In 2019, I was sitting at a desk on the 13th floor of an office building in Tokyo. I was three months into an internship with the architect Kengo Kuma, which was supposed to be the beginning of my career. Then a friend sent me a link. It took me to a 25-page essay by a professor called Jem Bendell, and by the time I finished reading it, something deep had shifted inside me.
Jem spent years working in corporate sustainability, in the boardrooms of major companies, convinced that working with business was the path forward. Then in 2018 he took a year off to read the climate science properly. Not the headlines. Not the summaries. The raw data. What he found was so different from the story the world was being told that he felt he had no choice but to write it down and publish it. That paper, called Deep Adaptation, has now been downloaded more than a million times. It helped inspire Extinction Rebellion. It changed the course of many people’s lives.
Mine included.
This is the first time I have spoken publicly about reading that paper and what it did to me. Becoming what Jem calls “collapse aware” did not send me into a pit of despair, though there were a couple of challenging years. Instead it asked me a question I had never seriously considered: if the future I had been promised is no longer guaranteed, what is actually worth living for? I left architecture. I shifted my skills to focus on resilience and regeneration – that led to the birth of Juntos Farm and a whole new life in food, farming and community building. None of that would have happened without the nudge that came from reading Jems Deep Adaptations paper.
This conversation does not stop at the hard stuff. We talk about what collapse has looked like throughout history, and what might exist on the other side of it. We talk about community, about spirituality, about the two years I spent in struggling with my mental health and how I found my way through. Jem is warm, funny, and unexpectedly full of life for someone who has spent the better part of a decade thinking seriously about the end of the world as we know it.
If this is a topic you have been carrying quietly, I hope this conversation feels like company. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
With love,
Finn