Some of you may have seen George Monbiot’s article in yesterday’s Guardian about the Dark Mountain Project. It was good to see it, and it was fair and balanced. There are issues we take with it, of course, and Dougald I have taken them up in a response column to be published in the paper tomorrow.
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.
Monbiot predicts that industrial civilisation will collapse, but “not in this century, perhaps not even in the next”. If it continues with economic growth and resource consumption it will “tank the biosphere before it goes down”.
Our civilisation will certainly continue down this path, because it would take a wholesale overthrowing of our dominant cultural values to make any other path seem attractive or even sensible. It is this failure to overthrow the dominant cultural values that is the Green movement’s real failure, not its failure to promote the selection of appropriate technologies. This always was a tall order for a marginal social movement, so perhaps we should not beat ourselves up too viciously.
But to return to Monbiot’s lengthy timescale, just remind me, how long do we have now, according to the best estimates, to do something radical to avoid a rise in planetary surface temperature by 2C and more? Is the number positive still, or has it turned negative, and if not how long before it does? And when the rise in temperature is above 2C, what are the prospects for the various unpredictable positive feedback loops to kick in (well no one knows, because we never got round to doing the right kinds of science to find out). Well there’s always geoengineering (what we used to call “technical fixes” in a rather sneering way, before they were all that was left.)
And then there is the other disaster, the accelerating rate at which we are offing other species through the simple expedient of not leaving them the space or the conditions in which to exist. Even if climate change does not cause a mass species extinction, which I expect it to, we still have the matter well in hand. Belt and braces.
Let’s try a little logic combined with honesty. For decades now we have been declaiming with escalating hysteria the urgency of our issues. The logic of claiming urgency is that a lack of action could leave things beyond recall. How long can we go on crying wolf before the wolf shows up? And if we imply that things could get beyond recall, that means that we believe they can. How will we be able to tell when they have? And how should our behaviour change if we accept that some threshold has definitively been crossed? Shall we go on mouthing the same nannying platitudes, as the people we are addressing trudge on down their ecological dead-end? Or shall we give them an opportunity to see how precious their last few years and generations will be? Shall we all take the chance to finally learn something about ourselves, before we are swept away by nature’s wrath? (yes, that’s anthropomorphic!)
Finally, Monbiot again. I wish I didn’t have to think about him. Without wishing to cast aspersions, I have to ask this: if Monbiot had no green solutions to sell us, what would he do for a living?
I don’t think George Monbiot did a very good job of representing the Dark Mountain project, and I think his criticism is unfounded. To be fair, Monbiot also misrepresents the prospects for coal gasification. I think he is misguided when he thinks that working to improve the system will really help. A “green” carbon neutral civilisation will destroy the environment as surely as fossil fuel powered technology is.
If Monbiot had perhaps read the Dark Mountain project’s Manifesto with more care, he might have realised the inherent flaw in its premise. It’s a well meaning effort, but ultimately unworkable.
Well, I don’t think George does actually believe in coal gasification, green industrialism and all the rest of it. I think he just doesn’t have a better idea, and thinks the alternative will be worse, so he’s hoping for the best. That’s a pretty good summation of the green position generally right now: get the right tech in place and cross your fingers.
Yesterday I came across an estimate of how much bigger the global economy will need to be by century’s end in order that 9 billion people can live like the middle classes of the West today. It seems it would have to be 40 times bigger. I don’t believe for a minute that George thinks this is either possible or desirable, but that’s the direction his logic takes him in.
In follow up to Dave Bradney, yes, a horrible collision with reality is approaching, and may already be here, but we just don’t feel it yet. But you ask the question that matters, will we “finally learn something about ourselves?” That has to be our pole star. If our aim is to change human values, which it must be, than the conditions for such a change are ripening indeed. One question to ponder–what is the critical mass for a genuine cultural shift. If we are at 1% now of people who get it and are ready to flip tables over, what if we had 5%, 10%?
We don’t hear much from Mr. Monbiot here in the US. but the green industry thing is alive and thriving. It follows two basic themes. One, it will make everyone happy and rich, and two, it will be easy. It’s always “here are three simple things you can do to save the earth.” We use to have lions like Edward Abbey and David Brower creating a true ruckus, mixing it up for the Earth, not a so-called green economy. But we’ve fallen into a trap of “selling” environmentalism as a new and rising market, a way out of the recession no less.
Environmentalism asks, will the meltdown happen this generation or the next? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Maybe better to ask, are we being brave or fearful, honest and deceitful?
Rob says:
“One question to ponder–what is the critical mass for a genuine cultural shift. If we are at 1% now of people who get it and are ready to flip tables over, what if we had 5%, 10%?”
That is a really good question. It entirely depends on who the people are. If the 1% contains all the most influential people, pop stars, actors, TV presenters, business leaders, politicians etc then that may be all you need. Otherwise even a majority of “ordinary” people will not be enough, because some people will always aspire to emulate the rich.
That is the problem – evolution has programmed us to equate consumption with success. The “successful” people consume more, a lot more. You would need to break that deeply held perception. If you can get the opinion formers to demonstrate that success is not associated with consumption, you may be on to something. Uncivilise the top, and the rest may follow.
You would also need to break the idea that couples who produce kids are successful, and that couples without kids have “failed”. I’ve never thought it more ridiculous to congratulate someone for having a baby.
Uncivilisation will need to get people to embrace the concepts of unconsumption and unreproduction. This will be a Sisyphean task, since the desire for consumption and reproductive success is so fundamental to our nature.
I have to say I think there is little chance of success of reorienting culture this way in the short term, but it is still worthwhile in the long term. What I think will cause cultural change is when we simply run of natural resources to exploit. At that point humans will be forced to live sustainably, and they may be uncertain and afraid. Having an alternative philosophy in place would help this transition.
Bob I don’t know if it just the way you have phrased it but I think it may be worth discussing the idea that “evolution has programmed us to equate consumption with success” and “the desire for consumption and reproductive success is so fundamental to our nature.”
Whilst I would agree that our genes have programmed us to reproduce given a suitable environment I disagree that we are coded to view consumption as a success. As far as our genetic coding goes I think the only measure of failure or success is our continuing existence as a species.
I think it is one of the many dangerous myths of our culture that subconsciously informs us that consumption equates to success.
Taken to an extreme (as I believe we are now) consumption will ultimately risk the continuing existence of our species. I therefore do not think that we are “hard-wired” to behave the way we do and to revere consumption.
I’m not sure 1% of “influential” people is any stronger than 1% of ordinary people. Environmentalism has already tried recruiting big names to its cause–Georgle Clooney, etc. It doesn’t change anything substantial. It might help draw people for a while, maybe influence a vote, but it doesn’t actually change anyone. And that’s what were talking about, true cultural (personal) change; change in beliefs, ideas, customs.
What I was trying to do was bring the vast, fairly incomprehensible project of “changing the world” down into terms that are reasonable to consider. What are the physics of cultural change? What critical mass of truly committed and radically aware people does it take to meaningfully influence the rest.
I’ve been thinking of this because such a situation is going on in my country, only in the wrong direction. Here we have this phenomenon called the TEA party. It is a movement of intensely passionate adherents to a cause that doesn’t seem to exist. They shriek about taxes even though taxes are going down, under a Democratic president no less. They tremble over the prospect of the government taking over health care, even though most of them are on medicare. It makes me think of a line from Yeats’ poem The Second Coming–”The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It’s an amazing contradiction. Here are people with nothing to scream about howling up a storm, while those of us who really have something to howl about, like the collapse life as we know it, hardly registerng a whisper. And so the question, if we are now only .1 or probably .01 percent of the population, what if we grew to 3%, or even 4, and howled as loud for something real. At what point does Truth take over?
There are a lot of complex issues here which would fill a book a two, so it’s difficult to explore the issues in a few words. However, there are two basic parts:
1) Understanding why we developed such a culture of over-consumption. We can see there are cultures around the world today which live at a subsistence level in balance with Nature, so what exactly happened around the 17th century which resulted in such a huge increase in population?
2) Determining how to reverse this trend, at least into a culture which doesn’t exhibit such excess. This obviously depends on correctly determining (1). It also assumes that there is a way to consciously change cultural direction – there may not be one. I don’t think people ever consciously decided “we are going to build a culture of excess”, it mostly just happened, encouraged I believe by various innate behaviours.
I think both of these questions are huge and very poorly understood. I think any practical steps to address the issues are therefore premature, or at least speculative.
The DMP manifesto picks answers for (1) and (2), based on an idea that myths have created our current culture, and that changing these myths will change our culture (paraphrased). I don’t believe either of those assumptions are true, or at least are too simplified to be effective.
I believe that we got to where we are today largely by “accident”, we found we were sitting on top of a large energy resource and also found a way to exploit it. The rest is simply explained by millions of individuals each wanting to “improve their lot”. A lot of the stuff we consume is unnecessary, we do so because it is cheap. Whether it is evolution or culture, most people don’t have an “off” switch which tells us to stop consuming when we have enough.
The problem with reversing this trend is that of changing an “unintentional” society to an “intentional” society, where we take the choice not to consume. We have never had a society like that. Is it even possible to create one?
So I read the Monbiot article and way too many of the comments. I think the commenter from EthicsEdinburgh summed it up best:
“Mr Monbiot and Mr Kingsnorth, I have not met either of you, but have read enough of each of you to respect you both. I have also read enough to get the impression that you are currently speaking past each other. We all need this discussion (not simply this thread, of course, but the wider discussion about imagining and evaluating possible futures). The debate between the positions you represent is far too important for it to be derailed by miscommunication and hyperbole. Dark Mountain are not urging us to do nothing and Monbiot is not saying “carry on” with the present system with a little green paint. Please, give each other the courtesy of listening carefully.”
I disagree about the one percent. The rich and especially the superrich need to set an example.
As for who is in the vanguard of cultural shift, I am amazed time and again that nobody in the Peak Everything movement ever mentions the resurgence of shamanism and entheogens/psychedelics. The entheogenic-psychedelic underground has FOR DECADES been in the vanguard in terms of showing the away beyond humanity’s existential insanity. So to a large extent has esoteric spirituality in general.
I’m not entirely happy with the quote that Vera supplies.
While I agree there may be an element of “speaking past” in this exchange, and I agree that listening and even to an extent empathising are important, I feel that there is a kind of arbitrary even-handedness in the quote, which in my opinion the actual situation doesn’t entirely justify (”now you’ve both been very bad boys and …”)
As I understand it both Monbiot and Kingsnorth have been eco/green/whatever-activists, so they can both claim familiarity with this background.
Kingsnorth is additionally making a case that his behaviour needs to adapt because he sees what happened previously as inadequate and/or inappropriate as a way forward. He explains this dissatisfaction with what happened previously in terms of a gradual vitiation of the green message, plus possibly having a sense (or am I interposing my own belief here?) that the time for avoidance manoeuvres has run out, and we have to prepare to take our lumps, in some shape or form.
Monbiot is denying all this, as would many/most in the green “establishment”, and he could be right, although my sense of the situation is that he is wrong. Of course he is a celebrity eco-guru and so, as I have pointed out before, he is more or less obliged to disagree.
I have been disappointed with two aspects of this thread so far:
1. While it is good to discuss what it might take to revise/overthrow the dominant cultural values, there has been no accompanying discussion of how long a time we might have to achieve such a change. If we were able to work out what we needed to do, we would still also need an estimate of how long we have left to do it, so that we could assess whether whatever was necessary could be achieved in the time available.
2. Although I do agree that cultural values are at the root of the problem, I am surprised that there has been no mention in this thread so far of the process that psychotherapists and psychiatrists refer to as “denial”. No thinking person can have worked for long as a green activist without coming to recognise that many people you talk to about these issues (outside of the green ghetto) glaze over and give every impression of not engaging with anything you are saying. You can almost hear them saying to themselves “la-la-la-la-la, is it safe to come out yet?” They seem so scared that you end up wondering why you aren’t more scared yourself.
This in turn creates a pressure to present yourself more “reasonably” and in a more restrained way, which may account for the progressive vitiation of the green “message” – if we do indeed agree that that has taken place.
Dave, the reason I resonated with that quote is that I followed a thread between Monbiot and Kingsnorth last fall, where they ended up sniping at each other and not going anywhere, and when I looked into this one, the same behavior is still going on. Each strutting his stuff, and trying to show off the other as the unreasonable one. The evenhandedness of the criticism does not, in my view, imply that both persons’ argument is equally flawed. I am on the side of Dark Mountain. I would, however, like to see a real conversation between the two…
Hi Vera, yes, I know what you mean, that kind of thing is always a hazard in this kind of exchange, especially when men are involved – or so they tell me (!)
Heh. It’s been known to happen…
But… it’s so… ole civilization…
“A real conversation.” Maybe that’s what all this is about. I haven’t read the thread Vera refers to, so don’t know about the strutting, but my sense is this conversation is more real than about any out there in media world.
It reminds me of the “Death of Environmentalism” movement in the US around 2004. A group of environmentalists came forward saying “environmentalism” as presently (then) conceived, spoken and practiced was effectively dead, completely unready to do what needed to be done, and required reinvention. This of course pissed alot of people off, but generated some much needed examiniation. Eventually, the “green” craze hit and the traditional environmentalists won de facto, able to say “look, environmentalism is back.” And that ended the conversation, which was too bad.
I thin everything with human beings begines with words. I wonder or instance, how much reaction spins around the word “Uncivilization” itself? I mentioned it to a drywaller I know. He thought a while and said, “so who’s going to be the first to give up their hot showers and novocain.” I don’t think DMP advocates the end of such basic comforts, but I think the word “uncivilization” implies that. Which leads us back to conversation, and I suppose language. What’s it going to take? How far are we willing to go? What’s the reality of our situation. Questions like these are breaths of fresh air to the quantitative analysis we are forced to endure in the name of environmental solutions.
Bob’s questions about the nature of human aquisitiveness are expamples. The initial value of DMP it seems to me, is it creates a table upon which such questions can finally be placed and considered. It may be in our nature to take nature. To expand, aquire, and show everyone. We may be telling people it’s bad to do what’s in their own nature to do. And if that’s so, Then What? Maybe you can’t change culture. But what if you have to? What if the idea of a static “culture” is itself a myth?
With regard to the ’sniping’ under the Guardian articles … the problem is that this was set up off the blocks as an argument/fight, rather than a discussion. That’s partly because that’s George’s style, and partly because of the nature of the comment threads on the Guardian website, which are notoriously idiotic and offensive. It’s virtually impossible to have anything like a proper discussion of any topic on that site. Knowing this I should probably have stayed out of it, and I have at least made my mind up not to write for them again. I prefer the intelligent, critical audience we get on here.
At the festival Dougald will be interviewing George, and we’ll see if we can tease out something more useful and encompassing and less tiresomely aggressive. We’ll stick a film of this on the site afterwards.
Another related issue is that DM is a cultural project and here it is being treated as a political one. Partly our fault, this, and of course what we are doing here has a political angle to it. But people looking for ’solutions’ are going to find themselves frustrated.
Rob is right – it’s about conversation, examination, turning over our assumptions in the light of reality, whatever that is. Mainstream media articles are not the best place to do this. Which brings me back to why we began this project in the first place …
LIVING STONE
I am living stone
I am breathing water
I am a shaper of wind
I am a fragment of sun
The ages form and dissolve
and form me once more.
I hear the groaning of earth,
the murmur and shifting
The silence beyond
The darkness beneath
The tricklings of life’s breath
Light is all around me
Time is all around me
I breathe it
As a living stone.
RE knee-jerk reactions, I too was put off by some of the language on my first glance at the Dark Mountain website (just joined, BTW.) It might be helpful to say, in some prominent place that- just as with tribal peoples- “Uncivilization” does not imply a lack of civility.
Yes, the “world” is the human created narrative of reality, especially of sociopolitical reality. The Earth, Hinamaya, is beyond the “world.” Even in the Christian narrative, the “world” is evil, not the Earth, for God created the Earth and saw that it was good. In Christianity, the fabled three sources of sin are the flesh (human desire and need), the world (the human collective of societies, politics, economics), and the Devil (spiritual evil). What confused so many fundamentalists is the confusion of the “Earth” with the “World.” Not the same.
Rob’s last post catches exactly the spirit of what the Dark Mountain project is creating: a forum for airing hard and necessary questions about civilizational collapse. Simply opening such a space is itself a powerful and courageous achievement: it’s clearly giving people permission to ask and talk about things that had no sustained public outlet before. (Thanks for that, guys
)
A trouble, though, is that a fair proportion of the questions being posed – important thought their concerns are – are framed in terms which still implicitly expect DMP itself – like a parent, government or other external authority figure – to deliver certainty and solutions. The tone is often one of scepticism over whether DMP has really got it right on specifics – for instance the timescale of collapse – or an intimation that support for the project will be withheld or withdrawn unless (correct to suit the listener) answers are forthcoming.
I’m not talking about the Comment is Free brigade, but thoughtful, perceptive people who clearly are seriously concerned about the issues DMP is addressing.
For example, to pick up one of Dave’s earlier contributions to this thread. Dave, I’m in complete agreement with you on the importance of bringing psychic mechanisms like denial into these conversations, but your first point – wanting to know exactly how long we’ve got to prepare – is to me a red herring. I just don’t believe that a process like industrial civilization collapsing can be predicted, quantified and project-managed like this. The ruse of massaging timescales in order to keep giving ourselves another 5, 10, 20, 50 or 200 years of breathing space to act now and avert disaster – as Simon Lewis attempts in his I’m-above-it-all reaction to the DM vs Monbiot exchange – is starting to look pretty threadbare. There’s no guaranteed answer – it depends, among other variables, on where you live, what you’re reading about collapse, which evidence base convinces you; what you need to believe in order to keep going.
It’s understandable why we expect certainty, encultured as we are to believe that every question can be framed as a problem which humans can solve. But what’s so vital for me about DMP is that it’s daring to turn these very expectations on their heads. To explore, instead, the cultural challenges of living with uncertainty, with predicaments that can’t be accurately foreseen or sorted with a quick fix.
These are vastly difficult things to get to grips with, sure; but it will be a very great shame if concerned people get stuck at expecting DMP to stand or fall on narrowly quantifiable issues, and miss out on its deeper and richer invitation: to start changing the basic terms in which we think our place within the world.
“Changing the basic terms in which we think our place within the world.” Exactly. A daring adventure indeed. Thank you for that, Catherine.
Steven Kopits in his article “Oil – What Price can America Afford”
has nominated crude oil priced above 4% of GDP will bring the economy down. This is why I believe that oil has been fluctuating between US$70 and US$80/barrel for the past months – once over $80 you’re in the 4% of GDP territory – George Monbiot has nominated a plethora of potential energy sources – none with an EROEI as high as oil but still thinks the economy will still stand up – it just beggars belief.