DOUGALD HINE

Tag: Dark Mountain

  • The Price of Life

    https://open.spotify.com/show/5xgoppriB1m3ahUB83cheA

    Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

    Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Kent: Is this the promised end?
    Edgar: Or image of that horror?

    King Lear, V.iii.264-5

    We’d walked eight miles already, on a warm July day, when the accident happened. That detail matters, because my mum is in her mid-70s, but this was nothing like what you think of as an old lady taking a fall. It was a slip and a headlong tumble on a steepening slope: a treacherous, skidding slope, like nothing I’d met in the six days since setting out from London. That morning in Reading, my parents had been waiting under the bridge, behind the Thames Water building, along with my friend Lloyd, to join us for the stretch to Streatley. Now my mum was in an ambulance, speeding back across the distance it had taken us hours to cover, to the A&E department of the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Later, one of us heard from a nurse who had been on duty when she came in that they hadn’t expected her to pull through.

    She did – and eight months later, she’s doing well – but this week, as the unfolding reality of the Coronavirus pandemic has spread itself across all our lives, I’ve found myself thinking back to those days in the hospital. Because there is a particular quality to this pandemic, a particular encounter to which it is bringing us. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a big part of it: what we’re going through right now is a collective encounter with parental mortality on a planetary scale.

    Just imagine, if you can bear it, how things would be right now if the group this virus mainly took was children under the age of ten. Or if, like HIV in Africa, it scythed through the middle generation, taking healthy adults in their 30s and 40s, leaving the kids to be raised by the grandparents. Compared to the visceral panic we would be living through, if either of those were the case, the panic we are actually witnessing looks like what it partly is – a live-action role play for the bored citizens of the late capitalist West, hoarding supplies of toilet roll, taking ‘shelfies’ of emptied supermarket aisles and posting them on Instagram.

    I don’t want to diminish the real fears that are at large. There are people I love who have been through bad pneumonia in recent years, or whose immune systems are whacked for other reasons, who are right in the firing line of this virus. Do all the sensible things you are being told to do. Look out for those who are most vulnerable, whether to the virus itself or to the falling dominoes of what we call an economy. And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, make time to feel the strangeness of the moment we are in – this sudden, forced interruption of business-as-usual – and the collective encounter that it calls us to.

    If you study Shakespeare, you soon learn that what marks a comedy from a tragedy is not how many laughs it raises, but how the story ends. A comedy ends with young people getting married; a tragedy ends with young people dying. Since getting married implies having children, comedy is a successful completion of the intergenerational cycle, while tragedy is the interruption of the intergenerational cycle. At some level, you’re dealing with the deepest fear and the deepest satisfaction of any human community: are our kids going to have kids and keep the show on the road? What makes this such rich material for storytelling is that the price is so damned high, and so nearly universal.

    I remember being a kid and the sheer force of wanting to grow up! I used to think this had to do with all that’s mad about the ways we corral children into schools, and no doubt there’s something in that, but now what strikes me is that this was the force that Dylan Thomas wrote of: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age.’ Something absolutely primal pushing us up, pushing up through us, towards adulthood. And somewhere along the way, it hits you that the price of your growing is your parents’ ageing, their journey towards death. The marriage that seals the comedy might be overseen by the parents, they may seem to be in command, but it augurs the end of their time as ‘the parents’, the handing on of that role and the entry into old age.

    It happens in lurching steps, the encounter with parental mortality. Many years may go by after that first loss of innocence that comes with knowing the price of your growing up, but for most of us there will be an event that brings the knowledge home. It stops being a fact that you can see out of the corner of your eye, and you are confronted with this reality, the tangle of thoughts and feelings it tows behind it, the mundane practicalities and the deep pulls on the heartstrings. And in the middle of it all, there is a lurching shift in the balance of power between the generations: these people who cared for you in your earliest vulnerability, with whom – if you’re lucky – you achieved some kind of adult relationship, are now pitched into vulnerability themselves. They will need you to care for them, now or soon, and sooner or later, they will be gone.

    Shakespeare takes the pathos of this power shift to its extreme with King Lear, where the old king is pitched into vulnerability and madness. Yet this pathos is not what makes the play a tragedy: what makes it a tragedy is the ending, in which Lear lives to see the death of his faithful daughter. The journey into age and death can involve great sadness, but a parent dying ahead of their children does not disorder the world in the way that a child dying ahead of their parents seems to do.

    Those of us who have parents over a certain age already live with the knowledge that there is a non-trivial likelihood of their dying in any given year. We know the journey they are on. I remember the spring my mum turned seventy, scrambling up Arthur’s Seat together, thinking to myself, we won’t be doing this in ten years’ time. Still, for a long while, this knowledge can hang out there at the edge of the field of vision. Every day, there are falls, diagnoses, ambulances rushing to hospital; events that bring this knowledge home to thousands of families, that call us out of ordinary time and into the strange moment of our vulnerability, of our participation in the great mystery of living and dying. But it doesn’t happen to us all at the same time, not usually. Not until now.

    The first death from the virus in Britain happened two weeks ago at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. I think of the maze of its corridors that we got to know over those 11 days last July.

    I get a message from Lloyd, who walked the first few miles with us from Reading that morning but left to catch a train home before we came to the hill where the accident happened.

    ‘Until this week,’ he writes, ‘I don’t think the younger half of us really believed that the older half would ever be gone.’ That has changed, quite suddenly, he suggests; and with the tangle of feelings which the change drags up, there comes a release of energy. ‘It has to do with letting go of the idea that we all need to wait until mummy and daddy have finished talking. It’s the release that most people experience more naturally when they go through mourning the actual death of a parent.’

    There’s something obscene, isn’t there, about admitting that the death of a parent can bring release? It brings other things too, and it comes wrapped in grief, but it’s best to own the shadowed complexity of all this. And the release is foreshadowed in this sudden, disorienting shift in the balance of power between the generations.

    In Italy, they are running out of coffins. Beloved old ones are buried or cremated without ceremony. Elsewhere, we wait and watch the numbers, knowing the likelihood that such a crisis will reach us soon.

    There is so much that we don’t know yet. It is so easy to fill the gaps with the stories we are used to telling. We’re too close to this event to tell its story yet, but we can notice things about it and feel the places where it roots down into truths that were always there. We can tell the kinds of stories that don’t try to fill the gaps, that leave room for the mystery, that set a place at the table for the stranger. How do we open our hearts and make ourselves hospitable, when we have to close our doors and keep our distance from each other’s bodies? To name the strangeness of what is called for, that in itself can be a start.

    The price of life is so damned high. It always was, but maybe we forgot this for a while, numbed to all the cycles we belong to and depend on. Whatever it is, this moment, and whatever stories will be told of it, let us find in its dark soil a seed of anamnesis, ‘unforgetting’, from which the next world can begin.

    First published in the online edition of Dark Mountain.

  • The Dream-led Dance: Ten years of learning to publish Dark Mountain

    The Dream-led Dance: Ten years of learning to publish Dark Mountain

    for Charlotte Du Cann & Mark Watson

    In dreams begins responsibility.

    W. B. Yeats

    Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.

    Mierle Laderman Ukeles

    The books live under the stairs. There are boxes of back issues stacked in a Narnia wardrobe. Twice a year, a truck pulls up in the lane outside the cottage and offloads the latest issue, stacked on wooden pallets. If they are lucky, the truck driver stops to help Charlotte and Mark get the boxes indoors, where they will be repacked and sent out to over a thousand subscribers.

    This work could be outsourced. There are distributors who take on publications like Dark Mountain and they probably charge less per copy than the handling fee the pair of them get paid, but the money would no longer go towards paying the rent on this old cottage which serves not only as depot but as editorial headquarters and the home of the people who carry the day-to-day responsibility for the whole operation as it heads into its second decade.

    I visit in early June and it’s still chilly enough to light a fire in the wood stove in the living room. (Those pallets don’t go to waste.) It’s a rare chance to work together face-to-face, rather than the hundreds of hours we’ve spent on Skype, as I hand over the last of my responsibilities for the publication I co-founded a decade ago.

    We walk from Reydon into the small town of Southwold, a seaside place where London people come at weekends. Charlotte takes me to see the mural of Orwell under the pier. We stop in at the Sailor’s Reading Room where Sebald stops off in The Rings of Saturn and I realise that it’s time I read that book again. At the beachfront café, we find a sheltered table to eat our ice creams. Soon we’re joined by Heidi, the new bookkeeper, who lives in a flat above the market square.

    On the way back, we call in at the Post Office, where all those books get posted. The postmaster comes out to shake my hand. ‘Thank you,’ he says with feeling. ‘You don’t have to put your business through us and it makes a huge difference.’ In recent years, Dark Mountain has grown to be his biggest customer, sending thousands of packages a year. There must be cheaper and more efficient ways to do this, but to change it now would be unthinkable. Standing here, I feel what it means that our small publishing operation has become a part of the economic ecosystem of this corner of Suffolk. It’s one of the reasons why Southwold still has a Post Office, when many English places of its size do not.

    I wish I could say that we set out to create a publishing operation which embodied a Polanyian idea of the social embedding of economic activity, but the truth is things ended up this way more by accident than design.

    Like the stapled together news-sheets I made as a child, or the photocopied zines of my late teens, Dark Mountain was the product of the pleasure of making a platform together with the necessity of doing so in order to write the things I wanted to write. Something similar applied to my co-founder, Paul Kingsnorth, whose idea it was in the first place, and our collaboration was born of a hunch that we weren’t the only ones in need of this platform.

    The first few hundred copies of our manifesto lived under my bed in Brixton. Orders got sent out when I remembered, or when readers emailed to ask why theirs still hadn’t come. The way that leads from dreams to responsibility was a shaky one. Even the crowdfunding of the manifesto was a close thing: a few months later, the site we had used went bust, taking with it the funds of any outstanding campaigns.

    The playwright Mark Ravenhill gave a lecture a few years ago at the opening of the Edinburgh fringe festival. He started with a story from the Facebook feed of a younger theatremaker, describing a dream in which he is at dinner with a man who plans to kill his wife. No one else knows about his plan. The man is also the owner of a fleet of rental vans. If the dreamer keeps quiet, he’ll give him a cheap deal on a van to get his show to Edinburgh. He wakes before the choice is made, but is troubled to realise he was tempted.

    To get our artistic dreams on the road, Ravenhill goes on to argue, we have to make a cut between two sides of ourselves, to be like Jekyll and Hyde, or the heroine of a play by Bertolt Brecht. On the one side:

    to be a good artist you have to be the person who walks in to a space and tells the truth. That’s what marks you out from the audience and why they’re sitting over there and you’re standing up there: you are the most truthful person in that room.

    On the other side, how do you get there? ‘Chances are by being a liar, a vagabond and a thief.’ You have to be cunning and ruthless enough to make your own luck.

    I don’t want to play the innocent, to pretend I don’t recognise what Ravenhill is getting at, and I’ve quoted his speech with enthusiasm elsewhere. That line about the duty to be ‘the most truthful person in that room’ catches at something important. Yet as I reflect on a decade as writer, editor and publisher at Dark Mountain, it makes me want to unsettle the neatness of the binary he sets up, because it is in danger of affirming an idea with which I cannot hold: the separation between the high, true work of art and the low, grubby business that supports it, a necessary evil and a source of contamination from which the art itself must be protected.

    For a start, it should be obvious that art deals in a tricky kind of truth. It’s hardly as though we leave our cunning at the stage door. To make theatre is to traffick in illusions: I think of Simon McBurney inThe Encounter, alone on stage, whispering into a cast of microphones, turning the audience’s headphones – the ultimate technology of isolation – into a device of hair-raising intimacy. To be an artist is to be a trickster, and that holds for poets, performers, playwrights and painters alike. Picasso had a point, old monster that he was, when he said, ‘Art is the lie that tells the truth.’ Having tried it on for size in the early years of Dark Mountain, I’d caution against the mantle of the artist as lonely truthteller. Self-proclaimed honesty is a dodgy business, as the signs over used car salesrooms attest. Do what you have to do and let others be the judge of how close to the truth you came.

    Meanwhile, the clean cut between the truth-work of art and the wheeler-dealing that underpins it sits uneasily with me, too. I want to call instead on the Maintenance Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, refusing to respect the cordon sanitaire between high and low status work, making the shit-work visible, maybe even playful, honoured instead of taken for granted. I’d call too on the cunning and grace of an artist like Theaster Gates, and on Kate Rich’s Feral Trade, where the art is another way of doing business. I don’t say we got close to the way these artists work in the practice of publishing Dark Mountain, only that the times when the work felt truest for me were the times when I caught a glimpse of those possibilities.

    ‘Poets are a special case,’ I wrote in Issue 1 of Dark Mountain. ‘Yeats is allowed to be silly, because poetry is not required to make sense.’ It’s a theme to which I’ve returned more than once: the artist as a special kind of grown-up, the only grown-up allowed to go out in public without wearing the clothes of economic rationality. The other side of this strange coin is that the everyday economic reality of life for the average artist in many modern societies has involved a degree of precarity that was, until recently, beyond the experience of most of their fellow citizens. One consequence is that many of the artists and writers I have worked with show signs of post-traumatic stress in their relationship to money.

    This colours the tensions that exist between the artistic vision of a project and its economic viability. Among the initiators of artistic projects, the work of book-writing might be seen as a higher calling than the work of bookkeeping, but it seems that society at large does not agree, since bankers make fortunes and accountants rarely worry about how to pay the bills, while award-winning authors often struggle to make ends meet. In the background of all this is a pervasive though rarely disclosed assumption: that pay should come as a reward for doing things you didn’t want to do. The very self-directedness of artistic work, the sense that we do things we love, contributes to the vulnerability of the artist as economic actor. The experience of being out of place in the economic game, of knowing the work you do doesn’t make sense according to the logic that dominates the society you live in, can breed an aversion to thinking about the economic aspects of that work. So you insist that a spreadsheet is beyond your comprehension, because innumeracy has become a matter of identity, a sign and a symptom of being on the side of the poets.

    The time would come when I made my peace with spreadsheets, but early on I was as prone to this as anyone. It was a humbling moment when it finally hit me how much of the hassle we went through with Dark Mountain might have been avoided if we had set the price of our first issue five pounds higher, but I don’t remember putting any serious thought into that decision at the time. We didn’t model its implications, we just plucked a number from the air.

    In the first two years, we ran the project unfunded, fitting the work in around other paying gigs, raising money through crowdfunding to cover the upfront costs of publication, paying ourselves a bit when there was money spare. By year three, this approach was under strain, as the workload grew. With the help of Michael Hughes, a friend and supporter, a funding proposal was put together. This was immediately successful, securing a grant of £10,000 per year for the next three years from the Deep Ecology Foundation, along with a one-off donation of £5,000 from a radical philanthropist in the UK.

    Together with the profits from book sales, this allowed us to set up a modest part-time salary for a team of two: Paul was paid for ten days a month as director, with Sophie McKeand as his assistant for one day a week. By this point, I was burning out and moving countries, but I remained sufficiently involved to share responsibility for the decisions that followed.

    There’s a pattern I’ve seen a few times now where money comes into a project previously held together by love and bits of string, and instead of this steadying the ship and allowing those involved to do what they’re already doing without making fools of themselves, it inspires a flurry of further activities. There was a touch of that over the next two years: when the last copies of Issue 1 sold out, we decided to splash out on reprinting it; we put time and energy into an album of music made by friends of the project, and the crowdfunding campaign for this was the first in which we missed our target. The premise of our funding proposal had been to bridge the way to self-sufficiency, to a point where sales of books would cover the work of running the operation, but there was no process in place to get us from here to there. Meanwhile, a decent desire to cheer each other on and avoid shame or blame could lead to a reluctance to name our mistakes and see them clearly.

    Towards the end of year four, we hit a crisis: our small non-profit company was weeks away from running out of funds. For me, this was the moment when responsibility arrived. Having let others carry the weight of the project up to this point, I now became its existential backstop, the catcher in the rye who would do what it took to keep this thing from running off a cliff. That meant dropping other commitments, teaching myself new skills and taking on tasks I would hardly have chosen, because there was no one else around to do them and they needed to be done. 

    So I ditched the crowdfunding model that had funded the first three books, because it meant much of our energy went into banging the drum to bring in money from the same 200 readers every time we wanted to go into print. To launch the rolling subscriptions system that replaced it, I had to plan out a business model that meant we could be confident of fulfilling our readers’ subscriptions, and then build the section of the website where they would subscribe. This worked – and when it proved that seven out of ten subscriptions rolled over smoothly from one year to the next, we finally had a path towards the self-sufficiency we had promised our funders. In the meantime, though, we had to cut back what we spent on paying ourselves to half of the already frugal budget. Rather than take a slice of this for myself, I dropped the creative and editorial side of my involvement to allow time for other jobs that could help pay the rent. Though the truth is, the biggest funder of Dark Mountain in the years that followed was my partner Anna, who brought in the regular income that allowed me to put in so many hours unpaid.

    The next turning point came as we hit year eight. Book sales and subscriptions had steadily grown, and with them the everyday work of running the operation. On paper, we were covering our costs, and we had begun to raise the fees we paid to editors, but in reality much of the work going into the books was underpaid. Two things exacerbated this: a drift in the relationship between work and money, and a lack of communication. When Paul and Sophie started getting paid, the principle was simple, with each of them paid the same amount per day. But as roles changed and were handed on, the memory of this was getting lost, and there was no process for checking how the principle was working out in practice and making changes. In fact, outside of the editorial process for a particular book, there were no regular meetings between those of us involved in running Dark Mountain, apart from an annual gathering that was usually tagged on to the excitements and exhaustions of a public event. Into this gap came all the ordinary human misunderstandings, the stories we tell about who is acting how and why.

    There was a moment when it could have ended badly, but instead out of this drama came a recognition that we were no longer the ad hoc, books-under-the-bed operation of our beginnings. These days, we had a well-organised Narnia wardrobe! And we needed to organise ourselves in other ways. So I undertook to create just enough process to give some rhythm to our work, without draining the life from it. The old structure of directors assisted by staff – which sounds so formal, but had come about by default – gave way to a publishing collective, made up of the half dozen of us involved in the month-to-month running of the project, joined by a couple of members of the wider pool of editors. I instituted a monthly call for this collective and this was met with some resistance: when work already expands beyond the hours that any of us are paid for, spending another two hours together on Skype can feel like the last thing that’s needed. Yet the difference it made to our work together soon dissolved any scepticism. Most months, the first half hour would be spent just checking in, telling each other what we could see outside the window or talking about the books we had been reading. With a small team spread over three countries, some anchor point of shared presence is needed, however artificial it felt at first.

    The other thing that came out of the year eight crunch was a written policy for how we ought to handle work and money. It started by acknowledging the gap between what we could pay ourselves, those of us doing this because it was Dark Mountain, and what we paid outsiders whose skills we needed. Handling our accounts, keeping the website up or printing the actual books: by now, we’d learned the hard way that having these services handled by friends of friends could be a formula for chaos, so we needed to be ready to pay the going rate. When it came to paying ourselves, the starting point was different: if all the work going into the books was paid at the rate it deserved, there wouldn’t be any books, but recognising this, we had to work towards a sustainable relationship between work and money, not just as an ethical commitment, but as a practical necessity. If those on whom the publishing of Dark Mountain depended were paid at a rate that meant they couldn’t make ends meet, it didn’t matter how much they cared about the project, sooner or later they would have to walk away. 

    With this spelt out, I proposed an ordering of priorities: first came the work that goes on week in, week out, handling orders, replying to emails, editing the website, because if the work you do for the project is part of your bread and butter, it has to be paid properly. Then came the project work, the editors who take on a time-limited task as part of the team coming together to work on an issue. This is intensive, hands-on work during the core weeks of the editorial process, but within the shape of your working year, it is feasible to balance it with other work that pays more and means less, so in the process of improving how everyone gets paid, this came second to the ongoing maintenance work. Finally, the hardest part, the payment of contributors to the books: hard because all of us on the publishing collective were also freelance writers or artists, and putting this work to the back of the queue felt like reproducing a pattern we had been on the wrong end of ourselves. From early on, we had commissioned covers for our books and paid the cover artists, but the work inside came from an open call. To pay the 50 or 60 people whose words and images appeared in a typical issue was an ambition we’d long held and one that still seemed out of reach.

    It took until year ten, but we got there. After raising the pay for the core team and the book editors, after experimenting with small commissioning budgets, with Issue 15 – the last before I left – we were finally able to offer a fee to everyone whose work appeared in the pages of a Dark Mountain book. How best to do this was a challenge in itself: should we try to differentiate between a full-length essay, a twelve-line poem and a piece of flash fiction, or between a photograph documenting an existing art project and a drawing made for this book? What to do about the different situations and expectations of our contributors? In the end, my answer was to be as open with them as possible. We set aside a contributors pot, £1,200 in the first instance, and wrote to everyone whose work appeared in the book, explaining the situation:

    From conversations with contributors over time, we know that there are those who are trying to make a living from their creative work (or simply to make ends meet), as well as others who are in full-time positions or have other means of support and would therefore be happy to go on contributing without a fee.

    Contributors were invited to opt in or out, based on which of these best described their situation, with the pot split equally between everyone who opted in. (‘And if you have any hesitation,’ the instructions continued, ‘then we would encourage you to choose Yes.’)

    In the event, the contributors to that book split half and half between Yes and No. Those who chose to receive a fee were paid just under £60 each. Not a great amount, but a start.

    How strange to write so many words about Dark Mountain and hardly touch on its subject matter, the questions it asks, the claims it makes, the hunches explored within its pages! That story has been told already many times, by me and others: there’s half a shelf’s worth of books, the original manifesto, hundreds of press articles and interviews, and even the odd PhD thesis.

    This other story I’ve been telling is only one of the lines that could be traced through this web of practice, the dream-led dance of how we became accidental publishers and learned to take responsibility. Name some of those other lines: Charlotte creating the role of producer, corralling editors and setting the tempo and holding the relationship between words, images and design; Mark holding the subscriptions system together and making it work; Ava Osbiston devising a submissions process for a publication that is not exactly a literary journal, that looks for raw potential as well as accomplishment, for the stories our editors can help to tell as well as the ones that arrive fully formed; Nick Hunt taking the website from a simple blog to an online edition that matches the richness of the books; Paul, from the very start, finding that our writing had created expectations and carrying responsibility for its consequences. Then there’s the physical work of printing, taking place beyond the horizon of our publishing team, under the direction of Christian Brett of Bracketpress, the one person to have worked on every single Dark Mountain publication. Each of them could tell another story.

    Within this web of tasks and responsibilities, there is work that is unavoidably monotonous. Where this exists, the aim should be that it is done as humanly as possible, rather than as efficiently as possible; that those doing it are in charge of how it is done, that they know and feel why it matters, that their work is not forgotten or belittled, and that they have the chance to combine this work with involvement in other parts of the creative life of the project. The responsibility for making sure this is the case is shared by everyone involved in making decisions about the running of Dark Mountain.

    Yet it would be a mistake to group together all the maintenance work and background process on which the artistic vision of a project depends and file it under that heading. My experience has been that it is possible to bring a degree of thought and care to these responsibilities that is in alignment with the more obviously artistic aspects of the work I got to do with Dark Mountain. There is an attitude here that can translate into many of the tasks that make up the practice of publishing.

    To take one example: when the need arises to write to readers and supporters, asking them for money, this can be approached as something you hate but have to do. At that point, I’ve seen gifted writers descend into grating cliché, turning out a bad impression of a sales spiel, because they are approaching the task as an evil that cannot be avoided. The alternative is to find a way of writing that message in words that ring clear and true, that embody what you are doing and why it matters. There have been days when I think I found that tone.

    Without making any stronger claim than that for the work I’ve done, I do believe there is a way of working that has truth in it. It isn’t easy, but nor is it complicated. At its heart, this way is about attention, which is why it has a lot to do with art. Attend to experience and let it show you what is missing from the stories you are telling. Attend to the relationships on which the work depends. Attend to what matters and whether it still matters. Attend to the alignment between what we say matters and how we treat each other. Look out for the moment when it’s time to stop.

    First published in OEI Issue 86-87, Publishing Practices, Publishing Poetics.

  • The Vital Compass: A Conversation With Vanessa Andreotti

    The Vital Compass: A Conversation With Vanessa Andreotti

    The second time I meet Vanessa Andreotti, we’re in the lobby of a Paris hotel. There are signs warning guests against trying to get around by taxi. It’s Saturday, 1st December, 2018 – or Act III, according to the calendar of the gilets jaunes protesters who are converging on the capital for the third weekend in a row, bringing half the city to a halt.

    We’re here for the Plurality University, a gathering of designers and thinkers and sci-fi writers brought together ‘to broaden the scope of thinkable futures’. There are distant sirens and smoke rising from the city below, and it feels like the future already arrived while we were busy looking the other way. So Vanessa and I slip away through the back streets, talking about what happens when the future fails. She’s just been back to Brazil, her home country, and she traces the lines that run from an eruption of anger that spilled out onto the streets there five years earlier to the election of Jair Bolsonaro. How much of today’s politics, around the world, is shaped by the dawning recognition that the ship of modernity – sailing under the flags of development and progress – is going down?

    ‘A lot depends,’ she says, ‘on whether people feel that the promises were broken, or whether they see that these were false promises all along.’

    The first step is an admission that something has gone badly wrong. This is the advantage that Trump had over Clinton, or the Brexiteers over the Remainers: whatever pile of lies they served it up with, they were able to admit that the ship is in trouble, while their opponents went on insisting that we were sailing towards the promised destination. In Brazil, the promise was that everyone could have the lifestyle of a new global middle class – and when this future failed to materialise, Bolsonaro was able to ride the anger of voters by claiming that it could have been theirs, if it hadn’t been for the corruption of his opponents. If the promises were broken, then we look for who to blame and how to take revenge. A lot depends, then, on the recognition that the promises could never have been kept; that they were not only unrealistic, but harmful. For only with this recognition is there a chance of working out what remains, what might be done, starting from the wreckage in which we find ourselves.

    For more than ten years, I have been seeking out conversations about what remains, looking for people with whom to think about the wrecked promises of modernity, ways of naming our situation and making it possible to talk together about it. The most illuminating of these encounters have been with people whose thinking was formed by finding themselves and their communities on the hard end of the processes of modernisation. As Gustavo Esteva and I discussed in Dark Mountain: Issue 4, there is a sense that the West is belatedly coming to know the shadows of development and progress, shadows all-too-familiar to those unto whom development was done.

    Vanessa Andreotti’s work deals with these shadows. Her institutional position at the University of British Columbia overlaps with her work as part of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, a collaboration between academics, artists and indigenous scholars and communities. Six months on from that day in Paris, we record a conversation, and as I listen back to the recording, I’m struck by the sense that she is always speaking out of a collective, collaborative, ongoing process of thinking together. Every time we talk, there are new versions of the ‘social cartographies’, poetic maps that make it possible to have difficult conversations. The maps that emerge from Vanessa’s collaborations are boundary objects, places where we meet, where there is a chance of sitting with our discomfort, with our limits, maybe beginning to find a place within a world that is larger and stranger than that allowed for in the ways of seeing that shaped the modern world.

    DH — Looking back at the Dark Mountain Manifesto, there’s a passage towards the end where we talk about ‘redrawing the maps’, a theme I’ve found myself returning to regularly over the past decade. The drawing of maps is full of colonial echoes, so we talk about seeking the kind of maps that are ‘sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain’. It’s this image of maps that are explicitly provisional and not pretending to the objective, detached, view-from-above quality that mapping often implies.

    That makes me think of what you call a ‘social cartography’ and the collection of maps that you’ve built up with your collaborators. Maybe a good place to start is to ask just what this way of mapping means to you?

    VA — You mentioned the colonial approaches to knowledge production, and I think we started there, with an intention to interrupt this totalising relationship with knowledge. In the work of the collective, we felt that maps – as images that could visibilise or invisibilise certain things – had the potential not to represent reality but to create metaphors. We wanted to create spaces for difficult conversations where relationships didn’t fall apart – and the cartographies have been our main tool for working through the difficulties, the hotspots, the tensions, the paradoxes and the contradictions of these conversations.

    So, for example, we have the cartography of ‘the house modernity built’ which is talking about the fundamental structure of modernity. There are two carrying walls and there is a roof that is structurally damaged, which is why the house is unstable, facing imminent collapse.

    We talk about the foundation of the house being the assumption of separability between humans and what we call ‘nature’. That separation then generates other types of separation, creating hierarchies between humans, and between humans and other species, and this is our understanding of the foundation of colonialism. In the collective, we don’t see colonialism as just the expansion of territory or the subjugation of people; we believe it starts with this foundational separability that interrupts the sense of entanglement of everything, that interrupts the sense that we are part of a metabolism that is the planet and that we belong to a much wider temporality within this metabolism. This separation takes away the intrinsic value of life within a wider whole and creates a situation where we are forced to participate in specific economies within modernity in order to produce value to ‘prove’ that we deserve to be alive.

    In the image of the house, one of the carrying walls is the carrying wall of the Enlightenment, or what we refer to as universal reason – this idea of a totalising, universalising form of rationality that wants to reduce being to knowing, that then creates a single story of progress, development and human evolution. The other carrying wall is the carrying wall of the nation state, which is often presented as a benevolent institution, but was primarily created to protect capital.

    The current roof of the house is the roof of financial shareholder capitalism, which is different from industrial capitalism. We talk about the differences between the two in terms of the possibility of tracing investments and of using the state as a means of both redistribution and some form of checks on capital.

    DH — The way the state used to act as a stabilising force within the system?

    VA — Yes, so now we have a speculative financial system where those checks and balances are eroded and where investment is at the expense of others. This investment in destruction is so normalised that even people fighting against climate change or for social justice end up not realising that by using a credit card – or by thinking about the continuity of, for example, our own pensions – we are participating in an economy that is primarily grounded on anonymity and destruction. So there is no way anybody participating in this economy can be innocent, whereas with industrial capitalism, it was much easier to trace the responsibilities: Ford as a manufacturer was embodied in Henry Ford, a person, where it was possible to say, ‘You have responsibilities in relation to society, in relation to your employees’. Today, Ford is a shareholder company and I don’t know if my pension contributions are already invested there, giving me a shareholder interest.

    I’m trying to make it simple enough, without losing the complexity of the connections between these things – because I think what these cartographies do is to connect dots in a way that works against our unconscious desires to not talk about the ways we are complicit in harm.

    DH — You said that a map like this is not claiming to represent reality, it’s offering a metaphor – and that reminded me of a thought about language that I found really helpful in one of your texts. It’s a two-fold distinction about what’s going on when we use language: one of which is an assumption that an objective description is being made, and the other is that language is always an action within the world, rather than a description of the world from above.

    VA — In this sense language mobilises realities. So instead of trying to index reality and meaning with a view to this totalising knowledge that can control reality and engineer something, what we do is see language as an entity that plays with us and we play with it. So the relationship with language becomes very different – and that’s why also, with the maps, they move and they do what they need to do and they need to change, because they are affectable by the world and by how people interact with them.

    We see that some of the maps are more stable than others because they are useful for more contexts, up to a point, but they can’t become canonical answers to universal problems. The keeping of the artificiality is really important, I think, because then it draws the attention to the process. It makes it an ongoing movement rather than an accurate description.

    DH — So going back to the cartography of the house – and the impossibility of not being tangled up with the systems that are perpetrating the destruction – that’s clearly part of what you’re trying to render visible, which makes for more difficult conversations than the ones that people often want to have. I feel like one of the reasons people shy away from those conversations is because they don’t know what to do if they let all this stuff in. It’s like a pit of despair opening before them – and so it’s easier to go off and have a conversation over here, where we’ve got some simplified version of the future and of how the world is, that allows us to talk as if we had a chance of setting things right.

    Letting go of that is both vertiginously frightening for people – it’s like looking off a cliff – and it’s also highly moralised. The terrible thing that Paul and I were accused of in the early days of Dark Mountain was ‘giving up’, and that’s about giving up on the stories of progress, giving up the teleological sense of direction and the possibility of mastery. So I’m interested in your experiences of what happens as we create and hold spaces of conversation beyond reform, beyond revolution, beyond any kind of promise of the direction of history.

    VA — I think the giving up of illusions and seeing disillusionment as a generative thing, this is what we’ve been looking at. As you said, modernity is falling and we need to create spaces for things to fall apart generatively. Partly these are the connections that need to be made through the cartographies. Partly it’s about supporting people to work through denial. In this sense, we have been talking about three denials.

    The first is the denial of violence: this house, this system that rewards us and gives us enjoyment and security, was created through violence and it is maintained by violence. So there’s an illusion of innocence and a denial of systemic violence that needs to go. Then there’s an illusion about linear progress and the possibility of continuity, this is the denial of the limits of the planet. The third denial is the denial of entanglement. We are not separated from the metabolism that is the planet, but there’s an illusion of separation – from land, from other beings, from each other, and even within ourselves, from the complexities of our own being. Once you start connecting these three illusions together, there is a falling apart. There’s also a sense that if you can’t do anything that leads to something in a teleological way, you’re not doing anything.

    This structure of modernity has created a feedback loop that starts with fears: a fear of chaos, a fear of loss, a fear of death, a fear of pain, a fear of pointlessness, worthlessness and meaninglessness that then become allocated desires for specific things. So for example, the fear of scarcity becomes a desire for accumulation. And then these desires, within the modern structures and feedback loops, become entitlements: the desire for accumulation becomes, in turn, a perceived entitlement to property or ownership.

    There are several of these feedback loops that make it very difficult for us to imagine anything otherwise or feel secure in embarking on things that could emerge, but that are unfamiliar and that don’t feed the feedback loops. At this point, we talk about the grammar of modernity, what makes things legible within modernity. Because of the reduction of being to knowing, legibility and the idea that reality can be indexed is what provides security. So from there we ask: what is the grammar that makes things legible and thus the only things that become real and ideal? If you want to put the world in a box, what is the size of this box and is it a square box? How does the world need to be, in order to be contained in this box? So we talk about illegibilities: things that are viable, but unimaginable, unthinkable within this grammar.

    DH — Possibilities that can’t be seen through these lenses.

    VA — Yes – and because we’re working with indigenous knowledge systems, or systems of being, we talk about the problems of trying to graft these systems into the same boxes we are used to. In that sense, we talk about what’s invisibilised. And there’s a need for not trying to make this visible. You need to make what’s invisible visibly absent first; otherwise, what you’re doing is just a translation into the grammar that you already have. We talk about exiled capacities, which are neurobiological states that may offer different kinds of security or stability, even without having a formalised notion of security. These could help us be together without the need to mediate our relationships in articulated knowledge. Through modernity, we relate to each other through knowledge filters, which makes sense to its grammar – but there are other possibilities for relationship, where these knowledge filters are not as important or as thick as we have been socialised into wanting.

    If we are not well in our relationship first with where we are – not just in geographical terms, but in a broader sense – there’s no chance we’re going to be able to have healthy one-on-one relationships. We need to be there and then through the unknowability – because there is not a knowing place, it’s a being place – through the unknowability of this being there is where you can connect with other people. So first, you relate through a vital compass, a compass of vitality. Then you have a more intellectual compass that works with it, but is not more important.

    DH — That image of a compass of vitality, it makes me think of Ivan Illich talking about conviviality and placing that emphasis on certain ways of being together, coming alive together.

    VA — That’s definitely part of it, but this vitality is not just human. It’s through the perception of vitality in everything, the unknowable vitality, that we sense our entanglement with the world.

    Suely Rolnik also talks about the vital compass, about how we are being fertilised by the world in unmediated ways, all the time; some gestations come to term, others do not. She talks about the fact that our vital compass is not being given space or developed, so we are having a lot of abortions of possibilities. This is because we want the moral compass to be the only mediator of reality, and this compass is broken.

    DH — Wow, what a powerful set of images.

    VA — I know! The abortion of possibilities really struck me… I suppose it’s true because if you are afraid of engaging with the world in an unmediated way, you’re not going to allow most gestations to come to term. You want to have autonomy and control over the life that you perceive to be only yours.

    DH — There’s a conversation I’ve had with various people about steering by a sense of what you come alive to – and learning to trust, to pay attention to this subtle sense of vitality. If something is dying a little, notice that, and don’t allow anything to be so important that it overrides that awareness and the message it is bringing, the message that something is wrong. To me, this image of the vital compass speaks to that set of conversations and experiences.

    VA — Suely Rolnik also has ten propositions to decolonise the unconscious. We have translated them from Portuguese in one of the collective’s publications. There are five in our version – and I think this little death you are talking about is there in those propositions.

    DH — That mention of the unconscious brings me to something else I wanted to ask you about. I’ve noticed you talk about your work as a collective in terms of a form of ‘non-Western psychoanalysis’. That struck me as a very curious phrase and I’m interested to hear more about that as a framing of what you’re up to.

    VA — Western psychoanalysis draws attention to the unconscious, to the desires and yearnings that drive our decisions and the ways we think. However, the ontology behind it is either anthropocentric or anthropomorphic. It’s all about bodies or archetypes. It’s useful, but it doesn’t really offer any way to manifest entanglement.

    The idea, for example, that the land dreams through us is not contemplated by Western psychoanalysis – but it is contemplated by other cultures, including indigenous cultures that use psychotropics, for example, where an encounter with a being in a plant will give you dreams that you wouldn’t have otherwise. These dreams help you work through practical knowledge, knowledge of the psyche and knowledge of the divine, and there are neurological, neurobiological and neurochemical changes too. That is how it becomes neurofunctional.

    If these practices are part of your lived reality, you’re talking not just about a chemistry of the brain or its biology, but its functionality: how you start to rely on these dreams, not as a different reality for an escape, but as an extension of the same reality. So we’re coming from learning about practices that do not see the body as the end, the human body – or even the human mythical frame – as the basis of existence…

    DH — As the place where the thing that psychoanalytic tradition is dealing with comes to an end, the limit of the reality it can speak of. I see that.

    VA — Let’s take the land as a living entity – not as a concept, but as a manifestation, because there’s a difference. A manifestation that is more powerful than just human cognition, but where humans are also part of this manifestation. If we flip that, what possibilities for being and knowing and doing and yearning are opened up? We talk about a metabolic intelligence, we’re thinking about a metabolism not only of the Earth but also of what the Earth is embedded in. In this sense, the land is not a resource or an anthropomorphic extension of ourselves, but we are an extension of the land itself.

    If you turn everything to an organic metaphor, we can talk about a metabolism that we’re part of, a metabolism that is sick or that has a big constipation – a lot of shit for us to deal with! Personal shit, collective shit, historical shit, systemic shit. It needs to pass, it needs to be composted, we need to be attentive to it. This shit involves the systemic violence, the complexities of different forms of oppression, the unsustainability of what gives us enjoyment and security, and the illusion of separation. So the denials are probably the cause of the constipation.

    We also talk about a ‘bio-internet’ and accessing a new operating system with new ‘apps’ or un-numbing and re-activating capacities that the house has exiled. In that sense, the engagement with indigenous practices is not about coding these practices as an alternative to modernity or as a supplement to modernity. Rather, it relates to (re)learning or (re)creating habits that can help us to figure out if we can interrupt the feedback loops (of fears, desires and perceived entitlements) of the house of modernity in order to open up possibilities that are currently unintelligible and unimaginable.

    DH — That thought about the possibility of new possibilities brings me back to a phrase of yours that has stuck with me. You talk about ‘hospicing modernity and assisting with the birth of something new, undefined and potentially, but not necessarily, wiser’. After we first met, I was teaching on the first course at a school called HOME, and those words of yours became a touchstone for that week. Afterwards, a guy who was there wrote an article for VICE and hung his whole piece on those words – except that, firstly, he managed to write you out of the story and just ascribe the words to me, and then he left out the second half, the part about the birth of something new.

    What I find striking is that this language of ‘hospicing’ gets used quite a lot in some of the places and conversations that cross paths with Dark Mountain. However, the other half, the assisting with the birth of something new, is often missing in those conversations. Part of that comes, I suspect, from an inability to see much space in between the end of modernity and the end of everything.

    I guess that’s what Paul and I were trying to name in the Manifesto, when we wrote that ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.’ Then, a couple of years later, in a conversation with David Abram for our second book, I stumbled on a further iteration of that thought: ‘the end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world.’ That feels to me like somewhere you’ve been spending a lot of time, finding language for that.

    VA — I think it goes back to the grammar and the feedback loops, too. So there is this desire for certainty, predictability and totalisation, right? You need to know where you’re going, even if it’s extinction! It gives you some security. So how do we open up and interrupt these desires in ways that allow us to take an integrative step into the metabolism, allowing the metabolism itself to show us the way through the vital compass that then recalibrates our intellectual compass.

    It’s very interesting that everywhere I speak about hospicing, there’s always a very strong normative desire for humans to create the new reality. It’s this archetype of agency that is extremely ingrained: the idea that we can create something, and then the lack of faith in humanity to create it, which then plays into this sense of resignation. People say ‘Well, I don’t believe we can do it’, and that’s it.

    What we are trying to get at is that the death we are talking about is an interruption of the totalisation. If it is about a move of integration, a move towards entanglement, towards the metabolism itself, then it’s the metabolism that does the dreaming and the creation. That’s why we don’t say ‘creating’ something new, we say ‘assisting with the birth’ of something new. We are assistants to it, we are not the ones doing it.

    DH — So it’s a humbler role that we might be arriving into, if we’re lucky?

    VA — Absolutely. And it’s very different from this bravado thing about saving the Earth or saving humanity or even saving ourselves or our families, prepping for the end of the world. Existentially, it’s a very different starting point. It’s not even about letting go of the ego, it’s shifting existential direction rather than focusing on form: that’s why we don’t use the word ‘transformation’.

    We are interested in the shift of direction from the neurobiological wiring of separability that has sustained the house of modernity to the neurofunctional manifestation of a form of responsibility ‘before will’, towards integrative entanglement with everything: ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’. This form of responsibility is driven by the vital compass. It is not an intellectual choice nor is it dependent on convenience, conviction, virtue posturing, martyrdom or sacrifice. You can see this responsibility at work in practices of indigenous and Afro-descendent communities that collaborate with the collective.(1) We have been working on the question of how to invite the interruption of the three denials and the composting of our collective and individual ‘shit’ in non-coercive, experiential ways.(2)

    Notes

    (1) See bit.do/billcalhoun and bit.do/webofcures

    (2) See bit.do/decolonialfuturesimpact

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 16 – REFUGE, a special edition to mark the tenth anniversary of the Dark Mountain Project.

  • 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.

  • Endangered Knowledge: A Report on the Dark Mountain Project

    The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

    Closing lines of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009)

    Almost a decade ago, Paul Kingsnorth and I published a twenty-page manifesto. Out of that manifesto grew a cultural movement: a rooted and branching network of creative activity, centred on the Dark Mountain journal, which has been variously described as ‘the world’s slowest, most thoughtful think tank’ (Geographical), ‘changing the environmental debate in Britain and the rest of Europe’ (The New York Times), a case study in clinical ‘catastrophism’ (Paul Hoggett, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Vol.16,3, 261-275) and ‘a form of psychosis [likely to] create more corpses than ever dreamed of by even the Unabomber’ (Bryan Appleyard, New Statesman). The diversity of these responses gives some indication of the difficulty of summarising the Dark Mountain Project and the ‘charged’ nature of the cultural terrain in which the project has been operating. 

    Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto was written in the autumn of 2008, as the financial system shook to its foundations, and it grew out of a sense that our whole way of living – ‘life as we know it’ – was endangered. While the rolling news that autumn gave an immediate edge to that sense of endangerment, our concern was not only with the self-wrought destabilisation of the project of economic globalisation, but the fraying of the ecological foundations of this way of living by the consequences of industrial exploitation. Against such a background, the manifesto calls for a questioning of the stories our societies like to tell about the world and our place within it: the myth of progress, the myth of human separation from nature, the myth of civilisation. And it claims a particular role for storytellers and culturemakers in a time when the stories we live by have become untenable. 

    Ten years on, I would locate the cultural and intellectual project set out in the manifesto as bordering onto the work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (the abandonment of the ‘dreams of modernization and progress’ and the multispecies storytelling of The Mushroom at the End of the World), Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement), Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (The Ends of the World) and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, as well as James C. Scott (Against the Grain), who having assembled the archaeological evidence against the myth of civilisation, writes despairingly:

    ‘Dislodging this narrative from the world’s imagination is well nigh impossible; the twelve-step recovery program required to accomplish that beggars the imagination.’

    Meanwhile, among those working directly with climate change, there is an increasing willingness to voice the question at the heart of the manifesto: if this way of living cannot be made ‘sustainable’ and a great deal of loss is already written into the story, what kinds of action continue to make sense? See, for example, Jem Bendell’s work on ‘The Deep Adaptation Agenda’, or the recent Guardian interview with Mayer Hillman (‘“We’re doomed”: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention’).

    As discussed in that article, there is a lag between the willingness of artists and writers to contemplate the possibility that we are already living through an event that might well be described as ‘the end of our civilisation’ and the willingness of scientists to suggest that this is the case. Perhaps there is a parallel here to what has happened over the past decade with the Anthropocene, a concept which is still following the slow process of authentication at the International Commission on Stratigraphy, but which has already been the subject of vast amounts of artistic and intellectual output.

    Even more than with the Anthropocene, there is a clash between attempting to write about this subject in reasonable prose and the content of what is being written about. Much of the early criticism of Dark Mountain seems to waver between a moral objection (‘you are giving up and if people listen to you, the consequences will be terrible’) and an existential recoil (‘this is unbearable to think about’). In relation to the second of these, the artistic nature of the project is important: as I have argued elsewhere, one of the roles of art under the shadow of climate change can be to create spaces in which we are able to stay with unbearable knowledge, without falling into denial or desensitization.

    Concerning the charge of ‘giving up’, as Paul Kingsnorth wrote in the early days of the project, there is something missing here: ‘giving up’ on what? There are those who move from giving up on the project of sustaining our current way of living to embracing the imminence of human extinction (see Guy McPherson). From the manifesto onwards, however, Dark Mountain has sought to open up the considerable territory which lies between these two outcomes. ‘That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics,’ we write in the manifesto.

    John Michael Greer, a regular contributor Dark Mountain, offers the helpful distinction between a ‘problem’ and a ‘predicament’. A problem is a thing that has a solution: it can be fixed and made to go away, leaving the overall situation essentially unchanged. A predicament is a thing that has no solution:

    ‘Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them “solves” the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away.’

    The claim which Dark Mountain makes is that our situation cannot be reduced to a set of problems in need of technical or political solutions. Rather, it is best conceived as a predicament. In the face of a predicament, it is not that there are no actions worth taking, but the actions available belong to a different category to those one would take when faced with a problem. 

    If I were to propose a list of the kinds of action worth taking in the face of our current predicament, it would include:

    1. taking responsibility for kinds of knowledge which might not survive the likely turbulence of the coming decades and doing what you can to better their chances of survival;
    2. making sure that the losses (of species, landscapes and languages) which already form the background to our way of living are mourned rather than forgotten, not least by telling stories of loss which themselves become a form of knowledge that can be carried with us;
    3. creating circumstances under which we have a chance of ‘knowing what we know’, encountering the knowledge of a thing like climate change not as arms-length facts, but as the experience of knowing by which my sense of who I am is changed.

    In each of these three cases, the work of writers and artists, storytellers and culturemakers has a role to play – and these roles have been explored over the past ten years in the work that has taken place around Dark Mountain. So far, the project has been responsible for thirteen book-length collections of writing and art, while inspiring manifestations as various as a number one album in the Norwegian music charts, an enormous mural on the side of a disused art college in Doncaster, and a year-long workshop at Sweden’s national theatre. To the best of my knowledge, it has not been responsible for any corpses.

    First published in KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies as part of a special issue on ‘Endangered Knowledge’

  • Coming Down the Mountain

    Coming Down the Mountain

    After ten years of holding the space of Dark Mountain – the space between stories, the place you come when things you once believed in no longer make sense – it’s time for me to move on. I won’t be leaving overnight, but I’m now working to finish up or hand over the bits for which I’m responsible, and once we’ve celebrated the tenth anniversary of the manifesto next July, I’ll wander off to join those friends and collaborators who are already part of the project’s past. (more…)

  • Ten Years on a Mountain: A Farewell

    There’s an old mythic way of thinking about the journey of a life which says that there are three times you will pass through, each with its own colour. You set out in the red time of youth, its raw energy not yet tempered by experience – and with luck, you are headed for the white time of wisdom. But whichever route you find yourself taking, the road that leads from red to white will pass through the black time, when that early raw energy starts to run low, when you are brought up hard against the knowledge of limits and you learn the humbling lessons of failure.

    They say there have been times and places in which this was recognised and accounted for in the expectations your community would put upon you. On entering the black time, your other duties were taken away and you would join the cinder-biters, whose only task was to lay down by the fire and make sure it did not go out.

    Who has such a community now? Hardly anyone. And most of us have grown up in a culture which prizes the red time of youth, and may look fondly on the occasional white-haired elder, but would rather not acknowledge the black times. So we struggle through, as best we can – or perhaps we find ourselves in a doctor’s office, being offered pills that promise to take the edge off the darkness. What we’re rarely offered is a story that might help us make sense of the time in which we find ourselves.

    * * *

    Ten years ago, when Paul and I were kicking around the draft of what became the Dark Mountain manifesto, neither of us had the tools to think in terms like these. The first I heard of cinder-biters or the three colours of initiation was from the storyteller Martin Shaw, one of the host of friends and teachers and collaborators who came into our lives as a consequence of having written that manifesto.

    But when I look back now at the beginnings of Dark Mountain, I see two men who stood on either side of a threshold. There’s only five years between us, but we met when I was in the last rush of the red years, having stumbled at last on something I was good at doing, while Paul was already deep in the black.

    I’m not spilling secrets here; it’s written across those essays of his which led so many readers to this project. The loss of faith in journalism and environmentalism, but also the way ambition turns to ashes: ‘I used to long to be on Newsnight every week, offering up my Very Important Opinions to the world,’ Paul writes, in Issue 2, grimacing at the memory of his younger self.

    Part of my role in those early years was to serve as a counterweight. I remember a mutual friend suggesting that Dark Mountain had been born out of Paul’s loss of faith and my finding a faith. In what, though? There are traces of it in the manifesto: that insistence on ‘the hope beyond hope’, ‘the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us’, and ‘the power of stories in making the world’.

    ‘It is time to look for new paths and new stories,’ we declare in the manifesto’s closing chapter, announcing our intention to create a journal that will be a home for this work. But as others joined the conversation, they led us to a recognition that the work is as much about recovering old stories, stories from the margins – and, in a phrase I remember hearing in those early conversations, holding ‘the space between stories’: the place where you can slow down, wait a while in the ashes of a story that failed, rather than rush headlong into ‘the new story’ and repeat the same mistakes.

    In Issue 4, I published a conversation with the Mexican intellectual and activist Gustavo Esteva, the only person Paul and I had known in common when we first met to share ideas for what became Dark Mountain. At one point, I talk about:

    the willingness to walk away, even though you have no answers to give when people ask what you would do instead, to walk away with only your uncertainty, rather than to stay with certainties in which you no longer believe.

    It’s a description of a pattern I saw in Gustavo’s life, but also of a pattern I’d begun to recognise around Dark Mountain. It’s Paul declaring, at the end of his essay in Issue 1: ‘I withdraw … I am leaving. I am going out walking.’ It’s what I understood from those words about ‘the space between stories’. It’s a journey I’ve seen others make over the past ten years: taking leave of hollowed-out stories and certainties in which they could no longer believe, resisting the rush to answers and to action, laying in the ashes for a while.

    ‘It’s a good name, you know, Dark Mountain.’ This was Martin Shaw, in the garden of a Devon pub, the first time we actually met. ‘It’s good because you’ve got an image there.’

    The sun moves across the sky, the seasons change and the face of a mountain shifts; features emerge or pass into shadow. The same thing will happen with an image, different sides of it catch the light in different moods, at different times of life.

    Long after Paul had introduced me to Robinson Jeffers’ ‘Rearmament’, the poem where he found the image that gave us a name, another aspect began to come into focus. More and more, I found myself drawn to the role that mountains have played as places of retreat, in both the spiritual and the tactical senses of that word. It caught something about the role Dark Mountain seemed to play for many of those to whom it mattered.

    You come here because it’s a good way back from the frontline. You come here when you’re no longer sure where the lines are drawn, when the maps are shaken and old identities scattered. You come here when it’s time to reflect, to ground yourself again, or to catch the whispering of realities that get drowned out in the street-noise of the everyday world. Maybe you build a shelter for a while, sit around a campfire with strangers who feel like friends, and look back at the orange lights of civilisation: just now, they seem a long way away. But you are not made of granite, peat or heather.

    There may not be much talk of ashes in the culture I grew up in, but we still know what it means to get ‘burned out’ – and by the time I left England in 2012, three years into the life of this project, I was burning out.

    I’d spent those red years running around London, bringing together conversations, watching ideas spark, learning to breathe projects into life. I was good with words, but I wasn’t a writer exactly – or not the way that Paul was. My role models were never the solitary romantic figure, the lone truth-teller set against the world; they were collaborators whose work took many forms, John Berger or Ivan Illich, thinkers and storytellers whose words were tangled up with webs of friendship and mutual inspiration. Following the threads I found there, I’d discovered that I could use words to create a space of possibility, a story others would want to step inside.

    There’s an energy that comes with learning to use your own abilities and finding that you have an effect in the world. Fuelled by self-discovery, you burn brightly – but then one day you realise you’re falling, you have been falling for a while, and only the forward momentum kept you from crashing already.

    I was lucky. Just as I entered freefall, I met someone who was willing to catch me. I moved countries, shucked off what I could of the responsibilities I’d been carrying, in the name of self-preservation – and over the next eighteen months, my involvement with Dark Mountain was limited to a few weeks of editing and a couple of pieces published in the books

    ‘Everyone I meet at Uncivilisation is an individual with a collective story to tell.’ This was Charlotte Du Cann, writing in 2011, about her first visit to the annual festival we used to run back then. ‘A poet from Scotland, a professional forager, the captain of a Greenpeace ship, a designer of hydrogen cars, a researcher into Luddite history.’

    I still occasionally encounter people who think Dark Mountain is a campaign to persuade everyone to give up – on climate activism, on saving the world, on the possibility that there is anything worth doing. Given the picture they seem to have of our project, I always wonder what they imagine could fill the soon-to-be fourteen volumes of that journal we proposed in the manifesto, what could have sustained the love and work of all the editors who have brought those books into being.

    I don’t remember meeting anyone at Uncivilisation who was seduced into despair by Dark Mountain – although there were those who had been deep in despair when they stumbled on the project, and who found relief in a setting where it was possible to give voice to a loss of faith without feeling judged or isolated. But like the contributors to our books, the temporary community of the festival was disproportionately made up of people who are active in one way or another, whether or not they would identify as activists.

    Yet here’s the twist: Dark Mountain itself has never been the place from which to act. You come here for something else, something harder to pin down. Something you’ve been missing.

    Charlotte came across one way of naming this in a conversation with a Transition Towns activist she met that summer at Uncivilisation: ‘If Transition is the village,’ he told her, ‘Dark Mountain is the shaman.’ In her report on the festival, she ran with this personification, Dark Mountain as the outlandish figure, walking the boundary between the human world and what lies beyond:

    to transmit a sense of deep time, of our rough lineage, of wild trees, of the ease and intimacy of talking about Big Subjects, without being heartless, idealistic, or controlling the outcome.

    This is a picture of the project that I recognise – and in hindsight, there seems to be a line running from that festival report to the role that Charlotte would come to play at the heart of Dark Mountain in the years that followed, bringing a new degree of beauty to the books and shouldering the heavy-lifting of a growing project, as it matured beyond its beginnings.

    Paul’s head may not actually have been in his hands, but that’s the way I remember it. And I remember the thoughts that ran through my head: Paul couldn’t go on carrying this much weight, and it wasn’t time for this thing to come to an end, and no one was going to magically ride to our rescue, so I was going to have to step back in.

    They say what changes, on the far side of the black time, is that you put your life in service of something larger. I may be greyer around the edges than I was ten years ago, but I’m not laying claim to any white-haired wisdom. All I’m saying is, that morning in Ulverston was the first time I chose to put this project ahead of my own interests, and probably the first time I really had to make that kind of choice about anything.

    I’d given a lot to Dark Mountain before that, but now I was in service to it. This meant teaching myself how to do whatever was needed: replacing the book-by-book crowdfunding with an annual subscription, setting up a cash flow model so we knew that there would be money in the bank to print the books, mediating the tensions that built up between members of a growing team, setting up regular calls so we actually started to function as a team. In an ordinary week, there were others who put more hours into the running of the project, but when a crisis hit – and in those days, it seemed like that was every other month – I was the one who’d interrupt a family holiday, turn down paid work and generally drive those I loved to distraction, as I threw myself into keeping the show on the road.

    ‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ wrote Yeats. To leave room for making a living, I gave up my role as an editor on the books, and the tasks I was doing now for Dark Mountain were not the things I enjoyed most or was even that good at. But I was here, and it wasn’t time for this to come to an end, and there’s a certain satisfaction that comes with taking responsibility.

    In my memory of the festivals, there was always a moment – around the Sunday morning – when people’s thoughts began to turn for home, and someone would start a big conversation with the question: ‘So, what are we going to do?’

    My answer was no: we weren’t going to do anything, and we certainly weren’t going to sit down now and arrive at a consensus, make a plan of action, organise ourselves into a movement.

    Probably this scene played itself out in my head, more than anywhere else, but the dynamic was real enough. Over those days together, many of us had felt a quickening, a sense of coming alive – and it was tempting to try to turn this into action. But pledges made in that liminal space are a prescription for disappointment.

    What was called for wasn’t, couldn’t be, a collective decision forged in a festival tent. Rather, the challenge now was for each of us to take whatever we had found here back to the everyday world, back to the frontlines or backyards or office cubicles that were waiting for us, and see which parts of it survived the journey. However inspired we felt right now, there was no shortcut, and no guarantee which parts of what we were feeling would still make sense on a Monday morning in October.

    Retreat is not defeat. Retreat is not surrender. A mountain can be a pretty picture on a postcard, or a place you sit alone for days and nights as the layers of your life so far get burned away and you get claimed by something larger. If that should happen to you, then you’ll come back changed. You’ll have lost some of what you thought you were, certain paths will no longer hold the attraction they once did, and you may catch sight of possibilities you couldn’t see before. If you sit for long enough, your eyes adjust.

    But none of us can spend our whole lives on a mountain. At the practical level, where dreams give way to responsibilities, none of us makes a full-time living from our work with Dark Mountain. It’s probably healthy that we fit our roles in around other freelance projects, creative commitments and part-time jobs that pay the bills and take us into other worlds.

    Still, if you take on a role where you’re seen as speaking for the project, where you get written about periodically in the press with varying degrees of accuracy, then inevitably you become identified with it, and it with you.

    For the best part of ten years, I’ve been one of the Dark Mountain guys. (‘The one you haven’t heard of,’ as I remember Chris T-T described me during his set at the manifesto launch.) And for a while now, I’ve known that my time in this role is coming to an end. I’ve served this project and been blessed by it in more ways than there’s room to tell and I’m ready to move on.

    I’m ready to head back down the mountain, to take my place again somewhere along ‘the long front’, as Doug Tompkins called it in Issue 3. Here in Sweden, Anna and I are starting a school called HOME, ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture’. This is a different task to the one Dark Mountain serves, and there’s a need to be clear about the difference, which is one of the reasons why it’s time to be moving on.

    I won’t be leaving overnight – there’s still work to finish up, helping the rest of the team to fulfil the promise of this new online home, editing some wonderful pieces that have already been sitting on my desk too long, and getting the business side of running Dark Mountain into as tidy a shape as I can before I go. But next July, I plan to walk the Thames from London to Oxford with my family, to arrive on the tenth anniversary of the manifesto’s publication at the riverside pub where it was launched, to celebrate the occasion with a party to which all friends of this project are invited – and then to wander off to join those friends and collaborators who are already a part of the past of Dark Mountain.

    For years, I struggled to articulate the asymmetry between my relationship to Dark Mountain and Paul’s. He was always generous in naming me as his co-founder, but he was the one with whom it started.

    One time, I tried to explain it to a journalist by talking about the idea of ‘the first follower’, from this little video about ‘how a movement starts’: that the critical moment isn’t the guy dancing like a wild thing on the hillside, but the first person who gets up and starts dancing with him. When I read it in print, it came out like I’d proclaimed myself his number one disciple.

    Then this summer, I realised what it is: for me, Dark Mountain was always a collaboration. Each of us brought years of our thoughts and doubts and inspirations to the beginnings of the project – but for Paul, there had been a time when Dark Mountain only existed in his head, a thing that was brewing, that he knew he would need help to bring about.

    As I look to the end of my time with this project, then, I find myself thinking about its future as a collaboration. It’s no longer a start-up that hits a potentially terminal crisis every other month. And for a long time now, it’s been sustained by the collective creativity and strength of a team who have taken it further than I’d have believed possible in those early years.

    At the heart of that team are Charlotte and her partner Mark Watson, both as much in service to this project as I’ve ever been, along with Nick Hunt and Ava Osbiston, and a growing gang of experienced editors, readers and steerers around them. There’s plenty of strength there to carry things forwards – but just as they joined me and Paul and lifted the weight from our shoulders, so others will be needed to join them along the road.

    The seasons will change, the sun will move across the sky and other features of the mountain come into focus. The image will be read in other ways. There is never only one map you can draw of a given landscape, never only one path that leads across it. I look forward to lifting my eyes from time to time and catching sight of you, all you mountaineers, tracing paths that I would never have thought of taking, until one day you find that it is time for this thing to come to an end – and when that day comes, know that ending is fulfilment and not failure.

    First published in the online edition of Dark Mountain in October 2018 to accompany the announcement of my departure from the project.

  • Dark Mountain: The Online Edition

    Dark Mountain: The Online Edition

    So many of my working hours in the first half of 2018 went into the new Dark Mountain website. It was a strange experience to have it “go live” while I was offline and away from work of all kinds last month. But also appropriate, a reminder that there are others who will take this project forwards.

    I got back to my desk two weeks ago – and it’s taken most of that time to steady myself, to find the balance between the things that came into focus while I was away and the things that were still waiting here on my return. But I think I’m getting there.

    Meanwhile, if you haven’t found it already, let me share the site with you. It’s by no means finished – if there’s one thing I learned over the past year, it’s that no website is ever “finished”. But already, I think, it fulfils two of the ambitions with which we set out: to create an online home for our work that approaches the beauty of the books we publish, and to go back and tell the stories of the work we’ve done over what will soon be a decade as a project. I hope you agree.

    Oh yes – and to celebrate me finally getting round to trumpeting the news of its launch, today we’ve published Childish Things, my essay on the ways that art gets tangled up with the sacred (originally written for last year’s SANCTUM issue).

  • From the Dead Centre of the Present

    From the Dead Centre of the Present

    It seems that we were following similar hunches, for years, before we were introduced. The crisis of 2008 had set us on these tracks – or rather, it meant that the tracks we were following anyway seemed suddenly relevant to people who hadn’t noticed them before, so that we found ourselves needing to reformulate, to express what it was we thought we had caught sight of.

    In my case, this took the form of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, written with Paul Kingsnorth and published in 2009. The hunch that we tried to put into words was that the crisis went deeper than almost anyone wanted to admit, that it went culture deep, that it was a crisis of the stories by which our culture has been living. And if this is true, we thought, then might it not follow that the work of telling stories and making culture becomes central to the task we face, the task of living through dark times and finding possibilities among the ruins.

    The tumbling weeks of crisis turn into months, years, and a new normal establishes itself, but it is never the promised return to normal. Eight years on, Dark Mountain has become a gathering point for people trying to work out what still makes sense, in the face of all we know about the depth of the mess the world is in.

    A mountain is not exactly an urban thing, though! Sometimes I tell people, it’s not a place you live the whole time: it’s a place you go to look back and get a longer perspective, maybe even to receive some kind of revelation, but you still have an everyday life to return to, back in the city or the village. That’s what I enjoy about this friendship and collaboration with STEALTH – and joy is a word that should be mentioned here, you know! I still remember the night we were first brought together for dinner by a mutual friend and we laughed so much all night we said, we have to do this again tomorrow, and we did. That’s how we got tangled up with each other.

    Now, tracing our tangled trajectories across these past eight years – you bouncing between cities, me wandering up and down a mountain of words – I see two stories that we seem to have in common. The first is spatial, the second temporal.

    The spatial story concerns a negotiation between the edges and the centre. I need to be careful how I say this, because we have all been told about the way that whatever is edgy, new, avant-garde gets metabolised, made palatable, made marketable and becomes the next iteration of the centre. That’s the story of selling out, or buying in: the great morality tale of counterculture.

    The story I’m trying to tell, here – the one I say we have in common – starts with the claim that the centre as we know it is already ruined beyond saving. This is what I see in that image of the burnt-out architecture faculty in Delft in ARCHIPHOENIX. In the manifesto that Paul and I wrote, we speak about this: “None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists…” And then we ask, “What would happen if we looked down?” What if we admit that the centre is already a burnt-out ruin? Might we need to ask ourselves what it is, exactly, that is doomed: what version of ourselves, what set of things (structures, institutions, customs) with which we have identified?

    If this is the kind of mess we’re in, then the challenge for those of us at the edges is neither to retain our countercultural purity, nor to negotiate good terms on which to cash in with a centre that is already collapsing – nor even to try to shore that centre up and prevent its collapse (too late!) – but to offer something that could take its place.

    “Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of the things,” writes Paul Kingsnorth, my co-founder in Dark Mountain, in late 2016. “Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it. In the old stories, people from the edges of things brought ideas and understandings from the forest back in the kingdom which the kingdom could not generate by itself.”

    The arrival at the centre of a figure from the edges is the opening move in many an old story. But the negotiation cannot set anything in motion, so long as the pretence is maintained that business can go on as usual, that a return to normal is on the cards.

    So when STEALTH asks how those practices which already showcase possible directions could be “made to work… on a scale that answers the challenges ahead?”, what is in question is not ‘scaling up’ for the sake of profitability, but what might take the place where the centre used to be. How do we find ways of going on making things work when – as in The Report – the all-powerful operating system breaks down. Like Anna Tsing, we are looking for the possibilities of life within capitalist ruins.

    “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” we write, on the last page of the manifesto. The ruins are not the end of the story. Ecologically, the species present (our species included) go on improvising ways of living together, even with all the damage. There are things to be done: salvage work, grief work, the work of remembering and picking up the dropped threads.

    This is where we slip from the spatial to the temporal. What is at stake in the temporal story is how we find leverage on the dead centre of the present. Not so long ago, the future served as a point of leverage: a place from which to open up a gap between how things happen to be just now and how they might be. That gap was charged with possibility.

    Here I think of the work of Tor Lindstrand, to whom you introduced me in that project in Tensta, ‘Haunted by the Shadows of the Future’. He tells the story of the disappearance of the future in urban planning: the evaporation of any vision or belief in the possibility that things could be different, as the development of cities is subsumed into the operation of the market and marketed with bland identikit images and words. The role of financialisation in this reminds me of William Davies’ description of the consequences of monetary policy under
    neoliberalism:

    The problem with viewing the future as territory to be plundered is that eventually we all have to live there. And if, once there, finding it already plundered, we do the same thing again, we enter a vicious circle. We decline to treat the future as a time when things might be different, with yet to be imagined technologies, institutions and opportunities. The control freaks in finance aren’t content to sit and wait for the future to arrive on its own terms, but intend to profit from it and parcel it out, well before the rest of us have got there.

    If the future is already plundered – and if, as Dark Mountain points out, the consequences of related kinds of plundering for the ecological fabric stand in the way of any revival of the confident future of modernity – how else can we open up that gap in which the possibility of change, the non-inevitability of present conditions, can be located?

    The great improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says that, when telling a story, you shouldn’t worry about what’s coming next: you should be like a person walking backwards, looking out for the chance to weave back in one of the threads from earlier in the story. We move through time backwards, like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’: we cannot go back and fix the mistakes of the past, but at least it is there for us to see, in a way that was never true of the future. Ivan Illich writes of ‘the mirror of the past’: if we look carefully into it, without falling into romanticism and without dismissing it as simply a poorer version of the present, then the past too can serve as a source for a sense of possibility. In a time of endings, one of the forms of possibility it offers is the dropped threads of earlier endings – the way of life which is now falling into ruin was built among the ruins of earlier ways of life.

    I see this as central to the method by which you seek to build possible futures, in Bordeaux and Vienna, in Rotterdam and Belgrade, and elsewhere. I remember sitting in a seminar room in Gothenburg as you showed us images of that mutual aid society in the Netherlands in the 1860s, created by workers to build their own homes. A trajectory can be traced from this initiative to the grander state projects for welfare of the mid-20th century, to the hollowing out of those projects under the neoliberal period of marketisation, to the crisis of 2008 in which they are revealed as ruins. Even as you go about improvising practical strategies to bring these ruins to life, you are always looking back to the beginnings of the story and asking what has been lost or written out, in the way that it has been told.

    In THE REPORT, you reveal the pattern by which the role of bottom-up initiatives in the building of the city have been written out of Vienna’s story. What emerges from these researches and the future narratives which they inform is the realisation that, in many parts of Europe, the achievements of social democracy were born out of movements which looked far more like anarcho-syndicalism than those who later consolidated these achievements into top-down state systems would be willing to admit.

    Those movements were born out of necessity, operating within the ruins of the commons, devastated by the early phases of industrial capitalism; now, after 40 years of neoliberalism, as we look for ways to operate within the ruins of the welfare societies of the 20th century, their histories can help us open the gap between how things are and how they might be.

    We meet in the conviction that telling stories is not just a way of passing the time, but the way that we find our bearings in the world. A story opens a space of possibility into which we can invite others and when the work of building new projects among the ruins is at its hardest, when we wonder if it is worth going on, it is by retelling the stories that we connect ourselves to the past and the future, place ourselves within time. The right story, told from the heart, can be the difference between going on and giving up.

    First published in Upscaling, Training, Commoning (Jovis, 2018), a book by the Dutch-Serbian architecture duo STEALTH.unlimited.

  • 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.