Ed. note: This post is excerpted from Chapter 3 of the book Transformative Adaptation, written by Rupert Read and Morgan Phillips, with Manda Scott, and published by Permanent Publications.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) has done fantastic work moving the dial on the ecological emergency. Meanwhile, the Transition Towns movement, regenerative agriculture and permaculture have long been working on the ground to seek the changes we need, bottom-up. Is there a way to bring these two approaches together?
XR’s approach to the long emergency, like virtually everyone else’s in the ‘environmental’ movement (including strikingly Just Stop Oil’s), has focussed to date on so-called ‘mitigation’ – on reducing climate/eco damage (ideally, to zero) by reducing emissions and habitat destruction, by putting pressure on the government to act.
This is quite simply no longer tenable as the sole or even main objective. Too little time is left; and government (and the system) is too profoundly resistant to doing the right thing. Trying to fill the jail cells (with a diminishing number of activists who are willing to do so) isn’t enough; and ‘mitigation’ in its technical sense just is not a sufficiently encompassing objective.
Many of us have been aware of this for some time — and this awareness can no longer be kept at bay. The ‘Theory of Change’ the radical flank has been using is not enough.
We need to embody the transformation that we aim to bring. We need to be fully addressing the crisis, which has gone too far to be addressed through ‘top down’ measures alone.
It is far too late for ‘mitigation’ alone; we need to make adaptation, often in the form of bottom-up action, central, too. Adaptation comes in three forms:
Shallow Adaptation, e.g. building higher sea walls. This involves no significant psychological change, just business as usual while trying to cope with a deteriorating world. (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls this ‘incremental adaptation’.)
Transformative Adaptation (aka ‘TrAd’), e.g. restoring wetlands/mangroves, using appropriate technology, living closer to the land. Transformative Adaptation is transformative because it is the route to system change. It requires willingness to undertake major psychological adjustments away from what has been ‘normal’. The IPCC calls this ‘transformational adaptation’, though what is meant by this phrase is often more modest than what we have in mind as TrAd. Part of the motivation for organising through the lens of Transformative Adaptation is to turn this inspiring phrase into a reality worthy of it.
Deep Adaptation, e.g. moving coastal cities inland and reducing their scale. Deep Adaptation is adaptation to collapse. To a future where our existing society is going to be swept away. It requires massive psychological adjustments.
I am strongly in favour of Deep Adaptation, which I regard as an essential hedge, a crucial precaution, and so I have co-edited a book with Jem Bendell on it. But on its own it is not enough. It might even run the risk of being a self-fulfilling counsel of doom.
The Three Forms of Adaptation Compared
Shallow / merely incremental adaptation is worse than useless on its own, because it pretends we can keep this civilisation stumbling on as is without real change. We can’t. The longer we try to do so, the further we go off the cliff.
Deep Adaptation (DA) is necessary: but I hold that it should be viewed as an insurance policy against worst-case scenarios, not as the whole goal/programme. In particular, it risks debilitatingly assuming, with a knowingness that we cannot (yet!) know is justified, that collapse is definitely coming. DA works best if conceived rather as in alliance with TrAd. DA is then taking precautions against a possible / likely (not certain) collapse.
Transformative Adaptation (TrAd), as reconceived and emboldened here (building on the origins of the concept in academia, the UN, and the work of the Green House think tank – see our edited book, Facing up to Climate Reality), breaks new ground in being potentially willing to use NVDA (Non-violent Direct Action) protectively as a tool in pursuit of these aims where appropriate, one (key) tool among others.
Both Transformative and Deep Adaptation make it essential that we confront what I call ‘the great sorrow’. It is too late to accomplish what my teacher, Joanna Macy, calls The Great Turning, even on an ‘emergency’ basis, in a way that will prevent great suffering. Great suffering is coming. Actually, it has obviously started and far more is coming. This is certain because of the onward momentum of the system we have and the bad feedbacks to some extent already baked into the planetary system.
A Vision For This
Civilisational decline – the ending of this civilisation – is inevitable. That future is already here only it’s not evenly distributed, yet …
In other words, some parts of the Global South are already experiencing collapse. The extremely hard task is to help each other morph gracefully into a better civilisation as we undergo energy descent. That process (which is very likely at some point to proceed via civilisational collapse, but doesn’t yet have to) will primarily be a process of adaptive relocalisation; a process that might have been to some extent jump-started by Covid. This is Transformative Adaptation.
TrAd is a win-win-win: we mitigate the effects of dangerous climate change, we work with Nature not against her, and we transform society in the direction it needs to transform anyway. TrAd enables us to cope with the deterioration that is already baked in while potentially improving our society and our future.
If we pull this off without collapsing altogether, then we get to keep the best of what we have (including global communications interconnectivity) while rebuilding community and insuring ourselves against over-dependence on long, uncertain, polluting supply lines.
With TrAd-centred ‘glocalisation’, our world can be the best of both worlds!
TrAd goes ‘back to the future’ – it returns us to aspects of traditional life that should never have been abandoned, while keeping those features of life today that ought not be lost and that are completely compatible with One Planet Living.
If necessary, we can (and will) do this for ourselves; we have to try.
You can find out more about the book here.
