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

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.

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.

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.

“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?”

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.

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.