There’s a palpable sense of expectation as we cruise down the canal. Two dozen people and barely a word passes between us. It’s not the roar of the triple outboard engines, nor the forced camaraderie of strangers thrust together, with only their environmentalisms in common. Rather, it’s the sense that we’re travelling towards something—not a place, but a phenomenon, an event—whose name we know but whose face we have not yet seen.

Our journey nearly didn’t happen. The day before, at a conference in New Orleans organised by the Humane Society of Louisiana, the organisers had informed us that due to unforeseen events our scheduled tour of Barataria Bay might have to be postponed, or even cancelled. The reasons were unclear—possibly the rising cost of chartering a private vessel, or because BP, who had offered the conference a tour of the affected region, had pulled out unexpectedly. No one was sure, but everyone was disappointed. Then, at the last minute, Billy Nungesser, the President of Plaquemines Parish who had earlier received an award from the Society, made an offer they couldn’t refuse: he would take the conference attendees himself.

Nine o’clock in the morning and already the sun is high over the water when we gather at Myrtle Grove Marina in Port Sulphur, about thirty miles southeast of New Orleans. Half an hour while we wait for the parish boats to arrive, and then we’re cruising south down Wilkinson Canal, the main artery of waterborne traffic in the area, passing dinghies moored to water cypresses and fishing camps with street signs nailed to their front doors. We’re piloted by Corporal Gerald Cormier and Deputy Wayne Gaurour of the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office, the former a young, stocky officer whose skin gleams like burnished copper from a youth spent on the water and his partner, a sly, quick-witted man twice his age who is generous with his extensive knowledge of the landscape.

Or rather, the waterscape. The areas we are entering, as became well-known after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, are the areas of the state where the land meets the water and begins to yield. Yet these wetlands are not just the end of Louisiana, where the Mississippi River and its tributaries enter into the Gulf of Mexico, but the end of America itself. In previous decades they were arable; older friends in nearby Houma (in Terrebonne Parish, west of Plaquemines, its name originally meaning ‘good land’) point out patches of open water that used to be farms, pasture, neighbourhoods, even cemeteries that are now eroding away. But that, of course, was before we discovered oil in the Gulf. And now, years later, the irony strikes me that we’re on a mission to discover it again.

It doesn’t take long. Halfway down the canal, thick cords of boom begin to line the marsh grass. Our destination, Bay Jimmy—an inlet off the larger Barataria waterway—is still an hour’s ride away, but even within a few miles of the marina and already the extent of the spill’s incursion is clear. The boom lines snake lightly across the surface of the water, largely cream white on their tops and fading to a crudded dark grey. They are anchored in place by regularly-spaced stakes of three- and four-inch PVC pipe, which resemble bright toothpicks sticking out of the water. Most of them are speared upright into the marsh floor, but a few lay at angles, struck by smallcraft or buffeted about by recent storm winds—where they have snapped loose the boom lines dangle in the water, swinging idly like an unclosed gate. Visually, the effect, over miles, is of a ragged, poorly-constructed wall built between the water and the marsh grass, a makeshift fence that has no hope of deterring the enemy from invading.

I ask Gaurour about its effectiveness. “It’s better than nothing,” he says, after a moment, “but you can’t stop the oil from going underneath it. And you can’t stop the boats from knocking into it, either.” As he speaks, we pass a vessel on which contractors are replacing damaged and oil-soaked boom, offloading fresh lengths from the bow of their ship where it is piled like thick white spaghetti waiting to be ladled on a plate. Dressed in full-body Tyvex hazard suits—mandated by BP for all cleanup workers in direct contact with either oil or chemical dispersants such as Corexit—they look like astronauts on a deep space mission. Apart from the stray fishing boats we saw at the harbour mouth, it’s the first human presence on the water we’ve seen. Passing them at idle speed we wave; one of the conference attendees yells unhelpfully off the port side, “Don’t forget to detox!”

Unrecognisable as humans as they are, however, they’re not the first sign of life we’ve encountered. The closer we get to Barataria Bay, the more we begin to see scatters and then full flocks of seagulls and terns. One group of terns has established a roost on a section of marsh grass flattened, Gaurour tells us, by an errant airboat, and a row of brown pelicans (the state bird of Louisiana) perches lazily on a length of clean boom. In comparison to the iconic photographs of bird-shaped sculptures of oil that have circulated in months past, these flocks seem sprightly and alert, which is encouraging. But our spirits, briefly lightened by Cormier’s and Gaurour’s further report that the wildlife population seems to be stabilising, sink once again as the canal abruptly widens and we enter the bay.

For ahead of us in the waterway looms an armada of vessels, as far as the eye can see. Skiffs, shrimpers, trawlers, oysterboats, single- and double-outboard johnboats, airboats, even pirogues (Cajun for canoe)—all manners and sizes of vessels speckle the horizon, puttering about the bay, skimming the inlets in search of oil, and crawling both upon the boom and along the marsh grass. I’m reminded of Dunkirk, of the photographs of the evacuation—wherein literally anything that could float across the Channel was recruited, from destroyers to dinghies, and the effort never ceased until the last man had waded off the beaches in France. Here in Barataria they are sprawled throughout all the bayous, bays, and inlets, each sporting a brightly-coloured auxiliary flag to signify the specific region of the coast which they are assigned, and as we reset a bearing for Bay Jimmy and throttle up, we pass dozens in our first minutes alone. The attendee who yelled earlier gives the same cry at each marsh-bound vessel we pass, but soon gives up, unable to keep pace with the numbers.

As we navigate at reduced speed through this impromptu flotilla, one of the attendees asks why so many are idle. Gaurour clears his throat. “Because they’re waiting,” he says. For what? “For the call.” To do what? “Whatever they’re told.” Most of the vessels are on standby, waiting in the bay for reports of sightings of oil—either by aerial observation or by other, smaller boats, known as spotters—at which point they then swing into action. They can wait for hours, or days, before receiving orders; these Vessels of Opportunity, as they’re called, are subcontracted and paid by BP. Slowly it begins to sink in: here we are in a few square miles of one waterway of one coastal parish of one state, and we’re looking at hundreds in one sweep of the eye. Imagining this sight across all waterways of all parishes of all the states affected, and the extent of the operation becomes clear. This isn’t Dunkirk. This is Normandy.

Shortly we draw near to the marsh grass where several vessels have crossed the boom line, itself just a few metres from the land. Closer up, features we couldn’t see from the canal begin to emerge. The first is an eerie stillness—unlike the rest of the waters in the bay, even unlike the rest of the waters inside the boom, the oil-soaked patches of marsh lay rigid, unmoving, even as the wind stirs and rustles the interior. The sight is utterly haunting. In the final scene of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, Alessandra Ferri, playing Juliet, has just taken the fatal dose of poison when Wayne Eagling’s Romeo enters the Capulet tomb and finds her there. His inability to comprehend her death is expressed in the way he picks up her lifeless body and attempts in vain to dance with it, him increasingly frantic, her as limp as a rag doll, stripped of any motion of her own. My friend Catherine, who introduced me to the ballet, says there is nothing so devastating as seeing a living body that was just dancing fall completely still. Down in the marsh, the acres of grass stiff and unyielding in the breeze, it is impossible to think of anything else.

Further strangeness comes in the contrast of colours. I have always felt the coastal wetlands of Louisiana (as well as Mississippi, my home state) possess beautifully simple tones: a silvery-green surface to the water, often iridescent in the light, offset by an infinite robin’s-egg sky and thick white cotton-candy clouds. In such a landscape the horizon is but a gesture, a way of dividing colours on the palette rather than orienting oneself upon the water, and the supple, tannic greens and browns of the vegetation offer a rich visual texture that both blends in and adds depth to the inlets and bayous. To this vista, however, have come new, unwelcome colours. First is the black sludge of the oil itself, encroaching on the line of the grass, noxious and purpled and warted like a toad’s skin. Second, and more chilling, is the line that has formed on the grass itself, about halfway up the stalks—between the black of the oil below and the shock of green above is a line where the grass looks singed, a ridge of rusted yellow and coarse, charred brown, as though the grass had been burnt by this liquid at its base. This ridge, itself a mock horizon line, runs across every patch of grass the oil has met, a thin brown line that divides the healthy from the sick, the living from the dying, even on a single blade of grass.

It is almost too much to bear. In a sudden acid reflux of memory I recall how my grandfather, Alfred Wicke, Jr., a chemist, served on one of the research and development teams in Huntsville, Alabama, for liquid weapons during World War II. I can still remember his telling me over a decade ago, not long before he died, about the mechanism used to seal World War I-era mustard gas into delivery canisters so that it wouldn’t prematurely release—thick layers of cheesecloth gradually eaten away by the compound, timed for either ballistic or airborne deployment. The innovations of this mechanism were later incorporated into the design the Huntsville team engineered for napalm, another petroleum-based agent of liquid flame.

As I have grown older I have had to reconcile my love for my grandfather with his work—his research on weapons of war was a necessity of his era, and was a source of conflict and disgust to him too. His other accomplishments included serving as President of the Audubon Society in Pensacola, Florida, and developing a novel method for the conservation of pine rosin in timber processing, an early green technology then-unheard of in the 1950’s. PaPa-Gran, as we called him, was a member of that remarkable generation of self-taught botanists and ornithologists, and in the study of the natural world had forgotten more than I will ever learn—when I think of him today, it is for this, first and foremost, and our shared love of classical music, that I remember him. But still I cannot look at the silently burning marsh without seeing the flames of napalm: struggling with his role in its creation, wondering what he would think were he here beside me, and feeling the flicker of an answer without asking.

Leaving Bay Jimmy we set a course for Bay Long, passing back into the wider Barataria waterway north of Grand Isle (currently headquarters for the unified command for the coastal parishes), bearing towards Isle Grand Terre. With the average depth in this area hovering between three and five metres, we are still a few miles out from the Gulf of Mexico proper, though the chop picks up slightly after we cross the riptide. Before reaching Bay Long, however, Corporal Cormier wheels us around a small island in the middle of the bay, Cat Island (not to be confused with Cat Island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast, one of the four barrier islands that protects the coast from hurricanes and storm surges).

“Y’all gotta look at this,” he tells us, “Time for some good news.”

Cat Island was, like all of these wetlands, much larger years ago; as it stands now it occupies about an acre, possibly two, in the middle of the bay. As we approach we see it is ringed in a layer of boom about twenty metres out from its shore, inside which we begin to hear the chatter of brown pelicans. The island is choked with them, calling in their melodic trill, diving and bathing in the waters, jostling for dominance on the sparse driftwood washed up onshore—as a known rookery, Gaurour tells us, this was one of the first islands the parish response teams moved to protect, and has since become a small success story amid the wider scenes of devastation. The strategy here, not possible everywhere, was reverse containment: usually boom line is deployed around an oil spill to keep it from spreading outwards, but in this case the conservation teams encircled the entire island to prevent the oil from coming in. What this makes the wildlife—civilians in a war zone, refugees in a camp, or witnesses to a crime—I’m not exactly sure, but the pelican population appears thoroughly indifferent to their situation. Some of the birds even swoop overhead our vessel, scolding us from the air.

Bay Long is our last stop; as we bid farewell to the rookery and reset our course, I take a closer look at the naval GPS. We are deep into Barataria Bay, and the evidence of what has led us to this point becomes clear. Sprinkled throughout the display on the overlays of both water and land formations are labels reflecting the extent of the oil exploration and extraction industry: navigational markers named platform, pipeline canal, constructions: wells, obstructions: wells and pipelines, and submerged dike/pipe sit as little as an inch or two apart. It looks like a map of an invasion, with local features named and isolated, sites and structures to engage once the boots hit the ground. And to an extent, it is: this map, which Gaurour says is commercially available from the manufacturer Garmin Systems, updated every year based on satellite data and local observation, shows both the extent of our encroachment into the wetlands and the extent of their retreat.

For now, our own advance is stalled: upon our arrival, Bay Long proves too shallow to progress any further under our vessel’s draft, and so Cormier and the other officers decide to call it a day. As we set a course back towards the marina, we fall into conversation, reflecting on what we have seen. For those who have never travelled in wetlands before before, the talk is of the beauty of the landscape. For those who are collecting data for litigation, the talk is of the pleasures of prosecuting BP. “We are treating this like a crime scene,” Nungesser had said the day before, “and we will collect as much evidence as possible to make our case.” All I can see, however, is war—but war in which the disfigurations of man-made and natural disaster have so mingled that it is difficult to tell them apart. If we are under attack from the oil, as these sights perversely suggest—the fence-like lines of boom, the armoured Tyvex suits, the armada of cleanup vessels, the military-grade coordination, the corralled and protected wildlife, relief organisations with names like Defenders of the Coast, and the same weapons we use against human beings—then we are also under attack from our selves.

Like Hurricane Katrina five years earlier, a disaster which serves as a touchstone throughout the tour, this disaster has reignited the conflict about the nation’s energy supply and its future—a conflict about our ways of life, our habits of consumption, and ultimately, our dependency on petrochemicals whose extraction now costs us more than their use returns. And the site of local, regional, and increasingly national self-conflict over these lifeways will be the front from which dispatches never age. Of the four primary elements the ancients identified, it is now impossible to ignore how this fifth has entered and altered them all. Oil is born of earth, arrives through water, gives us fire, and departs as smoke in the air, and in the meantime, transforms everything it touches. When will we be able to look at the basic elements of our landscape again, and not see it? For now it is impossible to say. The most cautiously optimistic answer at present, outside the glare of national and international media, is years. Ask anyone from around here—we will still be telling this story a decade from now, because it will still be as fresh as it was the morning it arrived on our shores.

In one sense, our earlier expectations have been satisfied, and our appetite for loss satiated. We have met the enemy, and it is us. But questions still remain. The last one comes shortly before we dock in the harbour, as we pass a vessel idling in the canal.

“Those guys are still sitting there from this morning,” remarks one of the conference attendees, “The fishing sure must be good.”

“They ain’t fishing,” Cormier snorts, “They working.”

The attendee clambers over to the port side of the boat to get a better look: “What are they working on?”

In truth, it’s difficult to see what, if anything, they are doing—the two men are perched firmly on lawn chairs on the bow of the boat, sipping bottles of water, feet propped up on coiled boom, watching the canal traffic pass. Cormier gives a wry smile at the landlubber.

“They’re working on getting their paycheck,” he says, then pauses amid our laughter. “Can’t you see?” Cormier resumes laconically, as though there were nothing in the world more obvious: “They’re working for BP.”

Benjamin Morris
9-16 August 2010

Acknowledgments
This article would not have been possible without the aid of Jeff Dorson, Billy Nungesser, Paul Berry, Donna Paige, PJ Hahn, Gerald Cormier, and Wayne Gaurour. The title for this piece was inspired by Bettina Furnée’s art installation of the same name. All images courtesy of Paul Berry.

Biographical Note
A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is a freelance writer and researcher. He recently completed a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and his creative work (poetry and prose) appears in such places as Anon, The Rialto, and Horizon Review. Recently he was awarded an Artist Development Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Editor-at-large at Forest Publications in Edinburgh, he lives in New Orleans.

First, it’s time to look ahead to issue two of Dark Mountain. Once again, we are looking for writing which emerges from the conversations around this project, stories by which to steer in uncertain times and voices from beyond the human bubble.

We’re proud of the first book – and encouraged by the responses we’ve had from readers over the past few months. The range of essays, conversations, stories, poems and images within it should give you a clearer sense of the scope of what we’re looking for than we were able to when we made our original invitation to contribute last year.

But we also want to move things on, to dig deeper. In the next book, we want to go further in exploring the “uncivilised writing” we called for in the manifesto. We’re looking for pieces which are hard to categorise, which reflect the messiness of life as we experience it, which have the high wildness John Berger recognises when he says (with Jay Griffiths’ marvellous books in mind):

“Reality is such that both language and imagination have to exaggerate, in order to confront it truly.”

So break down the boundaries between forms, bring us writing which negotiates with and speaks for non-human reality, beyond the bubble of civilisation and the human world.

Take us down to the ground level, too. We have set out some big arching arguments about the converging crises in which we find ourselves. Rather than rehearse these grand debates, let’s move towards the personal, the specific, the local. Write about the place where things become real for you.

And don’t feel constrained to write about particular subjects or themes. We’re not necessarily looking for “nature writing” or stories about climate change. We want to find writing with a long stride, words which will outlive our way of living. How many of the novels being written today will people be able to read in fifty years time, knowing the changes we were already living through, and not find irrelevant or offensive? Whatever you write about, do so in a way which will endure because it does not take too much for granted.

Dark Mountain II will be a hardback book, produced in collaboration with Bracketpress and published in spring 2011. To be considered for this issue, your contributions should reach us by Monday November 22nd. As with the first book, we welcome images as well as text.

You can send us your work by email – info@dark-mountain.net – or by post to:

The Dark Mountain Project
c/o School of Everything
18 Victoria Park Square
London E2 9PF
United Kingdom

I’m glad I did. Nicholson was, it turns out,  a very good poet. He is also an overlooked one. He has a Faber Collected edition out, but he has been largely bypassed in the story of English poetry in the twentieth century. True, he’s not in the same league as a Hughes or an Auden, but he is, it seems to me, a better and more important writer than his lack of profile would suggest.

That lack of profile seems easy to explain. ‘Lack of profile’, after all, means lack of recognition from those who officially recognise Great Writers, by which in turn we mean critics, other writers, publishers and the gatekeepers of the academy, who are largely based in or focused upon London and its satellites. Nicholson lived a long way from London. Neither did he live in any recognisably ‘poetic’ bit of the non-metropolitan regions: Oxford, say; Wordsworth’s Grasmere; Burns’s borders; even W. S. Graham’s Cornwall. No, Nicholson lived in a part of England which is even less obviously ‘poetic’ than Larkin’s Hull, and certainly had fewer academics and other writers in it.

Nicholson lived in the small Cumbrian town of Millom. ‘Cumbria’ has associations for many of us with mountains and becks, hiking and teashops, but Millom is far from that side of the county, literally and otherwise. It’s a small, ex-industrial town on the county’s neglected west coast, with high unemployment and a lack of direction. Cumbria’s west coast has fallen on hard times in recent decades. Formerly an industrial centre – mining, millworking and quarrying – it has seen all those industries disappear or decline, along with more traditional staples like farming and fishing. The lack of obvious tourist ‘draws’, and the lack of access ( it’s a long, long drive down that winding coast road …) has meant it has not been able to rescue itself with B&BS and museums in the way other parts of the county have. As a result it has drifted into neglect, poverty and unemployment. Its main industries now are the remnants of shipbuilding in Barrow – which today means constructing nuclear submarines – and generating nuclear power at Sellafield.

Nicholson, then, was something of a chronicler of decline. During his lifetime, the great ironworks that provided the steel and soul of his home town, and which were at one time the heart of one of the busiest iron mining and smelting centres in Europe, went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

Nicholson’s poem on what the closure meant for the town was understandably angry:

For what does it matter if it rains all day?
And what’s the good of knowing
Which way the wind is blowing
When whichever way it blows it’s a cold wind now.

But what marks out his poetry for me, and particularly his later poetry, is the way that it comes to terms with what is, by then, a clearly inevitable process of slippage. The way of life he grew up with – the works that forged his family and gave them reason to be there – were dying, and Nicholson was caught up in the tide. He knew he couldn’t swim against it: but he could write of it. In the face of this, he seems to have adopted a stoicism which is far from being defeatist but which, rather, takes the long view of the historical forces which are buffeting him. In the poem ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’, for example, he tells of walks he would take with his dad and his uncle Jim, as a boy, across the mine workings and foundry landscapes of the town. They would walk down to the shore – ‘a headland, half / blasted away’ – and he would find, sheltering amidst all this, a patch of bloody cranesbill flowers. The poem ends:

… it’s hard to tell there ever was a mine: pit-heads
Demolished, pit-banks levelled, railway-lines ripped up
Quarries choked and flooded, and all the lovely resistance
Of blackberry, blackthorn, heather and willow grubbed up and flattened.
A barren slack of clay is slurried and scaled-out over
All that living fracas of top-soil and rock. A town’s
Purpose subsides with the mine; my father and my Uncle Jim
Lie quarter of a century dead; but out on the stubborn skerry,
In a lagoon of despoliation, that same flower
Still grows today.

To have lived to see this seems impossibly grim: but there is also, in that small patch of colour among the ruins, some small hope. Something remains, endures. Something rises. There are other poems like this. In ‘Scafell Pike’ Nicholson looks ahead ‘five hundred, a thousand or ten / Thousand years’ to the future of England’s highest peak and sees

A ruin where
The chapel was; brown
Rubble and scrub and cinders where
The gasworks used to be;
No roofs, no town,
maybe no men;
But yonder where a lather-rinse of cloud pours down
The spiked wall of the sky-line, see,
Scafell Pike
Still there

It was when I read this that I realised how at least some of Nicholson’s work elided with that of Robinson Jeffers, another overlooked poet of western shores. They are probably more dissimilar than similar taken in the round, but this ‘deep time’ view of humanity – adopted, it seems to me, as a way of dealing some of the the pain and confusion that comes with living through a time of great change which will see many things you love destroyed – ties them together. Here’s Jeffers, for example, in ‘Carmel Point’:

It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.

The rock lasts when all else decays. And there are darker visions of the future too, such as in the poem ‘Gathering Sticks on Sunday’ in which Nicholson suggests that in the not too distant future:

The living world of men
Will take a lunar look, as dead as slag,
And moon and earth will stare at one another
Like the cold, yellow skulls of child and mother.

This ability to face the reality of decline and live through it – with both a sense of humour and a sense of community, as attested to by many of Nicholson’s other poems – makes it clear enough why he is worth paying attention to. But there is another sense which marks him out too: his sense of place.

In Uncivilisation, we talked about a few of the characteristics shared by the kind of writing we were trying to encourage, or perhaps unearth. One was this sense of stoicism and realism in the face of the decline of our civilisation, and linked to that a sense of humility and reality about the human place in the world. But another was a sense of writing from a place: knowing that place and understanding it. It was a sense of writing from beyond metropolis and cosmopolis, the two pole stars of modern culture.

Nicholson fulfills this remit. Living around here, I can get genuinely excited just by reading the titles of his poems: ‘To the River Duddon’; ‘Hodbarrow Flooded’; ‘Scafell Pike’; ‘Cloud on Black Combe’. This is my patch, and I already feel that, in some small way, I belong to it. Mine is the chosen belonging of the ‘offcomer’, as people like me are known round here. Nicholson’s was the bequeathed belonging of the born-and-bred.  But he didn’t reject it and run to London. He didn’t run anywhere. He wrote, and spoke, in the dialect of his locality. He stayed and endured and he wrote it all down and the result is work that is quite unlike anything that could have been written had he moved even to Kendal, let alone Kensington.

There’s no one way to do anything, but a writer who hunkers down, stays in his place, gets to know it but also comes to realise that he is just passing through it: this is surely an approach that will serve us well now. It is also, in these times, fairly unusual. For a writer in particular, there is perhaps nothing more unfashionable, or even unnatural, than staying at home. Maybe that attitude is going to have to change as the world does.

But then I probably just don’t get out enough. These days I spend most of my time closeted on my hill farm reading Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and oiling my shotgun. For this reason I have never run into a nimby or a nihilist either. Self-declared reactionaries are also thin on the ground. Fascists are certainly in evidence here and there – I have one as my MEP – but they do seem to be considerably fewer in number than some would have me believe.

This is odd, because in the last year I have been called all of these things and more. I never knew it was possible to be, for example, a utopian nihilist. I would have thought that the varying political demands of being a fascist, a Romantic, a conservative and an anarchist all at the same time would be simply exhausting, not to mention contradictory. Apparently not.

When we wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto we knew that, if anyone read it at all, some people would hate it. Quite a lot of people, in all likelihood, given the challenges it laid down. ‘If you want to be popular’ we wrote, ‘it is probably best not to get involved, for the world, for a time, will resoultely refuse to listen.’ If we’re right about nothing else, we were right about that. Extreme reactions, from all over the spectrum, have been a feature of the response to Dark Mountain. For every email we get from someone telling us they’ve been waiting for us all their life, there’s a blog post by someone else calling us names. I find the name-calling very interesting, and have been musing on it a lot.

What we are dealing with here is what we might calls Terms Of Dismissal – let’s call them ‘TODs’ for short. TODs are a crucial feature of all political and cultural debate. Humans are social creatures and tribal animals. We exhibit a need, apparent in every human culture, both to band together with others and to mark ourselves out from other, opposing tribes. This behaviour spills over into politics daily, where it is disguised, often very thinly, as rational disagreement about policies or positions.

The function of TODs is to delineate tribes, so that other tribes may be easily dismisssed without the need to respond seriously to any arguments they might be making. TODs are, in effect, the grown-up equivalent of the kind of names you called each other in the playground. Remember when being called a horrible name at school would stop you in your tracks? Remember the inadequacy of that old saying about sticks and stones? Being called names is nasty. Calling people names, conversely, is very effective. We’ve all done it. It’s easier, and far more common, than engaging seriously and decently with people whose worldview you don’t share.

Take, for example, the increasingly polarised world of US politics: it’s almost the perfect example. The USA seems to me at present – as an admittedly outside observer who gets most of his information from various imperfect media sources – to be a land in which even pretences of rational disagreement are being abandoned in favour of angry tribal entrenchment. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the end of the American republic in any meaningful sense in my lifetime, and I wouldn’t be surprised either to see its slide to the hard right continue until it becomes something very nasty indeed. After all, this the most powerful and heavily-armed empire in world history, and it’s in increasingly precipitate decline.

But anyway: the point is that this country is currently so angrily polarised that TODs almost count as political debate. If you support Obama’s healthcare package, for example, you will be dismissed as a ‘socialist’ by millions of people. There is nothing objectively socialist about anything Obama does, but objectivity is not the point. This is a term of dimissal, remember. It’s dog-whistle politics: calling someone a socialist signals to millions of other people that they are not to be listened to. They are on the Dark Side. They are not One Of Us.

The same function is served on the left by the word ‘fascist’ (or, over here, the words ‘Thatcherite’ or ‘neoliberal’, which seem to be interchangeable.) Call someone a fascist and it’s pretty much debate over: after all, who wants to be seen having polite discussions with someone who wears jackboots and glorifies the master race? If you don’t like environmentalists, you call them ‘sandal-wearers’ or ‘Romantics’ or ‘hippies,’ or maybe just ‘communists.’ If environmentalists don’t like you they might call you a ‘corporate stooge’ or even a ‘nimby’ (ironically, since this is a term dreamt up by a corporate PR machine with the express purpose of discrediting environmentalists.) And so on.

Dark Mountain has had plenty of TODs thrown at it over the last year. We can’t really complain, and we shouldn’t blow our own trumpet too much either. Anyone who writes or speaks about the likelihood of a depleted future, and the false hope peddled by those whose various schemes for avoiding it are looking more ragged by the day, will be showered in TODs. TODs come into play when things are being said that are a threat to the inherent psychological assumptions of the listener. If you talk about the likely crumbling of our way of life, and ongoing crumbling ecosystems of the Earth on which we depend, you will have TODs thrown at you like rocks. Some of them will be from the business-as-usual crowd, but others will be from people who consider themselves campaigners for change, mainstream (albeit corporate) greens, and even radicals. Sometimes their tone will be mocking and sometimes it will be pious: they will huff and puff and call you ‘irresponsible’ for daring to publicly discuss what you believe to be the facts. You will find that your very desire to discuss these things, precisely because they are difficult, is not only called into question but is violently attacked.

There are all sorts of undercurrents at play here. One of them is that many people who consider themselves to be radical opponents of the status quo are nothing of the sort. George Orwell famously wrote, with typical over-statement, that ‘every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a 
secret conviction that nothing can be changed’ and there’s certainly some of this going on today. It’s easy to rail against ‘the system’ if you think the system will always be there to rail against. If you start to believe that it might actually crumble, exposing you and yours to something much more uncertain and horrible, you may, in a very short time, find yourself converted into a reluctant but stout defender of the strength and vitality of the status quo. I’ve seen this happening to a few prominent green voices in the last couple of years, and there’ll be more of it to come.

But the main point, I think, is this: that when you are called a ‘doomer’ or a ‘collapsitarian’ or a ‘miserabalist’ or any of the other playground names that are currently doing the rounds, it is not you that is being attacked: it is the facts which are piling up to illustrate what is happening around us. I am currently reading Bill McKibben’s new book Eaarth, which I strongly recommend: it’s an important book, not least because it’s the first time that a prominent mainstream green writer has broken ranks. I’ll write more about it here when I’ve finished it, but McKibben’s essential point is that decline is already with us and that our task now is not to try and prevent the decline of industrial civilisation but to do our best to manage the descent.

The first third of McKibben’s book wraps up all the evidence you could possibly need to make this case, with hundreds of references. He explains the over-complexity of industrial systems, makes a strong case for peak oil and the inability of alternatives to fossil fuels to sustain anything like current levels of western comfort, looks at the likely retrenchment of economic globalisation and, most of all, scares the shit out of you with the ongoing realities of climate change which, in almost every single studied case, is moving much faster and more alarmingly than scientists had imagined. Climate change, says McKibben is not, as so much empty rhetoric would have it, a scary legacy that will face ‘our grandchildren’ if we don’t ‘act now.’ It was a problem for our parents: they didn’t tackle it, neither will we and the result is to all intents and purposes a new planet: one which will not act the way the Earth has acted for the 10,000 years in which we built our various civilisations. All bets on the future are off. It’s too late to go back.

I read and talk a lot about this stuff, but Eaarth still scares me. Part of me would like to be able to insult McKibben: throw some TODs at him and hope he goes away. But he’s too canny a writer and too good a researcher for that. That won’t stop some people trying. The ironic thing, for me, is that both ‘doomers’ and anti-doomers seem to want certainty. Doomers apparently long for the apocalypse. They want revenge on the world, or they want poor people to die, or they want to lead a revolution to erase the memory of their teenage acne (the tenor of the cod psychology at this point will depend upon the imagination and personal background of the name-caller.)  Their critics, conversely, long to be told that everything will work out fine: that the life they know will keep on keeping on, that the tech will save us as it always has, that those who think it won’t are motivated by sour motives, or are just idiots.

The third possibility – that of a decline, painful and in many ways horrible, but far from unprecedented and also presenting opportunities – is the hardest notion of all to consider. It requires hard thinking, and action to negotiate challenges, and it doesn’t offer up any easy answers. It means that there’s no ‘cleansing catastrophe’ and no voyages to the stars. It might not work, and we don’t know how it will pan out. Neither pieties nor rude words can help negotiate it.

English

Austrian

Ten days ago I spent a weekend in the  northern rain teaching people how to mow grass with a scythe. I’ve been using a scythe for four or five years, though it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve got any good at it. I began using one because I wanted to cut the grass in my orchard without using smelly, noisy, petrolly power tools, and also because I had come across the great Simon Fairlie and his persuasive addiction to these ancient and mesmerising tools.

Scything, largely thanks to Simon, is undergoing a renaissance in Britain. Scythes were used here from Anglo-Saxon times right up until the 1940s, initially to mow grass for haymaking and later also to mow cereal crops. They were operated by large mowing teams in the summer months and they were, and are, a terrific example of what used to be called ‘appropriate technology.’ The wooden handles, known as snaths, can be made anywhere there are trees by any competent woodworker, and the blades can be made by any blacksmith. They’re a genuinely pre- and post-modern tool, and will doubtless be around long after the Flymo has faded into legend. Keep the blade honed and peened, and know how to use them, and you have probably the most efficient and effective tool for cutting grass ever developed. This is proven entertainingly year after year at the Somerset Scythe Festival where the annual ‘scythe versus strimmer’ contest is always won by the scythe.

Like many other rural crafts, scything pretty much died out in Britain after the second world war, though this was not the case in many other European countries. In eastern Europe, mowing grass with scythes is still very widely practised, and both skills and tools are passed on from generation to generation. Even Western Europe still has a working scythe culture. Here in Britain, as in so much else, we are both ahead and behind: industrial revolution and enclosure rendered our fields empty and our slums full long before this happened anywhere else, and one of the consequences has been the widespread death both of small-scale agriculture and of the crafts, skills and ways of seeing associated with it.

Simon Fairlie has effectively kick-started a reinvention of scything in Britain by importing, selling and teaching the use of scythes manufactured by the 600-year-old Schröckenfux company in Austria. It was the use of the Austrian scythe that I was teaching at the Cumbrian Scythe Festival. Austrian scythes are terrific, lightweight instruments, with a vast array of interchangeable blades, that can be used for anything from mowing your lawn to harvesting wheat to trimming grass around trees on a forty five degree slope. As I say, there is a quiet renaissance going on as a result of the use of these instruments. Landowning charities and local authorities are starting to use scythes rather than strimmers to manage their grasslands, and thousands of people like me are using them privately. But what I saw at the Cumbrian scything event was something I had never seen before, which brought home to me the real meaning of the reinvention of tradition.

The people engaged in the sycthing renaissance in Britain are largely – though not entirely – people with no background in this tradition. Often they are middle class back-to-the-landers, pemaculture enthusiasts, smallholders, environmentalists and the like. They – we – are part of a movement which is attempting to re-learn land-based and practical skills that have been lost, both because it’s fascinating and enjoyable and because it seems increasingly obvious that such skills are going to be where it’s at in a post-industrial future. We are starting in this, many of us, from zero. Before I got my own Austrian blade I had never picked up a scythe before, and never thought about doing so. Like many, I was converted when I did. But I was converted to a tradition other than my own.

The kind of scythe we new-wavers use is not the kind traditionally used in these islands. British scythes are quite different to their European counterparts. The blades are heavy and stamped rather than light and hammered, and the snaths are thicker, weightier and more elegantly curved. They’re heavier, less adaptable and seemingly harder to use, particularly for women – scything in the pre-modern era in Britain was exclusively men’s work. For all these reasons, the old English scythe (and indeed the Scottish scythe, which is something else again) has been largely overlooked by the new-wavers. I’ve seen a few people use them, and have tried myself, but it’s always slower and harder work. Until ten days ago, I was much happier with my more adaptable, sleeker imports. But then I met Jim.

Jim farms Herdwick sheep over at Millom on the west coast. He’s a traditional Cumbrian farmer, from a Cumbrian farming family. He’s no-nonsense, wry and deeply practical. Jim turned up at the scything festival with an English scythe he had inherited from his father. He came because he still uses it on his farm, mainly to dock thistles, but knows few other farmers who do, and wanted to see what we were all about. In a Langdale meadow, in the middle of a downpour, Jim showed us, quietly and simply, how an English scythe is supposed to be used.

It was, for me, a revelation. Jim was a natural. In his hands, this heavy, tough old tool was wielded with efective simplicity. It cut through the grass easily, and left a beautiful swath of lawnmower quality. Jim simply turned up and got on with cutting a whole strip of meadow, and gradually the rest of us stopped what we were doing and watched him. When he’d finished he smiled triumphantly and told us that these fancy foreign scythes were not a patch on the real thing.

Talking to Jim afterwards I learned a lot I didn’t know about how English scythes are and were used, and I’m now caught up in a desire to get my own and learn how to use it. I may even pluck up the courage to seek Jim out and ask him to teach me – if he has time, which farmers rarely do. But I learned something else too, and it was about the difference between an inherited and a learned tradition. Watching Jim cut that meadow was like hearing a snatch of old song that I dimly recognised but could never learn to sing. The man was part of a living tradition. He may be at the end of it, but it can still be found, even here, even now. He had learned his skills from his father, who had done the same. The same tool had been passed on, along with the knowledge of how to use it. The connection, between generations and within communities, was part of what Jim brought to that weekend.

That connection is part, I think, of what we look for when we try to revive these old skills. Yes, we want to learn all sort of practical things that we think will be of use to us, and we talk a lot about peak oil and climate change and all the rest of it, but at least part of what we are doing is trying, clumsily but genuinely, to fit ourselves back into a broken lineage. But we can never do it; the links were severed long ago. We are the deracineated generations: we can sense what we’ve lost, but it’s only when we see it in action that it really bubbles to the surface.

Yesterday I was up in Scotland at the Big Tent Festival, which is full of people working hard to reinvent these ways of life, or to build on them: permaculturists, green woodworkers, low-impact housebuilders, grassland management charities, spinners and weavers and organic food growers. Alastair McIntosh was speaking there about resilient communities, and was talking about his childhood on the Hebridean island of Lewis. Alastair grew up at the end of a dying tradition, and he spoke powerfully about it. As a child, he explained, he was taken out fishing in small boats by his ‘elders’ and taught how to bring in mackerel and herring from the bay. When the boat landed he would walk home, distributing the fish around the village as he did so. It was a close-knit community in which skills and stories were passed on down the generations.

Most of that is gone now. The island is full of people from elsewhere in Scotland and elsewhere in the world, supermarkets on the mainland provide the mainstay of most people’s diets and the young are not taught to take the fishing boats out by their elders anymore. Even if they were, they would catch nothing, for the bays around Lewis have been emptied of fish by industrial trawlers.

What is lost when these skills are not passed on, when the links are broken? Not just the skills themselves, some of which are useful and some less so, but a deep sense of inter-generational community, of being part of a human lineage, in time and in place. What comes instead are new kinds of ‘community’ – atomised individuals and nuclear families, surfing a world of astonishing ‘choice’ within their ‘communities of interest’. One of Alastair’s contentions is that planning for a different future is not simply a case of thinking about tools, fuels or housebuilding techniques, but crucially depends upon building resilience both into real, geographical communities and into the human spirit; resilient human communities are the rock on which everything else is built.

For me, seeing Jim and his scythe at work spoke of something more than ways of cutting grass. It spoke of the broken links that got us here. We can never re-forge them, but we can try to remember them, and we can pass on what we still can. We can also look wider and deeper, beyond where we are and beyond our own background and assumptions and circles of friends and acquaintances, for what still remains, and listen to what it has to say to us. Or, as Alastair put it to me: ‘seek out the elders, and ask them.’

Last autumn we had the biggest floods in living memory. People were helicoptered out of their houses and entire towns disappeared under eight feet of burst river. Then we had the hardest winter for decades, in which the roads were sheets of ice  for weeks and I regularly had to ask the farmer to tow me up the hill with his tractor because my van wouldn’t make it. Now we are in the middle of the driest summer since 1929.

While this is bad news for my struggling broad beans, it does allow a rare glimpse of a drowned past. The levels of Haweswater, the easternmost lake of the Lake District, are currently exceptionally low, and this has brought the ghost village of Mardale Green up into the light for the first time in decades.

The story of Mardale Green has entranced me since I first heard it as a child, when I walked in the valley. Haweswater is today a long, empty stretch of water in a valley whose only outstanding features are spiritless squares of plantation pines. In some lights it’s an eerie place; you can feel some kind of loss there, an emptiness that hangs around in the air. There’s a reason for this, and it’s below the water’s surface. This lake did not used to be here.

In its natural state, Haweswater was two smaller lakes known as High and Low Water, which were separated by a narrow spit of land. They were fringed by trees and meadows, and their shores were dotted with farmsteads. At the head of the valley stood the village of Mardale Green, with its typical cluster of Westmorland stone houses, a medieval church and an inn, the Dun Bull.

images from Mardale Green

Haweswater’s valley is a dead end: there is no way, except on foot, to cross the mountain ridge known as High Street which blocks it at its western end (though the Romans managed to build a road that today still runs along this ridge; it’s a giddying achievement, often literally.) Haweswater’s isolated valley community, its landscape and history, were by no means unique in this region; in many ways it was typical of Lakeland life before the coming of modernity. It was tethered to its place and to its lineage, and many of its people knew nothing else.

I wonder, then, how the villagers felt in 1919 when they heard that the Manchester Water Corporation had secured the passing of the Haweswater Act, enabling the compulsory purchase of the valley, the construction of a dam at its eastern end and the drowning of everything in the vicinity, including Mardale Green. I wonder at the clash of cultures; at the how the coming loss was conceived and assimilated by the farming families, the hunters and the shepherds whose water came from the local becks and who had no telephone lines or electricity. The new reservoir was being built to provide drinking water for the burgeoning population of the city of Manchester. For the city to grow, a village, and a way of life, had to die.

It was all a painted miniature: progress in a nutshell. Vast armies of labourers were brought in to build the dam as the locals looked on. A new village was built to house the workers and their families, for the Haweswater project would take years. Unlike the existing village, this new, 20th century prefab settlement had electricity, pool tables, radios, washing machines – all of the promises which the new age was bringing. Construction of the dam took ten years. During that time, life in Mardale Green went on as it had for centuries, only now with the shadow of its own end hanging over it, lengthening by the day.

The dam’s plug was finally set  two decades after the project had been given the go-ahead. Most of the village’s buildings were blown up by the Royal Engineers before the flood. The Holy Trinity church held an emotional last service for the villagers which was also attended by hundreds of people from outside the valley – so many that most had to listen to Mardale’s farewell outside on the grass through speakers rigged up by a local radio ham. The church was then dismantled stone by stone. Bodies were dug up from the churchyard and re-interred in nearby Shap. Some of the stone was used to build the take-off tower for the new reservoir, in which the old church windows can still be seen.

The waters swallowed Mardale Green in 1939, as the world’s first fully-industrialised war swallowed Western civilisation. Today, in 2010, the old stone walls that surrounded the pastures, and the shells of some of the old buildings, have come up into the light again above the lowered surface of Haweswater. The old fields are bleached white, and the remains of the drystone walls are black and slimy.

Manchester is worrying again about its water supply, and the response of the authorities has been to instruct the population of Cumbria to stop using hosepipes. Now, as then, the needs of the city dictate to the country.

What happened to Mardale Green is still happening, on an infinitely bigger scale and with more pain attached, across the planet. In China, more than 1.2  million people have been forcibly displaced to make way for the Three Gorges Dam: a dubious world record. In India, the Narmada Bachao Andolan have been fighting for decades to stop the Indian government building a series of over 3000 dams in the Narmada valley, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying pristine ecosystems.

The story is always the same. An expanding economy needs water, or electric power, or both. Dams and reservoirs are planned, in the interests of national development and economic competitiveness. Villagers whose lifestyles are genuinely ‘low impact’ and ‘sustainable’ are barged out of the way, often in the most horrific circumstances, by a metastasising urban culture which claims to want to be both of these things but is not willing to pay the hard price. The city eats the country.

The line from the authorities is always the same too: this is for everyone’s benefit. The reality is usually different; the power and the piped water goes to the industrial areas, the cities, the rich suburbs. The refugees from the country go to the slums. Who notices? Who reports it? A few genuine journalists and passionate campaigners, but most of us never hear of these things, or care if we do.

It wasn’t very long ago that, after decades of campaigning by activists all over the world, the global organisations which had long supported and funded dam-building began to have second thoughts.  Demonstrations of the destructive ecological and social impacts of mega-dams were just too big too ignore. They were not, however, as big as the demand for the power and water that dams provide the ever-spreading Machine. Today, mega-dams are as popular as ever, and are often dressed up as  yet another ‘renewable solution’ to the climate change caused by the development model they were originally part of. It’s the same old mutton, now dressed up as low-carbon lamb, and we are still hooked on it. It gives us – some of us – power, order, control, national pride. It allows us to grow, for a while. We can drown the past, and much of the inconvenient present, under hundreds of feet of water and hope it never rises again to show us what’s beneath the surface.

Strangely, as I have been writing this it’s started to rain outside; the first rain in weeks. It’s heavy and fresh. What can be seen of Mardale Green will be no doubt be gone again soon, and Manchester will be able to breathe easier. Here in Cumbria we’ll be able to use our hosepipes to wash our cars down and water our herbaceous borders without having to worry about it. Everything will go back to normal.

Yet the Deepwater Horizon disaster – and the highly-televised flailing which followed it – have some of the qualities of those moments in which public consciousness shifts. There is a sudden sense of betrayal, for those whose places and livelihoods have been desecrated, and for millions more who can identify with them. Few environmental disasters have reached so far into the consciousness of those who would never consider themselves environmentalists.

Could this be some kind of turning point? And, if so, what is there left to turn towards?

Since its launch a year ago, Dark Mountain has sought to offer a space for deepening conversations about the unfolding ecological, social and economic crises among which we find ourselves. Conversations which take in not only technical, scientific and political considerations, but the deep roots of these crises in our ways of seeing and the stories we tell about history, necessity and our place in the world. So, today, we are making a new invitation to reflect on the experience of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what it means: for the United States and its view of the future, for a world hitting at ecological limits, and for those most immediately affected by it.

Over the next few weeks, we will be seeking responses from poets and engineers, philosophers and fishermen, songwriters, storytellers and statisticians. This is an invitation to mourn, to interpret, to contextualise or to prophesy – to create, in whatever form suits your thoughts and feelings, work which does justice to what has happened in the Gulf of Mexico and to all the less-publicised acts of ecocide echoed in this event.

A selection of the resulting work will be featured on this site – and we hope to publish it in a Print-on-Demand special issue of Dark Mountain. We are open to video and audio, as well as poetry, fiction and non-fiction, photography and images of all kinds. Work should reach us by Monday 16th August at the latest, but we will consider pieces as they arrive and begin publishing those selected as guest posts on this blog over the next few weeks.

Please send your work to info@dark-mountain.net and use the subject line ‘Deep Waters’.

However, we’re nearly on top of things! If you ordered a book from us before the festival, you should have it by now. If you don’t, please let us know. If you have ordered in the last week or so, books will be posted out early this coming week.

The exception has been the signed copies. If you ordered a signed copy as part of our fundraising process, we apologise for not having got them out to you yet. We’d intended signing books at the festival then posting them out afterwards, but in the chaos it was overlooked. We will be signing them and posting them out this week.

Thanks to everyone for your support and patience. Next time around we will have slicker systems in place (and hopefully more people running them!) This is what happens when you accidentally start a publishing company …

Update: 9th July – we’ve now posted out all the books that have been ordered so far, with the exception of a couple of orders received in the last week. If you don’t have your pre-ordered book within a week, please let us know.

There was a recent debate about Dark Mountain on the same site, which is now to be turned into a live action event. I’ll be talking about Dark Mountain, and the issues surrounding it, with a few other people, possibly including Alastair, at the Big Tent Festival in Fife in July. Come and contribute if you’re in the area. Later in the year, I’ll also be talking about the book at the Edinburgh Radical Bookfair, so I hope to meet some Scottish mountaineers at both events.