From our space of practice, we offered that ESCAPE is more than an ideology: we understand it as an affective and relational neuro-biological pattern (of hopes, fears and desires) with an ideological/intellectual surface.

In this conversation, we recognized the importance of identifying ESCAPE as an issue in movements of social and global change and thanked Professor Bendell for initiating this difficult conversation in his context of work and activism.

Since the publication of the text, an on-going conversation has been enlivened between Deep Adaptation and the GTDF collective, leading to the publication of a shorter piece by Professor Bendell called Why do modern humans oppress and destroy life on Earth? And what to do about it? The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) website was mentioned in the text as a place to explore the ESCAPE ideology further. Each of these aspects is examined in more detail in the text: The Collapse of Ideology and the End of Escape. ESCAPE stands for: Entitlement, Surety (which is another word for certainty), Control, Autonomy, Progress, and Exceptionalism. On 28 June 2020, Professor Bendell published a long text outlining the problems with an ideology he called “ESCAPE” that represents pervasive desires to deny or run away from unavoidable aspects of our reality. This is not about adapting gradually to the effects of climate change, but taking into consideration that there will be abrupt transformations of our relationship with the environment (like in the case of pandemics) as we make decisions today. The deep adaptation framework encourages societies to prepare for different forms of collapse, including complete societal collapse. The Deep Adaptation Forum is a collective space for exploring the implications of a near-term societal collapse due to climate change. Since the rejected paper was published on Professor Jem Bendell’s website, it has been downloaded over half a million times. Professor Bendell’s response to the reviews can be found here. The rejection was based on evaluations of anonymous reviewers that focused on the negative emotional impact that the text could cause on the readers. This paper was rejected by the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal. In this paper Professor Bendell argues that climate-induced collapse is now inevitable. He is also a co-founder of the Deep Adaptation movement that emerged in response to a paper he wrote in 2018 entitled: Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.

Jem Bendell is a Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria (UK).

Deep Adaptation by Jem Bendell