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.
Absolutely. Any little thing we can do is better than any little thing we don’t. Even the most optimistic outcome I can come up with is only going to slow the change down enough so we can get (a little) more of what we want out of it, so we better start thinking about what that is.
Jonathan Dawson provides a useful and not dissimilar analysis from Findhorn via Copenhagen, here.
It is in part that strange traction that progress has on our minds: it is inevitable and only dark powers keep us from achieving it. Around the next corner, however, the dragons will be slayed and we will move into the happy valley.
Jonathan Dawson’s image of ‘tragedy’ is an excellent one – our relative comfort is always secured temporarily and now it is unravelling. We must do all we can to navigate it artfully and preserve what we can and maybe we will emerge at some future point, chastened (at least temporarily) and building anew on more living foundations.
indigenous people particularly in Latin America are putting up a huge fight, you have to think agency, strategy, structures and yes it is about oppressed and oppressors.
Got to get political on this.
incidentally this may or my not be of interest http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-sceptics-are-like-alcoholics.html
Derek – yes, loads of people are putting up fights; always have been. Good for them. But this is far more complex than the old human political fault lines allow for.
Are you oppressed, or are you an oppressor? or both?
Alcoholics – yes. All of us, though, not just the Bad Guys.
Paul seriously look at the stuff from Lucha Indigena and get involved, the people in the Peruvian Amazon find been fantastic at stopping it being logged, work with them!
Aidesep are doing fanatastic and very effective work http://www.aidesep.org.pe/
I have got PHd in green political strategy so I am not going to do a two minute blog debate, neither should you but their is some stuff that works.
Derek – thanks, I am aware of this. I have done some work myself with indigenous peoples, as you no doubt know, and written a lot about it. I could point you also towards a lot of websites from all over the world run by excellent little NGOs (though I don;t speak Spanish, so that one is inaccessible to me.) But that is not the debate at hand. We are talking about climate change, complicity and the inadequacy of the ‘fight’ rhetoric, especially in the West. I don’t have a PHd, tragically, but I do have fifteen years campaigning, writing and thinking experience as part of the green movement. And environmentalism is failing at every turn.
And seriously: if it is about oppressed and oppressors, which are you? Which am I? This is such an important question. This is not a ‘two minute blog debate’ it’s a discussion about what comes next which aims to move beyond the usual paralysing limits. You can take as much time as you like over it; that’s what we’re about.
I think recently this blog has at times been perilously close to slipping into being a climate change debate, and consequently we get many of the arguments that are protagonists in the mainstream climate change literature. All of our possible future problems go far beyond climate change – which I am sure no one needs telling from me – which I think is a relatively minor problem. All this talk of carbon leaves me cold: I am inured, attentionless, and thoroughly confused. Juxtaposed with economic meltdown, running out of oil, over-population, lack of food (due to many factors: oil prices; cost; and climate), increasing controls from governments and police, major wars, and other things, climate change may exacerbate the situation, but is by no means the worst that could happen.
Fighting, and techno-fixes, and climate deals, and green living and such things are all well and good, but, in my opinion, of themselves almost useless. Of course, it’s great if protesters or rebels or eco-warriors stop a forest being destroyed, or if local people stand up against the big boys. These are all positive things, and to live in a world without them would be truly hellish.
But, this project has always been about the human mind, first and foremost. Our behaviour is the direct result of unconscious and conscious processes in the human brain. Some unconscious processes are so deeply ensconced in our minds, and act so supremely powerfully on our behaviour, that they never even emerge into the conscious mind. That way we have no opportunity to challenge them.
This I believe is what this project aims to deal with. The stories and myths we live by are deeply unconscious to almost all of us; yet they exert the most powerful effects on human behaviour. If we are to change anything – truly change things – then it is these unconscious processes that need to be dug out of our heads, stared at unflinchingly, and then challenged. A new mode of thinking needs to replace what has been insidiously and devastatingly formed in each human mind over the last – how long? Few thousand, tens of thousands, million years?
It is ultimately about the shaping of a new consciousness, founded on a new unconscious. Then our behaviour will be right.
Free your mind and your ass will follow.
And yeah, ‘climate change’, a ‘relatively minor problem’, I know. Some of you want to scream at me. Do all sorts of horrible things. Sorry about that.
Lee – yes, I think you have nailed something very significant. What interests me about climate change is what it says about us and our ways of living, and the stories myths and Self-shoring tales we believe in. Climate change is a symptom of something wider. This is not about ‘carbon’.
And yes, it is hard to write and talk about this without the usual ‘what can we DO?’ debate raising its ugly head. To my mind, the whole rhetoric of ‘fighting’ within the mainstream green debate is old and stale and useless. What underpins that? What makes us see external enemies rather than face internal complexities?
Answers on a postcard, or in the journal, or in guest blog posts please!
Meanwhile, happy Christmas, everyone; if that’s not too flippant under the circumstances …
Yes,Happy Christmas!
How about this to meditate on over the Christmas fayre: “Lessons from the Petri Dish” from Bruce Lipton’s ‘The Biology of Belief’:
“Even though human beings are made up of trillions of cells, I stessed that there is not one “new” function in our bodies that is not already expressed in the single cell. Each eukaryote (nucleus-containing cell)possesses the functional equivalent to our nervous system, repiratory system, excretory system, endocrine system, muscle and skeletal systems, circulatory system, integument (skin), reproductive and even a primitive immune system, which utilizes a family of antibody-like “ubiquitin” proteins.
I also made clear to my students that each cell is an intelligent being that can survive on its own ……. these smart cells are imbued with intent and purpose; they actively seek environments that support their survival while simultaneously avoiding toxic or hostile ones.”
Paul take a regular look at aidesep site and stick the spanish in to google translate and then see how you can support them.
I feel pretty oppressed by capitalism, all the land round here is stolen for a start and if I try and cycle into my nearest town I risk death….any way so what, we have to get organised and I still think Marx provides plenty of clues, do have a look at John Bellemy Fosters the Ecological Revolution.
any way happy xmass
Lee, I agree that a “new consciousness” is what is needed, but I believe it simply cannot happen until after the “old” consciousness has taken a massive hit, in the form of the collapse of the global civilisation.
Why? Because the vast majority of our fellow humans (basically good though they may be) have been fooled by the apparent success of their Civilisation project. Fooled into believing that it is actually a good thing, and that there could be no other acceptable alternative. Until the dream is shattered, they will not be able to imagine the beauty waiting outside their prison wall.
What then, is the New Consciousness? I hardly dare answer. Please don’t cyber-crucify me, fellow bloggers…..here goes…..it’s…..it’s spirituality.
One day, spirituality will displace greed. Love will triumph over fear. And we will survive.
Nice article Paul. Have you seen Rob Hopkins’ similar take on cop15?
http://transitionculture.org/2009/12/21/what-if-they-held-a-climate-summit-and-nobody-came/
[...] Do the same and get the same. Ein Blogbeitrag eines enorm spannenden Projektes über das ich gerade dank der Suppe gestolpert bin
Und obendrein der beste Artikel zum Theme Koppenhagen, den ich bislang gelesen habe! erzähl es weiter: [...]
I am happy to see the text that gets right into the middle of the problem we are facing, like Paul’s. However, this is so far the only site where I found what I believe to be the truth. I live in a country where public media only during the Copenhangen talks showed to the people there might actually be some problem with climate, but on the other hand there appeared some scientists who were publicly doubting the man-made climate change, thus only adding to the confusion. And it is only the climate problem, no mention of all other crises we are facing. This is here a situation that should have happened thirty years ago. When I start to talk about it in the way Paul presented, because this is exactly my view of the problem (and I talk only to the educated people, who I think might maybe understand) I don’t see understanding, only blank stares. So to me it’s clear: yes, we are the enemy. We must act, according to our consciousness, to do what we believe is right. And I believe there will come the day, as Mark above wrote, when “spirituality will diplace greed”. I hope that day is not far away. For this to happen we must weave the new stories – I like to imagine the people like the old Celtic bards, wise and spiritual poets, who were the Teachers of the people – which will gradually change the mind of Man.
Paul, I played an interview with you today on a radio show I do. It was with Alex Smith from Radio EcoShock. I liked it and checked out your site, and I really like your website. The manifesto is engrossing and well written.
I am curious to see where things go with the Dark Mountain project as the ideas and unlearnings lead to changes in your lives and social organization etc. For the most part I think you’re right on with everything I’ve read, but I am a bit uncertain about the total walking away from social change. I totally get the disenchantment with the Left and Activism and all that, in fact I think tons of people share that.
What I’m curious about is, in the interview I played, you said one of your greatest inspirations if the Zapatista movement, and their creation of autonomous communities of traditional Indigenous people, living in networks of tribal communities. Their movement involves not just beautiful writing, but people joining together and putting their lives on the line, taking a serious stand, and putting in work to creating a different life than what the state of Mexico would have them forced into.
That is something that is a third way, between business as usual and Activism… reclaiming land, building autonomous communities not dependedend on civilization, and fighting back as well. But I feel in your writings you don’t advocate much of any kind of strategy except to unlearn civilized stories. What do you think about this seeming contradiction?
A thought about how ‘we’re all part of the problem.’ I think that is a bit of a limiting thing, and not entirely accurate. It is possible for groups of people to not be part of the problem. I and a growing number of friends/people I know are doing just this… living off the grid, building our own shelters out of scavenged materials, sometimes this involves long-term squatting and sometimes this involves buying land, but it also looks like not eating civilized foods, hunting and gathering, tanning hides, making our own tools, knowing our bioregions, allying with Indigenous people, etc etc etc… and not just things pertaining to our personal lifestyles, but engaging in collective action to stop things like new industrial parks and garbage dumps etc. I think there is a huge gulf between people who live like this and those in charge of society and/or flowing along in it, and I know the earth is glad to have us alive and on its side.
Thanks, curious to know your thoughts.
[...] avoid the horrific impacts of runaway climate destabilisation, which leaves their calls for (yet) “one more big push” sounding a little hollow, even, I suspect, to [...]
Just wanted to check that you’re happy with my replicating part of the Dark Mountain Project manifesto at the conclusion of my own blog post on Copenhagen?
http://www.darkoptimism.org/2010/01/05/heroes-and-villains-in-copenhagen-and-beyond/
More than happy, Shaun – thanks. A good post.
What wasn’t on the table at Copenhagen seems a lot more important than what was. These suggestions from Craig Mackintosh of the Permaculture Research Institute seem like the best that the big entities could aim towards, under the circumstances
How to conserve remaining oil supplies and to best use what’s left to speed a transition to a post-fossil fuel society, and to commit to leaving newly discovered oil in the ground
How to invest in re-educating the masses worldwide in sustainable farming practices appropriate for their own climate and soil type
How to invest in re-educating the masses in all the other activities crucial for our existence (like localised clothing manufacturing, passive solar buildings, etc.)
How to shape policies to incentivise a resurgence in small scale polycultures (and how to accommodate the above through a staged and bloodless land redistribution)
How to shift funds from the present subsidising of large profit based corporations into financing small research centres in different microclimates to improve systems in all the subjects above, for the public good
How to carefully stage the above steps so our present vulnerable, globalised system doesn’t experience wholesale collapse during the transition, with its associated famine, disease and war, etc. The emphasis here needs to be on broad spectrum education
How to keep nations working cooperatively to acheive all the above
… etc. etc.
All of which would require, of course, a massive cultural shift as a starting point.
@Matt – thanks for your comments and questions.
The Dark Mountain Project is not about ‘totally walking away from social change’. Both of the founders – Dougald and I – are still involved in a fair bit of it. Have a look at either of my two books or Dougald’s website for more on that.
I think what we are disillusioned with – or I am, at any rate – is two things. Firstly, the recipe of change served up by most NGOs, ‘activists’ and the like: for reasons we have covered on this blog and elsewhere in some detail. Secondly, the idea that enough such ’social change’ quickly enough will shore up the current system, or that it should. These are tied up with a deeply naive view of how much such ‘change’ is actually possibly in a consumer society in which most people do not want to see a drop in their material standards of comfort and overconsumption.
Dark Mountain starts from the premise that collapse has begun, that most activism is deluding itself, and that the ’sustainability’ narrative is complicit in business-as-usual. It is, furthermore, specifically a cultural project. It is not about ‘activism’ as such, and it doesn’t seek to present ’solutions’ of the kind so beloved by our instant culture with its love of bullet points and easy answers.
It doesn’t follow from this that nothing is worth doing though – even though we may not be doing it here – nor that everyone causes as much of a problem as everyone else. Someone living at Tinker’s Bubble is not really part of the problem in a way that Jeremy Clarkson is. The point I was making in that interview is that most of the mainstream activist types who spend half the day online and the other half on the train to Copenhagen are not facing up to how much change is really needed, and probably don’t even really want to see it. Our culture and society is so entwined with ecocide that we are kidding ourselves if we think that windmills will ’save the world.’
What I admired about the Zapatistas, and what I admire about groups like them around the world, and about many tribal peoples, and about wild food foragers and low impact dwellers and the MST and many more like them (I visited a fair few for my first book) is that they get on with doing what they know needs to be done: standing up to injustice, fighting for the land, making things right in their place, with no expectation that what they do is necessarily replicable or that it will ’save the world.’ The EZLN, in fact, are very explicit about the fact that what they do is for them only and can’t be copied; that everyone needs to find their own appropriate response. I remain a great admirer of this approach. It’s the ‘hundred months to save the world’ stuff that I can’t abide.
Thanks for your thoughts though, and do keep coming back.
[...] avoid the horrific impacts of runaway climate destabilisation, which leaves their calls for (yet) “one more big push” sounding a little hollow, even, I suspect, to [...]
From http://www.ranprieur.com:
“At my talk Thursday, and at the Awakening the Dreamer symposium today, I kept noticing one issue: When affluent Americans ask “what can I do”, they mean, “What can I do to save the whole world? What can I do to turn industrial capitalism around in its tracks, to halt species extinction and reverse arctic melting, to feed all the starving people without further increasing the population, to transform human consciousness and witness a global utopia in my lifetime?”
My answer is, you can’t do shit. And I’m a woo-woo optimist. I think that beneath all events is an invisible Flow that is intelligent and loving. I think that any human system that goes out of balance with human nature, or with other life on Earth, is doomed to fail. I think that in all possible futures, dandelions will grow through ruined Wal-Mart parking lots. But within this optimism, I see room for epic catastrophes. And some catastrophes are now so far along that “what can I do to stop it” is the wrong question, and the right question is “what can I do to survive it, to help others survive it, to minimize suffering and prepare for recovery?”
I have been reading much of this website with interest, and do forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere already at length, but it does seem to me that the aims of (I paraphrase): just doing what we can to protect the land where we are, make things right where we live, stand up to injustice and so forth are entirely in line with the aims of the Transition Town Movement.
So, I was wondering if someone out there could explain the extent to which DM differs from TT, and the extent to which DM views that project as a move towards (a version of) Uncivilisation?
Thanks.
Its an interesting question that Elizabeth is asking.. and Paul will no doubt have a shot at explaining. It seems to me that what both projects (TT and DMP) have in common is their shift away from standard, largely selfish, reactionary stances automatically entered into by people faced with a developing crisis but unwilling to contemplate serious change.
However, Transition Towns is into social action and group planning for ‘practical’ transitions away from fossil fuel dependency and related blockages; whereas Dark Mountain Project appears to be about ‘individual based’ non-action that just could lead to group action if and when homogeneous groupings coalesce in order to preserve their newly evolved, literary/light footprint way of life.
This is an interesting blog Paul, and you’ve introduced a lot of threads that would be interesting to follow up.
I’ve been involved a lot in environmental campaigning over the last decade. After volunteering with Greenpeace, after starting the Alliance Against Urban 4×4s, after developing a charity and a wilderness camp for youth groups with Global Generation, after promoting decentralized energy, after directing We Are Futureproof…
I’m taking a step back to review what I’ve learned, and how my understanding of environmental activism has developed. I’m also asking, how does that mix with my spiritual understandings, from meditation practice and evolutionary spirituality teachings.
I’m glad you mention that ‘we have all created the climate situation’ as that is indeed true – it’s no more the fault of politicians than it is of corporations. It’s also not the natural by product of capitalism or the industrial revolution. We brought us here to this point. So what will we do next?
Right now I’m enjoying reading Stuart Brand’s new book on Ecopragmaticism. One thing I really like is he is taking big taboo subjects and opening them up. Subjects like urbanization vs returning to the land, nuclear energy, bioengineering.
Do we each have the courage to open up or ideas and really question them? I think I have to find a way to integrate everything, my whole evolutionary journey and all the things I’ve learned and done and seen and come out the other end with an authentic message for going beyond into this really positive and interesting opportunity we have before us.
Elizabeth-
I like Transition towns and there are some very good people involved. It is useful stuff. It is though, I fear, limited in application and scope. For an entire town to go into ‘transition’ mode, the entire town needs to be involved; my experience with TT is that, like the green movement as a whole, it is largely made up of the well-meaning, white, middle class parts of the town. Nothing wrong with these people of course (me being one of them I suppose) but the initiative would need to reach wider to be a genuine social movement and thus create widespread ‘change.’ Not that this makes it worthless, or anything; not at all. But like all other such ’solutions’ it has clear limits.
But that aside, the key difference is that the Dark Mountain Project is a cultural movement. We are not a green activist group, and we are not about ‘answers’ or ’solutions.’ We are about using cultural forms to examine our predicament, using writing and art to be open about where and who we are, and to question our cultural and social myths. It’s a different kettle of fish; though certainly complementary.
Thanks Paul for your response. I agree with you entirely, and I grapple with these questions as well in the work that I do. Keep up the good work.
Paul,
Thanks for your reply. I entirely agree with you that for TT to represent a genuine social shift, it needs to engage across all social strata. At the moment, I’m inclined to think that couldn’t happen until the consequences of our environmental destruction really bite hard here at home, and even then, it’s most certainly not a given that TT could successfully engage the critical mass necessary.
However, I don’t think I entirely agree with your distinction between a social and cultural movement. I know what you’re saying: that you’re about new cultural myths, new stories, not answers and solutions, but I do think that it’s impossible to entirely disentangle the DM from the TT (or pehaps the TT from the DM..?) Surely a point of DM, or a consequence of it, is to create an intellectual space more open to the praxis of TT?
Lastly, and on an entirely different note, I would like to take all the credit for introducing my friend Mario Petrucci to your project; I hope to be there at the forthcoming festival.
Best wishes,
Elizabeth