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The blizzard or the world
The exhaustion of the planet and existing ways of life as humankind is consuming our planet and presents a creative challenge: exploring 'uncivilisation'. In an article for openDemocracy, Paul Kingsnorth writes that he often wonders how we would act if we really believed it. How we would act and how we would write? It led him to the introduction of the Dark Mountain Project.
“Every day, we are hit with more news about the human impact on the non-human world. For decades, the evidence has been piling up. If you want to know about deforestation, species extinction, ocean acidification, overfishing or (the granddaddy of them all) climate change, you doubtless know where to look by now. And if you don’t want to look – because you don’t want to hear it – then nobody can make you,” writes Kingsnorth.
We know these things are happening, and we know why. We know that a rapidly growing human population with rapidly growing appetites is strip-mining the world. We know that industrial capitalism, which eats the world and calls it development, is a weapon of planetary mass destruction.
We know, most of all, that this cannot last, he writes, and then poses the question: “So why does nothing change?"
“We are constantly claiming some sense of fierce urgency about the future, but we are all of us, even those who claim to be trying to stop all of this happening, mostly still driving, tweeting, flying, using the dishwasher, chomping down the sushi and saving for our pensions as if nothing were really happening. We claim to know the facts, but we don’t really take them in; we don’t internalise them. Comfortable, as all readers of this will doubtless be, none of it seems real to us. 'Facts', wrote Joseph Conrad, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything’.”
In the face of the failure of Copenhagen, techno-fixes are also untenable as last-ditch attempts. “In any case, keeping the ship on course is of precious little use if it is headed for an iceberg,” argues Kingsnorth.
"I suspect that the great challenge of the 21st century will not be building a great, 'sustainable' civilisation to lead us to the stars, but coming to terms with decline, materially and existentially, as the fossil-fuelled bubble bursts and leaves us adjusting to a harsher reality.
“When I did finally accept the logic of this, I had to ask myself a question: what would I do if I really believed it? How would I live? And, pertinent to me in particular, how would I write? 'Writer', along with 'environmentalist', have long been the twin strands of my professional identity. Now both seemed inadequate to the task.”
Kingsnorth came into contact with Dougald Hine, also a former journalist but also a social entrepreneur and all-round ideas man. They began kicking around ideas. “What would a cultural response to our times look like, we asked ourselves, if it didn’t assume that the future would be an upgraded version of the present?” they asked.
The result was the Dark Mountain Project, an ambitious attempt to bring together a cultural movement of people who shared this vision of the future. “We believe that the obstacles we face as a civilisation are not purely physical, political or economic, but cultural; obstacles of the imagination.
"We believe that the stories we tell ourselves as a society are part of the reason for our rush toward a brick wall: stories about the ineffable march of progress, of our isolation from 'nature', of our uniqueness as a species, of the ability of our machines to save us from the consequences of our hubris.
“It seemed obvious what we had to do next: write a manifesto. We wanted to set out the stall for what we had decided to call 'Uncivilisation' – a process of unpicking the narratives of our culture and examining the threads they were woven from,” writes Kingsnorth.
They wrote a manifesto and sold their first print run of 300 copies in a few months. “Soon we were being contacted by people from all over the world, and in such numbers that we found it hard to reply.
"We started to work up interest among the media, old and new. We popped up on blogs and discussion sites from Bermuda to Russia, on radio programmes in the USA. [6] Newspapers picked us up, too – the Independent [7] and the Scotsman in the UK and others in Australia and Canada,” he writes.
The book Dark Mountain Journal, a collection of “Uncivilised writing” from all over the world, followed.
Together, Kingsnorth and Hine explore the imaginative challenges of our coming world. A fundraising campaign is under way currently to help them get the journal off the ground.
In May, they will launch it at the first Dark Mountain Festival, a two-day collision of speakers, workshops, art, music, cinema and practical events moving “Uncivilisation” from theory into practice.
“Where this will lead is anyone’s guess. But we have obviously touched upon something unspoken but fairly widely felt: a need for honest and novel cultural approaches to the human predicament.
"We believe that many of society’s certainties will crumble over the coming decades. But we also believe that the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. A precipice opens up before us: we need to stop looking away, and instead look down. What we see may be surprising,” writes Kingsnorth.
For the full report, click here
