caveats.

Gentle Decline 2/23: Expectations & Excessions

In which I set out what I think is going to happen over the next few decades in terms of the Gentle Decline.

[minemallpokerclub]

sometimes i google wet bulb temperature and decide that it really doesn't matter if i don't get full points on my assignments.

[godsinstrument]

New IPCC Report out today confirms that anthropogenic climate change has already caused irreversible ecological damage, that at this point it is inevitable that it will get worse before it gets better, and that investments need to start being made in adaptation over mitigation. We’re all going to die.

https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg2/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf

Recommended supplementary reading:

https://lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

[zen-garden-gnome]

”Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is a collective of researchers, artists, educators, activists and Indigenous knowledge keepers from the Global North and South. [...] Our collective has been in conversation with the Deep Adaptation movement in relation to Jem Bendell’s critique of what he calls ESCAPE ideology, an acronym that stands for entitlement, surety, control, autonomy, progress and exceptionalism. The critique of ESCAPE resonates strongly with our decolonial analyses of harmful ways of knowing and being within modernity-coloniality.

However, our analysis emphasizes that ESCAPE is not simply an ideology, but a habit of being with deeper affective, relational and neurobiological dimensions, including hopes, desires and unconscious attachments, compulsions and projections that cannot be interrupted by the intellect alone.

In this on-going conversation, our collective has offered our interpretation of ESCAPE as an illustration of a modern-colonial habit of being that is arguably prevalent in climate movements of low-intensity struggle, like those mentioned in the social cartography presented earlier:

Entitlement: “Me having what I want is your responsibility” or “I demand that you/ the world give me what I want”.

Surety: “I demand certainty, to feel safe and reassured about my future, my status, my self-image and my self-importance”.

Control: “I demand to feel empowered to determine everything on my terms, including the scope and direction of change”.

Autonomy: “I demand to have unlimited choice, including the choice of not having to be accountable for the implications of my choices or my complicity in harm.”

Progress: “I demand to feel and be seen as part of the avant-garde of social change and to have my legacy recognized and celebrated.”

Exceptionalism: “I demand to feel unique, special, admired, validated and justified in demanding all of the above.”

We have also offered a set of tools called “radars for reading and being read” that can help identify patterns of ESCAPE in conversations. In addition, and in response to ESCAPE, we have created a provisional list of dispositions that might orient us away from harms reproduced through ESCAPE, and toward deepened responsibility for our shared existence on a finite planet, across species and across generations. We called it “COMPOST”:

Capacity for holding space: for painful and difficult things without feeling irritated, overwhelmed, immobilized or wanting to be coddled or rescued.

Owning up to one’s complicity and implication in harm: the harms of violence and unsustainability required to create and maintain “the world as we know it” with the pleasures, certainties and securities that we enjoy.

Maturity: to face and work on individual and collective “shit”, rather than denying or dumping it onto others, or spreading it around.

Pause of narcissistic, hedonistic and “fixing” compulsions: in order to identify, interrupt and dis-invest from harmful desires, entitlements, projections, fantasies and idealizations.

Othering our self-images and self-narratives: in order to encounter the “self beyond the self”, including the beautiful, the ugly, the broken and the fucked up in everything/everyone.

Stamina and sobriety to show up differently: to do what is needed rather than what is pleasurable, easy, comfortable, consumable and/or convenient.

Turning towards unlimited responsibility: with humility, compassion, serenity, openness, solidarity, mutuality and without investments in purity, protagonism, progress and popularity.

We propose that approaches to climate engagement should go beyond instilling hope in the continuity of the world as we know it. We need tools and practices that can support all of us to “compost” and “grow up”. We need to accept that we have contributed to the creation of the current crises, but also that we have a responsibility to “show up” differently in order to create the conditions for other possible worlds to emerge in the wake of what is dying.” -Preparing for the End of the World as We Know It

[unofficial-jointhecountdown]

[jamabushi]

The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in this world are man and his dwellings

https://washburn.edu/reference/bridge24/Hojoki.html

[blackwoolncrown]

“In pursuit of a conceptual map of “deep adaptation,” we can conceive of resilience of human societies as the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances so as to survive with valued norms and behaviours. Given that analysts are concluding that a social collapse is inevitable, the question becomes: What are the valued norms and behaviours that human societies will wish to maintain as they seek to survive? That highlights how deep adaptation will involve more than “resilience.” It brings us to a second area of this agenda, which I have named “relinquishment.” It involves people and communities letting go of certain assets, behaviours and beliefs where retaining them could make matters worse. Examples include withdrawing from coastlines, shutting down vulnerable industrial facilities, or giving up expectations for certain types of consumption. The third area can be called “restoration.” It involves people and communities rediscovering attitudes and approaches to life and organisation that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded. Examples include re-wilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support. “

The deep adaptation paper is a heavy read but I’m actually glad to read it bc at least someone is willing to cut the shit and talk sense.