Last Sunday, on the Summer Solstice, Zahra from Collapse Life and I sat down for our third and final Book Chat on Jem Bendell’s Breaking Together — and it turned out to be one of the richest conversation yet. We talked about freedom, emotions, and finding beauty.
The last three chapters are Freedom in Nature, Freedom to Collapse and Grow, and Freedom from Fake Green Globalists . These are where Bendell stops building his argument and starts living inside some big questions. The writing shifts register. It becomes personal, sometimes philosophical, occasionally uncomfortable.
Freedom isn’t what we think it is
Bendell’s central claim in these chapters: most of what we call freedom is decoration. If every choice we make passes through centralised manipulated systems financial, political, informational. That we hold opinions but not leverage.
Real freedom would require alternative infrastructures, built from the ground up, owned and governed by people rather than by the few.
He courageously criticises the environmental movement itself: that the ecological crisis risks being captured by a technocratic elite. Being used to justify surveillance and control under a green banner. For Bedell who spent years inside the sustainability establishment, it’s a brave thing to say out loud.
A man who fell off his chair
The most readable section of the book comes in Chapter 12, when Bendell drops the academic register entirely and tells his own story. He collapsed — literally — at a dinner party, burning out under the weight of the work and the thinking. Friends helped him up and helped him see what he needed to let go of.
From that personal reckoning, he shares stories of others who asked the same question once they accepted that collapse was already underway:
so how do I want to live the time I have ?
Some retrained. Some built community spaces. Some simply stopped performing busyness and started becoming more present to their life.
Four questions to support that process of change.
From his Deep Adaptation framework, Bendell offers four invitations to help us live consciously in collapse :
What do we most value ?
What do we need to let go of , so as not to make things worse ?
What do we bring back from the past to help us forward ?
With what and whom can we make peace in the face of our mutual mortality ?
These aren’t rhetorical. In our conversation, they opened into real experiences — forgiveness, gratitude, estranged family members, old hurts carried too long. One of our community shared something quietly extraordinary.
Describing sitting with a wave of suicidal thought during a very dark day. But not pushing it away, and washing up on the other side to find he really did love this body, this life, this moving and working and playing.
We talked about the gift of this vulnerable share and how holding on to feelings , or being in denial is unhealthy. That emotional literacy is a necessary skill and somatic necessity to navigate these times .
Is there beauty in collapse ?
Bendell has a section in the book asking whether there is beauty in collapse. One of the most compelling arguments he makes is that the capacity to notice beauty is not a luxury or an escape, it is a form of resistance.
For Bendell there is beauty in collapse , but it is hard won beauty. It requires grief first, then a kind of unburdening. It lives in honest community, in nature, in music, in making, in learning. All bound in the sheer aliveness of paying attention as our world slips from the known into the unknown.
People who are surrounded by ugliness , manipulation and constant pressure are easier to demoralise. People who still notice beauty are harder to capture. I agree with his quietly radical claim, that aesthetic attentiveness and care is political.
This is why I bring poetry it into these spaces. Not as consolation, not as distraction, but as proof that the human capacity to find meaning doesn’t wait for better circumstances.
I mentioned how Randolph had sent me a poem that morning, to include Poets in the Threshold Series . The poem is from an early Chinese dynasty, written during its own time of hardship. It is about finding beauty. We talked about how important beauty is as an antidote to ugly authoritarianism .
About how poetry reaches across centuries to remind us that people have always faced darkness, always found some beauty inside it, always written it down.
This is what Bendell invites when he says collapse awareness, when moved through rather than buried, can be liberating.
Lampposts and what we’ve lost
The talk of beauty surprisingly took us to Victorian lampposts along the Thames. The video that went viral because it contrasts past and present utilitarian objects, lampposts . That were once made to be beautiful compared to what we have now: hideous, utilitarian, bristling with cameras.
The argument underneath it is that beauty reminds us we are creators . Strip it from public life and you strip something from how people see themselves and each other. Creativity, freedom, and the capacity to imagine alternatives are not separate things.
Bendell’s argument extends here to if the authoritarianism he warns us about takes hold. Then our freedoms will be curtailed under a green banner. That we lose more than our liberty. We will lose the creativity and innovation we’ll need most to meet our predicaments .
The lamppost is an ordinary thing, but it shows us what we are capable of if we bring beauty into our public and private spaces.
The question we keep returning to
Community. Decentralisation. Local ownership of essential systems. Bendell is for all of it, and so are we — and yet the how remains genuinely hard. Who governs ? Who protects it ? How do you trade across communities ? How do you stop a new enclosure ?
We don’t have answers. Neither does Bendell, entirely. But the honest position is that there won’t be one answer — the whole point of decentralisation is that it looks different everywhere, shaped by land, by people, by what’s already there. That messiness might be exactly the freedom.
In conclusion as Bendell see collapse as underway …
The old systems are centralized, brittle, and increasingly coercive. The next thing, will not be neat or formulaic. It will be local, partial, imperfect, experimental, and probably messy. It may take generations to rebuild the kinds of trust, trade, skill, and governance that modern systems have hollowed out.
But the alternative is to remain a passive audience while collapse is managed for us.
Living fully in the ruins
This is the main invitation I found in Breaking Together which is a truly impressive book. Not to agree with every argument, adopt every spiritual or political conclusion, or pretend that collapse can be made gently if only everyone becomes kinder. But to stop waiting for permission to think, speak, build, forgive, prepare, notice beauty, recover skills, reduce dependency, and live more honestly inside the world as it is.
By fully experiencing the sadness and despair , Bendell realised he wanted to “live to the max” in a new context. Collapse for him, is not the end of meaning, but a clarifying lens. A stripping away of what is false and making what remains more vivid.
Let me know your responses to this post, the conversation and the questions you would like to ask Jem Bendell.
Jem will be with us this Sunday 28th June at 17.30 UK in BOOK CHAT. He doesn’t do many interviews or give many talks these days. He preserves his time for what makes his life richer, music, meditation , time with friends and his work on regenerative farming. So do join us and send any questions if you can’t make it.
With Love and Solidarity,
Announcements and links :-
I will be on Robin Motzer Wildlands on Wednesday the 8th July 9.am Central and 3pm UK
Margaret Anna Alice in Courageous Conversation on Friday 17th July at 17.30 UK and 09.30 PST
Sarah Wilson is coming on BOOK CHAT 19th July to talk about her stunning new book ‘I Eat The Stars’
Thank you to everyone who joined in the LIVE and for being here.
