DOUGALD HINE

Tag: climate

  • Notes From Underground

    Following my departure from Dark Mountain in the summer of 2019, I joined the Scottish online magazine Bella Caledonia as a contributing editor. This offered a home for an essay series that became a journey into the deep context of the new climate movements: the school strikes that started outside the Swedish parliament, Extinction Rebellion closing down bridges and junctions across London, the conversations started by Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper and David Wallace Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.

    Notes From Underground is not a celebration or a critique of these movements, but an invitation to a quieter reflection on where all this is coming from, what it might tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves.

    After writing ten essays in three months, I took a break – and the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic meant this break extended longer than I’d anticipated – but the series will return in the autumn of 2020.

    Meanwhile, you can listen to the podcast version of the first set of essays here – or read them on Bella Caledonia.

  • The role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change

    In 2015-16, I had the opportunity to spend two years working with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, as leader of artistic and audience development. Part of my brief was to bring together practitioners from within and beyond the world of the performance arts to explore the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change.

    My starting point was to reject the basis on which artists are generally invited to collaborate in projects about climate change: however this is worded, it tends to come down to helping ‘deliver the message’. The result almost always fails – both as art and as political communication – because art isn’t a sophisticated extension of the public relations department or a cheap alternative to an advertising agency.

    One of the fruits of this work was a list of the roles that art might sometimes play. I wrote this up in the context of a longer essay for Dark Mountain, ‘You Want It Darker’, but during this week’s Transformative Imagination workshop with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, I realised that it might be useful to present this unfinished list on its own terms, as a contribution to conversations that seek to get beyond the old binary of ‘instrumentalisation’ vs ‘art for art’s sake’. So here it is:

    1. Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us.
    2. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down.
    3. Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone.
    4. Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’.
    5. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control.
    6. Art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.

    (Thanks to Måns Lagerlöf for making the unlikely decision to bring me to work at Riksteatern – and to all the members of the Dark Mountain Workshop which I ran there and the guests who joined us in those conversations.)

  • Negotiating the Surrender

    Negotiating the Surrender

    The place looks like an Italian monastery, all cloistered gardens and red-tiled rooftops. On a bright spring day you can get caught off-guard: stepping out onto the open walkway that links one building to another, you find the air two seasons colder than the view from the windows seemed to promise. We are a long way north of the Alps, in the small lakeside town of Sigtuna, thirty miles outside Stockholm.

    There are advantages to the location. A few weeks after I moved to Sweden, we had a friend passing through, one of the fiercest activists I ever knew, whose work has run from hacking together networks for the Syrian resistance to fighting for transgender people’s right to exist. As we sat together in a patch of sunshine on a chilly April morning, she stretched her arms and sighed: ‘This is the one place I come where it feels like I’m back from the frontline.’ No country is without its frontlines, but two centuries of neutrality have given Sweden a sense of peace that is striking by comparison to most corners of the world, and nowhere more so than in Sigtuna, a town whose street plan hasn’t changed in a thousand years. In an upper room of one of the wooden houses that line its main street, in 1942, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer held secret meetings with George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, bringing news to the Allies from the German Resistance of its plot to overthrow Hitler.

    For a hundred years, the cloistered buildings of the Sigtuna Foundation have been a place of meetings between worlds, where artists and priests and scientists gather on neutral ground. The Climate Existence conference belongs to this tradition: a gathering where the facts of climate change are not kept at arm’s length, where we grapple with the ways that we are changed by what we know. This latest meeting took place over three days, and though it was only the start of May and the leaves had not long been on the trees, the temperature was rising to match the architecture, the first taste of a relentless summer when forests would burn and wells run dry.

    At the end of the first day, Kevin Anderson took to the stage, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre. Before he was a climate scientist, Kevin built oil rigs for a living, and he has the bluntness of an engineer, together with the moral clarity of a man who hasn’t flown in many years, rejecting the logic of many in his field who justify their carbon footprints on the grounds of the importance of their work. His message was stark: to have a chance of meeting the goal agreed by governments in Paris, to keep climate change within a limit of two degrees, impossible things need to happen. Things beyond the bounds of what even the most progressive elements in mainstream politics have been willing to contemplate, even on their best days, over the past thirty years. The less bad news, he went on, is that a lot of things have happened over the past decade that weren’t meant to be possible – and he listed the banking crash, the Arab Spring, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the election of Donald Trump. The point is not whether we would welcome these developments, whether they represent a move in the right direction, but what they tell us about the nature of the times in which we are living: these are times in which impossible things happen, things which all the sensible voices whose job it is to tell us how the world works were busy telling us couldn’t happen until they did, and in this there lies a dark vein of hope.

    As I listened, I thought of something Vanessa Andreotti – professor of race, inequalities and global change at the University of British Columbia – had told us earlier that day. They have a saying where she comes from in Brazil: ‘When there’s a flood coming and the water’s at your ankles, you can’t swim. When the water gets to your knees, you still can’t swim. But when the water reaches your butt, it’s time to start swimming.’ When things get bad enough, types of action that were previously impossible become possible.

    These two thoughts about impossibility set me wondering: whereabouts in our societies is the water high enough already to start swimming? Because when it comes to climate change, it can still seem like it’s only lapping at our ankles. Even against the backdrop of the fires and the drought, the conversations I heard in supermarkets and at family gatherings last summer were mostly: ‘Isn’t the weather amazing?’ and ‘Don’t the farmers moan a lot?’ and ‘The government ought to buy more of those firefighting planes so we don’t have to keep borrowing them from Italy!’

    If I had to guess where the waters are highest, I’d say it’s places like loneliness, mental health among young people, technology addiction. And of course, compared to what climate change means right now in Kiribati or Mozambique, these are the very definition of ‘first world problems’: crises of meaning, rather than ‘existential crises’ in the literal sense of the ability to subsist.

    But what I’m asking is, where are the sources from which ‘impossible’ change might come, the points where things are bad enough right now in the societies whose ways of living need to change most in the next few years, if the worst of climate change is to be averted? And my hunch is that the answer might lie somewhere other than the obvious places in which action around climate and behaviour change tends to focus.

    *   *   *

    17 November, 2018. I’m watching footage shot on camera phones. Against a backdrop of famous monuments, protesters bring traffic to a halt, interrupting the business-as-usual of Saturday in a capital city.

    The images come from both sides of the Channel. There’s something uncanny about the emergence on the same day of these two movements, Extinction Rebellion and the Gilets Jaunes, the similarity of tactics, even the aesthetic coincidence of the fluorescent colours, the yellow vests in Paris and the yellow, green and pink flags on London’s bridges. At first glance, they look like mirror opposites, two sides ranged against each other in the battle for the future – and, as George Monbiot points out, the BBC is far more generous in its coverage of French activists protesting fuel price rises than British activists protesting climate change.

    Yet there are other lessons here. The carbon tax on diesel may have been the last straw for the French protesters, but there had been plenty of other straws. When market incentives are employed to tackle climate change, they tend to fall hardest on the people already getting the hard end of the deal in a market society, whether at a national or an international level. William Davies calls neoliberalism ‘the disenchantment of politics by economics’ – an attempt to get the processes of measurement, competition and price to do the work of remaking society, without the qualitative judgements and collective decisions of politics – and in this sense, what went up in smoke in Paris was the fantasy of green neoliberalism. This is where the third demand of Extinction Rebellion comes in: a serious response to the climate emergency will require a radical democratic process, a transformation of our way of living in which we participate as citizens, not just as consumers.

    The shared tactic of the roadblock already points in this direction, insisting on the urgent need to slow down, to bring the rush of business-as-usual to a halt, so that we can start to have a real conversation about how we are going to live, how we are going to change our lives, given what we know about the mess in which we find ourselves.

    *   *   *

    There’s a clickbait ad that keeps appearing in my Facebook feed for an organisation that wants to plant eight billion trees. I haven’t checked them out, but let’s assume that the people behind it are for real, that they are as scared as you and me by what is happening with the climate and that their over-simple story about how we can fix things is offered in good faith. What gets me is their idea of hope. Because, after a vivid account of the future towards which we are headed, they offer this proposition: if only we plant more trees, then ‘instead of the post-apocalyptic dystopia… everything continues as usual.’

    In this morning’s news, there’s a report that the number of young people in the UK who say ‘life is not worth living’ has doubled since 2009. It now stands at almost one in five.

    Think of the word ‘sustainability’. Whatever it once meant, it ends up meaning the project of sustaining as much as possible of our current way of living, only with wind turbines and electric cars. Like the commentators caught off-guard by Brexit and Trump, the mainstream proponents of sustainability fail to grasp how limited is the appeal of ‘everything continues as usual’.

    *   *   *

    When I think about what is at stake now, there’s a phrase that keeps coming back: this is about negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living.

    How much of the economic activity that you see around you could just go, overnight, and no one would honestly miss it, if this could happen without anyone going hungry or homeless as a consequence? Of course, that’s a huge if, especially when – as in the UK – rough sleeping and dependence on food banks have already been rising for years. Yet this is what a surrender looks like: it’s about how much of the organised activity of a society can be decommissioned, not by 2050 or 2030, or even 2025, but as soon as possible. The fact that, as David Graeber found when he wrote about ‘bullshit jobs’, much of the activity that shows up as GDP is widely recognised as pointless, including by those carrying it out, is one of the hidden assets here.

    To negotiate a surrender, you need a credible threat – and this is where the movement that began in London last November might look again at its strange twin across the Channel. Clearly, Extinction Rebellion would not seek the edge of chaos which drew so much attention to the Gilets Jaunes. Yet if this is truly a rebellion, then – in its own non-violent way – it needs to carry the kind of threat to the existing order that forced Macron to back down. When the big NGOs start talking about ‘the next wave of climate change protests’, we should be alarmed, because if that’s all this is, it will achieve as little as the waves that went before.

    Yet there is another side to negotiating a surrender. The militancy that brings the existing order into question needs to be matched by the quiet places of conversation, away from the frontlines, where unlikely partners enter into dialogue. This is the story of peace negotiations everywhere. It is also the spirit of the campaigners in the Irish referendum on abortion who were willing, as Fintan O’Toole writes, to ‘talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody’.

    Finally, if this is a surrender, it’s a strange one, for there are no victors here. We are not equally implicated, for sure – but we know that it is our way of living that must be surrendered, and not only the lifestyles of Macron and his friends in the Davos set. Recognising this, we might set the insights of military strategists and peacemakers alongside the understandings of surrender to be found in spiritual traditions or in the treatment of addiction. Between them, they could tell us that to surrender is to give up, to be humbled, perhaps humiliated, but with a chance – not a guarantee – that we may live to tell the tale. 

    First published in This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook (Penguin, 2019).

  • After We Stop Pretending

    After We Stop Pretending

    The setting could so easily seduce you. Painted wooden houses line three sides of a square of grass: the red house, the white house and the low wooden barn between them where the bunk rooms are. On the fourth side, the slope falls away, past the village library, past the station house and the railway tracks to the lake. A strip of an island a hundred yards offshore, then miles of water stretching to a wooded horizon.

    The first clue that something is wrong should be the colour of the grass: dead-yellow already in the first days of June. No rain for weeks. The radio says we had the hottest May in over 250 years, but seeing as the oldest continuous temperature records anywhere began in Stockholm in the 1750s, you can probably stick a few zeros on that figure.

    Now look again at the island – the one in the photograph on the homepage for this school called HOME – and see how it changes when I tell you that the scatter of low buildings by the jetty is the oldest preserved oil refinery in the world, the soil still poisoned from spills before our grandparents were born. This is where we meet, in a landscape whose beauty is haunted by a history of extraction. Whatever else there may be to say, this is the background against which our voices rise and fall.

    A train pulls into the platform. Among the passengers who disembark, there are a number wearing rucksacks, looking around to find their bearings. They take in the lake and the island and the hostel on the hill. Together, they begin the short climb that leads to where we are standing, and, with their arrival, something shifts: this school, which has so far been a story Anna and I are telling, becomes something larger, messier and more substantial. For the next few days, in these borrowed buildings, it will be a place where our ideas and fears and longings get tangled up with those of the people who have taken up our invitation, an invitation to ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of re-growing a living culture.’

    * * *

    One member of the group that week stands out in my memory. Fran is not the loudest presence; a large, gentle man in his early forties, he can be humble almost to a fault, yet there is a steadiness that marks him out. Here’s what I think it is: out of the whole group, he is the only one who hasn’t come alone. I mean, he made the journey solo, sleeping on overnight coaches, but he was able to do this thanks to the support of dozens of people who chipped in to crowdfund his way to Sweden – and so he arrives with a small village at his back, a community to which he already had to explain what was calling him here, and by which he is held. Sometimes in the sessions, I can see their faces leaning in over his shoulder.

    A few months later, I’m planning a trip to England when I get a message from Fran: would I like to come and visit his hometown and give a talk? So that’s how the two of us end up sitting on this low stage in an arts space in Stroud, along with our hosts, Emily and Ali; the four of us watching as the seats fill up and the queue stretches out the door, hoping we don’t end up having to turn people away. Looking out at this crowd, I’m guessing a good few of Fran’s villagers are in the house tonight.

    Well, it seems the folks without seats are happy to stand at the bar, and the whole room listens intently over the next two hours as we talk about what it might mean to take seriously the question with which the invitation to our school began: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’ I talk about things I’ve learned over the past decade with Dark Mountain: about how despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs, nor an end state; about how much of what makes human existence endurable lies beyond the reach of the state and the market, unmarked on the maps we’ve inherited from recent generations; about the role that art has played as a refuge for those aspects of reality that retreat from the gaze of those who would measure and price everything, that slip away like deer into the forest; about the hunch that, whatever hope is worth having today, it lies on the far side of despair, where the maps run out, at the margins or hidden in plain sight.

    Fran and I talk about what it means to make room for this within the ordinary fabric of our lives, among the everyday pressures; creating pockets, spaces to which it is safe to bring more of ourselves than it would be wise to bring to many of the workplaces, educational institutions or families we have known.

    Then right at the end of the night, just as Emily and Ali are drawing things to a close, they invite a friend up to the stage, a woman I haven’t met yet.

    ‘A few of us are organising a rebellion,’ she says. Not words I was expecting to hear, but as she goes on, I realise that I’m listening to something new – or new to me, at least. This is the voice of an activism that comes from the far side of despair, that has room for grief, that calls for courage rather than hope, that frames the stakes of climate change as starkly as anything we’ve published in Dark Mountain: this is not about saving the planet by changing your lightbulbs, it’s not about how we can sustain the way of living of the Western middle classes or fulfil the promises of development or transition to eco-socialism; it’s about how many species will be driven out of existence in the decades ahead, and whether our own is to be among them.

    Two weeks later, Extinction Rebellion delivers its demands to parliament, and as November goes on, their actions bring parts of London to a halt: blocking the five main bridges across the Thames, then holding up rush hour traffic at key junctions around the city, morning after morning. Even the organisers seem taken aback at the scale of the response. The other week, my mum called to say she’d heard a BBC radio documentary about Gail Bradbrook, and wasn’t that the woman I’d told her about from Stroud?

    From the occasional Facebook messages we exchange, I get the sense that Gail and those around her are riding a storm now, so I’m glad we got that chance to meet briefly in the relative calm of the weeks beforehand. And it seems fitting that the thread of serendipity which brought us together should run back to the gentle presence of Fran and the weave of generosity that brought him to Sweden in the endless days of early June.

    * * *

    ‘What do you do, after you stop pretending?’

    I wrote those words one night in the spring of 2010, as we were preparing for the first Dark Mountain festival. They became the frame for the Saturday programme on the main stage, and when Paul and I wrote a comment piece for the Guardian ahead of the event, it ran under the headline: ‘The environmental movement needs to stop pretending’. Among the crowd who gathered in Llangollen that weekend, there were those who came expecting us to offer a vision of what the environmental movement should do instead, and they were disappointed. I remember one guy from Manchester who was outright furious, railing to anyone who would listen, writing to us afterwards to demand that we refund his ticket.

    Maybe there are people whose ideas are born crystal clear and arrive in the world just as envisaged in the imagination, but my experience has always been that projects stumble into being: any new undertaking has to wrestle its way clumsily through the muddle of what you thought it would be, past the temptations of what others want it to be, until – if you’re lucky – it starts to reveal what it’s capable of being. In the case of Dark Mountain, it was only some years in that I saw clearly that this project wasn’t the place from which to ‘do’ anything. Whatever else, it has been a place where people come when they no longer know what to do; a place where you can bring your despair and put it into words, without being judged, without feeling alone, and without a rush to action or to answers.

    There’s a subtlety here that’s not well served by the pugnacious rhetoric of some of what got written in the early days. Activist writing often has the tone of telling everyone else what to do, and that certainly carried over into the ways I used to word things. The subtlety is this: to insist that the space you are holding is not one from which plans can be made or action taken is not to claim that no one should be taking action or making plans.

    There’s a video on YouTube, an hour and eight minutes in the quiet, slightly shambly company of Roger Hallam. It was filmed in a university lecture theatre last May, soon after the meeting at which Roger, Gail and a few others came up with the idea for Extinction Rebellion. If you sit down to watch it, make sure you have time to get to the end: I had to stop halfway and wait till the next morning, and this was a mistake.

    The first 40 minutes are where he presents the climate science, attempting to add up how much warming is already inevitable and where this would take us. There is something mesmerising about the parade of numbers – 1.2° that has happened already; 0.5° within a decade from the loss of the Arctic sea ice; another 0.5° from CO2 already emitted but not yet fed through into warming; the water vapour effect, doubling the impact of warming from other sources to give another 1° – and this is just the start, he adds. Somewhere around the 3° mark, we’ll lose the Amazon – assuming Bolsonaro hasn’t got there first – and this will bring another 1.5° of warming. Having got this far, Earth will tip further into a hot state, outside the conditions under which humans are capable of living.

    I’ve been reading, thinking, writing and speaking about this stuff for long enough to know that a certain caution is called for. As one climate scientist put it to me, the bits we know for sure are scary enough, without stating worst-case scenarios as facts. Still, watching the first half of Roger’s talk was enough to give me a sleepless night. Maybe we need those nights every so often, to be brought back to the existential core of our situation, to have the layers of reasoning with which we insulate ourselves peeled off.

    ‘Why we are heading for extinction,’ begins the title of the talk, ‘and what to do about it.’ The remaining half hour is the bit about doing. What is striking is that Roger makes no attempt to row back on the bleakness of what he has already told us. There is no bargain on offer here – ‘If everyone does X, then all this scary stuff will go away’ – only the observation, backed up by research on social movements, that those whose willingness to act endures the longest are not the activists who are motivated by outcome, who need to be given hope and to believe in their chances of success, but the ones who are motivated by doing the right thing. It’s the first time I can remember seeing a call to action which explicitly invites people to go into despair. In the closing minutes of his talk, Roger speaks about ‘the dark night of the soul’, the need to move through the darkness rather than avoid it. This is a call to rebellion that is framed in the language and draws on the traditions of mysticism.

    I don’t say that this is without precedent; indeed, part of Roger’s argument is that the rational, secular logic of mainstream Western activism, with its dependence on promises of progress, is the anomaly, while the stance for which he speaks has more in common with what has sustained grassroots movements in other times and places, and continues to do so. But this is the first activism around climate change in the West that I’ve encountered that has roots this deep, that draws on spiritual traditions without slipping into New Age wishful thinking or fantasies about a collective evolution of consciousness. It’s the closest I’ve seen to an activism that can answer that question I didn’t know how to answer back in 2010: what do we do, after we stop pretending?

    * * *

    In late July, we hired a car and drove north. This was the middle of the wildfire season, the Swedish authorities were dropping bombs on burning forests and borrowing firefighting planes from Italy. Our county got off lightly, but there were nights when you could smell the smoke on the air. We’d be following a backroad between villages and a convoy of fire engines would come speeding past. Coming home one evening, on the radio, two young hipster comedians from Södermalm were sniggering about how stupid the countryside people are and why don’t they just move to Stockholm rather than live out in the sticks and wait for their houses to burn down – and I thought: what the fuck, does it not occur to them that the rest of the country might be listening?

    We stayed on a farm and the farmer told us that she had a problem: in this heat, the lambs didn’t notice the shock from the electric fencing, so they were getting out and running everywhere. But her farm was lucky, she said, they had about three-quarters of the fodder they would normally have at this point in the year. In other parts of the country, farmers were trying to send their animals to slaughter because they couldn’t feed them, except the slaughterhouses couldn’t handle the number of animals the farmers wanted to send them.

    At almost any moment in human history, this would be the highest-order crisis a human society could face: to have to slaughter your herds before summer is out because of a lack of fodder. For half a dozen generations now, we’ve lived in a world that is bound together by supply chains whose effect is to distribute the impact of any local crisis across the whole system, so that a failed harvest in the American wheat belt is more likely to cause bread riots on the streets of Cairo than on the streets of Chicago. This works until it doesn’t, until the frequency of local crises strains the global system to breaking point. In the meantime, while the system holds, it means that those whose ways of living place most strain upon the system will be the last to notice.

    * * *

    ‘What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.’

    This was Vinay Gupta, on a Saturday afternoon in Llangollen in 2010, in the soulless converted sports hall of a venue where we held that first festival. It was one of those lines that everyone seemed to remember. There was talk of putting it on a t-shirt.

    I realise now that I have taken consolation in such thoughts.

    When Marks & Spencer put up those posters that said ‘Plan A: Because there is no Plan B’, I asked: no Plan B for who? For posh supermarkets and department stores, or for liveable human existence? Or do we no longer make the distinction?

    When I wrote about Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, it was to point out the thread of irony running through it: you’ve got this kid and his father pushing a shopping trolley down a road. In one scene, the father finds what might be the last can of Coke in the world and presents it to his son like it’s a sacrament. Isn’t there something that gets missed here, among the biblical cadences and the apocalyptic horror: the traces of a satire on our inability to imagine a liveable existence beyond the bubble of supermarkets and superhighways?

    Before Dark Mountain came on the horizon, I’d read my way through the writings of Ivan Illich, from the revolutionary moment of the early seventies, when he wanted to show that ‘two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age’, to the late eighties, by which time he had seen environmentalism co-opted into the oxymoron of ‘sustainable development’. And still he was able to glimpse in the fiction of Doris Lessing, or the everyday realities of his friends in the barrios of Mexico City, ‘what kinds of interrelationship are possible in the rubble’, among the ‘people who feed on the waste of development, the spontaneous architects of a post-modern future.’

    In talks, I would tell the story of the Natufians. Late in the last Ice Age, in the territory marked on our maps as Israel and Palestine, they lived in year-round villages. They were among the first people anywhere to settle and they lived like this for 1,500 years, fifty generations, long enough for any memory of their ancestors’ wanderings to pass into the dreamtime of gods and culture heroes. Then came the Younger Dryas, the 1,200-year cold snap that turned Europe back to tundra and broke the pattern of the seasons which watered the wooded valleys in which they had made their homes. They knew nothing of the processes by which this climate change had come upon them; it was not a consequence of their actions, only a shift in the weather. Within a short time, they abandoned their settled way of life and became wandering gatherers and hunters, returning to the old villages only to rebury the bones of their dead in the ruins of the houses.

    Then I would recall a passage in After the Ice, Stephen Mithen’s history of the prehistoric world, where I first learned about the Natufians. He sends a time-traveller to walk unobserved through the lives of the people he is writing about: coming upon a band of late Natufian nomads, he follows them to a gathering in one of the ruined villages. The interment of bones is accompanied by storytelling, feasting and celebration; the connection between past and present is reaffirmed. In Mithen’s reconstruction, these days of festival offer a respite from the hardships of the present. Yet afterwards, as the people go back out onto the land, they do so gladly: ‘They are all grateful for the return to their transient lifestyle within the arid landscapes of the Mediterranean hills, the Jordan valley and beyond. It is, after all, the only lifestyle they have known and it is the one that they love.’

    These stories were never meant as lullabies. We are living through a tragedy whose measure exceeds our comprehension and most of us are implicated in this tragedy. We were born into this situation and there is no simple way to free ourselves from it. The grand summits, the uplifting rhetoric of leaders, the protests at the summit gates: none of this will make it go away. The changes we make to our lifestyles, the meat we don’t eat, the flights we don’t take: none of this will be enough. We will not make this way of living sustainable, nor anything like this way of living – and yet, I’ve always felt able to add, this need not be the end of the story. There will almost certainly be creatures like us around for a good while to come, and though they will live with the consequences of the way we lived – though their lives may be hard, as a result, in ways we do not like to think about – they will not simply live in our shadow: the way of life of those who come after us will be, just like our own, the only lifestyle they have known and the one that they love.

    I stop now, as I’m writing this, to take a swig of coffee, and I try to think about the lives of the people who grew the beans, the landscape in which they were grown. I try to think about the lives of the people who assembled the computer at which I type these words, the people who mined the minerals that went into its making, the places they were taken from the ground. The conditions in which the people who grow our coffee live are not simply a default, back to which you and I might tumble should the project of civilisation (or ‘development’, as it’s known nowadays) collapse. Our lives are more entangled than that, joined by global supply chains which stretch back into the unfinished history of colonialism and its plantations, where the lives of people and plants were subject to a brutal simplification.

    Still, I have taken consolation in such thoughts, in the awareness that there are vastly more ways in which humans have made life work than the lifestyle which happens to prevail around here, just now. This way of living could unravel without that being the end of the story, the end of any story worth telling. I still hold this to be true, but lately I find there are more nights when I wonder whether anything will survive the unravelling.

    * * *

    Mid-October. Still tired from the two-day journey back from England, my first morning home, and I’ve agreed to record an interview for the Culture show on Swedish national radio. The presenter and I sit on a bench in the park across from the railway station. He starts off asking me about the fires this summer. He’s hoping I’ll say that something has shifted as a result, but all I can think of is the stream of comments, overheard at the hairdressers or the supermarket, or around my in-laws’ dinner table, through the rainless weeks of July and August. ‘Isn’t the weather amazing?’ people would say to each other, and ‘Don’t the farmers complain a lot!’ and ‘The government should really buy more of those planes so we don’t have to keep borrowing the ones from Italy.’

    After the interview, I start to wonder, though. Perhaps something has begun to shift, below the surface: a change in the conversation about climate change in certain places, a darkening realism, a movement in the boundaries of what it is possible to talk about. I’ve had some strange encounters lately with people on the inside of institutions who have lost all faith in the usual stories about how we’re going to manage this mess we’re in.

    That speech last September by Guterres, the UN Secretary General, was unusually stark: ‘I’ve asked you here to sound the alarm,’ he begins. ‘If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.’ Of course, in the next breath, he is insisting that there are great opportunities ahead for green economic growth, because anything else is still unthinkable. In quiet corners, though, I’ve heard the unease of people whose job it is to put together the numbers and show how all this can be done: the need to leave the assumption of growth unquestioned is pushing them into claims that are clearly absurd. Their question is how to voice the unthinkable in a way that will have a chance of getting heard.

    Here’s what I think I’m picking up, as we head into 2019: the official narratives about climate change are under strain from so many directions, there may just be a major rupture coming. Another straw in the wind is Jem Bendell’s academic paper, ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’, released in August and downloaded over 100,000 times by the end of the year. From foreign correspondents to solarpunk hackers, I keep hearing how it’s reframed the discussions going on in all these different worlds. To many Dark Mountain readers, the message of the paper won’t come as a great surprise: ‘near-term social collapse’ due to climate change is inevitable, while catastrophe is probable and extinction possible. But when this suggestion is made by a professor of sustainability leadership with twenty years’ experience working with academia, NGOs and the UN, it has a different kind of impact, at once a symptom of the shift that is underway and a contribution to that shift.

    Something similar applies to Extinction Rebellion. In its framing of the situation in which we find ourselves, in the energy which has gathered around it and the speed with which all this happened, it may well be among the first movements of a new phase in the story of our collision with the realities of climate change. If this reading of the signs is anywhere near right, then there will be other movements along soon, other kinds of rupture and other kinds of work to be done.

    There’s an old video from Undercurrents, the activist film network, shot in 1998 at the Birmingham G7 summit. Thousands of Reclaim The Streets protesters gather outside New Street station. On an unseen signal, the crowd spills out into the road, whistling and whooping, swarming around buses and cars, outnumbering the yellow lines of police. In the chaos of the minutes that follow, a stretch of urban freeway is occupied; part of the concrete collar of ring road thrown around the city centre by modernist urban planners in the 1950s, it’s an appropriate site for a movement that has grown out of protests against the road-building plans of the current government.

    A couple of tripods have gone up, the sound systems won’t be far behind – but right now, there’s aggro up at the front, where a few vehicles are still caught inside the reclaimed zone. A man just drove his car into a small group of protesters – not at any speed, just trying to nudge them out of the way, just threatening them with half a tonne of metal – and now he’s out of the car and arguing with the police, as more protesters put themselves in front of his car, holding a banner, and now the police are letting him get back in, and now he is putting his foot down and driving straight ahead, as everyone manages to leap aside, except for one young man who is still on the bonnet of the car as it accelerates beyond the last police lines and out onto an empty dual carriageway.

    I’ve never managed to track down that video, though people have assured me it exists, but I was the guy on the car, and it was only luck that meant I walked away that day with nothing worse than bruises and shock. And while it was a drama at the time, I’d hardly thought of this in years, until I saw the livestreams of the swarming protests where lines of Extinction Rebellion activists were stopping traffic at major roundabouts in London, the queues of impatient motorists, the sound of car horns. 

    I learned two things the day I went for a ride on a Birmingham bonnet. The first was that I am not the person you want on the frontline, when tempers are fraying and the adrenalin is rushing. There must have been ten of us in front of that car when the driver put his foot down, and the other nine all managed to throw themselves clear. I love the ones who can keep cool and make good calls in the heat of the moment, but that’s not me, and my reflexes aren’t going to come to anyone’s rescue.

    Compared to the days of Reclaim The Streets, Extinction Rebellion seems strikingly sober, yet there’s still a headiness to any movement as it gathers momentum. Watching from afar, as friends use their bodies to stop vehicles, I realise that I believe in the work that they are doing and I know that there are other kinds of work that will be needed, away from the frontlines. Among that other work, there’s still a need for the space Dark Mountain holds, not least as a place to retreat and re-ground, but it’s no longer my time to hold that space: I’ve known for a while, and it’s been official since October, that I’m moving on from this project. So that brings back the old question: what do you do?

    The second thing I learned that day in Birmingham was more unsettling. As the car drove off, I went chest down on the bonnet, looking into the windscreen – and then I rolled over, and he swerved to throw me off and I landed, half-running, tumbling to the ground. But in the moment before I rolled over, I remember seeing the driver’s face and knowing that he had no more clue what to do next than I had, that we were caught in a shared helplessness.

    It’s the end of the year and Anna and I take a couple of weeks offline to rest and reflect. Walking beside the lake in the small town where she grew up, we talk about this sense that something is shifting, and what this means for the work that seems worth doing now, how to frame what is at stake. ‘It’s about negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living,’ I say.

    There’s a thing called the Overton window, the boundary of what is ‘thinkable’ to governments and decision-makers: what you can talk about and still get taken seriously, inside the rooms where the decisions get made. I have an image of the window as a windscreen, an expression of helplessness on the face behind the glass.

    Unthinkable things are going to happen, that much seems clear. 

    ‘You should stop going round saying we’re all going to die,’ someone who spent time in those rooms told me, years ago, in an early online argument about Dark Mountain. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever gone round saying that,’ I wrote back, ‘except in the non-apocalyptic sense that, sooner or later, we are all going to die.’

    There are things you can’t see clearly through that window, possibilities that go unmarked on the maps according to which the decisions are taken. We can come alive in the face of the knowledge that we are all going to die. And in the meantime, before we die, we can try to live out some of those possibilities: the ways of being human together that are hidden from view when the world is seen through the lenses of the market and the state; the ways of feeding ourselves that get overlooked because they don’t work as commodities. We can try to negotiate the surrender of our way of living, without pretending there’s any promise that this would make it all OK, without pretending we even know what OK would look like. We can have some beauty before the story is over, without pretending we can be sure how long we’ve got.

    * * *

    It was Anna who came up with the name – before we thought of it as a school, when we were just talking about creating a hospitable place to bring these conversations together. ‘It’s not a centre,’ she said. ‘We’re not starting a community. It’s our home, and everything else starts from there.’ It doesn’t come into being on those weeks when we advertise a public course, when people we’ve yet to meet make long journeys to be here. Those are just the times when we’re able to open up the work that’s already going on: the conversations we bring together around the kitchen table, the people who come and stay, the thinking that gets done in their company. This part of the story is clearer now than when we made that first invitation to the course last June. We’re clearer, too, about the urgency: the need for quiet spaces where bridges can be built between troubled insiders, an awakening grassroots and what one of our collaborators, Vanessa Andreotti, has taught us to think of as the ‘knowledge-carriers at the edges’; spaces of negotiation, away from the frontlines. Clearer about the role of the network we have built, our ability to bring people together and the consequences this can have. So this is our answer, just now, the place where we might have something to contribute, the work we’re going to do.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 15.

  • Extending the Glide: A Conversation with Jem Bendell

    I first met Professor Jem Bendell at a festival in the middle of a Swedish forest. This was back around the beginning of the 2010s, and he wasn’t a professor in those days, and to be honest we didn’t find that much in common.

    The festival was called Future Perfect. The organisers had brought together sustainability thinkers, ecologically-minded designers, organic food entrepreneurs and a whole smorgasbord of buzzwords. At several points, I was provoked into forceful interventions, which led to the invention of the role of ‘difficultator’ – a kind of anti-facilitator or heckler-in-residence – in which capacity they invited me back the following year.

    My impression of Jem from that event was of a big NGO, sustainable development, Corporate Social Responsibility guy. He was living in Geneva, working as a consultant to the UN. He’d done things: the Marine Stewardship Council was one of his projects, and he’d been in at the beginning of the UN Global Compact. He was all about getting big business to drive sustainability. He struck me as driven, ambitious, serious, but I didn’t get much sense of someone wrestling with the existential implications of the mess in which we find ourselves. And fair play, he was too busy for that.

    So it came as a surprise when we crossed paths again last year and he told me that Dark Mountain had been much on his mind. I’d been aware of the ripples made by a keynote that he had given at a climate change conference in Australia, setting out an agenda for what he calls Deep Adaptation, based around the three ‘R’s of Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration. It’s been picked up in places like the Planet B festival in Peterborough last summer and a forthcoming season of events at the NewBridge Project in Newcastle – while Charlotte Du Cann wrote about it in the call for submissions for the next Dark Mountain book.

    When I caught up with Jem over Skype a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been struck by how far he had travelled since our first meeting, so I was curious to know what had set him on that journey.

    JB: I gave my inaugural professorial talk in March 2014 at a big literary festival in Cumbria. I’d already become aware of some of the latest science on climate change, so I decided to frame sustainability as an adventure – to say that we have to let go of our incremental, non-ambitious, conformist approaches. I gave a speech about that, because it was a frame that could be palatable to my colleagues, my employer, my academia and my audience. But I was coming down with the flu during the speech. And for the week after, I was in bed ill.

    There’s something emotional about a conclusion – that’s what you do in an inaugural lecture, you try and synthesise twenty years of your work, and by summarising, you’re also concluding it. So I spent that week in bed, with a fever, not doing much apart from reading scientific papers and watching traumatising videos from the Arctic. And I actually went into despair.

    It took years before I became more deliberate and public about this, and in a way it’s taken me until now to realise that I’ve been going through a professional catharsis which goes back to March 2014.

    DH: I read a piece that you wrote for openDemocracy later that year, arguing that the mainstream debate around climate change had become detached from the facts that were now coming in from the science. You highlight four different conversations going on around the edges which you say have more to do with the reality of where we find ourselves, one of which is a conversation you identify with the radical end of Transition Towns, the work of people like Charles Eisenstein, as well as with Dark Mountain.

    JB: The reason I wrote that article was that after the experience I’d had that year, I couldn’t help but have conversations with friends about this topic, and I found that I just left people sort of staring into space with their jaws wide open. So I wanted to give them something that would help them think things through, and then they could end up with whichever of those agendas that I mapped out in the piece – and working on any of those agendas would be better than the mainstream denial of how things are.

    DH: That brings me to the speech where you presented what you call the Deep Adaptation agenda. Can you say a bit about how you arrived at that framing?

    JB: Looking back over the last few years, I didn’t really know what to do about this realisation that we can’t fix climate change, that so much of the impact for our civilisation is already locked in. I didn’t know how to work on that. And I realised that one of the reasons was the lack of a framework to get your head around all this. So I thought it might be useful to come up with a map for people who are climate experts, policymakers, researchers about what this might mean. A map that would sound approachable, but would actually be the thin end of a wedge, in terms of where it would take them.

    This coincided with an invitation to a place in Australia where I used to work, Griffith University. It was the tenth anniversary of their centre and they invited me to give the keynote. They are at the centre of the climate change adaptation network of Australia, so they had hundreds of climate change policymakers coming from across the country, and researchers and academics. And I couldn’t justify flying down there and just giving a speech about, you know, the latest great ideas about investment in solar, and so on.

    I was a bit scared, because I knew the guy who was organising the conference and I knew he’d want me to be dynamic. Everyone who’s organising a conference wants to be upbeat – and suddenly the keynote person is going to give a speech about the end of the world, or that’s how it might come across, anyway.

    It was a bit of a coming out. Standing in front of these climate experts who work with this all day and saying: well, this is my reality, this is what I’m struggling with, and this is a map that I have that I think we could use to work on it.

    I called it Deep Adaptation. I introduced the three ‘R’s: Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration.

    DH: So this is where you’re trying to say, OK, what kind of stuff is worth working on, if you start from climate change as an unfolding tragedy, rather than as a problem that can be fixed and made to go away. Can you just elaborate on what falls within each of those three spheres?

    JB: Sure, well the first one – Resilience – I chose because it’s so mainstream already in the adaptation field. Even in the business schools and the sustainability field, the term resilience had become popular. Because businesses have been experiencing, through their supply chains in particular, disturbances and disruptions through weather events correlated with climate change. But I talked about resilience in a deeper sense than just, ‘How do we diversify our suppliers so that if one gets knocked out by a hurricane, we’ve still got something else?’ So for example, I was talking in a hall which was next to the Brisbane River, which had had flood water lapping at its doors just a year previously – and I pointed out that the place had been refurbished with the electric sockets still near the ground. We need to think again, to switch our mind-sets. These once-in-a-century events will be happening every five years, so resilience needs to wake up to that.

    That brings you into Relinquishment which is about not just, how do we preserve what we want to preserve, but what do we need to let go of? Because if we don’t let go of it, we’ll make matters worse. And I felt that the discourse of sustainability would have seen that previously as peculiar and defeatist – and I wanted to say that, we’re going to have to let a whole lot of things go, ways of life, cultural patterns. You know, in that room we were all wearing suits with ironed shirts and ties, with blasting air con. There are patterns of behaviour which we have to let go of – and I thought, give it a fancy name and you recode it as something interesting, rather than defeatist.

    Then the third one, Restoration – again, it exists already, with people talking about the restorative dimension of environmentalism, restoring ecosystems. Not just stopping the damage, but improving things. But for me, I wasn’t saying that in terms of how we can fix everything, but that you rewild because it is going to happen anyway and you build that into your thinking. But it’s also about restoration in terms of how did people have joy, fun and love, and wonder, celebration and meaning, prior to this hydrocarbon civilisation?

    So Resilience is ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’, Relinquishment is ‘what do we need to let go of?’ and Restoration is ‘what can we bring back to help us through this?’

    DH: So you said you were nervous in the run-up to that speech. What kind of reaction did you get?

    JB: I was surprised and delighted at the warm round of applause and the things people were saying to me afterwards. I remember one lady came up to me and said she used to be a pilot in the Outback of Australia and in her training, they used to do quite a spooky exercise which was called ‘extend the glide’. And it’s about, if the aircraft has a problem with the engines and they cut out, how do you then extend the glide to just give yourself more time to find yourself a safer place for the crash landing, but also on the off-chance that the engines might kick in again. And she said, that’s what you’re inviting us to start working on: how do we extend the glide?

    There were other people coming up to me and what I understood was that they had already been talking about these things in their own ways, making sense of it, but not really in their day-jobs, despite being paid to be environmental professionals.

    DH: How has this changed the work you’re doing – that experience of despair and catharsis that you described, going back to 2014, and then creating a framework for those who want to work with this professionally – where has that taken you in the years since?

    JB: Well, in 2017 it took me into politics, writing speeches for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, because it seems to me that we need a cultural shift towards compassion and a spiritual awakening, an awakening from the delusion of materialism. We don’t see much of that in politics, but Corbyn was saying something similar in a secular way.

    Meanwhile, I decided to approach education in a very different way, as a sort of emancipation from your received assumptions and received wisdom, as a preparation for people to be able to approach these very disturbing and troubling times. But also to see it as an amazing – it’s kind of crazy to say, isn’t it – an amazing opportunity for reflection into the true meaning of being alive. Because climate change is holding up a severe mirror to our consciousness: it means we have to really ask why we are here. Because somehow, we delay that question, and now we can’t.

    So on the one hand, I see that I’ve been doing quite a lot of stuff that I’m OK with that flows from that point in 2014, but I also realise that part of this has been getting busy in order to distract myself, because I didn’t have a good way of living with this knowledge. My sense of self-worth as a good guy, working hard, becoming an expert, becoming a professor – along the way, I made sacrifices in order to achieve that, and then suddenly I had a loss of a sense of self-worth, my role, my identity in life. So I think quite a bit of what I’ve been doing over the past years has been reconstituting a sense of self.

    So thank you for inviting me to talk about this, because it made me reflect in the last few days, and I realise that maybe it’s useful to share this. Because this cathartic process that I went through, some of it conscious and some of it actually only making sense to me looking back, is perhaps something that other people will go through and need to go through. And maybe it’s something we can go through together and help each other.

    I guess I’ve gone through a grieving process and now I realise that it was pretty damn obvious that I will die, everyone I know will die, any community or culture I could ever contribute to will die out, this human species will die out, and the Earth and everything on it will die – well, that’s just obvious, we all knew that, anyway.

    DH: Yes, all of those things were true before the great hydrocarbon episode in humanity’s history. Arriving at that is an important part of the journey of making sense of what it means to be alive right now.

    JB: I feel free of some forms of delusion, some forms of social pressure, and I am approaching things with fascination and playfulness. And what I didn’t have over the past few years were fellow travellers and community, and now I’m realising that I do need a community around this very realisation that we’ve been talking about. And what will emerge from that, I don’t know, but there will be love within it, there will be creativity within it, there will be a sense of wonder at being alive at this incredibly strange moment in human history.

    This conversation with Jem Bendell was published on Dark Mountain’s Online Edition in March 2019, four months prior to the publication of the Deep Adaptation paper.

  • Three Seasons With CEMUS

    Three Seasons With CEMUS

    It’s early spring. I’m taking a language course for immigrants with a higher education. Eight years is the average time it takes before an immigrant to Sweden gets to work in a job that matches their professional qualifications: this course was created to shorten that time. I am not the person the course is aimed at, but I graduated from the basic Swedish for Immigrants programme two months ago and my classmate Sepi told me about this, so here we are.

    Here we are in Uppsala – because, as part of the course, we’re on a half-day outing by bus from Västerås to sit in one of the lecture theatres in Blåsenhus and be taught about Swedish history and culture. At the break, the lecturer is having an animated discussion with some of the other students. It seems they are arguing about climate change. I don’t know how it started, but as I wander over, I hear him explaining insistently that climate change is not a catastrophic threat and anyone who tells you it is – whether they are a scientist or anything else – is saying this because they are making money out of it. 

    Even if I wasn’t angry, I’d have struggled to hold my end of an argument in Swedish, and I am angry. This guy isn’t actually Uppsala faculty, he’s a freelancer with a PhD who’s been drafted in for the occasion, but to hear someone stand up in the role of lecturer in a place like this and tell students that climate science is driven by ulterior motives strikes at some deep faith I have in the university as an institution. (Not to mention that half my classmates are here having made unimaginable journeys to flee the civil war in Syria, a war which was preceded by five years of drought; like any single event, that drought can’t just be pinned on climate change, but it is the kind of event which climate change makes more likely and it is a catastrophe.)

    So I try to argue with him – and he says, ‘Ah, I guess you’re planning to make money out of this stuff’ – and I say, ‘I’m a writer and if you think I’m motivated by making money, you should tell my bank manager, because he could use the laugh.’ I don’t say this, obviously, because I’m trying to make myself understood in broken Swedish while angry and upset. But whatever I actually say, his comeback is, ‘Well, there are other kinds of currency than money.’

    Half an hour later, I’m in a cafe on a side street in the centre of the city, meeting Isak Stoddard and Ingrid Momrisr from CEMUS for the first time. We’ve been in touch by email for a few weeks, though when we arranged to meet, I couldn’t have guessed how raw I would be feeling. My writing has been tangled up with climate change for years, going back to before Paul Kingsnorth and I wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto. It was that manifesto which put me on the radar at CEMUS, Isak tells me. After writing about this stuff for years, you get inured to the various flavours of denial – until one day you’re caught off-guard by an encounter like the one I just had, and suddenly you’re peeled right open.

    And if you have luck, at that moment, you walk into a cafe where you’re welcomed by people you’ve never met before, but who listen while you tell them what just happened, and you know they understand.

    *   *   *

    It’s summer now. The sun is hanging over the lake behind me, a group of young people sit on the grassy slope running down to the shore and I am perched on a rock by the water’s edge. It’s one of those endless hot June evenings and if there is anything closer to paradise than a Swedish lakeside on an evening like that, then I’ve yet to meet it. To sit here talking about darkness seems a little absurd – but still, everyone is listening.

    The group are all staff from CEMUS who have come away together for a night before the summer. I’ve been invited to give a talk, so I’m telling the story of how Paul and I came to start Dark Mountain. How it grew out of a loss of faith in the stories we had been telling within the environmental movement. You’d hear leading figures in this movement give the same speech they had given five years earlier – the same calls to action, the same insistence that we can do this – and then if you talked with that person quietly over a drink later in the evening, you’d find they were in fact pessimistic to the point of despair. That gap disturbed us.

    Now, as I write this, it strikes me – how different was the claim we were making about the environmental movement from what that lecturer who so incensed me in Uppsala had been saying? Aren’t we both doing something rather similar: calling into question the honesty of those who stand up and speak about climate change? ‘The environmental movement needs to stop pretending’ ran the headline on an early article that Paul and I wrote for The Guardian. It reminds me that, in our first attempts to articulate these thoughts and get them heard, we seemed to position ourselves as the lone truth-tellers, which is a dangerous way of behaving.

    But that headline started with a slightly different phrase, a question which I used to frame the first Dark Mountain festival: ‘What do we do, after we stop pretending?’ This is not an allegation about some other group on whom one is passing judgement, it is a confession – and anyone who recognises their own experience here can step within the circle of that undefined ‘we’. In the days when we started Dark Mountain, I wasn’t used to standing on stages in front of rooms full of people – that came later – but in the gap between the uplifting speech and the quiet conversation at the end of the night, I recognised something I had struggled with myself.

    A common reaction to Dark Mountain in those early days was to say, ‘You guys have burned out, it happens to us all – but you shouldn’t be making such a noise about it, you’ll put other people off.’ That reaction was sincere, but it didn’t feel adequate. The idea that a movement uses people as fuel – that the experience of uncertainty, fear and despair should be swept away like the ashes from last night’s fire, while we stack up a new row of fresh green optimists in the hearth – is widespread, but not wise. Dark Mountain was born out of the desire to create a space where we could talk to each other about uncertainty, fear and despair, without a rush to action or to answers. It was born out of our own need for such a space.

    And we had a feeling that art had an important role to play in this. Not as a communications tool to deliver a message or raise awareness, but as a way of holding such a space, making it possible to face the darkness without shutting down or running away. A large part of my work in the years since we started the project has been learning more about these roles that art can play.

    So yes, in a sense, we started by questioning the honesty of the way climate change is presented – but not the motives of the people doing the presenting, nor the integrity of the scientific work that produces knowledge about a thing like climate change. Rather, it was a question about the struggle to tell true stories about what these facts mean, about the way they collide with our idea of how the world ought to be, the shape of history and our place within it. The gap towards which we were pointing has to do with the question of despair. If despair is a thing to be avoided at all costs, then it is right to hold onto whatever straws of optimism one can find, so you end up emphasising these, however feeble they feel to you. But something I’ve learned through this work is how much energy can get tied up in avoiding despair at all costs, so that letting go of our attempts to cling to optimism can release a surprising sense of relief and even hope. Something else I’ve learned is that despair does not have to be an end in itself. For a lot of people, Dark Mountain has been a journey to the far side of despair, though none of us emerges from such a journey unchanged.

    So these are the things we are talking about, in the endless sunshine of a June evening, by a lake, at a time of year when it is hard to take the idea of winter seriously. And later, we grill corn cobs over a barbecue in the woods and share cans of beer, and I start to understand a little more about the community that gathers around CEMUS, the atmosphere which brings the centre to life.

    *   *   *

    The next time I arrive in Uppsala, the sun is shining, but there’s an edge to the air. It’s the first of September. Autumn is coming.

    We are in the same lecture theatre where I’d had that argument, six months earlier. A cavern of a room with no windows, it could be any season, any time of day or night. But this time I am standing at the front. I’ve been asked to give the opening lecture of the year.

    ‘What can we say about the future?’ I ask. ‘This talk won’t involve any charts or projections. I don’t have one of those scenario planning models with four different ways the world might look in 2035. I’m not going to wrap things up with a list of ten things we can do that will make everything turn out OK. I only have one prediction for you, and I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it, and it’s this…’

    Click to the next slide, huge letters filling the screen behind me:

    WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.

    A ripple of laughter passes around the room – and I go on to talk about the need to come to terms with the undramatic reality of personal extinction that waits for all of us, somewhere down the road, if we’re going to see clearly when we try to talk about the larger kinds of loss which frame the time in which we’re living. This seems like a good place to start, for a room full of people who will spend the year ahead thinking hard and learning from many different disciplines about the mess the world is in.

    And for me, these three seasons mark the starting point of a relationship with CEMUS and the people who make up the centre which has been unique in my experience. I have been a guest lecturer at many institutions across Europe, but nowhere has come to feel more like home. Through formal and informal collaborations with CEMUS, I have been able to bring people I admire greatly to Sweden – Keri Facer, professor of social and educational futures at the University of Bristol, or the mythographer Martin Shaw who created the Oral Tradition course at Stanford. Over a day or two in Uppsala, they will lecture to students, take part in a research seminar and a public event, and they go away speaking warmly of this particular corner of Swedish academia. Under the auspices of CEMUS, I’ve sat on stage at Sigtuna Stiftelsen, holding a conversation with the philosopher and animist David Abram and the Archbishop of Uppsala, Antje Jackelén – and I’ve met within the same walls, when Kevin Anderson brought together twenty of us for three days to go deep into the role of arts, humanities and social sciences in the quest for rapid decarbonisation. And every time I’ve walked into the offices on Villavägen, I’ve been received with the same warmth that Isak and Ingrid showed me that first day we met, and caught a sniff of that atmosphere which Ivan Illich once wrote of:

    ‘Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.’

    Thank you, my friends, for inviting me to be a part of CEMUS in the past few years – and may you continue to thrive in the next twenty-five.

    First published in The CEMUS Diaries, a series to mark the 25th anniversary of the Centre for Environment & Development Studies at Uppsala University.

  • Medan klockan tickar at The Stockholm Act

    Medan klockan tickar at The Stockholm Act

    The play I co-wrote – about what it’s like when the Anthropocene is your day-job – is getting a further outing this week at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern as part of The Stockholm Act festival.

    For more details, see The Stockholm Act website. I should probably mention that the play is (mostly) in Swedish.

  • How Climate Change Arrives

    How Climate Change Arrives

    The sun is out, the sky is a cloudless blue and the kids around me on the train are talking football. On mornings like this, it’s hard to hold onto the sense that we are in trouble, let alone that this trouble might be deep enough to derail our whole way of living.

    Even the numbers involved are underwhelming: two degrees of warming by the end of the century, three degrees, four… We’ve heard all the warnings, and still it is hard to equate these numbers with disaster, when they are smaller than the variations on the weather map from one day to the next.

    The year before last, I got a Facebook message from a Sami woman, a reindeer herder whose family follows the animals north each summer across the mountains from Sweden to Norway. A few days later, we were sitting drinking coffee in a meeting room in Stockholm. She talked about a journey to fix up her uncle’s cabin in early May, travelling on a winter road, the kind of road that runs across a frozen river. The river is always frozen until the third week of May — you can count on it — but this time, when they get there, it already thawed. There’s no getting across. Further north, the same summer, they come to a mountain where they always store food in the ice of a glacier, but this year the glacier is gone. In July, the temperature stays over thirty for three straight weeks as the reindeer huddle, miserable in the heat. This is not the future, not a warning about what happens if we fail: this is how things are, already. If your life is bound to the seasons, you don’t need charts or projections to know that something is going badly wrong.

    Our lives are bound to other things. Where we live, you can change seasons almost as easily as channels on the TV. Summer or winter are only ever an air ticket away. We see strawberries in Tesco in December and the strangeness of this hardly registers. Our liberation from the constraints of the seasons is assumed to be progress, but it might be wiser to call it an illusion. All that food in the supermarket is coming from places where the seasons still count. We still live off soil and sun and rain. There is no question of going ‘back to the land’, because we never left: we just stretched the chains that link us to it so far, we lost sense of what lies at the other end.

    For now, a sharp tug on the supply chain means an unwelcome bulge in our grocery bills, a corner to cut somewhere else in the household budget. Elsewhere, the consequences cut deeper. The Arab Spring started when Tunisian police confiscated the fruit stall of street-trader Mohamed Bouazizi. He burned himself to death in a desperate protest against corruption, but the waves of protest that followed across North Africa and the Middle East were fuelled by years of sharply rising food prices. The brutal war in Syria came on the heels of five years of drought. This is how climate change arrives, not as a clean case of cause and effect, but tangled up with the cruelties of dictators and the profits made from commodity market speculation, washing up in boats on package holiday coastlines.

    I don’t mean this as a call to guilt or despair. If you write about climate change, there’s a pressure to be upbeat, to talk about changing lightbulbs and the falling cost of solar panels. Not long ago, Britain went a day without burning coal for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. These things are also part of the story. I want to tell you, too, about all the knowledge that is barely on the maps we were given at school. Like how, even today, only 30% of the world’s food is produced within the agro-industrial system, while half of it is grown by peasant farmers, people who still have one foot in ways of making life work that are older than the fossil fuel economy. A Somerset farmer has three Syrian teenagers sent to him on a scheme: the first morning, they clear a weedy patch of land in no time, then one lad picks up a handful of soil and squeezes it in his hand. ‘Good humus,’ he says. Those already living with the consequences of climate change are not simply victims, they may yet be carriers of badly-needed knowledge in the tight times ahead.

    So yeah, I don’t want to doom you out. I just think we owe ourselves a little sobriety, a willingness to look hard at where we find ourselves and get a sense of what may be at stake. That last bit is tricky: one moment, we’re urged to ‘Save the Planet’ — like the stars of a superhero movie — and the next, we’re looking at a poster behind the Marks & Spencer’s checkout that says, ‘Plan A: Because there is no Plan B.’ And the more times you look at that poster, the more you have to ask, ‘No Plan B for who?’ For M&S and Tesco and strawberries in December and holidays in the Greek islands — or for liveable human existence? Or is that not a distinction we’re willing to consider?

    Don’t get me wrong: I’ll be stopping in at the supermarket when I pick up my son from nursery this afternoon. It’s just that my dad can remember when the supermarkets arrived: my gran would ride half way across Birmingham and back on the buses to claim the free frozen chicken you got on opening day. I can’t pretend the convenience doesn’t suit me. But if we’re really saying the future of our 4.5 billion-year-old planet is in doubt, then I’m not sure it’s wise to stake everything on getting to hang onto a way of doing things that’s been around for less than a lifetime.

    This essay first appeared in The Precariat, a newspaper published by the organisers of Planet B festival and distributed in Peterborough in July 2017.

  • You Want It Darker

    As things stand, I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.

    Martin Shaw, Dark Mountain: Issue 7

    The regular mechanisms of political narration are breaking down. The pollsters lose confidence in their methods, the pundits struggle to offer authoritative explanations for events that they laughed off as wild improbabilities only months before.

    It’s a measure of how badly things have broken that, over the past year or two, members of the strange crew that meets around Dark Mountain have found ourselves filling the gap. I’m thinking of posts we’ve written in our various corners of the internet that were read and shared far more widely than most of us are used to, seemingly because they helped readers find their bearings in a time of deepening disorientation.

    There’s a role for this kind of writing now that seems clearer than it did eight years ago, when we started this project. That’s why, today, we are launching a fundraising campaign – asking for your help to build and launch a new online publication. It won’t replace the Dark Mountain books, but it will run alongside them and provide an online home for writing that seeks – as my co-founder, Paul Kingsnorth put it at the start of this series – ‘to make sense of things, and to examine our stories in their proper perspective.’

    At this point, if you want to head straight for our fundraising page and make a donation, then be my guest – but in the rest of this post, I want to make a few suggestions about why this kind of writing matters now, based on what Dark Mountain has taught me over the past eight years.

    * * *

    Let’s start with a few of the pieces I mentioned – the chances are you already read some of these, but setting them alongside one another, something else comes into view:

    These are posts that got shared and reblogged and quoted and seemed to travel halfway around the internet. Mostly, they were written for our personal blogs or websites – but the authors are editors or regular contributors here at Dark Mountain. You can see places where we spark off each other’s ideas, as well as significant differences in perspective. If you read them all, you’ll probably find some that jive with you and others that jar. But I want to point to some common ground.

    For one thing, while we draw on different political traditions, this is writing that starts a couple of steps back from the familiar terrain of political debate and analysis. I’m reminded of an answer I gave, years ago, when asked if Dark Mountain was a political project: ‘I think there may be times when it is necessary to withdraw from today’s politics, in order to do the thinking that could make it possible for there to be a politics the day after tomorrow.’ Or as Paul put it at the opening of this series, ‘Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of things. Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it.’

    If you start exploring the work of any of these writers, you’ll find that mythology is a recurring reference point, a deep element in how we make sense of things. At the end of his post from the morning after the Brexit vote, Martin Shaw wrote, ‘Television, radio and internet will be able to tell you all the above-ground implications of what’s just taken place.’ When these surface accounts fail to satisfy, though, there’s a hunger that is fed by the underground currents of old stories.

    One of the things that marks out this writing, then, is a willingness to enter territory that we could call ‘liminal’. It’s a term that comes from the study of ritual, given to the middle phase of a rite of passage: the preliminaries are over, you have shed the skin of an old reality, but not yet acquired the new skin that would allow you to return to the everyday world. The liminal is the space of the threshold, with all the vulnerability and potential of transition: the costliness of letting go, with no guarantee of what will come after. The liminal phase of a ritual is the moment of greatest danger – or rather, ritual is a safety apparatus built around the liminal. Whichever, the liminal is where the work gets done, where the change happens.

    So here’s the first suggestion I want to make: if this writing is filling a gap left by the failure of more conventional kinds of political narration, it’s because it is able to operate in the territory of the liminal, and these are liminal times.

    * * *

    It’s not just the broadening audience for this writing that points to its timeliness. The past year also saw more conventional voices getting drawn into the territory that Dark Mountain has been exploring.

    Take Alex Evans, a former advisor to the UK government and the United Nations, who just wrote a book called ‘The Myth Gap’. After a career based on belief in the power of ‘evidence, data and policy proposals’, his experience of global climate negotiations brought him to a crisis, and to a sense of the need for something more than facts and reasoned arguments. ‘We’ve lost the old stories that used to help us make sense of the world,’ he says, ‘but without coming up with new ones.’ And he quotes Jung: ‘The man who thinks he can live without a myth is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or the ancestral life within him, or yet with contemporary society.’

    Or check out the series on ‘spirituality and visionary politics’ that the political strategist Ronan Harrington edited for Open Democracy last year – and Jonathan Rowson’s report on spirituality for the RSA. ‘Scratch climate change confusion long enough,’ writes Rowson, ‘and you may find our denial of death underneath.’

    There’s lots to say about these examples, but for now I just want to take a couple of points from them. First, that the call of the liminal is making itself felt ‘above ground’. But then, that there is a danger of wanting to jump straight to rebirth, to promise bright visions and new positive narratives. Evans draws on Jung, but I’m not clear how much room there is here for the shadow – nor for the loss and uncertainty, the darkness and disorientation that are the price for entering the liminal.

    Then again, by the end of 2016, others were ready to make the descent. I once spent an hour on stage with George Monbiot pounding me over the pessimism of Dark Mountain, so it was striking to read his list of ‘The 13 impossible crises humanity now faces’. Then you had John Harris discovering Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. Watching experienced journalistic commentators move in the terrain that Dark Mountain has been exploring for the best part of a decade, it strikes me that there is another danger. To navigate at these depths, you need a different kind of equipment. Facts alone don’t cut it down here.

    This brings me to the other aspect of Dark Mountain which may be crucial to finding our bearings within the liminal – the centrality of art and culture to the work of this project.

    * * *

    A man is whispering in your ears, disorienting you, playing tricks with your perception, even as you watch him alone on stage with little more than a few bottles of water and a cast of microphones. This is Simon McBurney’s The Encounter, one of the most staggering pieces of theatre I witnessed in 2016: a show that leads you into the story of a meeting between a photographer lost in the Amazon and a tribe whose world is under threat. Their response to this threat takes the form of a ritual, a journey to ‘the beginning’, which is also a deliberate bringing to an end of their culture in its current form.

    The concept of liminality was first used to describe the structure of rituals like the one at the centre of The Encounter, but its application as a term for thinking about modern societies is connected to the study of theatre and performance. The anthropologist who made the connection, Victor Turner, distinguished the ‘liminal’ experiences of tribal cultures – in which ritual is a collective process for navigating moments of change – from the ‘liminoid’ experiences available in modern societies, which resemble the liminal, but are choices we opt into as individuals, like a night out at the theatre. This distinction comes with a suggestion that true liminality, the collective entry into the liminal, is not available within a complex industrial society.

    Now, perhaps this has been true – but here’s my next wild suggestion. The consequences of that very complex industrial society are now bringing us to a point where we get reacquainted with true liminality. To take seriously not just what Dark Mountain has been talking about, but what Monbiot and Harris are touching on, is to recognise that we now face a crisis which has no outside. The planetary scale of our predicament makes it as much a collective experience as anything faced by the tribal cultures studied by Turner and his colleagues.

    If this is the case, then where within our existing cultures do we go for knowledge about how to navigate the terrain of liminality? Not to the sources of factual authority, much as we need them, but to the places where liminoid practices have endured – to the arts, especially those forms in which people gather and share a live experience, and also (Turner would tell us) to those traditions and institutions that deal with the sacred.

    In 2016, I came to the end of two years working as leader of artistic development with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre. The collaboration came about because their artistic director had been strongly influenced by the Dark Mountain manifesto. In the workshops we ran together, writers, directors and performers met around the question of what art can do, in the face of all that we know and fear about the depth of the mess the world is in.

    The answers that emerged began with a rejection of the usual invitation to put our art to use as a communications tool to deliver a message on behalf of scientists, policy-makers or activists – not out of some misplaced sense of ‘art for art’s sake’ purity, but because this isn’t how art works. 

    Instead, many of the possibilities I caught sight of during this work had to do with the liminal. Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down. Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone. Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control. And art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.

    These are strange answers. For anyone in search of solutions, they will sound unsatisfying. But I don’t think it’s possible to endure the knowledge of the crises we face, unless you are able to draw on this other kind of knowledge and practice, whether you find it in art or religion or any other domain in which people have taken the liminal seriously, generation after generation. Because the role of ritual is not just to get you into the liminal, but to give you a chance of finding your way back.

    Among the messages of the liminal is that endings are also beginnings, that sometimes we need to ‘give up’, that despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs – nor a thing to be mistaken for an end state. 

    * * *

    Somewhere in the tumbling days that followed the US election, I saw it go by in the stream of social media. ‘It’s basically Breitbart vs Dark Mountain now, isn’t it?’ someone wrote, like we’re the last ones left whose worldviews aren’t in smithereens after the year that just happened. And like a few things in 2016, it had the taste of a bad joke that might have more truth in it than you’d want to be the case.

    In the last weeks of the year, as we were putting together this series of reflections, a discussion got started among the Dark Mountain editors about what the role of this project should be, in the years ahead. Bad jokes aside, it’s clear that the work we’ve been doing has taken on a new relevance, and with that comes a sense of responsibility.

    A couple of things are clear. The books we publish will always be at the heart of this project – and the work of artists, the makers of culture, will always be our starting point.

    Every year, thousands of copies of our books go out to readers around the world. By the standards of an independent literary journal, it’s an achievement, and it’s through the sale of our books that we’re able to pay for some of the work that goes into Dark Mountain. (The rest of the work, as you can imagine, is a labour of love.) 

    A sobering realisation this autumn, though, was that the audience coming to this website each year is a hundred times the size of the number of people ordering the books. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – but over the years, we’ve given only a fraction of the attention to this site that goes into each of our print issues.

    So we came to the conclusion that it’s time to do something online that comes closer to the richness of the books we publish (and will go on publishing). Exactly what form this takes, we’re still working on – but it’s going to be an online publication, something more and different to a blog – and a site that reflects more of the web of activity of the writers, thinkers, artists, musicians, makers and doers who have taken up the challenges of the Dark Mountain manifesto.

    To make this happen, we need your help. 

    We’re asking for donations to cover the costs of building and launching a new online home for Dark Mountain. You can send a one-off amount, or set up a small monthly subscription – or if you’d like to talk about other forms of support, then you can get in touch. Everything you need to know is here, on our new fundraising campaign page.

    How ambitious we can be with the next phase of Dark Mountain depends on the level of support we get, so at this stage we’re not setting a fundraising target or a deadline – but we’ll tell you more as we go along. 

    Meanwhile, thank you for reading and sharing the work we publish. From the crowdfunding of the manifesto onwards, everything Dark Mountain has done over the years has been made possible by the support of friends, collaborators and readers. We don’t take that for granted – and wherever things go next, however dark it gets, we’re thankful for the journey we’ve been on with you.

    Published on the Dark Mountain website as the closing essay in a series reflecting on the political events of 2016 — and to launch the campaign that crowdfunded the new online edition of Dark Mountain. Over the following six months, we succeeded in raising over £37,000 to fund the creation of a new online edition which launched in June 2018.

  • Medan klockan tickar

    Four researchers are thrown together in a room. They come from different fields and different backgrounds, they are at different stages in their careers, but what they have in common is that their work has brought them to the frontline of human impact on the living world. We listen in on their conversation, as they talk about what it does to you when climate change isn’t something you read about in the newspaper, or go to a protest about, or try not to think about, but the thing that is waiting on your desk at nine o’clock each morning.

    As part of the Människans scen project, the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm commissioned four members of the Dark Mountain Workshop to collaborate on a play. Each of us was paired with a scientist and through conversations with these partners, we created four stories which were then woven together into a script.

    The play toured Swedish university cities as a rehearsed reading, the audience seated in a circle, the actors among them, followed by a facilitated discussion. An afternoon performance with an invited audience of researchers was followed by a public show in the evening.