It was a moment of clarity and despair that led to Professor Jem Bendell’s transformation, leaving him at the heart of a contentious new global social movement. Things were going swimmingly in Bendell’s life at the time. Back in 2012 he had been named by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.
At Cumbria University his career teaching and researching in sustainability leadership was taking off. Several homes were lost along the Bells Line of Road. Credit: Nick Moir Just shy of 40 years old he was made a full professor.
He was publishing papers in prominent journals and his two books had been well received. “I was living in a beautiful part of the world, the Lake District in the UK,” he recalls, speaking from his new home in Bali as he prepares to travel to Sydney for this weekend’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Then, while preparing for his inaugural professorial speech, Bendell dived back into the scientific literature to check in on how quickly the climate was heating, and how well our efforts were going at cutting emissions to slow the process on rates of habitat and biodiversity loss.
What he read shattered him. “I’d always thought, you know, we had the rest of the century to change, otherwise we would be in a pickle.” He began to tuck the scientific papers and new stories that bothered him most into a folder.
These were the sorts of stories many will remember. Stories about ancient frozen gasses burping from the Arctic tundra decades before scie.