Over the last few weeks, a lot of people have asked us to suggest books which pick up on the themes of this project. In time, we’ll add a recommended reading section to the site. As a first step towards that, I thought I’d share a list that I made for a friend who had enjoyed the manifesto and wanted to know where to go next.
Writing this, I realise that some people will be surprised by the absence of names like Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jared Diamond or James Howard Kunstler. This is a personal selection, representing the writers and books which led me to this project – I’m sure Paul’s list would be different again. It’s also a reflection of our aim to open up a broader cultural conversation about the kinds of future we may be headed towards, that’s in dialogue with, but not limited to, the “collapse” genre.
There are other kinds of omission: this is an all-male selection, for example. I’m hoping others will extend it in directions where our knowledge becomes sketchy, and suggest other writers whose work we should be celebrating. Please add your suggestions in the comments, and let’s start the process of creating a Dark Mountain reading list.
Alan Garner, ‘Thursbitch’ – If I had to choose one novel to represent the kind of writing for which we argue in the manifesto, this would be it. Brilliantly written, it is grounded in a deep sense of place and time. At its heart is an eighteenth century jagger, Jack Turner, whose journeys across the Pennines and beyond trace the far end of a web of marketplaces and campfires – becoming, ultimately, the Silk Road – by which goods and stories travel the length of a continent.
A novel is not a means to an end and I wouldn’t want to use this or any other as a piece of ammunition. I do believe, though, that we may be better prepared for a future which turns out not to be an upgraded version of the present, if we become more aware that the past was not a prototype for the present. I know few books which more powerfully evoke the strangeness – the autonomy, even – of the past.
John Berger, ‘Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance’ – The theme of time comes up also in the latest collection of essays from Berger, another writer who embodies the spirit of this project for me. “The longer one looks at Jitka Hanzlová’s pictures of a forest,” he writes, “the clearer it becomes that a breakout from the prison of modern time is possible.” Berger’s break-out is never escapist. “I’ve always put life before writing,” says the autobiographical narrator of his novel ‘Here is where we meet’. His work insists on the need to stay with lived experience, and particularly the experience of those outside the walls of the centres of power. This kind of writing from “beyond the city limits” is what I’ll be looking for in contributions to the Dark Mountain journal.
David Cayley, ‘The Rivers North of the Future’ – Ivan Illich is best known for books like ‘Deschooling Society’ and ‘Energy and Equity’, widely read in the 1970s. Twenty-five years later, towards the end of his life, he took part in a series of conversations with David Cayley which became this book. These conversations explore the understanding of history underpinning Illich’s work, summed up by the Latin motto, corruptio optimi pessima, “the corruption of the best is the worst.” How is it that institutions and structures born out of good intentions can come to produce the opposite of their intended effects? This is a historical investigation into the origins of those institutions which – as Illich writes in his final book, ‘In the Vineyard of the Text’ – “create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate… consume the earth.” What comes out of this is the importance of distinguishing ground-level human needs from the systems by which we happen to meet them at this point in time.
David Abram, ‘The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World’ – This is a difficult book to sum up – Abram is an academic philosopher and anthropologist, who also happens to be a sleight-of-hand magician. His attempt to understand how language and writing shape our relationship to the world starts from his personal experiences among indigenous magicians in Southeast Asia. “The task of the magician,” he says, “is to startle our senses and free us from outmoded ways of thinking.” That is certainly a Dark Mountainish enterprise, and his argument about the origins of the skills of literacy in the skills our ancestors used to “read” their surroundings is appropriately startling. This is a book which has particular relevance to the theme of anthropocentrism, which Paul wrote about the other day.
Hugh Brody, ‘The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World’ – We do not find it easy to imagine other ways of living, except in terms of our horror at the loss of what we take for granted. Hugh Brody has spent over forty years as an anthropologist and an advocate working on behalf of tribal peoples. The central theme of his work is that these people are not “living in the past”. They are our contemporaries, and in his accounts of his experiences, he describes people making deliberate choices about which technologies they do and don’t wish to adopt: what is and isn’t compatible with the way they want to live. These are deeply contemporary choices. Through observations such as those of Anaviapik – an Inuit friend of Brody’s, visiting London for the first time – we can get a sense of the strangeness of things which we take for granted. At the same time, Brody offers a larger historical argument about the deep roots of our ways of thinking in the relationship between hunters and farmers, stretching over thousands of years.
Neal Ascherson, ‘Black Sea’ – This is not a critique of civilisation, but an attempt to understand it – or, more precisely, to understand the historical roots of our concepts of “civilisation” and “barbarism” in the encounter between Ancient Greek culture and its neighbours on the far side of the Black Sea. Ascherson ranges backwards and forwards, tracing the echoes of this encounter through the stories of the peoples who have lived around that great inland water, from prehistory to the last days of the Soviet Union.
Steven Mithen, ‘After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5,000 BC’ – This is an epic summary of what we know about how people lived through the last major period of climate change. Mithen is a Professor of Archaeology and he combines a command of his subject matter with a talent for teasing stories out of it.
Take his nightmarish reconstruction of the early town of Çatalhöyük, with its fearsome iconography of bulls and women whose breasts split apart to reveal the skulls of dead animals. Mithen suspects its residents, alienated from nature, became trapped inside their own myths: ‘every aspect of their lives had become ritualised, any independence of thought and behaviour crushed out of them by an oppressive ideology manifest in the bulls, breasts, skulls and vultures.’ Or again, there is the haunting story of the Natufians, who lived comfortably in villages across the Middle East for fifty generations, before the climatic switchback of the Younger Dryas brought in a thousand years of cold and drought, scattering them to a hungry, wandering existence.
Mithen does not offer any overarching theory about civilisation; rather, the power of his book lies in the diversity of stories it offers, the range of ways in which people respond to their circumstances and the role of culture in shaping those responses.
John Michael Greer, ‘The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age’ – Among the writers who offer a direct account of our present situation and the changes which may lie ahead, Greer’s book – and his blog, The Archdruid Report – stand out for the depth and breadth of his frame of reference. In ‘The Long Descent’, he ranges from a presentation of the case for Peak Oil, to a speculative survey of the prospects for different religious traditions in a world of global economic contraction. He insists on the inevitability of such a contraction, and is equally scathing about those who believe it can be avoided, and those who anticipate a sudden, dramatic collapse. Each group, he claims, is deluded by a classic Western myth: the myth of progress and the myth of apocalypse. Whether or not you accept the whole of his argument, he is one of the clearest thinkers and best writers in this territory, and this is a book which also contains practical suggestions for how we adapt to the scenarios outlined.
Dmitry Orlov, ‘Reinventing Collapse’ – While Greer’s hallmark is his erudition, Dmitry Orlov stands out from the (mostly American) “collapse” genre for his personal experience of the economic and social breakdown of a society. Drawing on his experiences before, during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, he calls his work “a comparative theory of superpower collapse”, and his writing is laced with a dark Russian humour. In Orlov’s account, collapse is ultimately personal: however large-scale its causes, the experience varies from individual to individual, and plays out differently according to how we and those around us respond. ‘Reinventing Collapse’ is a reminder that the circumstances envisaged with horror by much of the collapse literature are the lived experience of people in many places today. The personal and collective resilience by which life goes on in failed states and shanty towns may turn out to have a great deal to teach us.
None of these books is easy to summarise, but together they offer one route across the terrain of the Dark Mountain. If you want to explore that route further, we’ve put together a Dark Mountain bookstore where you can order these and other titles relating to this project. (It’s powered by Amazon – and any commission we get will go towards the costs of publishing the first issue of the Dark Mountain journal.)
And if you have suggestions for other books that should be on our reading list, please tell us about them!
I think JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians would fit in nicely in this list. It gives a great sense of the inexorable ebb and flow of ‘civilisation’, helping the reader to see its impermanence (and that this is not a tragedy or an ‘end of history’ in any way).
Of these I am most familiar with, and am taken with, Dmitry. Thank you for the list … this seems a rather male space so far. Do men spend more time looking into the dark crystal than women?
risa b
Perhaps men are just more melancholy, Risa … More seriously, this project is the brainchild of two men, both of whom are writing these blogs and both of whom, by our own admission, seem to have male dominated reading-lists. But this project is in its early stages, and is emphatically not a male concern. Our events have been nicely balanced, as have the blog posts here. And there’s much more to come.
Hmm, Risa asks an interesting question: “Do men spend more time looking into the dark crystal than women?” Not as far as I can tell, but perhaps men have had the courage and imagination to put it into fiction and nonfiction earlier than women. But there are plenty of women bloggers and filmmakers on collapse – eg, Carolyn Baker and Sally Erickson – and the ranks of ecopsychologists willing to face collapse are easily half women. I don’t know whether Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin will pass the muster of Uncivilization, but I think they come close – and I’ve enjoyed their novels.
Here might be a suggestion of a moving work by a woman I greatly admire – “My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization” Chellis Glendinning
Ursula LeGuin would certainly be on my list, Suzanne – I loved the Earthsea books. I might add Jeanette Winterson too, and certainly Mary Oliver.
In regards to solutions to the crisis, you ought to add the book I’LL TAKE MY STAND: THE SOUTH AND THE AGRARIAN TRADITION by Twelve Southerners – http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Take-Stand-Tradition-Civilization/dp/080713208X/ref=ed_oe_p
They were writing about the problems that we face related to industrialism about 80 years ago; read the famous introduction to that book @ http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/White/anthology/agrarian.html
For a female and feminist voice, “The Subsistence Perspective” by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies might be a good work to turn to. They argue for a subsistence-based economy and culture, attempting a critique of civilization and globalization from the perspective of below–the viewpoint of women of the global South.
I’ve recently been reading Jeffers, spurred by your allusion to “Rearmament” here. May I suggest an appropriate soundtrack for such preoccupations: http://www.anti-politics.net/raum/
To add a name to the woman-authored texts on discontinuity, with a fairly recent book drawn, like Clendinning’s, from the therapeutic tradition.
Carolyn Baker (2009), Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse
There is also the classic, Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Civilizations. Published the year before the wall fell. Has recently collaborated (he’s an archaeologist, I think) with ecologists Allen and Hoekstra on a book terribly titled Supply-Side Sustainability. Good lessons for starting over, perhaps.
Tony Fry’s work at the Design Philosophy Papers is a little less mainstream. They are calling for something like a civilizational project, though are not necessarily very sanguine about its prospects.
http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/home.html
There is Heinberg’s Peak Everything, and pretty much anything by David Orr.
Transition towns of course.
And a really beautiful work falling somewhere between Brody and Abram: Calvin Luther Martin’s The Human Way of Being, based on his time among the peoples of the far North.
Look forward to following your work here.
Best wishes,
Paul Anderson
How about Shikasta by Doris Lessing, for a cosmic view of a stricken planet?
I would recommend a truly transformational book, ‘The Ascent of Humanity’, by Charles Eisenstein. It is difficult to summarise its scope, but here is the synopsis from Amazon:
‘The Ascent of Humanity is a radical exploration of the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the human sense of self. Eisenstein traces all of the converging crises of our age to a common source, which he calls Separation. It is the ideology of the discrete and separate self that has generated these crises; therefore, he argues, nothing less than a “revolution in human beingness” will be sufficient to transform our relationship to each other and the planet. And this revolution is underway already. In all realms of human endeavor, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth-pangs of a planet in crisis. The range and depth of Eisenstein’s thesis is breath-taking. Encompassing science, religion, spirituality, technology, economics, medicine, education, and more, he details a vast paradigm shift reflecting a more fundamental shift in the human sense of self. Even in this dark hour, he says, a more beautiful world is possible — but not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control. The convergence of crises is revealing the final bankruptcy of those methods.Soon, he says, we will abandon the Babelian effort to build a tower to Heaven, as we realize that the sky is all around us already. Then, we will turn our efforts to creating a new kind of civilization, a conscious civilization designed for beauty rather than height.’
A very interesting list of books, Dougald. On the fiction front, may I recommend ‘Riddley Walker’ by Russell Hoban? It’s one of those rare works of the imagination that creates a world both familiar and strange, ancient and modern. Set in a degraded, post-nuclear holocaust Kent, it is about humanity’s attempt to regain the technological knowledge (in this instance, gunpowder) that led to its collapse in the first place. Hoban seems to suggest that the civilising impulse will always lead to the same destructive outcome; yet for all the darkness of its setting, reading the novel is an exhilarating experience. At first glance the language, as degraded as the people and landscape, seems difficult and alien; yet read it aloud and suddenly it becomes intelligible and unnervingly familiar. It’s one of those rare novels where style and content are indivisible (something Garner, also rooted in place, achieves so remarkably) and which suggests what may grow from the ashes. The book has haunted me for years and ought, I think, to be considered an ‘Uncivilised’ masterpiece.
what about a lot of practical books on medicine, farming/gardening, tool making, communication, building?
I’m glad you mentioned Doris Lessing, add to that ‘Memoirs of a Survivor’.
Also, John Christopher who wrote the Tripods trilogy, his literature for children often deals with apocalyptic and dystopian futures in ways that reflect on lived society. Also ‘The Death of Grass’, a book he wrote for adults, demonstrates how we are only a few days food away from total breakdown and perhaps reflects on the coming food crisis.
I’d also like to nominate Ray Mears as someone who knows a bit about uncivilisation if I can (?!).
I recommend people to read “The Jesus Incident” by Frank Herbert.
“Until you meet an alien intelligence, you will not know what it means to be human.”
There are many things in the dark mountain that need to be addressed. First of all is whether the people living on the Dark Mountain are looking for wealth to come from the mountain, or if they think of themselves as useful to the mountain. People don’t have to be consumers, and in the past, we weren’t. Consumerism was created and displaced usefulness. People can create wealth FOR the planet, rather than FROM the planet. This Net Usefulness to the future is what determines all extinctions. We have to do more than just be neutral consumers: we have to be Net Creators..just in case. That’s the rule of life’s battle against entropic randomness.
Can I put in Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf and Barbara Ehrenreich, my favourite theree journalists writing topday.
A great collection of short stories edited by Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars trilogy fame) is: Future Primitive, the new Ecotopias. It is a collection united by visions of the future in which civilisation takes different turns, away from endless tech growth towards collapse or a graceful energy descent. It contains a story by Ursula K Le Guin (whose sci-fi anarchist classic “the Dispossessed has to go on the list!) and a story by Ernest Callenbach who wrote the original “Ecotopia” in the early ’70’s, a short novel describing a the split of the north western states of the US succeeding from the rest of the country to form their own ecological state: Ecotopia. It’s a bit dated now but definately a classic – although maybe slightly too utopian to be called “uncivilised.” Also, David Holmgren’s latest, “Future Scenarios” contains some interesting thoughts on collapse or near collapse scenarios…food for thought.
And may we also add Patiann Rogers to the poetry list. Where Mary Olivers tends to invite us – by attending to the poetic detail of the actual world – through a window to a human-cosmic revelation, Ms Rogers takes us to a visceral and sensual unskinning of the world as we know it. This fire and passion, I believe, is one of the things that marks Dark Mountain as essential. Both approaches – Mary and Patiann – are essential and remarkable.
Thanks for this list and discussion, too. As a lover, explorer, and teacher of this kind of writing, I am knee-deep in gratitude.
There is another kind of writing, too, where the human heart (and its stories) and the plainsong of deep nature lie side by side, and weave together. Where I live – Australia – this is the hunt and the journey for future writing. The land and stories here are the deepest and oldest we have. Our mountains are so old you can walk up them in ten minutes, kicking dust.
The Blue Plateau, by Mark Tredinnick (University of Queensland Press) is a profound attempt to walk this path through writing. Mark’s writing is both plain and poetic, yet at unwary times something catches you by the throat, and you hear your heart beating, and thump of something in the dark underbrush. A prominent indigenous writer and activist here, Melissa Lucashenko, called this book true blackfella writing, but from a white point of view – it doesn’t ask anything of the land, but listens, accepts, and feels. It is both a campfire conversation, and the shadows of the fire dancing tall against the trees.
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David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, if only for the post-civilisation section.
I think Tom Hartmann The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight is most applicable to Dark Mountain project. He argues that without cultural change adaptation (to a post oil world) will be much harder.
The rest of my Peak Oil reading list:
The Party’s Over, Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg (two good understandable summaries of where we’re at)
Hubbert’s Peak by Walter Youngquist (popular science of peak oil)
Twilight in the Desert by Matt Simmons (techy detailed book on why Saudi Arabia won’t delay peak, still suitable for popular consumption)
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay (100 year old book on why groups are more stupid than individuals)
Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken (why small grass roots groups are necessary and powerful)
On the psychology of military incompetence by Norman F Dixon, (organisations cannot exclude incompetent placemen from being promoted through their ranks)
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek (confronts the failures of contemporary ideologies/theory and proposes unexpected resolutions (not PC))
The Technological Society Jacques Ellul
Overshoot by William Catton (the summary is too scary, go read something useful)
Buddha by Karen Armstrong
The Black Swan by Taleb (why we don’t expect what happens)
Collapse by Jared Diamond ()
The Take by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein (Argentina etc.)
The Natural Way of Farming by Fukuoka
(This is now an integral part of permaculture, but can also stand as distinct, pre-dating permaculture by decades.)
The Carbon Fields’ by Graham Harvey (a study on UK farming including animals)
Farmers of Forty Centuries by FH King (Chinese farming)
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History by Howard Bloom
“Geodestinies by Walter Youngquist (heavy going science of resources and history)
Linked: the new science of networks by Albert-László Barabási
Ishmael trilogy (Ishmael, Story of B, My Ishmael) by Daniel Quinn (a series of three books alright, I cheated that force to question my place in the world)
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization
The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirzig
Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual by Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay.
The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer
Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
Catching Fire by Wranghams
Creating Community Anywhere by Shaffer and Amundsen
Lessons of History by Ariel and Will Durant
Hi there, i was just tipped off about your project-brilliant!
Heres a few suggestions for reading if i may-
Women and Nature:the roaring inside her by Susan Griffin. Superbly written.
Off the Map by Chellis Glendinning.”An expedition deep into empire and the global economy”.
Fire and Ice by Laurel Luddite and Skunkly Munkly. A superb self published tome about personal exploration and recovery from civilization. Very thoughtful and passionate. Possibly only available from the US Green Anarchy collective.
All John Zerzans titles.
Nature and Madness and Coming home to the Pleistocene by Paul Shephard.
The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. A deconstruction of industrial agriculture/civilization/patriarchy. She’s on a mission with this one. Currently co-authoring with Derrick Jensen.
Thanks for your time! Excellent site.