I suppose if one only stuck a toe into the literature of climate change, into its factual evidence, its numbers, into its long-form meditations and its day-to-day reportage, one might still be able to manage some deflection. One might still be able to push what it has to say into a corner to be visited only now and then. Put in a half of foot, however, and compartmentalization becomes almost impossible. We face a moral crisis of shattering proportions.

Here’s what some environmental activists are arguing about these days: Is societal collapse inevitable, and therefore, is our time best spent in moral and practical preparation for that collapse; or are we capable of some great transformation at the most fundamental levels–transformation of our myths and metaphors, of the way we think and the way we live? It sobers one to the bone just to grasp that this question isn’t being raised in some dystopian novel or film, one step away from nightmare, in an aesthetic practice of venting and processing. It’s being raised in the terms of a rational debate.

Earlier this year, Jeremy Lent, the author of The Patterning Instinct who I’ve mentioned several times at this blog, took issue with Jem Bendell, the writer of “Deep Adaptation: A map for navigating the climate tragedy,” a concept paper published last year that has since been downloaded many tens of thousands of times. In this paper Bendell argued that the resilience of our current systems cannot be assumed and that their breakdown is already unfolding and inevitable. He created a forum to explore what changes, personal and collective, “might help us prepare for–and live with–a climate-induced collapse of our societies.” Lent found much common ground with Bendell but pushed back on the notion of inevitability. That sort of hopelessness would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Lent argued.

My purpose here is to call attention to their exchange. My summary sentences don’t do it justice, and it drew notice and comment in other online locales. There are several ways to follow it, but this was my path:

“Hope and Vision in the Face of Collapse — The 4th R of Deep Adaptation” — a January summary by Bendell of his initial paper with an extended discussion of his concepts of “reconciliation” and “radical hope.”

“The Love in Deep Adaptation — A Philosophy for the Forum” — a March post by Bendell and Katie Carr that makes clear that Deep Adaptation is not a call for going off-grid with a stockpile of weapons.

“What Will You Say to Your Grandchildren?” — Lent’s April essay pushes back against Deep Adaptation and poses, instead, Deep Transformation.

“Responding to Green Positivity Critiques of Deep Adaptation” — Bendell answers Lent the next day. This post includes all of Lent’s post with responses interspersed between passages.

“Our Actions Create the Future: A Response to Jem Bendell” — Lent follows up to Bendell’s response and includes a selected bibliography on civilizational collapse.

(Here is a link to Bendell’s complete Deep Adaptation paper, which I have not yet read in full.)

It’s best to read the exchange for oneself, but I’ll offer an observation. I was struck how much Lent and Bendell share in common in terms of fundamental orientation. Both have a “systems view of life,” to use Fritjof Capra’a and Pier Luigi Luisi’s phrase. This is explicit in Lent’s work. The Patterning Instinct begins with a preface by Capra, and one of its themes is the “remarkable correspondence” between what the West called Neo-Confucianism in Song-era China and “modern findings in systems and complexity science.” These findings emphasize “how self-organized systems are fractally embedded within one another” and “the intrinsic interdependency of all living systems” (252, 371).

I’m less familiar with Bendell’s thinking, but claims he makes in the posts above align with the systems view. We suffer from the “delusion” of separateness, he writes. We haven’t regarded “rivers, soils, forests and fields as part of ourselves.” This “othering” of nature, of a piece with the othering of people, has justified “exploitation, discrimination, hostility, violence, and rampant consumption.” Elsewhere he writes that “wisdom traditions” and “contemporary physics” tell us that “we are co-creating our reality with others, the material and ineffable dimensions in ways that we can never fully comprehend.” These are basics of the systems view. Lent wouldn’t disagree.

It is on this last point, however–the point about the co-creation of reality–that Lent intervenes. Maybe we can’t fully comprehend the ways in which we co-create our “material and ineffable dimensions,” but we do know that these dimensions are intrinsically coupled. “Human society itself,” Lent writes in his second response to Bendell,

is really two tightly interconnected, co-existing complex systems: a tangible system and a cognitive system. The tangible system refers to everything that can be seen and touched: a society’s technology, its physical infrastructure, and its agriculture, to name just some components. The cognitive system refers to what can’t be touched but exists in the culture: a society’s myths, core metaphors, hierarchy of values, and worldview.

The dynamic interaction of these two systems create feedback loops that “can profoundly affect each other and, consequently, the direction of society.” The attitude we take to the current crisis matters, in other words. Thinking in terms of collapse reinforces the possibility of collapse. Thinking in terms of transformation reinforces that possibility, in turn. “The only real path toward future flourishing,” Lent writes, “is one that transforms the basis of our civilization, from the current one that is extractive and wealth-based, to one that is life-affirming, based on the core principles that sustain living systems coexisting stably in natural ecologies.” Already moving in that direction are “innumerable pioneering organizations around the world.” They need our support, our membership, not our dismissal.

Why do they differ on this point? Is it that Bendell’s systems thinking is less thoroughgoing than Lent’s, or is it an understandable distrust, on Bendell’s part, that even a touch of the utopian is escapist? It may boil down to how one characterizes denial. “Green positivity,” as Bendell calls it, is in denial of the inevitability of collapse. Bendell, Lent charges, denies the possibility of a great transformation.

“What will you tell your grandchildren?” Lent asks in the title of his first post countering Bendell. He evokes the question German children asked their parents and grandparents about how and whether they took a stand against Hitler. When our grandchildren ask us about the climate crisis, Lent asks, will we be able to look them in the eyes? Bendell replies,

I will never look my grandchildren in the eyes because I decided not to have children. Many people are choosing to make this very difficult decision. One reason is that having a child in the West is the greatest contribution to carbon emissions that you could make. Another reason is the realization of the world they will have to live and die within.

I’m leaving Bendell the last word here, not necessarily because I favor his position, but because I want to recognize the skin he has in the game.

A version of this essay was published at the Society for US Intellectual History Blog.