English

Austrian

Ten days ago I spent a weekend in the  northern rain teaching people how to mow grass with a scythe. I’ve been using a scythe for four or five years, though it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve got any good at it. I began using one because I wanted to cut the grass in my orchard without using smelly, noisy, petrolly power tools, and also because I had come across the great Simon Fairlie and his persuasive addiction to these ancient and mesmerising tools.

Scything, largely thanks to Simon, is undergoing a renaissance in Britain. Scythes were used here from Anglo-Saxon times right up until the 1940s, initially to mow grass for haymaking and later also to mow cereal crops. They were operated by large mowing teams in the summer months and they were, and are, a terrific example of what used to be called ‘appropriate technology.’ The wooden handles, known as snaths, can be made anywhere there are trees by any competent woodworker, and the blades can be made by any blacksmith. They’re a genuinely pre- and post-modern tool, and will doubtless be around long after the Flymo has faded into legend. Keep the blade honed and peened, and know how to use them, and you have probably the most efficient and effective tool for cutting grass ever developed. This is proven entertainingly year after year at the Somerset Scythe Festival where the annual ‘scythe versus strimmer’ contest is always won by the scythe.

Like many other rural crafts, scything pretty much died out in Britain after the second world war, though this was not the case in many other European countries. In eastern Europe, mowing grass with scythes is still very widely practised, and both skills and tools are passed on from generation to generation. Even Western Europe still has a working scythe culture. Here in Britain, as in so much else, we are both ahead and behind: industrial revolution and enclosure rendered our fields empty and our slums full long before this happened anywhere else, and one of the consequences has been the widespread death both of small-scale agriculture and of the crafts, skills and ways of seeing associated with it.

Simon Fairlie has effectively kick-started a reinvention of scything in Britain by importing, selling and teaching the use of scythes manufactured by the 600-year-old Schröckenfux company in Austria. It was the use of the Austrian scythe that I was teaching at the Cumbrian Scythe Festival. Austrian scythes are terrific, lightweight instruments, with a vast array of interchangeable blades, that can be used for anything from mowing your lawn to harvesting wheat to trimming grass around trees on a forty five degree slope. As I say, there is a quiet renaissance going on as a result of the use of these instruments. Landowning charities and local authorities are starting to use scythes rather than strimmers to manage their grasslands, and thousands of people like me are using them privately. But what I saw at the Cumbrian scything event was something I had never seen before, which brought home to me the real meaning of the reinvention of tradition.

The people engaged in the sycthing renaissance in Britain are largely – though not entirely – people with no background in this tradition. Often they are middle class back-to-the-landers, pemaculture enthusiasts, smallholders, environmentalists and the like. They – we – are part of a movement which is attempting to re-learn land-based and practical skills that have been lost, both because it’s fascinating and enjoyable and because it seems increasingly obvious that such skills are going to be where it’s at in a post-industrial future. We are starting in this, many of us, from zero. Before I got my own Austrian blade I had never picked up a scythe before, and never thought about doing so. Like many, I was converted when I did. But I was converted to a tradition other than my own.

The kind of scythe we new-wavers use is not the kind traditionally used in these islands. British scythes are quite different to their European counterparts. The blades are heavy and stamped rather than light and hammered, and the snaths are thicker, weightier and more elegantly curved. They’re heavier, less adaptable and seemingly harder to use, particularly for women – scything in the pre-modern era in Britain was exclusively men’s work. For all these reasons, the old English scythe (and indeed the Scottish scythe, which is something else again) has been largely overlooked by the new-wavers. I’ve seen a few people use them, and have tried myself, but it’s always slower and harder work. Until ten days ago, I was much happier with my more adaptable, sleeker imports. But then I met Jim.

Jim farms Herdwick sheep over at Millom on the west coast. He’s a traditional Cumbrian farmer, from a Cumbrian farming family. He’s no-nonsense, wry and deeply practical. Jim turned up at the scything festival with an English scythe he had inherited from his father. He came because he still uses it on his farm, mainly to dock thistles, but knows few other farmers who do, and wanted to see what we were all about. In a Langdale meadow, in the middle of a downpour, Jim showed us, quietly and simply, how an English scythe is supposed to be used.

It was, for me, a revelation. Jim was a natural. In his hands, this heavy, tough old tool was wielded with efective simplicity. It cut through the grass easily, and left a beautiful swath of lawnmower quality. Jim simply turned up and got on with cutting a whole strip of meadow, and gradually the rest of us stopped what we were doing and watched him. When he’d finished he smiled triumphantly and told us that these fancy foreign scythes were not a patch on the real thing.

Talking to Jim afterwards I learned a lot I didn’t know about how English scythes are and were used, and I’m now caught up in a desire to get my own and learn how to use it. I may even pluck up the courage to seek Jim out and ask him to teach me – if he has time, which farmers rarely do. But I learned something else too, and it was about the difference between an inherited and a learned tradition. Watching Jim cut that meadow was like hearing a snatch of old song that I dimly recognised but could never learn to sing. The man was part of a living tradition. He may be at the end of it, but it can still be found, even here, even now. He had learned his skills from his father, who had done the same. The same tool had been passed on, along with the knowledge of how to use it. The connection, between generations and within communities, was part of what Jim brought to that weekend.

That connection is part, I think, of what we look for when we try to revive these old skills. Yes, we want to learn all sort of practical things that we think will be of use to us, and we talk a lot about peak oil and climate change and all the rest of it, but at least part of what we are doing is trying, clumsily but genuinely, to fit ourselves back into a broken lineage. But we can never do it; the links were severed long ago. We are the deracineated generations: we can sense what we’ve lost, but it’s only when we see it in action that it really bubbles to the surface.

Yesterday I was up in Scotland at the Big Tent Festival, which is full of people working hard to reinvent these ways of life, or to build on them: permaculturists, green woodworkers, low-impact housebuilders, grassland management charities, spinners and weavers and organic food growers. Alastair McIntosh was speaking there about resilient communities, and was talking about his childhood on the Hebridean island of Lewis. Alastair grew up at the end of a dying tradition, and he spoke powerfully about it. As a child, he explained, he was taken out fishing in small boats by his ‘elders’ and taught how to bring in mackerel and herring from the bay. When the boat landed he would walk home, distributing the fish around the village as he did so. It was a close-knit community in which skills and stories were passed on down the generations.

Most of that is gone now. The island is full of people from elsewhere in Scotland and elsewhere in the world, supermarkets on the mainland provide the mainstay of most people’s diets and the young are not taught to take the fishing boats out by their elders anymore. Even if they were, they would catch nothing, for the bays around Lewis have been emptied of fish by industrial trawlers.

What is lost when these skills are not passed on, when the links are broken? Not just the skills themselves, some of which are useful and some less so, but a deep sense of inter-generational community, of being part of a human lineage, in time and in place. What comes instead are new kinds of ‘community’ – atomised individuals and nuclear families, surfing a world of astonishing ‘choice’ within their ‘communities of interest’. One of Alastair’s contentions is that planning for a different future is not simply a case of thinking about tools, fuels or housebuilding techniques, but crucially depends upon building resilience both into real, geographical communities and into the human spirit; resilient human communities are the rock on which everything else is built.

For me, seeing Jim and his scythe at work spoke of something more than ways of cutting grass. It spoke of the broken links that got us here. We can never re-forge them, but we can try to remember them, and we can pass on what we still can. We can also look wider and deeper, beyond where we are and beyond our own background and assumptions and circles of friends and acquaintances, for what still remains, and listen to what it has to say to us. Or, as Alastair put it to me: ‘seek out the elders, and ask them.’

Last autumn we had the biggest floods in living memory. People were helicoptered out of their houses and entire towns disappeared under eight feet of burst river. Then we had the hardest winter for decades, in which the roads were sheets of ice  for weeks and I regularly had to ask the farmer to tow me up the hill with his tractor because my van wouldn’t make it. Now we are in the middle of the driest summer since 1929.

While this is bad news for my struggling broad beans, it does allow a rare glimpse of a drowned past. The levels of Haweswater, the easternmost lake of the Lake District, are currently exceptionally low, and this has brought the ghost village of Mardale Green up into the light for the first time in decades.

The story of Mardale Green has entranced me since I first heard it as a child, when I walked in the valley. Haweswater is today a long, empty stretch of water in a valley whose only outstanding features are spiritless squares of plantation pines. In some lights it’s an eerie place; you can feel some kind of loss there, an emptiness that hangs around in the air. There’s a reason for this, and it’s below the water’s surface. This lake did not used to be here.

In its natural state, Haweswater was two smaller lakes known as High and Low Water, which were separated by a narrow spit of land. They were fringed by trees and meadows, and their shores were dotted with farmsteads. At the head of the valley stood the village of Mardale Green, with its typical cluster of Westmorland stone houses, a medieval church and an inn, the Dun Bull.

images from Mardale Green

Haweswater’s valley is a dead end: there is no way, except on foot, to cross the mountain ridge known as High Street which blocks it at its western end (though the Romans managed to build a road that today still runs along this ridge; it’s a giddying achievement, often literally.) Haweswater’s isolated valley community, its landscape and history, were by no means unique in this region; in many ways it was typical of Lakeland life before the coming of modernity. It was tethered to its place and to its lineage, and many of its people knew nothing else.

I wonder, then, how the villagers felt in 1919 when they heard that the Manchester Water Corporation had secured the passing of the Haweswater Act, enabling the compulsory purchase of the valley, the construction of a dam at its eastern end and the drowning of everything in the vicinity, including Mardale Green. I wonder at the clash of cultures; at the how the coming loss was conceived and assimilated by the farming families, the hunters and the shepherds whose water came from the local becks and who had no telephone lines or electricity. The new reservoir was being built to provide drinking water for the burgeoning population of the city of Manchester. For the city to grow, a village, and a way of life, had to die.

It was all a painted miniature: progress in a nutshell. Vast armies of labourers were brought in to build the dam as the locals looked on. A new village was built to house the workers and their families, for the Haweswater project would take years. Unlike the existing village, this new, 20th century prefab settlement had electricity, pool tables, radios, washing machines – all of the promises which the new age was bringing. Construction of the dam took ten years. During that time, life in Mardale Green went on as it had for centuries, only now with the shadow of its own end hanging over it, lengthening by the day.

The dam’s plug was finally set  two decades after the project had been given the go-ahead. Most of the village’s buildings were blown up by the Royal Engineers before the flood. The Holy Trinity church held an emotional last service for the villagers which was also attended by hundreds of people from outside the valley – so many that most had to listen to Mardale’s farewell outside on the grass through speakers rigged up by a local radio ham. The church was then dismantled stone by stone. Bodies were dug up from the churchyard and re-interred in nearby Shap. Some of the stone was used to build the take-off tower for the new reservoir, in which the old church windows can still be seen.

The waters swallowed Mardale Green in 1939, as the world’s first fully-industrialised war swallowed Western civilisation. Today, in 2010, the old stone walls that surrounded the pastures, and the shells of some of the old buildings, have come up into the light again above the lowered surface of Haweswater. The old fields are bleached white, and the remains of the drystone walls are black and slimy.

Manchester is worrying again about its water supply, and the response of the authorities has been to instruct the population of Cumbria to stop using hosepipes. Now, as then, the needs of the city dictate to the country.

What happened to Mardale Green is still happening, on an infinitely bigger scale and with more pain attached, across the planet. In China, more than 1.2  million people have been forcibly displaced to make way for the Three Gorges Dam: a dubious world record. In India, the Narmada Bachao Andolan have been fighting for decades to stop the Indian government building a series of over 3000 dams in the Narmada valley, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying pristine ecosystems.

The story is always the same. An expanding economy needs water, or electric power, or both. Dams and reservoirs are planned, in the interests of national development and economic competitiveness. Villagers whose lifestyles are genuinely ‘low impact’ and ‘sustainable’ are barged out of the way, often in the most horrific circumstances, by a metastasising urban culture which claims to want to be both of these things but is not willing to pay the hard price. The city eats the country.

The line from the authorities is always the same too: this is for everyone’s benefit. The reality is usually different; the power and the piped water goes to the industrial areas, the cities, the rich suburbs. The refugees from the country go to the slums. Who notices? Who reports it? A few genuine journalists and passionate campaigners, but most of us never hear of these things, or care if we do.

It wasn’t very long ago that, after decades of campaigning by activists all over the world, the global organisations which had long supported and funded dam-building began to have second thoughts.  Demonstrations of the destructive ecological and social impacts of mega-dams were just too big too ignore. They were not, however, as big as the demand for the power and water that dams provide the ever-spreading Machine. Today, mega-dams are as popular as ever, and are often dressed up as  yet another ‘renewable solution’ to the climate change caused by the development model they were originally part of. It’s the same old mutton, now dressed up as low-carbon lamb, and we are still hooked on it. It gives us – some of us – power, order, control, national pride. It allows us to grow, for a while. We can drown the past, and much of the inconvenient present, under hundreds of feet of water and hope it never rises again to show us what’s beneath the surface.

Strangely, as I have been writing this it’s started to rain outside; the first rain in weeks. It’s heavy and fresh. What can be seen of Mardale Green will be no doubt be gone again soon, and Manchester will be able to breathe easier. Here in Cumbria we’ll be able to use our hosepipes to wash our cars down and water our herbaceous borders without having to worry about it. Everything will go back to normal.

Yet the Deepwater Horizon disaster – and the highly-televised flailing which followed it – have some of the qualities of those moments in which public consciousness shifts. There is a sudden sense of betrayal, for those whose places and livelihoods have been desecrated, and for millions more who can identify with them. Few environmental disasters have reached so far into the consciousness of those who would never consider themselves environmentalists.

Could this be some kind of turning point? And, if so, what is there left to turn towards?

Since its launch a year ago, Dark Mountain has sought to offer a space for deepening conversations about the unfolding ecological, social and economic crises among which we find ourselves. Conversations which take in not only technical, scientific and political considerations, but the deep roots of these crises in our ways of seeing and the stories we tell about history, necessity and our place in the world. So, today, we are making a new invitation to reflect on the experience of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what it means: for the United States and its view of the future, for a world hitting at ecological limits, and for those most immediately affected by it.

Over the next few weeks, we will be seeking responses from poets and engineers, philosophers and fishermen, songwriters, storytellers and statisticians. This is an invitation to mourn, to interpret, to contextualise or to prophesy – to create, in whatever form suits your thoughts and feelings, work which does justice to what has happened in the Gulf of Mexico and to all the less-publicised acts of ecocide echoed in this event.

A selection of the resulting work will be featured on this site – and we hope to publish it in a Print-on-Demand special issue of Dark Mountain. We are open to video and audio, as well as poetry, fiction and non-fiction, photography and images of all kinds. Work should reach us by Monday 16th August at the latest, but we will consider pieces as they arrive and begin publishing those selected as guest posts on this blog over the next few weeks.

Please send your work to info@dark-mountain.net and use the subject line ‘Deep Waters’.

However, we’re nearly on top of things! If you ordered a book from us before the festival, you should have it by now. If you don’t, please let us know. If you have ordered in the last week or so, books will be posted out early this coming week.

The exception has been the signed copies. If you ordered a signed copy as part of our fundraising process, we apologise for not having got them out to you yet. We’d intended signing books at the festival then posting them out afterwards, but in the chaos it was overlooked. We will be signing them and posting them out this week.

Thanks to everyone for your support and patience. Next time around we will have slicker systems in place (and hopefully more people running them!) This is what happens when you accidentally start a publishing company …

Update: 9th July – we’ve now posted out all the books that have been ordered so far, with the exception of a couple of orders received in the last week. If you don’t have your pre-ordered book within a week, please let us know.

There was a recent debate about Dark Mountain on the same site, which is now to be turned into a live action event. I’ll be talking about Dark Mountain, and the issues surrounding it, with a few other people, possibly including Alastair, at the Big Tent Festival in Fife in July. Come and contribute if you’re in the area. Later in the year, I’ll also be talking about the book at the Edinburgh Radical Bookfair, so I hope to meet some Scottish mountaineers at both events.

Responses to and reports about the festival – the first substantial Dark Mountain gathering – are popping up all over the web. I think it would be fair to say that they are very largely positive, with a good number of useful suggestions about what could be done better next time (assuming there is a next time), what worked, what didn’t and what could change.

For the two of us, the most significant part of the festival was simply bringing together 400 people for whom Dark Mountain means something. For some of those people, this project has become an important part of their development and even their lives. Others had a passing interest and turned up to see what was going on. What was fascinating was that there seemed to be no-one there who didn’t have something significant to say. We had hoped this would be a gathering of participants, not a show with an audience, and that seems to be what happened. This is probably the reason why the most common demand for future events was a lot more time and space for people to self-organise, get together and just talk and spend time, away from the manic menu of talks, debates and the like. This is something we’ll certainly listen to. If there’s one thing we learned from UNCIVILISATION, it’s that we probably tried to do too much. We can perhaps plead over-excitement here: there were so many good people and groups that we wanted to showcase that we probably tried to cram too much in. We also took too much on our own shoulders. You live and learn.

UNCIVILISATION also showed us how much energy has gathered around this project and what a remarkable collection of people have been drawn to it. More than before, this now feels like a real movement. There are enough people involved, making things happen (see the network for evidence, and join it if you haven’t already) that we can happily begin to stand back a bit and not take everything on ourselves. We never wanted this project to be focused around us as two individuals, so this comes as a relief. It’s thrilling to see others taking ownership – and to start thinking about the best ways of acknowledging this – as well as to respond to the offers of help, suggestions, proposals and plans that have been coming our way over the last few weeks. It’s beginning to look like Dark Mountain really is meeting a need that is not being fulfilled elsewhere.

But the festival also focused our minds on which aspects of the Dark Mountain journey this project ought to be focusing on. The strength and the weakness of this project has always been its wide range. The issues we addressed in the manifesto, and the interests and experiences we have as people cover a wide range – politics, journalism, poetry, art, community organising, activism. Applying ourselves to even one of these areas would be a big task. Sweeping them all up together, as we have sometimes done, is a vast undertaking, and perhaps not a desirable one. On occasions, we have probably lost our focus. This recent blog, from mountaineer Dave Pollard, makes that case, and restates eloquently what DM could, and in Dave’s view ought, to be about.

In the wake of UNCIVILISATION, and the many possibilities it has thrown up, we think it’s time for a restatement of what Dark Mountain is – and what it isn’t. Time for a paring away of the fat and a focus on where we go next.

For us, the Dark Mountain Project is an invitation to face the converging crises of our century as a cultural challenge – rather than only a technical or political one. We use the word ‘cultural’ in several senses. In the sense that anthropologists use it, since this is about changes in our way of being in and making sense of the world. In the sense, too, that the Culture sections of the newspapers use it, because writers, artists and musicians have a particular role in the way we make sense of the world and find meaning in it as it changes. But our list of those who work in the field of culture would be broader, taking in craftspeople and those with practical skills, and embracing, too, the need to move beyond the ‘Two Cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities famously identified by CP Snow. (We find it encouraging that responses to the manifesto have come from mathematicians, psychologists, engineers and biologists as well as poets and songwriters.)

We do not dismiss technical or political responses to the crises we face, although we may question the assumptions behind them, and the extent to which they rely on wishful thinking. But they are not the focus of this project. Rather, we invite people to explore certain questions: in what ways are these crises rooted in our cultural assumptions, the stories we have told for generations and the ways in which we have seen the world? How do we disentangle ourselves from those assumptions? How can we forge cultural responses that undermine the poisonous myths we have inherited – the myths of humanity’s centrality, materialism, progress, the separation of ‘people’ from ‘nature’? Where do we find new stories, or old stories whose time has come? What other ways of seeing might alter our understanding of our situation? And how do we help send these stories and ways of seeing out into the world?

This is what, for us, Dark Mountain is. So, what is it not?

Dark Mountain is not intended as a vehicle for theoretical or abstract arguments about the future. While we anticipate a difficult century ahead, our emphasis is on the unknowability of the future, not on attempts to predict it. We do not want to construct a boxing ring in which fights between worldviews are staged, nor a vehicle for apocalyptic fantasies. And, perhaps crucially, this is not an ‘activist’ project: if you are looking for new ways of ’saving the world’, you have come to the wrong place. Dark Mountain is not a political movement, in that specific sense, nor was it meant to be.

Having said which, we recognise that we have not always been so clear. Sometimes we have forgotten the starting point of our journey – and sometimes others have misunderstood our purpose. (Among other things, this has led to too many fruitless arguments about whether we are ‘giving up’ on ’saving the world’.)

If you approach Dark Mountain as an open question – approach it seeking, or wanting to help craft, a cultural response to an age of crisis; and understand that it starts at the point where we stop pretending that our current narratives can provide us with what we need – then you may find much nourishment in it. We have been heartened by the responses of people who have encountered the project in this way.

On the other hand, if you approach it as a political project, and you come to us looking for programmes, five-point plans or suggestions for what the next stage of your journey through activism should be, then you are likely to find yourself frustrated. Answering these questions is not what we are here for. Admittedly, we’ve engaged in enough publicly political dogfights over the last year to make it understandable that some should see us this way. And small-p politics will always be, as someone once put it, the ‘background hum‘ of our work; it could hardly be otherwise. But it’s not the central focus, and if you’re looking for political answers, this project is unlikely to satisfy you.

This, then, is the basis on which we’ll be going forward. The festival and the book have been, we hope, good attempts at providing forums for this cultural response to flourish. We’ll be on the case with a new book later in the year, and we’re looking for contributions now (more on that here soon). Other events and approaches are taking place all over the network. And we’ll be announcing a call for submissions for a more specific project on this blog in the next week, which we hope will get some juices flowing.

What we’ll also be doing over the next few weeks is posting film, photos and responses to the festival up here, so that those who couldn’t make it can engage with what was on offer. This should be enough to keep us all busy for the summer. In the meantime, your responses to what we’ve said here would be very useful.

Finally, thanks again to everyone who made UNCIVILISATION possible: to the speakers and performers who gave their time and their talents, to Michael and Kat who held things together, to the stewards, to the sound and lighting crew and the rest of the Pavilion staff, and to everyone who came. A great deal of hard work, perspiration and inspiration, patience and generosity went into making the festival happen. We feel grateful and inspired by the way that people came together.

I’d really like to know peoples’ thoughts on the event. It was hard to evaluate an kind of general mood – if there was such a thing – as I was run so ragged. I’ve started a feedback thread on the Uncivilisation network, as have other Mountaineers this morning (thanks all). Please let us know what you thought and what you think about the future. Or post on this blog, or send us an email.

I’m about to take a holiday until my head stops buzzing. At the moment I am full of ideas and thoughts provoked by the many people I met at the weekend. Thoughts, too, about how Dark Mountain is developing. One in particular stays with me right now: something Chris Wood said on stage during his intense and mesmerising set on Sunday night, and something which I’d discussed with him over some beers beforehand.

‘I wonder’ he said, ‘whether you’re trying to reinvent the wheel.’ He was referring to our declared search for ‘new stories’ with which to negotiate the age of decline. As a folk singer, Chris suggested that the stories we need might be out there already – that in past human experience we could find the narratives we are looking for, dust them off and re-engage with them.

The same point seemed to come up, from different directions, all weekend – from Alastair McIntosh, Adrienne Odasso, Jay Griffiths, Vinay Gupta and many others. I think they were right. While in many ways the things we are facing are entirely new – climate change, for example, or human-induced mass extinction – in other ways, they are ancient. Civilisations have fallen with regularity in Britain alone over the last millennium, and as they did so people wrote stories, sang songs, told tales to help them relate to what was happening. Those tales are still out there. Even the age of ecocide is not entirely unpredecented – humans have been doing the same thing, on a more local scale, ever since they evolved. Those tales are still out there too.

Digging, I think, is what we need. We’re not so much looking for something new as looking to re-engage in a new way with something very old. This is the image I’ll take away with me from this weekend – digging, looking for treasure beneath the soil, trying to unearth something that’s been there waiting for us. We excavated a good bit of topsoil this weekend, I hope.

It’s not news, of course, that greenhouse gas emissions are intimately linked with economic success. To a degree, it’s basic common sense. Industrial economies run largely on fossil fuels. To understand just how dependent on those fuels we are, and how ‘renewables’ and even nuclear are currently nowhere very significant on a global level, have a look at this breakdown of global energy use:

Source: Edro

The global economy, in other words, is fossil fuels. To put it another way, it is climate change. Economic growth equals more emissions. Economic collapse equals fewer. The most famous example of this was the collapse of the Soviet empire after 1990. Its economic apocalypse caused a huge drop in greenhouse gas emissions. To this day, the former USSR still doesn’t pollute as much as it did at the height of its economic pomp.

Source: Chris Vernon

What to make of this? Well, if you’re Derrick Jensen, say, the conclusion you draw is that industrial society itself is inherently toxic and must be destroyed, in order to save the biosphere. From the point of view of global ecological health, as opposed to human happiness, there’s clear merit in this argument. It’s clear that the global human economy is an engine of ecocide. The trouble is, of course, that even if you can make yourself comfortable with the massive human costs of bringing down industrial society, there’s no conceivable way of actually doing it. When we interviewed Jensen for issue 1 of Dark Mountain, I thought he did a good job of unintentionally demonstrating this. It seems to me that most people in industrial societies, and perhaps outside of them too, will always choose human comfort and safety above what they see as some vague concept of ‘ecological health’. If we are asked to choose between giving up our cars today and giving up the existence of coral reefs in two decades, I think I know what we’d choose. I think we have already chosen.

What to do then? Another approach – far more fashionable and on the surface more ‘realistic’ – is that of ‘eco-pragmatism.’ Eco-pragmatism is very much the in thing right now. Assuming that some grand shift in human consciousness is unlikely, that most people on Earth seem to aspire to Western levels of affluence and over-development and that this is hard or impossible to stop, especially in democracies (and even in dictatorships – look at China), its proponents therefore put their faith in two things: techno-fixes and ‘decoupling’.

The techno-fixes are easy enough to understand: they’re everywhere, and the mainstream green movement has abandoned most of its other aims in order to shill for them. Whether they be giant windfarms or solar arrays in Cornwall, the idea here is to get enough renewable energy sources up and running quickly enough to replace fossil fuels as a significant energy source, and thereby prevent the worst impacts of climate change. I find this narrative utterly unconvincing for a number of reasons we’ve covered here before, and of course I’m not the only one. But questioning it right now is almost impossible; we may have to wait until its proponents hit the brick wall of their own over-excitement before we can have a proper discussion about it.

The second part of the eco-pragmatist equation is the idea of ‘decoupling’ economic development from both emissions and, more broadly, from the material intensity of the economy. As the human economy grows it consumes more stuff. It consumes more fish, wood, ore, fossil fuels, animals, plants, metals and the rest. Some of these are replaceable, some are not, but all of them, taken from the Earth and consumed by us at current rates, has a knock-on effect on the health of the biosphere, of which climate change is only the most all-encompassing example. And it will get worse, for sure. If the projected global population, by 2100, was to live the same kind of lives we currently live in countries like the UK, the global economy would need to be 40 times bigger than it currently is. That’s right: 40 times bigger. It has been calculated that if the world economy grows at a rate of 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period  resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first evolved. Think about that. Sit back and really think about it.

So – runs the eco-pragmatist argument – this being the case, we need to work out how to develop without doing all this bad stuff. Obviously we need to develop, because it’s everyone’s right to have a telly and a dentist. So we need to work out how to run an economy that doesn’t constantly need to grow, and therefore strip-mine the world.

This argument – that we can ‘develop’ in much the way we are now developing without economic growth – has become a kind of last redoubt for the rhetoric of ’sustainable development.’ Those who push it are well aware of how destructive the human economy is, how democracy colludes in it, and how rising population growth and rising human wants are combining to eat the world. But they see no real way out of the capitalist, materialist society we have built, and they see discussion of alternative systems as ‘unrealistic’ – which often they are.  So they alight instead on attempting to maintain the garden of earthly delights that we call modern civilisation without the engine of its creation – economic growth.

It sounds tempting, but I’m not really convinced.  For starters, though I’m no economist, I know that the modern economy can’t currently function without growth. Amongst other things, growth is needed in a capitalist economy to offset labour productivity – in other words, to provide new jobs for people made jobless by the economy’s relentless drive towards increasing labour efficiency, which itself is stimulated by the need to grow in order to outcompete others. How you get around this, I don’t know, though various learned people who know a lot more about economics than me think it could be done.

But I think they’re missing something. I think our current societal worship of economic growth, while posing as a piece of economic rationalism, is nothing of the kind. For some reason, this thought crystallised in me this morning when, reading the John Fowles novel The Magus, I came across this short passage, spoken by the central character to his young, idealistic, egalitarian protege:

But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfil itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a high pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.

This, I think, is what we believe growth will give us; it’s why we cling to it as to a liferaft. Far from being simply a boring but necessary component of a capitalist economy, growth has become the defining purpose of our political leaders. Nobody sensible questions it, and anyone who does is immediately dismissed as a ‘Luddite’ who wants to ‘have everyone living in caves.’ I see growth as an offshoot of progress, or perhaps a new, more contemporary version of it. Progress – the idea that the future is always better than the past, that everything always improves and will continue to do so, that we have ’some destination’ which will take us to ‘a higher state’ – is the defining myth of the modern world. It is beneath all our skins, and without it we are lost. We have nothing to believe in; nothing to strive for.

Our pursuit of growth is not rational – it is atavistic.  I don’t think this is just a dry-as-dust debate about how to decouple energy intensity from job creation. I think it is the potential toppling of one of our founding myths, and I think it will take more than pragmatism to knock it off its pedestal.

The comments underneath articles like this are usually a pretty depressing example of the worst tendencies of the internet, and this time round was no exception. As ever, a common criticism of Dark Mountain was that we were a group of people who had ‘given up.’  Interestingly though, this criticism was rarely if ever extended beyond those two words. In other words, it was never made clear what we were supposed to be giving up on. This is largely because it’s generally a knee-jerk, defensive reaction – in this case from environmentalists, who assume that giving up on the platitudes of environmentalism is the same thing as giving up on, well, life.

What interests me about much of the wider debate around Dark Mountain  is how often confusions and conflations like this arise. The overarching one is our unerring ability to confuse the world with the Earth. The Earth is the planet we live on, of which we are one species amongst billions. The world is human society – civilisation. My bone of contention with environmentalism is that it has moved seamlessly from defending the former to defending the latter whilst pretending that they are the same thing – and that many of its footsoldiers don’t seem to have even noticed.

I’ve written an essay examining this in more detail for the first issue of Dark Mountain. It’s one of the essays George quotes from in his piece. We’ve been talking on this blog for nine months about this first collection of Uncivilised writing. It fulfils one of the missions we set ourselves in our manifesto – to seek out a new kind of writing, and send it out into the world. We’re very excited to be able to announce that the book has now arrived in our hands, and can be ordered now through this site.

We hope this book fulfils some of our promises, and we’d like to hear thoughts about that, positive or otherwise. If you’ve already ordered a copy, it will be on its way to you in the next ten days. After the festival, we’ll put our minds to the next one.

The festival, meanwhile, is now only sixteen days away, and it will hopefully fulfill another of our initial aims – bringing together a wide group of people, to take this project forward. Today we have also put the full festival programme online. I hope you’ll find it exciting – I do, and I can’t wait to see it come together, and what comes out of it. We have arranged some of the big sessions around two key themes – ‘time to stop pretending’ on the Saturday, and ‘new stories’ on the Sunday. The former will see, amongst other things, Dougald acting as Jeremy Paxman to George Monbiot’s man from the ministry, which should be worth the ticket price alone.

What I’m really looking forward to though is the conversations that will be going on throughout the weekend, and in the Dark Mountain camp in the runup, around the campfire, in the bar, on the grass and all around the site. There’s going to be a lot happening. If you’re still planning to come but haven’t bought your ticket yet, now’s the time, before they all go. Any questions you still have can hopefully be answered by the Uncivilisation network.

Living in Britain in the last week has been an interesting object lesson in how cherished assumptions and seemingly fixed situations can change faster than our ability to come to grips with their meaning or significance. I don’t imagine it’s done yet, either.  It seems like a good time for us to be coming together. There’s a lot to talk about.

UNCIVILISATION 2010, the Dark Mountain Festival, is a chance to invite more people into those conversations. It’s not intended as a one-off event, though, but as part of an ongoing, rolling discourse that moves backwards and forwards between ideas and actions. I shared one example of that yesterday, the interview with Vinay Gupta which we’ll be publishing in Dark Mountain Vol.1, in which he invites us to consider the prospect of a future in which “we’re all Mexicans”.

Here’s another example – a session which Vinay and I recorded earlier this week with Pat Kane (author of The Play Ethic – and frontman of Hue & Cry!), Mike Bennett of risk consultants Buttered Side Down and psychologist Alex Fradera. This was part of The Agora, a series we’re recording at Brixton Village.

Pat was due to discuss the Digital Economy Bill and the broader crisis of the music industry – but as that morning’s headlines were about the crisis in Greece, we soon found ourselves discussing the parallels between the two situations, and the lessons from Brixton Village itself. The result may be a bit obscure in places, but hopefully it gives some sense of the flow of ideas in this corner of the Dark Mountain network:

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Join in the conversation on the UNCIVILISATION Network – or in the flesh in Llangollen next month.