DOUGALD HINE

Tag: projects

  • 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’

  • 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.

  • It’s Time to Start a School

    An hour’s drive northwest from here, you take a turning off the two-lane highway, near the bottom of a steep hill. After that, you’re on an unpaved road, heading into the woods. At first, there are red wooden houses dotted to either side, but then the scattered township thins out and for the last couple of miles, there’s just you and the trees, a glimpse of lake somewhere off to the left, and this single-track road.

    I’m doing my best, but it’s hard to reproduce the unexpectedness of what comes next. When I bring people here, however much I’ve told them, there’s always an audible expression of amazement as we round the last corner and this huge white Bauhaus structure comes inexplicably into view. It gets better, because as we park and climb out, the newcomers peer through the glass in disbelief, starting to make out a building within a building: the old red wooden schoolhouse, two storeys high, which served as the first home for the gang of theatremakers who dreamed this madness into being, still stands where it always did, inside one wing of the new structure.

    Back in November, the day after I turned forty, this is where we came. Eight grownups and two small kids, cars slithering down the icy road: a little gang of friends and collaborators who had taken up my invitation to spend a weekend at the impossible theatre in the woods, thinking about the years ahead and what we might do together.

    The idea didn’t arrive while we were out there – they keep their own time, ideas like this, and mostly they show up sometime after you let go of your expectations, really let them go, with no promise that anything will come along to take their place. You have to give up. And then, if you’re lucky, something shows up, and it doesn’t look like what you were expecting, but maybe it is the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.

    So yeah, something showed up. In the days afterwards, nurtured in conversations around our kitchen table, an idea took shape. And here it is – it’s time to start a school.

    This year, Anna and I are starting a school together. It’s a school called HOME, a school for culturemakers. Over the past few months, we’ve been figuring out how to talk about it, starting to tackle the practicalities – and today it’s time to share where we’ve got to and make an invitation.

    Here’s one way that we talk about it:

    HOME is a school where we study the mess the world is in, not as a set of discrete problems to be solved, but as a tangled and humbling predicament.

    We follow the roots of this predicament deep into history, uncovering the buried assumptions which have shaped our ways of seeing and being in the world, catching sight of the possibilities those assumptions hid from view.

    We learn from artists, philosophers, community builders, improvisors, historians and poets. Looking for a term to bridge these worlds, we call ourselves a school for culturemakers. We cultivate the art of invitation, hospitality and friendship, finding here the seeds of other ways of being human together.

    It starts quite simply with a one-week course this summer. The course will run from 4-8 June in the village of Ängelsberg, a couple of hours train ride west of Stockholm. I’ll be teaching alongside my friend Andrew Taggart, a practical philosopher who weaves webs of conversation, enquiring into the gaps within our present ways of life. We’re calling the course Finding Our Way Home and it starts with a question: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’

    We’ve already taken a few bookings before we got as far as launching a website, but today the site is launched and open for enquiries. You can read the rest of the invitation that we’ve made – and, given that the last residential course I taught sold out with two months to go, should you find that the invitation speaks to you, then I’d encourage you to send us an enquiry without delay.

    Meanwhile, in the spirit of these letters, I want to head a little deeper into the woods, to think aloud about what it means to start a school, where this has come from and where it might be heading – and, for those with long memories, to say a word or two about that time when I was going to start a university.

    There are books that matter to you immensely at a certain moment in your life and a few years later you can hardly remember why – and then there are pieces of writing, often no more than a few lines, that you know you’d carry with you to the ends of the world. One of mine is a passage from The Cultivation of Conspiracy, an address given by Ivan Illich in Bremen in 1998. He is looking back on the places of convivial learning that he had created with his friends over the previous forty years – from a ‘thinkery’ in a one-room shack on a Puerto Rican hillside, to the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca, Mexico, to the hospitable household at Kreftingstraße, where on Fridays after Illich’s lectures the spaghetti bowl would feed two dozen guests around the table, with sometimes more spilling out to sit on the Mexican rugs in the next room. In all of these places, he says, they have sought to foster a particular atmosphere:

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

    I’ve carried those lines for years, like a navigational instrument, looking for the places which have that atmosphere, seeking to cultivate it in the spaces where I’ve worked. So when I think about what it means to start a school, it doesn’t start with a course or a curriculum or a building, but with the way of being together that Illich is talking about.

    There are people whose work you discover at the right moment. The year I discovered Illich, I was twenty-five and I’d just walked out on what looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. I’ve heard stories like this often enough now to know the pattern: sometimes you have to give up, to turn down the offer no sensible person would refuse, to walk away without any explanations that will satisfy your friends’ parents or your parents’ friends, because that’s the price of entry to a different kind of life. At the time, all I knew was that I’d exchanged a staff job in the newsroom for temping in warehouses and call centres, a new sense of freedom, and the realisation that the university careers service didn’t have any lives my shape. If I wasn’t going to contort myself into one of the careers on offer, I would have to make a life of my own. 

    Books were my friends that year and I read with a focus that surpassed anything I’d had as a student at Oxford. I was reading for my life and the writers I discovered became my companions.

    Four years down the road, I would travel to Cuernavaca, to a gathering of Illich’s friends and collaborators, where the atmosphere he spoke about in Bremen still lingered in the late night conversations. I remember sharing a taxi through the city with one of them, Carl Mitcham, and telling him that I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. At this, he burst out laughing. ‘I remember Ivan telling me, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror!’

    School of Everything – the startup I co-founded in 2006 – took its inspiration from Illich and the ‘free universities’ of the late 1960s, but the path it went down was summed up by Cory Doctorow, who wrote that we were building ‘the eBay for learning’. What’s strange is that we knew better. The five of us who started it had met in a room where learning was understood as a matter of relations, not transactions. It was one of a series of such rooms, spaces with names like the University of Openness, the Temporary School of Thought and the Really Free School. On a good day, they too had that atmosphere, and they were spaces in which people seemed to come alive.

    Out of those experiences came a desire for something more-than-temporary. And I had been learning the art of talking projects into reality: after School of Everything, I started Spacemakers, and the same year, Paul and I launched Dark Mountain. I’d grasped something about how to tell a big story and invite people to step inside that story and make it real together. I was just past thirty, and making up for lost time, running off the raw red energy that comes with discovering your own abilities. I didn’t know much yet about limits, or about failure.

    So in the early spring of 2011, I threw out my biggest story yet. First on the internet, and then in talks at places like the Royal Society of Arts and TEDx London, I asked for help to start a new kind of university. I’d pulled off enough wild schemes by then that people gave me a hearing, and all kinds of conversations and connections came about as a result – but as summer turned to autumn, the plan unravelled, while the pace at which I’d been living finally caught up with me. Within a year, I would leave London.

    It was a humbling time. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I remember my old friend Charlie Davies – he was the one who had brought together the temporary school where the founders of School of Everything first met – handing me a small coin, looking me in the eye, and saying, ‘I give you failure.’ There are journeys for which no other currency is taken.

    The luckiest stroke I ever had was that, just as my London life fell to pieces, I met someone who could see past the mess I was in and who chose to make a life with me. Anna and I had been travelling different routes, but steering by the same stars. In her case, the route had led from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries in the Middle East and supporting women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. At the heart of it was a commitment to conviviality: her tiny flat in Stockholm was dominated by a table large enough to seat fourteen; the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom had been taken down to make room for it.

    As I said goodbye to London, having given up on the idea of starting some kind of university, I remember an unfamiliar sensation of patience. Whatever mattered about that idea would come back in a different form when the time was right.

    If the time seems right now, that’s firstly because I’m not doing it alone. Over the past six years, Anna and I have made a home together that is a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared foundation for our work. In the idea of a school called HOME, that intention has found its form.

    Then it’s because I have things to teach. Looking back, those earlier free universities and temporary schools were a source of fellowship, a meeting point for an invisible college in which I found my contemporaries – and bringing people together like that still feels vital. But in the past couple of years, I’ve found that the teaching I do is moving to the heart of my work. Walking into a room, sharing stories and ways of thinking that I’ve found helpful, letting the questions that follow lead us deeper. (As I write this, I remember a recent visit to the Kaospilots school in Aarhus, Denmark: for a month afterwards, most days my phone would ping with mails and messages from students who had been in that room, still resonating with the ideas we’d talked about.) So I want to create the conditions where I can do that well.

    Finally, the time seems right because I’ve come to see another way of making projects happen. Sometimes telling the biggest story you can and getting hundreds or thousands of people to step inside it is the way to go – but the best work often happens more quietly. I’m prouder of the West Norwood Feast, the community-owned streetmarket that Spacemakers helped start in south London, than the project that we did at Brixton Village, which is the one that got all the attention.

    For several years now, I’ve been teaching residential courses at places like Schumacher College, so the first step in starting this school is to take that kind of course and organise it on our own terms.

    Beyond that, Anna and I are inspired by the example of small schools that offer longer programmes – places like the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, run by our friend Martin Shaw, or Stephen Jenkinson’s School of Orphan Wisdom. So before long, we want to create something along those lines, making an invitation to be part of a learning community that comes together several times a year.

    In the longer-term, our intention is to find a permanent location, a place we can call home in all senses of the word, with the further possibilities that would offer. A few years from now, I’d love to be holding a yearly summer school, a little like what I’ve heard tell of the summers in Cuernavaca, half a century ago. 

    In the meantime, we’ve found a beautiful setting in which to get started, working with a family-run hostel in Ängelsberg. It’s a village of 150 people with its own railway station, there’s a lakeside sauna and all the other things you’d want in Sweden with midsummer around the corner. And going by the first few people who are on board, it will be quite a special gang that gathers there this June.

    There was a time when I was launching projects left, right and centre – throwing out ideas, some of which took on a life of their own, while others left no trace. Writing this, I realise that it’s been a while since I launched something new, and rarely have I put as much of my heart into a project as with this little idea for a school.

    It won’t be a school of everything, and it doesn’t promise to reinvent the university. We’re not out to build a grand highway to the future. This is a little road heading into the woods. Maybe you will join us on that road. I hope so.

    Published as Issue 16 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter, to mark the launch of a school called HOME.

  • Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    It is unusual for a twenty-page, self-published pamphlet to be given a two-page lead review in the New Statesman, and rarer still for that pamphlet to start a cultural movement that the New York Times can introduce to its readers as ‘changing the environmental debate in Britain and the rest of Europe.’ Yet those are two of the more public markers of the strange journey taken by this manifesto in the five years from its first publication to the preparation of this new edition.

    We get emails most days from readers who have found something here that resonates with their own experience. They write about hope, recognition, a sense of feeling less alone. Sometimes an email leads to a collaboration, some- times a collaboration deepens into a friendship that would not have existed were it not for this text. The fruits of those collaborations make their way into the Dark Mountain books – six books so far, and counting – where hundreds of writers, thinkers and artists from around the world have ventured further down the paths we started to sketch out here.

    Then there are the attacks. We have been called all sorts of things: Romantic dreamers, crazy collapsitarians, defeatists, utopians and nihilists. A professor of social policy used a paper in an academic journal to present Dark Mountain as an example of clinical ‘catastrophism’: ‘a temporary or sometimes recurring difficulty in getting things in perspective or proportion.’ The journalist Bryan Appleyard made the rather startling allegation that we represent ‘a form of psychosis’ likely to ‘create more corpses than ever dreamed of by even the Unabomber.’ There have been thoughtful critical responses, too, sometimes leading to conversations in which we come to understand each other better, but these are less frequent than the angry accusers and the long-distance psychoanalysts. 

    Putting all these different reactions alongside each other, trying to make out the pattern that they form, what strikes me is how little it resembles a taking of sides over a recognisable argument. Something else is going on, something that reaches into murkier corners of ourselves than are generally given space on the shores of public debate. The lines of thinking that run through this manifesto are also the contours of a dark shape, an inkblot shape of our puzzlements, doubts and fears—so that, even more than is always the case with the slippery substance of language, every reading is also a veiled reflection of the reader. There are monsters here, if you look for them; there are dead ends, but there are also slender threads of possibility waiting for someone to pick them up. 

    The text which became Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto took shape over a period of six months, starting in the summer of 2008. From this distance, it already seems like the last summer of another age. Not an innocent age – no one could call it that – but an age in which certain delusions were easier to sustain. Then, wham! Lehman Brothers came down and for a few weeks we saw the naked fear of powerful men with no idea how much of their world will be left standing. If you got any kind of a kick out of that final scene in the film Fight Club, when the music swells and the credit card companies’ skyscrapers detonate, then you had to feel some exhilaration, even as your wiser self whispered that all this was not about to end in a jubilee of cancelled first world debt. 

    As the mayhem of those weeks subsided, as the months that followed became years, we found ourselves in an age where crisis has become the new normal. An age of widening extremes and darkening horizons, when outbreaks of hope spark sporadically like broken power lines across networks and onto the streets, but the future no longer holds the promise it used to. Young people struggle to achieve the everyday security on which to build a life, something their parents took for granted. And all the while, beyond the bubble of the disorientated west, the epic of loss grows louder: more species, more languages, more landscapes every year. 

    None of this started with the financial ruptures of late 2008. But most of it intensified in the aftermath of those events, becoming at the same time harder to ignore. And if this manifesto has travelled further than we imagined, one explanation is that it has helped people to get their bearings in a world where the thin, shiny surface of prosperity has cracked. Trying to make sense of our own experience, it seems that we put words to a feeling that others shared and that has become more widespread in the years since. A feeling that there is no way through the mess in which we find ourselves that doesn’t involve facing the darkness, being honest about the scale of the unravelling that is under way, the uncertainty as to where it will end. A feeling that it is time to look down. 

    After it was published, people assumed that we must have been friends for years, but in reality Paul and I were still getting to know one another. We had met on the internet, reading each other’s blogs and recognising common ground. Both writers, both recovering journalists, both of us had been through intense periods of involvement with activism and arrived at a certain kind of disillusionment. 

    We were disturbed by the state of environmentalism. It seemed that sustainability had come to mean sustaining the western way of living at all costs, regardless of whether this was possible or desirable. As carbon emissions continued to mount, prominent campaigners spoke privately of their pessimism, but still got up at rallies to give the same rousing speeches. The movement was in danger of becoming a church where the priests have lost their faith, but don’t believe the congregation are ready for the truth. And when you tried to talk about this, it was always framed as a choice between insisting on the efficacy of more marches, petitions, boycotts and treaties, in spite of decades of failure – or giving up, which meant despair. 

    We were disturbed by the state of literature and the cultural landscape. I remember feeling that most of the books being celebrated in the Sunday newspapers were going to look irrelevant or offensive in a generation’s time, given what we already knew about where things were headed. A passage from Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday embodied this, when Henry Perowne starts musing about what will happen if ‘the present dispensation’ is wiped out: 

    the future will look back on us as gods … lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life-spans, wondrous machines.

    The possibility that the future might view us in a different light did not seem to cross his or McEwan’s mind. Even on those occasions when writers did their best to face the entangled ecological, economic and social crises that surround us, the results tended to be unsatisfying: art deadening into a communication tool for messages from scientists and campaigners, soap-opera scale stories playing out against a backdrop of melting icebergs and failing negotiations. The literary tools inherited from the recent past seemed ill-adapted to the times into which we were heading. 

    These were the conversations we had, first over email and then in the corners of pubs, making lists in our notebooks, sharing names, mapping constellations of writers whose words we had found we could steer by. The idea of a literary journal came naturally, not because we thought it was the answer to all of this, but because it might provide a space to ask the questions. Besides, from the age of eight, I had always been starting little magazines and newspapers, and I can’t imagine Paul was any different. He had more experience of the grown-up world of publishing, not least from his time running The Ecologist, while I had been discovering the way that words can spread over networks, as one of the editors of Pick Me Up, a weekly email newsletter of DIY culture. That gave us the idea of crowdfunding for Dark Mountain, at a time when inboxes were not yet deluged with invitations to Kickstarter campaigns. 

    If we were going to start a journal, it seemed a good idea to kick this off with an essay that explained why we were doing it, that framed an invitation or a challenge. That was what we agreed at the end of an evening in early summer in a pub beside the Thames just outside Oxford. It was in the barn behind the same pub, just over a year later – on the 17th of July, 2009 – that we launched the resulting manifesto to an audience of a few dozen friends and family who between them had put up the money to fund its printing. Someone suggested afterwards that it was strange to ask people to support a manifesto before they had read it, and I suppose that is true, but I don’t think any of our funders had seen the text before that night. 

    The first edition of the manifesto was a hand-stitched pamphlet, made by our friends at Bracketpress of Rochdale, Lancashire. It went through three more printings before the number of copies needed exceeded the sensible limits of their fingers and we decided to republish it as the slim book you now hold in your hands.  

    Why go to all the bother of printing, when we could just have released it onto the internet? We got asked this occasionally, sometimes with an edge of moralising at the waste of resources, as if the servers that hold up the web run on fairy dust.  

    From the outset, the text has also been available online, and a hundred times as many people must have read it on our website as in print. But there is something about the unnecessary effort of making a physical object in a digital age that changes its meaning. So long as letters were the primary form of correspondence, their existence was functional, taken for granted. Now, think what it means today on the rare occasions when a handwritten letter arrives from a friend, and think about how different this feels to the arrival of another email in your inbox. 

    For those who believe – not unreasonably – perhaps that a manifesto should offer a set of proposals, a plan of action, a prescription for the new school of writing it intends to inaugurate, this may not be the most satisfying of manifestos. ‘What are you saying we should do?’ was a frequent reaction, put to us with varying levels of frustration, not least by activist friends. 

    Slowly, over time, we worked towards our own answers to this question. If you follow Paul’s essays through the course of the first five Dark Mountain books, they trace a journey towards one such answer. Other contributors offer their own examples, and the examples differ, because these are not loud, confident, once-and-for-all answers. They are provisional, maybe good enough for here and for now, for putting one foot in front of the other. They do not relieve you of the responsibility of finding your own answers, though they may provide clues as to what the process looks like. 

    But all that came after the manifesto, which was written when we were still working out how to frame the questions. To write a manifesto is to write loudly – ‘A manifesto,’ bellows Tristan Tzara, ‘is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis!’ – but under all the sound and the fury, at the heart of this manifesto is a hunch that sometimes it is right to walk away, to withdraw, to give up on hopes that no longer ring true, even though you have no answer to the accusing questions that will follow. Sometimes retreat is the only action left that makes sense. To give up things you have held dear – beliefs, identities, habits – is an end, but it can also be a beginning, though it makes you no promises in advance. Only the chance that, having let go, as your eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, you may catch sight of something that your bright certainties had hidden from you. 

    If you were to ask either of us, five years on, do we stand by what we wrote in this manifesto, I suspect our answers would be similar. We stand by it, not as a stockade to be defended, but as a first attempt to say something, to work out how to say something, the fuller significance of which we are still discovering in the company of a growing gang of friends and collaborators, most of whom would never have met if we hadn’t been brave enough, or foolish enough, to commit these words to print in the first place. 

    Published in the 2014 and subsequent editions of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.