The Independent’s literary editor, Boyd Tonkin, writes an interesting piece on the literary ‘response’ to climate change and ecocide in general this week, which gives the Dark Mountain Project a decent amount of space to explain itself. Our only complaint is that he quoted Ian McEwan first. But we are not going to be churlish about it, because we are not churlish people.

(an aside on the word ‘churlish’: it is a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon word ‘ceorl’ which, broadly, means ‘peasant.’ ‘Peasant’ itself, of course, means simply a small farmer. Note how ‘peasant’ today is a term of mockery, and ‘churlish’ has come to mean sulky, disagreeable, unaccommodating. Is this how the powers-that-be viewed the peasant classes then, as now? Has there ever been a more dangerous and despised class than the independent-minded, literally grounded, small farmer?)

Elsewhere in the media, my recent Dark Mountain-ish take on Copenhagen in the Guardian has popped up down under, where they know a bit about drought and decline. And the Daily Mash has an excellent take on the email scandal which has just exposed climate change for the obvious global communist conspiarcy it has always been.

Posted by Paul. Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 10:18 pm.