deep adaptation

English

Alternative forms

• Deep Adaptation

Etymology

Coined by British researcher and academic Jem Bendell in 2018, perhaps modeled after deep ecology etc.

Noun

deep adaptation (uncountable)

1. A concept, agenda, and international social movement to confront societal collapse caused by climate change.
   • 2019 November 22, Nafeez Ahmed, “The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun”, in Vice‎^[1]:

     “Deep Adaptation has become an international movement now, with people mobilizing to share their grief, discuss what to commit to going forward, become activists, start growing food, all kinds of things.”

   • 2020 December 26, Jonah E. Bromwich, “The Darkest Timeline”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN:

     One criticism that emerged of Deep Adaptation more specifically was that this vague forthcoming disaster that Mr. Bendell was describing was already happening to many people — just not yet to the Western academics, bankers and journalists whose interests he had piqued.

   • 2021 May 17, Susanna Rustin, “How we talk about the climate crisis is increasingly crucial to tackling it”, in The Guardian‎^[3], →ISSN:

     Another is the British academic Jem Bendell, who advocates an approach he describes as “deep adaptation” to an anticipated “societal collapse”.

   • 2023, Joel Jay Kassiola, Timothy W. Luke, editors, The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 102:

     Deep adaptation strategies also seem imperative to their advocates, because concerned climatologists and environmental activists today are deeply distraught over the prospects of limiting global warming to 1.5 over preindustrial temperature levels.

See also

• collapsology
• doomism

Further reading

• Deep Adaptation on Wikipedia.Wikipedia