After three weeks of discussing Breaking Together, yesterday Susan Harley and Zahra Sethna welcomed its author, Jem Bendell, for an insightful (and sometimes challenging) conversation about collapse, freedom, climate, spirituality, and how we move forward when old stories no longer hold up.
Thanks to everyone who joined and took part in the conversation, including Christine Mose, Pat Browne, Randolph Proksch, Rachel Wild and some new members of the community who joined us today for the very first time!
Bendell is best known for his 2018 paper on Deep Adaptation, which helped bring the language of societal collapse into broader public conversation. For many people, that paper was a rupture: a moment when climate change stopped being a future policy problem and became a personal, existential reckoning.
In Breaking Together, Bendell expands that reckoning into a broader diagnosis of modern systems — economic, ecological, political, spiritual — and asks what kinds of freedom might still be possible in an age of breakdown.
The strongest moments in the discussion came when Bendell reflected on his own journey: from working inside the world of corporate sustainability and global institutions, to questioning whether reform had any real chance of success given the scale of the metacrisis.
He spoke candidly about the assumptions that shaped his earlier career: that there was still time, that systems could be reformed step by step, and that institutions could be persuaded to do the right thing.
That part of the conversation felt especially resonant because so many people in our audience have gone through some version of that same process: i.e., believing in a system, working inside it, trying to make it better, and then, whether slowly or suddenly, realizing the system may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
One of the more interesting threads was Bendell’s critique of consensus culture — both in climate science and during COVID. He made a strong case that science suffers when dissent is demonized, especially when informed disagreement is treated as dangerous rather than necessary. That point matters far beyond climate change or public health. In almost every major field now, there are questions one is permitted to ask and questions that mark you as suspect.
Bendell’s discussion of eco-libertarianism was another important thread. He pushed back against the darker forms of environmental despair — the idea that humans are a cancer on the earth, or that the planet would be better off without us. That kind of thinking may sound like grief, but it can lead to dangerous places. Once humanity itself becomes the problem, coercion starts to look like compassion.
His alternative is to recover a view of human beings as dignified, sovereign, and capable of voluntary cooperation. The enemy is not humanity itself, but the systems that reward destruction, dependency, extraction, and disconnection.
That may have been one of the most valuable ideas in the conversation.
At the same time, some of the most interesting practical questions remained unresolved. When audience questions pressed into geoengineering, public policy, solar cooking, regenerative agriculture, or real-world examples of eco-libertarianism, the answers sometimes became more about correcting the frame than exploring the question.
To some extent, that is understandable as Bendell has clearly spent years being misrepresented, attacked, and forced into categories he rejects. Still, there were moments when the conversation seemed to brush up against something deeper — only to move away from it.
Perhaps the most honest takeaway from the conversation is that there is no single collapse response.
Some people will move to the countryside, some will build intentional communities, and some will focus on food, soil, water, and local resilience. Still others will stay in cities and live as fully, gratefully, and creatively as they can. Some will turn inward, some will organize, some will pray, while others will make music.
There might be something unsettling about that if you’re seeking hard answers and global-scale solutions. But there’s also something freeing about it, because if there is no one way to go about this, then we each have to ask ourselves: what can I actually do?
What is actually possible, honest, and necessary in the life we have? And how do we keep asking difficult questions without turning every conversation into a test of loyalty, purity, or worldview?
Those are not easy questions, but they may be the ones that matter most now.
After several weeks of heavy collapse reading, we thought we’d do something a bit more light-hearted and fun next Sunday. Please join us and bring the laughs!
