Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse

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We are far cooler than hipsters, because we are composting mainstream ways into more vital ways of bold, caring and creative living.

Data on our quality of life shows a global plateauing since 2016 and that 90% of countries have a declining quality of life. If Bendell’s 2018 Deep Adaptation paper was a disruptor, it seems to me that Breaking Together may be his patient but timely response to both his supporters and detractors – a well considered reflection on all he has learned over the intervening 5 years. So, while each action might resist authoritarian structures in different ways, they all affirm the ecolibertarian premise of social liberty – freedom within the bounds of mutual respect, interconnection, and ecological responsibility. Published by Good Works, an imprint of The Schumacher Institute, the paperback and epub will be available in June 2023.I do not have the book but read the review as none of my neighbours thought that it would be worth their while coming round for a climate assembly in the garden to discuss carbon over tea and cake. Building Intentional Communities: This is highly ecolibertarian as it promotes self-reliance, community living, and less reliance on harmful, large-scale systems. It can be as simple as neighbours gathering for singing and games, rather than being on their own watching telly. And top experts in their silos are incentivised to ignore an integrated perspective on this situation. For Bendell, the climate crisis is not simply a matter of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

So, when world leaders were on stage in New York, grandly signing off on their sustainable development goals, most of their countries had already begun their decline. Measures of human fulfilment in decline, a worldwide crisis of mental health and suicide, the soil being degraded and lost, dangerous air pollution, rampant inequality, political corruption and paralysis, billionaire capture of the news media, a pandemic, the creeping realisation of the consequences of the climate crisis. The resulting analysis is bracing, radical, and immensely helpful for those seeking to live a purposeful life in an age of societal breakdown. Scholarship on past civilisational collapses shows us it is hard to say when because societal collapse is a process – not an event.Dr Stella Nyambura Mbau, Loabowa Kenya“This book is part of a healing movement that extends beyond what we normally think of as ecological.

I mention this today as an example of how people who believe in themselves and what they are doing can make really bad choices when they are so convinced of their need to make the world a better place.Dan: When you listed the top ten prosocial actions community organizers can use to active social justice outcomes – how many of them would you categorize as ecolibertarian? Humanity’s very survival might depend on us stopping deforestation – now – as well as speeding up appropriate reforestation and agroforestry – now. Dan: Please go deeper into the subject of how critical wisdom may be attained in practice, through pathways that provide live learning experiences through real relationship building. Perhaps it's time to broaden our sources of insight and scholarship, when considering liberation and the collapse of white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, ableist systems?

I wrote to him that none of the events he might fund could occur on any of his properties and that he could not be a host, simply being a guest. Capitalists aren’t challenged by wokeness, and have incorporated it into their advertising – but I think wokeness is something that has been absorbed into the culture and into people irreversibly, especially young people, in ways that have moved us forward, and made a move to the commons more likely (we all have to work together in communities to make it happen, after all – all of us). And it teaches us it is hard to explain precisely why because collapse is always the result of multiple interacting factors.Mindfulness can be cultivated through practices like meditation, reflective journaling, and conscious dialogue with others. In Breaking Together, he lays out the evidence that collapse is now under way, and the clarity he gained by accepting that. Hands up if you have also experienced difficult emotions because of your awareness of what is happening and what is to come? The first half of the book is devoted to the evidence for the present-day breaking-down of 7 foundations upon which Bendell says contemporary industrial consumer societies sit: their economic and monetary systems; their energy use; the biosphere and the climate; their food supply; and their social systems.