Our “normal” was more important to keep than theirs The post starts with “it’s started”… What exactly has “started” and for whom? Blood rushes through my cheeks, I feel something else coming: the end of what “normal”? Why is this business as usual called “normal”?

In a recent post about training people to facilitate Deep Adaptation (DA) conversations, the author calls all this “ the end of normal ”. More recently, the UN warns that we may be having a climate disaster per week ! The list is endless… yet I still could sit safe in my balcony. Another (UN) report reminds me that we are already experiencing an “unprecedented” rate of species extinction and that up to 50% of the species could be extinct in only a few decades. “I’m safe here” I tell myself …and yet, a sense of urgency burns inside, a sense of uneasiness: a recent UNHR report showed that we have the highest ever number of displaced peoples: an unprecedented 70.8 million people around the world have been forced from home, with nearly 25.9 million of them being refugees most treated as a burden, put into camps or worse: into detention centers as if they were criminals, only a small percentage (usually the most privileged among them) make it to Canada, the United States or Europe. “I’m safe here” I tell myself …and yet, a sense of urgency burns inside, a sense of uneasiness These days were far away now, almost surreal, and yet, I know they are also a flight away, like when I went back home to Argentina for the first time in 15 years and remembered what “societal collapse” looked like.

I recalled the time when this was not my reality, when clothes and furniture were scarce, when water came from a well, when I ran barefoot on unpaved streets. ”Īfter finishing reading that paper, I gazed through my living room window in Surrey, Canada: children were safely playing on our middle class street, an oblivious neighbour was mowing the lawn, the spring (felt almost as summer) was glorious and I recalled that line I read more than 30 years ago from a Carl Sagan book – a line that has stayed with me all these years: “the last day on Earth will be as perfect as a summer day.” I floated, still in shock, to my kitchen: magically, the tap gave me drinking water, the power was still a switch away, I could walk to the market if I ran out of anything. Refugee camp – Image by David Mark from PixabayĪ few weeks ago, I re-read the controversial, unorthodox and courageous paper called “ Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy ”, where professor Jem Bendell shares the results of his review of the latest climate data and how he “chose to interpret the information as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction.

Jem bendell deep adaptation