The week before last I was in Paris. While I was there, I paid a visit to the Musee D’Orsay in an attempt to build on my minimal artistic education. I’d never been there before, but the Musee D’Orsay turns out to be a great museum; a bit like Tate Modern in that it is a new use for an old building (in this case a stunning ‘Beaux-Arts’ railway station), but nothing like Tate Modern in that it contains art.

This is one of the biggest paintings in the museum: Romans of the Decadence. Seen for real, it is quite something: it’s staunchly old-fashioned, maybe even slightly pompous, but it’s executed with a real sense of belief. You can see why: it’s a campaigning painting. Here are some of the top people of the once-mighty Roman Empire, feasting and debauching like there is no tomorrow – which there won’t be, as it happens, largely as a result of the grape-sucking, fornicating, wine-guzzling loucheness of the ruling class here displayed. Clearly a rot has set in at the heart of things; a rot whose immorality is driven home, if it needed to be, by the figures of the two foreign visitors to Rome standing to the right of the picture, looking on the scene with undisguised contempt and disapproval. We have come, they seem to be saying, to what we were told was the heart of civilisation. And this is what we find. Decline, it is clear, is well underway.

Of course, this painting is not really about Rome. Painted in 1847, it was a comment on the perceived decadence of France’s ‘July monarchy’. A portrait of a society which the artist, Thomas Couture, a Jacobin and radical, believed was in danger of going the same way as Rome if it didn’t mend its ways and turn its gaze outward. When it was unveiled it was with an explanatory quote from the Roman poet Juvenal: ‘Crueller than war, vice fell upon Rome and avenged the conquered world.’

I wonder if there has ever been a generation, in any civilisation, which didn’t think, to a greater or a lesser degree, that its society was decadent, falling apart, betrayed by hopeless leaders, suffering from a failing system. Perhaps not. But the fact that this may be the case doesn’t disguise another fact: that it is sometimes true. Sometimes societies are noticeably in decline; sometimes a cultural decadence does set in. When it does, ferociously insisting otherwise may become a necessary survival mechanism, but it doesn’t arrest the slide.

This set me wondering about the society I live in. In some ways – ways which we have explored here before – it seems that an inevitable decline is clearly underway. This is the decline of the industrial world: the world that has held sway globally for two centuries. We’ve looked at this in economic and environmental and political terms: climate change, peak oil, ecocide, the collapse of political and economic narratives; the evidence is all there.

It is easy, in some ways, to point to things like climate change, peak oil or deforestation, or even the hardening of the democratic veins with corporate fat, as signs of an imminent collapse or decline, because at least to some extent these things are clearly measurable. But what about more malleable, fuzzy, cultural pointers? What about decadence? Because if decline is real, it should surely be obvious in the culture we make.

It seems to me that a healthy society would have a healthy cultural heart. Its art, its music, its literature, its manufacturing, its artisanship – its ability to make things, from songs to machines, and to make those things speak about its values and its dreams – would be strong. It would have a sense of itself in time and place which, if not identifiable immediately, would be so in retrospect.

Think, for example, of Britain in the 1960s: arguably the peak of the 20^th century popular British state. Culturally, it soared: in music most obviously, but also in fashion, in art, in literature, in cinema: in all these areas there were real, lasting examples of making, from the Beatles to Mary Quant, from Billy Liar to James Bond, the Mini to the Routemaster. In retrospect, we recognise the sixties with ease: the clothes, the hair, the music, the art, the politics, the cars. It was a moment of cultural heat which left an imprint on time.

I think the same could be said of the seventies and the eighties, to lesser degrees: look back, isolate these moments and the things they produced, and you can see them for what they were: recognisable chunks of history, with their own cultural forms and responses. The nineties, too, just about cut it: from Grunge to Britpop, Irvine Welsh to Danny Boyle.

I wonder if this can be said of the first years of this century. True, we are not long past them, so the retrospective is not possible yet. But the first signs, it seems to me, are of a culture collapsing in on itself.

What great, era-defining books did the last decade produce? What cinema? We were neo-gypsies one season, neo-Mods the next. Music was uber-derivative, often literally cut-and-pasted from earlier forms; there was no real fire, no lasting gathering point for culture or subculture. The London stages filled up with nostalgic musicals based on the tunes of three decades before, the pop charts with whey-faced androids culled from corporate TV ‘talent’ shows. So many celeb mags now line the shelves that it’s almost impossible to count them; but they all run the same stories. Overall, beyond the specifics, was a sense: a sense that everything had been done, that we were killing time, treading water. Irony, cynicism, cleverness and perhaps most of all, money, were held up as shields against our cultural flaccidity. We had run out of stories to believe in.

Meanwhile, in the age of blogs and tweets and pirating and consumer choice, a generation has grown up believing that everything is free, everything has been done and nothing is sacred. Currently there’s a mini literary scandal going on in Germany: a hip young author has been caught stealing entire pages from another novel and pasting them into her own effort (which appeared, naturally, to rave reviews from middle-aged literary neophiles desperate not to look past-it.) When she was caught, though, she wasn’t cast into outer darkness: she was put on the shortlist for a prize. This, it was explained, is just what the kidz do these days: they mix and match; they ‘hypercontextualise’. It’s fine. It’s the new culture. ‘There is no originality any more’, said the author, with no sense of irony, in her defence.

Our culture has always fed on the meat of earlier eras; all cultures do. From a medieval cathedral to an album by Mike Skinner, everything has influences rooted in an idea of the past. But there must surely be a gulf between a culture that builds on past influences to create something new and a culture that cannibalises past influences because it has run out of ideas; and then begins, as it seems we have begun, to cannibalise itself.

It’s hard to write this kind of thing without sounding like someone who thinks it was all better in his day. I grew up with Duran Duran and Kylie Minogue, so I harbour no illusions. And I’m being quite Brit-focused here; doubtless things are different in France and Canada. But I’d be willing to bet they aren’t that different. I don’t think this is just my imagination: it looks rather like the intellectual and moral exhaustion of the West is becoming ever more obvious in popular culture: which is, must be, the weathervane of wider society. We can’t say anything new, or even pretend to try. We have even lost the will to resist: the whole consumer apparatus of money and wanting has colonised everything, including the rebels. We are no longer a society of makers – we are a society of takers. Cultural pirates, living off the works of others, calling them our own, making money from money and art from art. Speaking to ourselves, turning in circles, swallowing our tails.

I wonder if others out there feel the same, and I wonder in particular what thoughts others have about the cultural moment we find ourselves in. What defines it? What has the 21^st century brought us so far? If we are the Romans of the decadence, where next? What does culture mean in a dying empire?

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I’ve just been catching up on some of the recent conversations online around this project. One post that caught my eye was from Matt Sellwood (Green Party candidate for Hackney North), who pins down one of the subtleties of what Paul and I have been trying to say over the last few months.

He starts by summing up and rebutting a couple of the regular charges which have been levelled against us. First, that we aren’t offering solutions to the ecological crisis:

They are explicitly not suggesting another solution to ‘the problem’, but rather a way for humans to deal with the reality of our existential situation.

Precisely. The second charge he tackles is that we are “giving in to despair”:

Kingsnorth and co argue that false hope is in fact unhelpful, and further, identify it as the prevailing emotion of the environmental movement over the last decade. I can certainly sympathise with this. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have forced myself to give an up-beat, positive, hopeful speech on climate change, when really I’ve wanted to acknowledge my innermost feelings – that we are very near the edge – and that we might already be over it.

Coming from a Green Party candidate, that’s refreshingly honest. Too often, listening to “leading environmentalists” repeat familiar phrases, I have the impression of a priesthood which has lost its faith, but continues to recite the liturgy, believing that the truth would be too much for the sheep in the pews.

So what happens if we stop pretending? In many ways, that was the central question of our manifesto – and Matt pushes at it. Does giving up “false hope” become, as he puts it, “an excuse for having given up on any change being possible at all?”

Paul can answer for himself – but for me, there are two answers to this question.

The first is what I do. Besides Dark Mountain, I spend most of my waking hours creating projects like the Space Makers “slack space” operation that’s been running in Brixton over the last couple of months, turning a half-empty market into a rolling festival of pop-up shops and events. How does that relate to writing about “the end of the world as we know it”? Either I’m totally dissociating, or – and this is the interpretation I prefer – there are things in this kind of improvisational, reappropriational activity which in some way rehearse the skills we need for living in the ruins.

The second level answer is summed up by something I wrote last autumn:

‘Changing the world’ has become an anachronism: the world is changing so fast, the best we can do is to become a little more observant, more agile, better able to move with it or to spot the places where a subtle shift may set something on a less-worse course than it was on. And you know, that’s OK – because what makes life worth living was never striving for, let alone reaching, utopias.

There’s a big difference between the task of trying to sustain “civilisation” in its current form – supermarkets and all – which is what “sustainability” has largely come to mean, and the task of holding open a space for the things which make life worth living. I’d suggest that it’s this second task, in its many forms, which remains, after we’ve given up on false hopes. (Note that this doesn’t mean organising a campaign against supermarkets, which is the default mode of a lot of what’s called activism.)

And, although Dark Mountain is an avowedly cultural, imagination- and ideas-centred project, this emphasis does not imply a disparagement of practical, hands-on or even technology-focused approaches towards our situation. Engineers as much as artists can choose to engage with the (probably impossible) challenge of sustaining our current way of living, or the (as I see it, more genuinely hopeful) challenge of creating possibilities for liveable and meaningful lives, when and where that way of living is not an option.

That’s one reason I’m glad to have filmed a dialogue with Vinay Gupta, the founder of the Hexayurt Project, exploring the relationship between Dark Mountain and the territory he has been exploring in appropriate technology, infrastructure and disaster relief. If you’ve not heard of him before, check out ‘Hexayurt Country’, published ten days ago – an outline plan for rebuilding Haiti on a shoestring budget, using local skills, which draws on the last eight years of his work.

When we sat down to talk, the conversation soon came round to the relationship between villages and cities, a theme which connects our cultural and technological concerns. The video starts from the point where he asked me about some of the writers and thinkers championed by this project – as he put it, “cultural figures who could have had a Manhattan penthouse, but chose to go and live in a village.”

(If you have any difficulty with the video, try hitting reload.)

It’s conversations like this which I hope we’ll be able to open up, as this project develops: on this site, at UNCIVILISATION: The Dark Mountain Festival in May, and in the pages of the Dark Mountain itself – the book-length publication, the first issue of which we’re currently editing. If you want to help us get that into print – bringing together voices like Derrick Jensen, Jay Griffiths, Alastair McIntosh, John Michael Greer, Ran Prieur, Melanie Challenger and lots more – please pre-order your copy and consider making a donation towards our current fundraising campaign, by visiting this site:

http://www.indiegogo.com/darkmtn

Thank you for your support.

We’re hard at work on Dark Mountain: Issue 1 – our first book-length publication, drawing together writing that takes on the themes of Uncivilisation and the task of negotiating between the world as we know it and the unknown world beyond.

In the next few days, we will have a final contents list for this issue, which we’ll share with you on here. (Those of you who submitted work, thank you again for your patience.)

In the mean time, we have a few bits and pieces to keep you up to date.

Firstly, the latest on our funding situation. We started out with a target of $7,000 to raise. With two weeks to go, we’re well past half way to that goal – having raised $2,115 in pre-orders and contributions through our online campaign, plus a private donation of £1,000. We’ve reduced the online target to reflect that donation, which leaves us with another $3,235 to raise between now and February 15th, when the final text of the journal goes to the printers.

If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, we’d be very grateful for your support – and if you have, we’d be grateful for anything you can do to help us spread the word further. Here’s the link to the page where you can pre-order a copy (and, if you choose, make an additional donation):

http://www.indiegogo.com/darkmtn

Here at Dark Mountain HQ, we’re continuing to burn the midnight oil. Here are Paul and I, caught on camera at the end of a long day’s editing:

It’s barely half a year since the Dark Mountain Project was launched, but with the new year still young, it’s time to shift things up a gear. We have been thrilled and flattered by all of the interest there has been out there in our frankly experimental attempt to create new narratives for new times. There’s clearly an appetite, born from current events, for what we’ve been trying to say.

Today we announce an event and launch a campaign which mark the next stage of this project. We need your help to get there: between now and 15th February, we aim to raise £4000 (or $7000) to cover the costs of publishing our first book-length journal – and we’re offering a range of rewards and recogition to those who help us reach that target.

As we had hoped, a movement is genuinely beginning to coalesce around the Dark Mountain Project; a movement of creative, thinking people, who have stopped believing the ‘one more push’ narrative of the green activists; who are bored with the clever cynicism of much contemporary art and literature; and who don’t believe that the much-vaunted ’sustainable’ future will, could or even should become a reality.

There are two key ways in which the project of Uncivilisation will move forward in the first six months of this year: the first issue of the Dark Mountain Journal, and our first festival.

May is when it all happens. That’s when the journal will be launched; and it will be launched at UNCIVILISATION 2010: the first Dark Mountain festival, which will take place on the (bank holiday) weekend of Friday 28th to Sunday 30th May. That’s the weekend that you should block out in your diaries immediately, because you’ll end up feeling very sorry for yourself indeed if you miss out on the chance to come and get involved in the Uncivilising project.

First, the journal. Issue 1 of Dark Mountain will be a book-length, cloth-bound hardback, designed and printed by our artisan friends at Bracketpress, laying out, for the first time, the beginnings of Uncivilisation in print. We are sifting through contents and potential contents now, and it is thrilling stuff.

We already know this issue will include essays from award-winning writer Jay Griffiths, author of Wild, two highly acclaimed poets, Glyn Hughes and Mario Petrucci, and other writers including Alastair McIntosh, Simon Fairlie, Ran Prieur and John Michael Greer. There will be new poetry from Melanie Challenger, Mark Rylance, Mario Petrucci and Louis Jenkins; interviews with philosopher Derrick Jensen and Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog; fiction from Paul Kingsnorth, Nick Hunt and others; and comics, artwork and other splendid visual displays. It’s going to be quite something.

As is UNCIVILISATION 2010: the Dark Mountain Festival. Dougald and I have just come out of a planning conflab for this, and we’re both hopping about with excitement. In and around the revamped Pavilion in the beautiful town of Llangollen, nestled amongst the dark mountains of north Wales, we’ll be presenting a weekend-long menu of talks, readings, live music, workshops, demonstrations, art exhibits, walks and more. It’s no coincidence that UNCIVILISATION 2010 clashes with the opening weekend of the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. While the literary establishment gathers for its annual love-in, we will muster an opposing army at the other end of Offa’s Dyke for a very different kind of gathering.

We’re looking forward to talks, debates and arguments from writers and thinkers including Alastair McIntosh, Tom Hodgkinson, George Monbiot, Melanie Challenger, Glyn Hughes and Jay Griffiths; a writers’ panel discussion on the failures of literature to tell the real stories of a collapsing world; music from Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Chris Wood, Chris T-T, Marmaduke Dando’s Powerdown and Will Hodgkinson’s Ballad of Britain; outsider art and photography exhibits; a theatre and bookshop;  a specially-curated Dark Mountain Cinema; and practical workshops on topics ranging from ‘collapsonomics’ to Uncivilised poetry to foraging for wild food. There is more to be announced, so keep coming back here for updates.

As you’ll see, the Dark Mountain website has also undergone a snow-white, winter deep-clean. You can explore our blogroll and hopefully find things a bit more easily – and you can also buy festival tickets and journals in advance.

As of today, we’ve put the first 100 festival tickets on sale at a reduced price of £55 (After this tranche is gone, the standard price will be £60 each). This covers the whole weekend’s activities, plus camping. Book now, as they say, to avoid disappointment.

We’re also launching a funding campaign to raise the costs of printing the Dark Mountain journal. The book will be designed and printed by the wonderful Bracketpress of Rochdale. We’re due to deliver the final text to them on February 15th and we need to pay them around £4,500 for their work. That’s about £4,000 more than we currently have in the Dark Mountain bank account, so we’re asking for your help to raise the difference.

This isn’t just about shaking a hat for donations, though: in return for your contributions, we’re offering copies of the journal and a range of other Dark Mountain bonuses to those who contribute. Here’s the deal (in dollars, because we’re using an American website: rounded-up sterling price in brackets):

• Donate $10 (£6) or more and you’ll get 50% off the price of the journal when it comes out
• For $25 (£15) or more, we’ll send you a copy of the journal, hot off the Bracketpress, to wherever you are in the world – even the South Pole!
• For $50 (£31) or more, you get a copy signed by both of us – and by any of the other contributors we can get to sign it for you
• If you’re willing to contribute $100 (£62) or more, you’ll not only get a signed copy of the journal, but your name will be printed in big letters in a roll of honour at the back of this issue – and you’ll also have our undying thanks
• For $250 (£155) or more, you get all of the above – plus a VIP ticket to UNCIVILISATION: The Dark Mountain Festival. (Small print: this basically means we’ll buy you beers all night and introduce you to the speakers and bands.)
• And anyone who’s able to contribute $500 (£310) or more will get three minutes on stage on the Saturday night of UNCIVILISATION to talk about anything you want. (If you’re shy, we can think of an alternative way of honouring your contribution…)

There are lots of ways that people can help this project on its way, and not all of them involve money. In particular, we’re grateful for the huge number of contributions people have sent in for the journal. The standard has been extremely high – and reading them, we can see how strongly you have connected to the ideas and the arguments we’ve hosted here over the past few months.

If you sent us material and you still haven’t heard back from us – we promise we will be in touch very soon either way. Many thanks for your patience; we were overwhelmed and have had a hard time keeping up. If you are still thinking of contributing, please do: lines are now open for contributions for issue 2. And we are still looking for acts to perform at the festival: if you have any thoughts, whether you are a speaker, a poet, an artist, a musician, gardener or have any other skills you think need airing, please do drop us a line soon. We’re also open to recommendations for people you’d like to see in the line-up.

The aim of the Dark Mountain Project has always been to curate a conversation and to let things happen naturally, rather than simply broadcast our own Very Important Thoughts. It is in this spirit that the festival will be held; coming along will make you not a spectator but a participant, in any way you choose to interpret that.

Finally, we will use the next few weeks on this blog to introduce the work of some of the writers who’ll feature in the journal and at the festival. We think that all of this should keep us all pretty busy for a while. Happy new year!

There are actually a lot of positives we can take away from this experience

What, then, did we get? From the months of negotiating, the armies of bureaucrats and ministers and NGO lobbyists, the cycle blockades and hopeful marches, the rioting and the windbaggery and the urging and the demanding? What did we get for the vast array of human and non-human resources – the private jets, the limos, the suites, the security guards, the restaurants, the media rooms, the convergence centres – marshalled to fill a cold, northern city with hundreds of thousands of people and a whole week of hope and rage?

We got, says the head of the UN, an ‘essential beginning.’

Yes, you heard that right. A beginning. It is almost the year 2010. The Earth’s climate is changing. Perhaps a point of no-return has been reached; if not, it will be reached soon. The human economy is growing like a cancer cell, the human population is growing with it. The forests are falling, the oceans are emptying and the atmosphere is filling up with threats that come closer by the day. We appear to be approaching another mass extinction.

In response, we have a grudging partial recognition of a non-binding, unspecific potential future commitment by five countries to do something at some stage in the future as circumstances permit.

We don’t like to say ‘we told you so’ here at the Dark Mountain Project, because it’s not really our style, even though we did. The more you point out the obvious fact that this turkey will not fly, the more hate mail you receive from people who have spent years frantically glueing wings to it, throwing it off the fence and imagining that the reason it keeps falling to the ground is that the politicians are being nasty to it. So let’s not do that again. Let’s do something more forward-looking and positive and seasonal. Let’s look at what might happen next.

Reaction to the inevitable failure of Copenhagen so far seems to be dividing into camps. Firstly, there is a kind of furious anger. People who hoped it would help, despite themselves, nevertheless find themselves enveloped in rage; rage about the corruption or simple ineptitude of politics, the stupid destructiveness of global capitalism and the inability of most of humanity to wake up. I understand this reaction perfectly, having been through it myself many times. It was, however, always based on a false premise.

Next there is a reaction that we might call the ‘one more push’ delusion. This suggests that, though Copenhagen was a disaster, we can still save the world by reducing those emissions. How? Not quite sure, but it will definitely involve a mass movement, more people on the streets, more pressure on politicians, some direct action and … yes, you have heard this all before. It’s standard NGO stuff. It says we just need to do what we have been doing for years, only harder, and it will work out, because it has to work out. Scratch the surface of this position and you see sheer despair. There are no other options, so we just keep on keeping on. It is displacement activity at its finest. I hope it doesn’t catch on too widely.

Next, there’s a kind of revolutionary rage building. I’m getting whiffs of this all over the place, from angry mainstream greens who want to shut down power stations, to more people seriously exploring the idea that the problem might not, after all, be emissions or population or even capitalism but the structure and the story of industrial civilisation itself. The best exemplar of this position is Derrick Jensen, an interview with whom will feature in the first issue of the Dark Mountain journal. I sense more and more people drifting towards this kind of view of things, even if they don’t accept the moral logic that ensues.

Beyond all this, of course, there are the business-as-usual folks. One of the arguments we’ll be hearing a lot more of in the next decade is the case for various kinds of geo-engineering fix; something which makes a grim sense if you want to keep the show on the road as emissions continue to rise and politics continues to fail.

What will prevail? The trouble I have – and it is what gets me called ‘cynical’ all the time, even though that’s not really what I am – is that I don’t find any of these positions convincing. What I think we have failed to internalise is our complicity in climate change: the fact that we are not just responsible for it; we are it. It’s not the nasty corporations or the useless leaders or the ‘deniers’: or not just them, anyway. It’s us.

It is tempting, but wrong, to believe that Copenhagen shows that  ‘they’ have sold ‘us’ out and now ‘we’ need to act. Johann Hari produces a great exemplar of this line in the Independent today. Hari’s is the line taken by many of the angry people who were naive enough to believe that Copenhagen was ever going to lead to anything and now feel betrayed that it hasn’t. In this analysis, the corrupt politicians have sold ‘us’ out and now ‘we’ have to stand up and be counted.

Another similar take comes from the excellent Joss Garman, also writing in the Indy. Joss knows more about the intricacies of climate change activism than most people, and he’s of the opinion that ‘at its core this carbon crisis is, in fact, a political crisis.’ Similarly, Hari thinks the problem is that ‘The world’s leaders refused to agree.’ Both seem to agree on what is needed now. ‘It is time to take collective action’, declares Hari. ‘Every coal train should be ringed with people refusing to let it pass. Every new runway should be blockaded.’ Joss (unlike the blustering Johann, I suspect) will probably put his money where his mouth is on that one, as he has before, which is something that shouldn’t be sneered at. But that doesn’t mean the analysis behind it is quite right.

I don’t think the failure of Copenhagen was really a political crisis at all. It was a wider human one; a crisis of comfort, perhaps. The problem here is that the activist tropes of the old left are being dredged up to try and tackle a problem they were not designed for. This is not a campaign to get votes for women, or civil rights for African Americans, or a campaign to ban the bomb or stop the building of a motorway. It is not a ’single issue’ campaign amenable to the old tools of marching, rioting, letter-writing and mobilisation. It is not a fight between a group of oppressed people and their oppressors. It is a campaign in which the people who might be expected to do the protesting are also the ones causing the problem.

It is, in other words,  a campaign against ourselves. Against our own lifestyles and our assumptions and our privileges – mine, yours, Johann Hari’s. Where does Hari think all the people are going to come from to ring these coal trains or shut down these power stations; to rise up against their own comfort? Turkeys do not riot for Christmas. The leaders at Copenhagen knew that. They knew they were going to have to answer, back home, to their voters (and, of course, to their corporations; a man may, after all, serve two masters) – and they knew that Johann Hari and Joss Garman are unfortunately far less appealing to most of their electorate than Jeremy Clarkson. The only possible revolution that could one day result from climate change would be a rising wave of anger in the poor world when things get really desperate a few decades down the line. As for the Jensen/Zerzan-style narrative: it has an impeccable and sometimes appealing logic to it, but a logic that will pass most people by and enrage and upset many others; it’s never going to have any mass traction.

What happens now will be interesting. Copenhagen is being talked up by both friends and foes as a ‘turning point.’ I hope that it is. I hope it means we can move away from imagining that ‘the system’, for want of a better moniker, can be self-healing. Perhaps we are starting to realise how badly-adapted our systems of mass consumption and mass politics are to the complex world we live in.

Accept that, it seems to me, and what flows is not despair (to my mind, the urge-the-leaders-build-a-movement line is riddled with despair) but creativity. Creative ways to deal with collapse, creative ways to blend thinking with doing, creative ways to live well, creative ways to free your mind – all of it springing from what Buddhists might call ‘acceptance’; that things are coming apart and we cannot stop them but we can try to surf the wave. Small, all of this, and challenging and slow and deep and not at all co-optable by the Big Ideas Urgently crowd, but potentially a lot more lasting.

In the second of our guest posts, film-maker Dan Walwin suggests some starting points for building up an Uncivilised filmography. As ever, we would like to hear your thoughts on how the list could be extended.

Lifeboat (1944, Alfred Hitchcock)

Echoes of this can also be found at the conclusion of Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968). Chiefly Second World War propaganda, but also illustrates a narrative that James Lovelocks taps into when he writes: ‘Make no mistake, the lifeboat simile is apt; the same problem has faced the shipwrecked: a lifeboat will sink or become impossible to sail if too laden.’

Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Features a fairly horrific scene where one of the drivers of the explosive-laden trucks is wading into a pool formed by oil gushing from a severed pipe (caused by another truck exploding), only to fall under its surface and have a leg crushed as the other driver accelerates through the pool in fear of being stuck. Very tense, desperate, and unsentimental.

Woman of the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

A man gets tricked into staying overnight with a woman who lives down a pit in the sand dunes, only to find next morning that there is no way of climbing out again, and that to survive they must perpetually dig the sand out of the pit.

The War Game (1965, Peter Watkins)

Filmed as if it were a documentary covering events during and following a nuclear attack on England, this is a harrowing look at the realities of nuclear war and the accompanying breakdown that would follow. Comparable with Threads of 1984.

Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky)

Seeming to pre-empt the Chernobyl disaster in its myth of ‘the Zone’: ‘Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change here. (…) But in fact, at any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness … everything that happens here depends on us, not on the Zone.’ Three desperate individuals meditate on existence while deeply enveloped in a landscape which is both threatening and offering the hope of salvation.

Time of the Wolf (2004, Michael Haneke)

Unflinching in its dissection of a generic European country following collapse. Disturbing and almost totally grim but, of course, nothing less than to be expected. ‘I believe that the catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game, to remake zero by provoking it in every conceivable way’ – J.G. Ballard

Dan Walwin is a film-maker who will be curating the cinema space at the forthcoming Dark Mountain Festival

Just a quick post to remind anyone who is thinking of contributing to the first Dark Mountain Journal, that you have three weeks left in which to do it. The deadline expires at midnight on 31st December.

There’s more information here on the kind of thing we might be looking for; and here is the nitty-gritty.

We’re also issuing a call to anyone who might have something to contribute to the Dark Mountain Festival next May to get in touch. More on that here; and here is the Dark Mountain Facebook group, complete with official invite.

This might be anyone from performers, visual artists or musicians to people with experience of organising or designing events. If you’ve got something to offer, please don’t be shy. This is the time to offer it. Drop us a line at info@dark-mountain.net

Some good news just in from Copenhagen:

Which is obviously a great relief.

In the unlikely event that this fails to work, we can also report on the growing popularity of the idea of artificial ‘trees’. They look like this:

It seems they will absorb that pesky carbon so much better than the real thing:

‘Klaus Lackner, a physicist with the Earth Institute …  estimates that each ‘tree’ would cost £12,000 and over its lifetime would capture almost 20 times the amount of CO₂ it consumed during its production and operation … The institution calculates that 100,000 artificial trees could capture all emissions from Britain’s homes, transport and light industry. It says that five million would do the same for the whole world.’

Five million of them. Imagine that. You could leave all the lights on and not feel guilty.

We  will return to the topic of ‘geo-engineering’ – less politely known as civilisation’s latest desperate get-out clause – another time in this blog. For now, relax your shoulders, breathe deeply and repeat after me: it’s all about carbon. Carbon is all it’s about.

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love.
But I can’t help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run.
And it wears me out …

Writing about the Copenhagen summit – indeed, writing about climate change in general – is starting to make me feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Or, if I wanted to be more of a cultural nationalist (even one who finds Dickens annoying), like Scrooge. I’ve been watching the buildup to the summit with a kind of cranky, disinterested fascination.

Watching the endless plugging of the Guardian’s earnest ‘10:10′ campaign, for example, whose launch at Tate Modern told you everything you needed to know about the class makeup of its worthy and doomed attempt to push the nation out of its collective rut, made me feel that ‘bah humbug’ is the only appropriate response. Similarly, when tens of thousands of nice people took to the streets of London on Saturday dressed like Smurfs (or whatever) in order to – you guessed it – ’send a message to our leaders’, ‘humbug’ seemed inappropriate only because it was far too mild a response.

Now we’re going to have to read, and watch, and listen to, acres of drivel as Copenhagen builds up (’liveblog from the summit venue!’ etc) to a conclusion which will sell itself as a great leap forward in order to make the various world leaders who have turned up look like they’re doing something, and will then quickly unravel. It’s the season of goodwill, and maybe I should really be making more of an effort to connect with that all-important ‘hope’ we are all supposed to be feeling. But I can’t. Humbug, I say, to it all.

Why do I say this? I’ve spelled it out before, and we spelled it out in more detail in the Dark Mountain manifesto – but for now, the world ‘hope’ is worth focusing on. Since beginning the Dark Mountain Project I have been regularly accused by some green friends of ‘giving up’, or of not having adequate reservoirs of ‘hope’, and the use of this word has been, I think, telling. Forty years or more of green politics has come down to – what? Hope. Desire. Belief. Faith. And not a faith in anything likely or even realistically possible. A faith like any other: blind, desperate, resting ultimately on despair.

‘Hope’ on its own is a meaningless driver of any kind of change. Worse than that – it is pernicious. It is blind faith in the impossible. It is a lie. Remember the crazy ‘hope’ encouraged by Obama and his followers prior to his election? It wasn’t long ago. They’re a bit quiet now, those excitable young hopers. As quiet as those New Labour voters were from about 1998 onwards, I seem to remember. And I remember because I was one of them. I remember that hope we placed in young, fresh-faced Tony and his team. I remember its audacity turning very quickly into inadequacy. I remember the comedown.

Therefore we should all despair, right? After all, despair is the opposite of hope, and if we don’t feel one, we must feel the other. This is the accusation thrown at those of us who can’t abide this Diana-like fervour, but it’s nonsense. Hope itself is not a bad thing; but it has to be a hope built on a firm foundation.

I might plant some beans in my garden, for example, and hope they come up. If I plant them at the right time of year, if the seed is good quality, and if I water and feed them at the right times, they will probably germinate. They might not, of course; something could go wrong – blight, an unusually rainy spring, wily rats or pigeons – but the chances are that I’ll get lucky with at least some of them. That’s a pretty sound thing, in other words, to be hoping for. It’s good hope.

On the other hand, I might go into the newsagent and buy a scratchcard and hope to win a million pounds. Strictly speaking, I might do; it’s a faint possibility. But it’s so faint – the odds are stacked so high against me – that it’s effectively a false hope. It might be worth doing for fun, but it’s not something I’d want to stake my future on, unless I was very dumb indeed. It’s bad hope.

Hoping for world leaders to sort out climate change is bad hope. It’s foolish and naive and hugely unlikely. When we look at what we ‘hope’ for from a summit like Copenhagen, we can start to see why.

We hope that vast and deeply entrenched vested interests – fossil-fuel conglomerates; loggers; automobile corporations; the ‘military-industrial complex’; political parties; unions; all the wide and winding alleys of a global economy built on cheap fossil energy – can be somehow overcome in a very short time. We hope that an economy built on the need for constant growth can somehow be reattuned, also in a very short time, into some kind of fluffy, harmless, ’steady state’ system. We hope that this is possible in a world with a rapidly-expanding human population with rapidly-expanding appetites; appetites which need to keep expanding in order to keep that economy on the rails.

We hope that the ‘consumers’ of the rich world – that’s us – will be prepared to make radical changes to their lifestyles; either through personal choice (see 10:10 and a billion other such attempts) or because their governments will force them to. This requires us also to hope that democracies, which are predicated on giving their voters what they want, and promising more of it, will suddenly be able to turn around and tell them they must have less of everything without democracy itself shuddering into serious trouble.

Failing all of this, we turn to the ’supply side’: we hope, in the best tradition of post-Enlightenment Rational Man, that our technology will save us. We hope we can build enough windfarms quickly enough and that they will work. We hope we can invent a ‘carbon capture’ system to allow us to keep burning coal. We hope we can cover the Sahara with mirrors and get a ’supergrid’ up and running. We hope that electric cars will work, or hydrogen fuel cells or decentralised energy systems. We hope we can stop the Canadians digging up and selling their tar sands and persuade the Saudis to keep the rest of their oil in the ground. We hope that we can get all of this done against the interests of those who run the fossil-fuel economy and the inert and inadequate political systems that supposedly govern it, and against the competitive nature of people and nations. Failing that, we hope we can work out some way to start pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and under the sea, or to send it into space or to create cloud cover that blocks the sun’s rays, or to whack space mirrors up into the blackness to reflect the light back again.

Hope hope hope. It could be you. You might get lucky. It’s worth a flutter. After all, the alternative is global apocalypse, right? So let’s paint ourselves blue and get hoping.

We are set up to fail at this, and hoping otherwise will not lead to joy; it will lead to despair. Better, surely, to get real. Better to be honest with ‘the public’ instead of lying to them (they know you’re lying anyway). Better to look the future in the face and understand what it is likely to bring. This is not, please note, the same as ‘giving up’. Stopping the burning of fossil fuels, for example, is hugely important: however far we’ve gone, we could go further, so we should row back as quickly as we can. Living lightly is good too. All such things are good; but they are not going to keep our show on the road and if that’s why you’re doing them, you are going to end up feeling very let down. To say this is not to give up: it is to face up.

We have overshot, and like any civilisation that overshoots, we are starting to pay the price. We need to be honest about this. We also need to be honest about our own role in it as individuals. I like the laptop on which I am writing this. It’s a great machine. It is also part of the problem, and so am I. We are all part of the problem, and there is not going to be a ’solution’ of the kind presented at Copenhagen: simple, top-down, focused, technological, everything-will-be-OK, nothing-to-do-with-us.

Dealing with the fallout of this comes down to us and our kids and theirs too. I strongly believe that the first stage in coping with that reality is accepting that it is a reality. The first stage of kicking the bottle, for an alcoholic, is admitting that he has a problem. We have a problem, it is not going away, and Mr Obama is not going to solve it for us. We are going to have to live with it for a long, long time. We could get something good out of it, at least, by asking ourselves how it came about, and what lies we told ourselves to make to possible. Telling ourselves more of them instead will not make us feel better, at least when the morning comes.