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specifics – for instance the timescale of collapse – or an intimation that support for the project will be withheld or withdrawn unless (correct to suit the listener) answers are forthcoming.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.

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.

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 …

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?