It is eight o’clock on a chill winter morning, and my son is browsing over a bowl of porridge in the kitchen.  He has woken to snow on the skylight of his bedroom, and is keen to be out at first light, watching the morning as it eases from the dusky remains of the night, seeing the birds as they splinter from shadowed hedgerows into the lightening sky.

For what seems like some years now, he has taken to wandering the lanes around our village, noting the changes of the seasons, the nesting habits of local birds, the arrivals and departures of migrants.  It is a form of naturalism which places a high value on direct observation; one which owes more to Gilbert White than to David Attenborough, and which is increasingly rare.  ’If stationary men would pay some attention to the districts on which they reside,’ wrote White from his Hampshire vicarage in January 1788, ‘and would publish their thoughts respecting the objects which surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete county-histories’.  White’s diligence, his contribution to nature writing as a whole, is a reminder of the importance of patient, impartial observation, of noting changes as they occur, of making comparisons through a long acquaintance with a local territory.  He expresses a rootedness in place which is all but unfamilar to us now, a life lived entirely within the confines of one small English parish, a place which was all the world to him.

This identification with home, this yearning for the place which is most familiar, is the natural compass in our brains.  Scattered as our lives are, we turn towards home for security, for familiarity, for shelter and rest.  It is the ache which is better described in the Welsh word hiraeth; a longing for one’s homeland. Longing is the right word here: ‘Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances’ as the poet Robert Hass puts it.  We each carry with us, in the kernel of our modern, fragmented souls, a yearning which may seem like wanderlust, but is in fact a desire for that which is most unattainable, that end to our restlessness which comes with finally arriving home.  A longing not to do or achieve, but simply to be.  Be-longing.  Belonging.

In April 2010, the Eyjafjöll volcano in Iceland erupted, pouring clouds of ash into the skies above the North Atlantic.  I remember the morning after it had happened, standing on my porch with a cup of tea, looking across to the familiar view of hills.  Above them, skeins of alabaster cloud stretched across a spring sky of peerless blue.  I was aware that, for the first time since I had lived here, the sky was not smeared with the vapour trails of aeroplanes.  There were no airliners from Manchester and Schiphol, bound for Canada or the U.S., ferrying cufflinked executives from their first class lounges to their air-conditioned conference suites, the anonymity of place repeated from one confined space to the next.  For a few days, the skies above Cumbria resembled those of my childhood, before the availability of cheap air travel commodified the world, before cheap breaks in Thailand or Turin consigned the Mini Traveller and seaside guest houses to a fogotten antiquity.  I thought of the thousands of people stranded in airport lounges, the eerie silence which had descended on the vast acres of concrete beyond the glass windows. It was, very briefly, a world which had shrunk to a human scale, which forced us to look inwards, not outwards, to rejoice in the local and the immediate; most of all, to accept a limit on our ability to fly to other countries at low cost, whenever we wanted, whatever the impact.

The carbon produced when we take a short-haul flight to a destination in the middle of Europe – to Geneva, say, or Frankfurt or Milan – is around seventy-five kilograms, or the typical weight of an adult male.  On the few occasions now when I am obliged to fly for work purposes, I imagine this dark mass of carbon on the seat beside me; a coal-shaped statue of a person about my height and weight, a shadow self.  It is my dark conscience, my reminder of the impact of the western, modern freedom that I have, this privilege and power.  As I rise to leave my seat, I feel the cold grip of his sooty hand on my arm.

I think of how the world was before we could make these journeys, of how the mysterious and exotic informed our sense of wonder.  I think of my grandfather, who only ever travelled abroad once, as part of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, to the Western Front in 1917.  As I was growing up, he would follow my own trips across Europe in his ageing copy of the Times Atlas, tracing the routes with his mottled finger.  This ability to live inside our own homes and our own minds, to travel in our imagination, is the preserve of the young and the old, and of those denied their freedom; captives and refugees.

In the springtime of the ash cloud, I read Judith Schalansky’s exquisite book Atlas of Remote Islands.  This is a book about not travelling; someone whose childhood in Eastern Germany had an enforced element of stability; a form of internal exile in which it was only possible to move beyond the Soviet bloc by travelling within one’s mind.  A yearning for freedom and liberty became sublimated into a desire for the unknown allure of faraway places.  She closes her introduction with a perfect reminder of the joys of such imagined journeys: ‘Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits – the whole world.  This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired.  Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day.  There is no more poetic book in the world.’ It is a recognition that knowledge is a form of elegy, that to acquire something – a place, a memory, an object – is to abandon the yearning, to resign oneself to a small loss in mystery and uncertainty.  In our insatiable desire to possess the world, we overlook the commonplace, the local, the immediate.  We have seen the furthest reaches of distant continents, but will never know the seasonal stirrings of our parish, the way that Gilbert White did in Selborne, the way my son strives to do as he leaves the house, binoculars in hand, the morning light reflecting off the new snow.

I have been meaning for many weeks to write a second blog reflecting on the time I spent at the end of last year in Patagonia. (You can read the first post here.) There is a lot I could say, perhaps too much, and this, I think, is the problem. I have wanted to write in particular about what it taught me about ‘nature’: a terrible, overused, potentially meaningless and yet also vital word, that encompasses so much of what we are concerned with here at the Dark Mountain Project. My experience in Patagonia was an immersion in wildness, and it brought bubbling up in me many thoughts, emotional responses and instinctual reactions which needed a lot of processing, particularly when I brought them back to the overdeveloped world.

I’m currently reading Gary Snyder’s book of essays The Practice of the Wild. Snyder is a fascinating writer, fully immersed in his subject, unafraid to reflect emotionally as well as analyse rationally, and mostly able to do so without coming across as a terrible old hippie.

In Uncivilisation, we rejected the whole notion of ‘nature’ in the sense in which the word is often used in this culture. We wrote:

The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Both are intimately bound up with each other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained.

The ‘myth of nature’, in this context, is the falsehood – long established in the modern world – that humanity is somehow not natural; we are apart from everything else, destined to control it, above it, or perhaps below it, but not integral to it or related to it in any sense but the scientific. While I stand by this notion, I have also more recently come to prefer the word ‘nature’ to the  word ‘environment’, by which it has been largely replaced. ‘Environment’ is a technocratic, dry, pseudo-scientific word, which strips the natural world of any sensuous or living qualities, and reduces it merely to the backdrop of human activity. In Dark Mountain book two (which you can buy here, and really should) Rob Lewis, in his essay The Silence of Vanishing Things, does an incisive job of exposing the language of contemporary environmentalism as part of the reason why that movement has hit a wall. The reclamation of the word ‘nature’ by its practitioners might be a starting point if we were looking for some change there.

Snyder has another take on nature, though, which I very much like. In his essay The Etiquette of Freedom, he explains that he uses the word ‘nature’ in its broadest sense, to mean ‘the physical universe and all its properties.’ The word ‘wild’, on the other hand, he uses to denote those portions of the physical universe which  remain free from the agency of humanity. Snyder writes that this definition of wild:

Come very close to being how the Chinese defined the term Dao, the way of Great Nature: eluding analysis, beyond categories, self organising, self informing, playful, surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete, orderly, unmediated, freely manifesting, self authenticating, self willed, complex, quite simple.

The undomesticated animal; the self propagating plant; the land unfarmed or unmanaged: the food crop growing unbidden rather than in forced regiments; the human societies ‘whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation’ –  these are wild.  In this context ‘we can say,’ writes Snyder, ‘that New York City and Tokyo are natural but not wild. They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd.’

I take you on this long etymological diversion because much of my time in Patagonia was spent in genuinely wild places, where humanity intruded only slightly. One of these places was Parque Pumalin, in northern Patagonia. Pumalin is one of the last significant areas of temperate rainforest in South America – and increasingly in the world. It is an incredible place, and it had a strange effect on me. It is around the same latitude in the southern hemisphere as Britain is in the north, so while a visit to a tropical rainforest, for me, is a truly alien experience, a visit to the temperate forests of Chile was a comforting one. I seemed to recognise much of the flora and fauna, even though it was different: the same niche was being filled, the same atmosphere was being created. Pumalin is an incredible landscape of huge old trees, steep green mountains, sea fjords full of dolphins, porpoises and sea lions. The air is clean, the galaxies can be seen at night, you hear no industry, no cars. It is what much of Britain must have been like before the Neolithic revolution. In some deep, old, primal part of myself, I felt I had come home.

The preservation of Pumalin is the work of Doug and Kris Tompkins, hugely ambitious conservationists who are pioneering a number of similar projects across South America. Their aim is to conserve, or in some cases recreate, vital natural habitats, on a scale which makes that conservation meaningful enough for the survival of threatened ecosystems and species. Both deep ecologists, they are raising a flag for the importance of preserving natural systems in an age of global ecocide. The transcript of a conversation with Doug and Kris, which I recorded  in Pumalin, will appear in Dark Mountain book 3 later this year.

I was hugely impressed with the work that the Tompkins’ are doing – it is one of the  few truly inspiring things I have seen in a very long time. Regular readers will know that I have long come to the conclusion that it is now going to be impossible to prevent serious climate change, more destruction of habitats and species or the continued expansion of the human Empire. That Empire currently affects 93% of the Earth’s surface. The environmental movement, despite a huge amount of work and passion, and despite being right about most of the big picture for forty years, is failing to prevent the ongoing destruction. I don’t believe that anything will prevent much more of it now, bar the collapse or winding down of the industrial system or the running dry of the sources of fuel on which that system operates.

This is a bleak view to hold, but despite wanting to find it, I haven’t found anything which convinces me it’s not the correct one. On the other hand, thinking like this does not lead me to believe that ‘nothing can be done.’ Plenty can be done, to try and protect what we have left; but we need to do it in the context of the unravelling of the wild, and not in the context – common up to this point – of a ‘campaign’ to put all the pieces back together again when so many of them have already been washed away by the sea.

It seems to me that if we value the wild, as Snyder defines it, the most important task on our hands now is to preserve whatever aspect of it we can. Most of us will never be able to do anything like the work that the Tompkins’ do, but all of us can do something, whether it be physically preserving land that we own, or spreading the word, or learning useful skills to teach others, or working to keep safe what remaining wild things and places can be kept safe from the gathering storm.

There is something of a fashion, currently, for predicting the end of the wild – or for suggesting that it has already ended. The first shot was fired nearly 25 years ago by Bill McKibben in his pioneering book The End of Nature, in which he suggested, correctly of course, that globalised impacts of the human Empire such as chemical pollution and climate change meant that there was no genuine wildness left, in the pre-human, pristine sense. Recently, there has been a new slew of books and websites proposing that we are entering the ‘Anthropocene’ era, and that we must now take our rightful place in the pantheon of gods, pulling the levers of the natural world in order to to preserve a living planet.

This dubious neo-Wellsianism is, I suspect, simply a manifestation of a growing panic in a culture which feels it is losing control. While we are, in one sense, clearly facing the end of the wild world we have known, we are not going to be taking control of it any time soon. Given that we can’t even control our own economies, or plan our transport systems effectively, or indeed manage our individual lives in most cases, it takes a strange kind of blind optimism to imagine we can ‘manage’ an entire planet.

But, fantasies aside, we are in any case still left with very large areas of the Earth – such as that preserved by Pumalin – which are still effectively primordial. Will they survive climate change and the growing human appetite for more shiny things? We don’t know. But we have to hold on to them as if they will, because there is, at this stage, nothing else to do.

I suspect that the best hope we have now – hope for a living planet, hope for the continuation of beauty and wildness and ecological diversity and our own sanity as a species – is to protect as much of the world’s wildness  as we can, try and carry it through the coming storm and just hope that on the other side we will have found some accommodation with ourselves and with the wild. Any such accommodation, if it ever comes, won’t happen in our lifetime. But we have a flame to keep, in case it ever does.

In the first Dark Mountain book, I wrote a long essay entitled Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, in which I tried to analyse my reasons for falling out of love with green activism. This essay has been reproduced this month in the US-based Orion magazine, and last week I had an hour-long online discussion about it with the American writers Lierre Keith and David Abram. David Abram has been a friend of the Dark Mountain Project for some time, and I find him one of the wisest thinkers on the nature of wildness and humanity.

In this conversation, David said two things that struck me in particular. Firstly, he talked about the ‘metamorphosis’ which our civilisation needed to go through if we were to have any hope of understanding the real meaning of the wild world – and he didn’t suggest that this would be easy, or even possible in our lifetimes. The second thing he said took me right back to the temperate forests of Chile, and to the passion and determination that I felt when I walked in them. ‘The way that nature exceeds us,’ he said, ‘is so necessary.’

The way that nature exceeds us: I find a kind of dark hope in this thought. Somehow, in whatever form, nature will always exceed us; this is the fact that our culture cannot face but is going to have to. I came back from Patagonia with a new determination to do what I could to carry something wild and precious through this storm. I don’t see that there is a better or more important project than that right now.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve become more and more aware of other journeys crisscrossing my own. I’m following the route of a man who walked this way in 1934, tracing his path from the words in his books, but increasingly I find that his are not the only footsteps. The people I’m staying with bear testimony to the journeys of previous guests: ’someone stayed here for a few days last year who was walking from Germany to Morocco,’ or ‘riding a Vespa over the Alps,’ or ‘cycling from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean…’ I am starting to glimpse a continent bisected by wanderers on strange, lonely quests, striking out on unknowable missions. Sometimes they leave traces.

My energy was low on the Rhine near the village of Rolandseck. It was a damp, dispiriting day and my steps were getting heavier – I still had a long way to walk before I had a place to sleep. At that point I came across a long metal plaque zigzagged into the paving stones, engraved with English words: a 2838 kilometre coast to coast walking journey on roads pavements tracks and bicycle paths from bilbao to rotterdam starting at the river nervion continuing to an alpine origin of the river rhine and following its course to the north sea ending at the hook of holland spain france switzerland germany the netherlands. Nearby was a sign with further explanation, but actually I didn’t want to know more. It was enough that someone had been here, that someone had walked this same path, and this evidence of a previous walker lightened my steps until nightfall.

Walking slightly drunk one afternoon (I was decanting whiskey into my hip-flask and the whiskey didn’t all fit), acted as a weird charm – out of a sudden squall of rain appeared a wild-eyed, grinning man with broken teeth and an enormous, demonic-looking grey dog. ‘Come, come, you must stay dry here,’ he said, motioning me into the shelter of someone else’s garage, and then embarked on a strange monologue: ‘My name is Harry. Like your youngest prince! But I am not a royalist, never! I am free. I hate hierarchy! Do you know that this class system, this system of kings and earls and counts, was brought here by the Romans? Before the Romans came to this land the Germans were free, we were all equal, no one was better or worse than any other. We must still overthrow this Roman mentality, so we can be free again…’

He went on in this vein until the rain stopped, at which point I walked on. It was only later that afternoon that I came across a little sign – a centurion’s helmet and the word limes – and realised I was inadvertently tracing the old boundary of the Roman Empire from Holland to the Black Sea. The Romans controlled the west bank of the Rhine but never conquered the wild tribes to the east. How amazing, a thousand years later, to meet a man enthusiastically babbling an ancient communal memory of tribal freedoms versus imperial oppression – however vague and inaccurate – through a mouthful of crooked teeth, on the line of that frontier.

Another route I constantly cross, follow for a while, lose again, and pick up a few days later, is the Pilgerweg – the pilgrim’s way – that spreads through all the countries of Europe until it becomes the Camino de Santiago. Until now I hadn’t realised that these paths were connected, branching and dividing and merging again like the map of a nervous system, until they converge, after thousands of miles, on that dusty little town in the north of Spain. I am heading east, not west, but I’m still tracing the same pathways. So far I haven’t met another walker, but sometimes I get the notion that someone might be shadowing my journey, or I might be shadowing theirs – they might be half a mile behind me or half a mile ahead of me, perhaps even stopping when I stop, crossing the road where I cross the road, having a rest on the same low wall, sneaking off for a surreptitious piss behind the same tangle of trees.

For two days this week I found myself following a series of little brown and white signs showing the silhouette of a woman driving an antiquated vehicle, with the words ‘Bertha Benz Memorial Route.’ These signs didn’t strike me as particularly exciting, but, I later found out, mark a journey of almost unimaginable  significance – something that led, around the world, to cultural and environmental changes so profound that they seem better understood as a shift in consciousness. In 1888, Bertha Benz, wife of engineer Karl Benz, test-drove her husband’s prototype automobile on this road from Bruchsal to Pforzheim. This seemingly unassuming jaunt was the maiden voyage of the world’s first car – the car from which every other car, from the Model T Ford to the SUV, can trace its lineage. Even Karl Benz had his doubts about it, but by driving this route between the two cities, his wife proved that the automobile was a viable form of transport. Just how viable, she couldn’t have imagined. Only fifty years later, Germany gave that first car’s descendants the world’s first autobahns, ensuring their dominion over the landscape. Perhaps a walker following this route is like a Carib Indian – if there were any of them left – retracing the voyage that Columbus took with the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. Sketching the outline of a journey that led to the destruction of a world.

Looking at Europe’s map today, the logical consequence of that journey can be seen in the webwork of red and yellow lines that divide and subdivide the continent, autobahns and their tributary roads that split the formless wilderness into abstract geometrical partitions – another branching nervous system like that of the Camino de Santiago, but one that has no end to arrive at, no destination. Walking alongside these roads, which I often find unavoidable, I see and hear and smell and feel that consequence every day. And yet, as I’m starting to discover, it’s not the only map. There are roads between the roads, from the limes to the pilgrim’s way, the cycle-tracks, the borders of fields, the Wanderweg – the wander way – the corridors of connected woodland left behind from carved-up forests, as well as the rivers and the streams that were Europe’s first thoroughfares. This is the map I am starting to glimpse, tracked by the ghosts of travellers past. Sometimes they leave traces.

Akshay starts his tenure with a review of Keith Thomas’s 1983 book Man and the Natural World, which was originally published on The Occasional Review.

Most people in today’s society are profoundly helpless. Try to imagine what you would do if the water stopped coming out of the taps and filling up your toilet tank. As America and perhaps the global industrial system begin to come apart at the seams, one stops taking such services for granted. One also realizes that potable water comes out of taps every so often in human history, but then also disappears, usually for centuries at a time.

I would give you some of the specifics, but unfortunately I have been realizing lately that I am a historical illiterate. Virtually everything I know about the human past has been picked up from historical novels, movies, or asides in books about other things. I haven’t read a work of pure history in a long time, and it’s only recently – as I realized that modern industrial civilization is just as susceptible to collapse as the ones that have come before it – that I began to feel the weight of my ignorance.

Which brings us to Man and the Natural World by the British historian Keith Thomas. I found it for a dollar at an outdoor book market and was attracted to the title. Thomas describes changing attitudes to the natural world in early modern Britain, a time period that he sets at approximately 1500-1800. A great many things happened in the relationship between Britons and their natural environment during this period: enclosures of common land, increasing urbanization, the birth of scientific taxonomy, early attempts at conservation, and many others. I read a few pages, saw that Thomas was an engaging writer, and decided to take a first step towards dispelling my massive ignorance of the human past.

Man and the Natural World, as a study of attitudes, contains references to an extraordinary variety of sources, everything from poetry to pamphlets to popular sermons to the log books of merchants and aristocrats. Thomas realizes that to convince people that a certain belief was actually widely held, he must accumulate a fair amount of evidence, and the book often consists of fascinating lists of information. Here is an example from the chapter on botanical nomenclature:

Anyone who wants evidence of the way in which polite sensibilities have changed with the centuries need only consider the briskly anatomical nature of this now suppressed terminology, for in the seventeenth-century countryside there grew black maidenhair, naked ladies, pissabed (or shitabed), mares fart and priest’s ballocks. In the herb garden could be found horse pistle and prick madam; while in the orchard the open arse (or medlar) was a popular fruit. Even the black beetle was twitch-ballock and the long-tailed titmouse bum-towel. Many of today’s more fanciful flower names—lords and ladies, for example—are deliberate inventions of the nineteenth century, designed to obliterate some unacceptable indecency of the past…

If this passage bores you, don’t bother with Man and the Natural World. If you are delighted and a little sad that the pissabed is now called a dandelion, this book will give you endless pleasure. My favorite country-name for a plant was “welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk,” now commonly known, apparently, as the houseleek, and still associated with virility in some quarters.

Man and the Natural World is more than a wonderful assemblage; Thomas’s arguments slowly emerge out of these progressions of lists, and his points are complicated and sometimes disturbing. For example, one might simply long for earlier times when local people knew plants and their functions. As Thomas demonstrates, though, these names only existed for plants with some obvious human utility, and placed man’s needs at the center of their world (pissabed describes the diuretic quality of the plant’s roots, whereas the more modern word dandelion apparently comes from the “lion’s tooth” shape of the leaves themselves.) Early naturalists who came to rural people to help identify plants soon reached the limits of their knowledge; rural curiosity did not extend to even common plants that had no known human function, so the naturalists had to go around naming and classifying these plants themselves.

“By eroding the old vocabulary, with its rich symbolic overtones,” Thomas writes, “the naturalists had completed their onslaught on the long established notion that nature was responsive to human affairs.” This may seem like a simple impoverishment, but it also led to the modern attitude, which I am certainly in sympathy with, that parts of the natural world deserve to be left alone whether people can get anything out of them or not.

Another fascinating chapter is on the human attitude towards animals. Thomas shows how urbanization and the keeping of pets led to a sentimental attitude towards animals (he has a list of animal names over time, showing how they got progressively closer to human ones) which then led, often, to the revulsion of city-dwellers towards country people who made a living off these animals. And the country people were, indeed, enormously cruel. Some of the old means of producing tastier meat, including nailing live ducks to a floor by their webs, are as brutal as anything one can find in a modern industrial plant, albeit on a smaller scale.

So which attitude is “correct” — that of the practical countryman, or the city sentimentalist who refuses to give up the meat and services which these animals provide, but instead, like Gilbert White, simply plants a screen of trees to protect himself from the sight of the slaughterhouse? And to what extent is vegetarianism – which is my personal choice - even possible without the global supply lines that provide people in cold climates with a continuous supply of varied food?

These questions arise constantly while reading this book, because Thomas convincingly shows how most modern environmental attitudes actually arose out an increasing estrangement from nature, which then produced a longing for the world that was being destroyed, often without a concomitant willingness to give up the fruits of that destruction.

…by the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of people had come to find man’s ascendancy over nature increasingly abhorrent to their moral and aesthetic sensibilities. This was the human dilemma: how to reconcile the physical requirements of civilization with the new feelings and values which that same civilization had generated…The growth of towns had led to a new longing for the countryside. The progress of cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued nature. The new-found security from wild animals had generated in increasing concern to protect birds and preserve wild creatures in their natural state. Economic independence of animal power and urban isolation from animal farming had nourished emotional attitudes which were hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the exploitation of animals by which most people lived.

Obviously, none of these contradictions have gone away. It is generally comfortable city-dwellers that call for environmental protection, are quite convinced about climate change, and then take flights across the country to enjoy the scenery of their favorite national park, all while depending on massive quantities of resources to maintain every aspect of their lifestyle.

And yet some of the attitudes that such people have developed, even tinged with hypocrisy and a lack of practical knowledge, seem to have enduring value: a respect for nature outside its utility to man, compassion for the lives and suffering of animals, and an aesthetic feeling for wild as well as managed nature. As D. H. Lawrence once wrote, the road that modern man has been struggling along has been filled with waste and mistakes, and we may end up going back to where we came from, but it has also been a real journey; there has been some development along with the destruction. When we begin to return to a pre-industrial pattern of life – I am starting to suspect this will happen forcibly with the end of cheap oil, and probably entail a great deal of suffering – hopefully there are some lessons that can be saved from the path that we have been on. We also have lots of things to re-learn from past societies, and books like Thomas’s (his other classic work about the same early modern period is called Religion and the Decline of Magic) can help illuminate the road that led to the modern world, which we may soon be walking back down.

This post is the first in a series of dispatches which Nick will be filing for Dark Mountain along the way.  You can find out more about his journey on this website.

I’ve been walking for over two weeks, and it’s only just starting to occur to me that travelling this way is so much slower – indescribably so much slower – than any other form of transport. Apart from walking backwards, perhaps, or crawling on my belly. I’m on the first stretch of a very long journey, on foot across Europe to Istanbul, and I have plenty of time to think about these things. It’s an interesting adjustment. Bicycles pass me with speed and grace that I envy, but at least recognise as just a faster version of what I’m doing – making my way from one place to another – while cars, to my pedestrian eye, travel so incomprehensibly fast I have already started to think of them as something quite alien, engaged in an activity entirely different to my own. I’m wondering if the same is felt by geese when an aeroplane thunders in the distance.

My perceptions of distance have altered quickly. In a car, or even on a bike, you see a landmark on the horizon – a church tower, say, or a tall tree on a hill – and you spend ten minutes watching it steadily growing bigger and bigger and then suddenly you’re there, adjusted to its scale. Walking, you barely notice it change. It stays the same size and it stays the same size, and it stays the same size and it stays the same size, and then you watch the ground for a while and when you look up it’s fractionally bigger – or maybe that’s just a trick of the eye. It can be agonising – the trick is to stop caring. After all, if I was in a hurry I wouldn’t be walking in the first place. I’ve been thinking of those fairytales about castles that never draw closer, no matter how long a traveller walks, always teasingly keeping their place on the edge of the horizon. I know where those stories come from now, and imagine the way they were dreamed up by walkers, one step after another.

Walking has also made me consider the urban landscape differently. There’s a huge difference, I’ve discovered, between walking on soft grass or mud and walking on a high-impact surface like tarmac or on pavements. Hard surfaces jar the bones of the legs, sending regular shock waves through the body, and caused agony in my shins in the first few days. For this reason I’ve become obsessed with finding low-impact passageways through towns, clinging to any grassy verge, strip of mud or municipal lawn, doing everything I can to avoid the harder ground. Pavements are more obstructions than aids. This marks me out as a different type of walker to the strollers in the streets. I am not walking in town, I am walking through town, and these narrow corridors of soil are my connection back out to the countryside, a tenuous but traceable thread that strings one green space to the next.

The environment I’m in, I’ve noticed, determines people’s perceptions of me. Along the river path on the bank of the Rhine, people see my muddy boots and rucksack and sleeping bag and two-week beard and recognise me as a walker – one of their own, doing the same thing as them, only going a longer distance. When I’m in a city centre, eating bread and cheese on the steps of the cathedral, I morph suddenly into a tourist – what else could I be? But in the spaces in-between – nowhere lands like industrial zones or urban sprawl or outer suburbs, flanked by highways and motorway bridges and factories and out-of-town car showrooms, far from beauty either rural or urban – then I don’t belong in any category at all. People stare from passing cars, shooting me baffled and suspicious glances, as if I must be lost or desperate or doing something vaguely illegal. This isn’t a walking-designated zone, there is no clear reason for me to be here – I am out of place. Between country and city, in these no-mans-lands, I can only be perceived as a vagrant.

It will never be darker than this.  The sun has completed its drift towards the horizon, such that our days are illuminated only faintly by a milky light, filtered through low cloud.  I walk across fields in the gathering dusk each evening, the western sky glowing a thin, translucent red by the last of the sun.  The space between the morning sunrise and the evening sunset seems painfully short, all our light-time activity compresses into a few hours, in these days that are defined not by light, but by the absence of light, by the need for candles and open fires, for talismans to banish the darkness which lurks at the edge of our consciousness.

For thousands of years, the solstice was the turning point of the year, one of the fixed times by which we navigated our seasons.  Its precise timing would be measured by observing the point where the sun rose in the south-east; edging further and further southwards to a point, somewhere on the distant horizon, beyond which it could drift no further, and from where it would begin the long and slow return through the spring.  Our ancestors had this knowledge, used it to chart the passage of the year, the times for planting and reaping, for hunting and resting.  I think of burial chambers and sacred sites, such as the one at Maes Howe in Orkney, which used this unique knowledge in rituals or festivals; how the midwinter sunrise would illuminate a carved device etched on a rock slab at the farthest end of a long tunnel, a glimpse of the light which would occur only at this, the darkest point of the year.

The idea of charting the passage of the seasons by observing the transit of the sun was revived during the enlightenment, when lettered men in country parsonages had time and means to pursue an interest in natural history.  Some even promoted the construction of heliotropes; timber structures which could be used as transit-lines to observe the movement of the setting sun.  Gilbert White, in January 1781, wrote that ‘My Heliotrope, which is J. Carpenter’s workshop, shows plainly that the days are lengthened considerably: for on the shortest day the shades of my two old chimneys fall exactly in the middle of the great window of that edifice at half an hour after two P.M.’

I think now of that ancestral knowledge of the movement of the sun and stars, and try to imagine the relationship those people had with light, with place.  That precise datum on the south-east horizon only made sense because it was viewed from a precise and fixed viewing point, the centre of the village or community, the sacred site, a place which spoke of a unique and intrinsic relationship with the land.  It is a way of being that we have lost, just as we have lost our awareness of the moon phases, or the tides, or the subtle changes in soil and vegetation which hinted at the presence of water, or food, or a safe place to stay.

The importance of the solstice, one which is not lost on our modern lifestyles, is that it is the point at which the light begins to return to our beleaguered lives, the time when the promise of spring illuminates the depths of winter.  It is a time of change, of new ways of being and living, of the return of hope.

The solstice this year falls at 3am on Thursday 22^nd December.  It is that liminal time of the night, the time when the connections between the human world and the world beyond are most porous, the time when life and death are balanced in a precarious equilibrium.  When we wake on Thursday morning, the light will have turned in our favour; new growth will be stirring beneath the mulch of winter’s rains.  It will never be darker than this.

Having said, in my last post about ten days ago, that I’d be posting new blogs up here every week, I then promptly got flu and had to spend several days in bed. The best laid plans. But I’m starting again, now, just in time for Christmas.

As I mentioned a few posts back, I have been out of the country for two months, and have only recently returned – to the winter, to the fug of viruses and mist – and begun to settle in. I don’t do this kind of trip very often, for all kinds of reasons, but this year my family and I decided to make the most of a proffered opportunity and flee the nest for eight weeks. We went to Chile – to Patagonia, mostly. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk a bit more about various aspects of this journey, in a few separate blog posts – the last of which will engage with the question of whether a trip like this is ever justifiable in the first place. After that, in the new year, I hope to be able to launch a series of guest blogs from various writers. We are still open to offers from anyone who has an idea for such a post, by the way – get in touch if that’s you.

So: Patagonia. The ends, as they used to say, of the Earth. I went partly in response to an invitation, partly because there was some work I wanted to do there, for Dark Mountain and for other outlets, and partly – primarily, in fact – because for as long time I have wanted to escape. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the notion of escape has dominated my life for at least the last year, and probably for much longer.

Escape from what? From civilisation? Not really. I don’t believe that’s possible, for someone like me – perhaps not, really, for anyone now. Even wearing clothes with zips is civilisation. Civilisation is in my head. I am civilisation. I carry it with me wherever I go. There’s no escaping that. It’s silly to even try. It’s like trying to escape from a metaphor.

Still, I wanted to escape something. My own country, my own expectations, others’ of me? Perhaps. Noise, pollution, overcrowding, the internet? For sure – though living in Cumbria, only the latter is usually a problem; and even the smallest town in Patagonia has internet cafes now. People? Not really. After all, I took my family with me – and in my two months away I met some of the best people I’ve met in years – grounded, real, doing the right thing, smiling as they did it, never making a show.

What then? Well, for a long time – perhaps for a lifetime, if I really think back, or an adult lifetime at any rate – I have had an itch. This itch tells me that I am missing something. It tells me that Out There somewhere, the world is wilder, greener, less denuded of life. It tells me that Out There somewhere are people living freer lives, in freer societies; that nature teems with life, that there are things that make this country and this life seem as small and tame and controlled as they are, when seen in perspective.

Part of this, I’m sure, is my Romantic nature. But only part. Because all of this turns out to be true. I have seen it before in my life, and I saw it again this year in South America. Only this time, with the time to think and the time to write, I realised, almost with the force of a revelation, what it was: that itch. I realised what I was chomping at, and trying to run from.

I realised, very simply, that I am an animal and that I have lived most of my life in captivity.

I feel this, forcefully, whenever I am released back into the wilds again, but it’s never been so clear to me before – so obvious that i could put it into words. I feel it in a small way when I go running across the lakeland fells, or walking the banks of Scottish lochs. And I felt it in Patagonia, when I was fortunate enough to be able to immerse myself for weeks in landscapes like this:

Something begins to uncoil inside you in these situations. Something begins to die – some old skin, some carapace – and something else begins to come alive. You realise what air and water are meant to taste like. You see the galaxies again and remember what the night sky is. You see tree trunks hung with mosses and lichens, and remember that all trees looked like that before the industrial revolution acidified the air. You know the meaning – the physical meaning – of being part of a world which is bigger than mere humans, and that this feeling is what it means to be truly human. You see great flocks of birds in the skies, and wild creatures – sea lions, otters, dolphins – in the ocean inlets, hear the cacophonies in the forests and you feel a tugging, a real physical kneading of the limbs – a loss. Because you know that where you live now, in the overdeveloped world, inside the human bubble, everything was once like this.

This was brought home more clearly in the last half of my journey, when I spent some time in Parque Pumalin – of which more here soon, and in Dark Mountain book 3 later this year. Pumalin is one of the world’s last intact temperate rainforest ecosystems. Coming from a  temperate country, the place is hauntingly familiar. The temperature, the moisture in the air, even many of the plants – they look like some magically preserved film taken in Europe at the end of the last ice age, before the humans really got going.

Well, that was then and this is now. Now, we humans are captives of our own cleverness and lack of wisdom. Now we live in – and are part of – what can be best described, I think, simply as the Machine. The Machine is a civilisation that has become so complex that it must continue to grow in order to survive. It is a techno-culture that makes cogs of its human population as it has made a factory floor of the non-human world. It is a civilisation whose panoply of shiny things is failing, more and more clearly, to mask the hole in its heart and in the heart of the world. Living in the Machine, we become the parts that make it move and progress, and as we do we rely on it more and more. As people, as a culture, I think we are dimly, slowly, beginning to wake up to the magnitude of this.

The poets, of course, have always known it:

… The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. It song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.

- R. S Thomas, ‘Other’, 1972

I did a lot of reading while I was away. Some R. S. Thomas for one – a poet I can never get enough of. Also, some Edward Abbey. If you have never read Edward Abbey, do so now. He is wild, funny, dangerous and usually right. In one of the places we stayed I picked up this book, and found the man thinking my thoughts for me, back while I was still a child, on the Machine’s final destination:

… the technological superstate: densely populated, centrally controlled, nuclear-powered, computer-directed, firmly and thoroughly policed. Call it the Anthill State, the Beehive Society, a technocratic despotism – perhaps benevolent, perhaps not, but in either case the enemy of personal liberty, family independence and community sovereignty, shutting off for a long time to come the freedom to choose among alternate ways of living. The domination of nature made possible by misapplied science leads to the domination of people; to a dreary and totalitarian uniformity.

Well, that sounds pretty spot on to me. I realise now that I’ve written two books myself, without quite meaning to, which seem to be charting our path towards precisely this place. What Abbey didn’t know back then was that the environmental politics he espoused would become one of the Machine’s crutches, helping it to march across the wildlands and open oceans in a flurry of ’sustainable’ barrages and turbines. And it’s when you get back to the wilds which still remain, when you free yourself even for a time from the everyday grind of the wheels, that you start to really grasp how the grip is tightening.

Two other books I’ve recently read are Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress and Spencer Well’s Pandora’s Seed. Both, from different areas of specialisation (the latter focuses on archaeology and genetics and puts meat on the bones of the former, which is more of a cultural overview) make the point that the development of civilisation is less a glorious rise from the sludge than a series of accidents, usually prompted by a natural disaster or sudden shift in circumstance. The development of agriculture, for example, almost uniformly leads to a much worse quality of life, in terms of health and longevity, than hunter-gathering provided. So why did people do it? Possibly because of overpopulation, possibly because of climate change, possibly because of war. Either way we then blundered regularly in to what Wright calls a series of ‘progress traps’: each development requires another, which requires another. Overpopulation requires a steady food supply, which leads to agriculture, which leads to settled populations which leads to more overpopulation, which leads to the necessity for social control, which leads to bureaucracy and hierarchy, which leads to … there are better accounts of this process than I can provide, but suffice it to say that the ratchet is still turning. Step outside your door and watch it in action. Click.

Can we step away from it? I don’t think so now, if I ever did. I said at the beginning of this post that I had been thinking – dreaming – of escape for years. It’s quite true. But escape from the Machine now is barely a possibility, and the options narrow every year. In Patagonia, supposedly a remote and hardscrabble place not so long ago,  and still one now in places, there’s no escape from the seeping globoculture that mobile phones and the web brings. Controversy rages presently over government plans to dam some of the wildest and most beautiful rivers in the region and run vast powerlines thousands of miles up the country to provide energy for the copper mines of north Chile. The economy must grow. You cannot escape this mantra now in the deepest forests or the coldest ice fields of this once wild Earth.

Funnily enough, R. S. Thomas somehow knew this first too. ‘Stuffy as it may seem’, he wrote in a letter to his son late in life, ‘you can never really escape.’ He spoke from experience. Thomas was an Anglicised Welshman who ached all his life to be ‘Celtic’ but who never felt – as his poems clearly demonstrate – that he had really got there, or ever could. He grasped constantly at something just beyond his reach, culturally and physically (he spent his whole life shifting from one Welsh parish to another, looking for something that evaporated when he came close to it). Ironically, after his death he was virtually canonised as a Welsh national poet. Others see what you never do.

No escape then, from the Machine. Not now. Is this a reason for despair? Curiously, this belated discovery lifted my spirits. I can’t really explain this. Perhaps if I had found some paradise I would have wanted to stay and never return. Now I have found – confirmed, really, because I knew it at some level – that the Machine is everywhere, or soon will be, it somehow makes it easier to bear living in its heart. In fact, as I watch that heart stuttering daily – as I watch the tide, I hope, beginning to ebb, and the mess being left on the shoreline - I sometimes feel that I might yet live to see the day when people see this thing for what it is. I don’t know what that will look like, or what they will do when they accept it. But I know it’s going to be an interesting year.

However, this is about to change. The Dark Mountain Project is about to enter a new phase of activity, which I’m personally very excited about.

Since we began life in 2009, the Project has effectively been run by its two founders – Dougald and myself. It’s been run mostly unpaid, and part time, in a way which has not been, to put it politely, highly organised. Under the circumstances, I think that we have a long list of achievements to point to despite this set-up. A self-published manifesto that made global waves and still does; two high quality books that have sold in their thousands and are still selling; two festivals which brought together any number of brilliant people; smaller events, online conversations and more. A real network has developed, and many people in it have put a lot of time, effort and energy into this Project, mostly, again, unpaid and unsung. It’s been incredible to see, and quite humbling.

But we’ve got to the stage now where we have to move on. It’s not possible to keep going like this, straining everyone at the sinews. The project has got too big to be handled entirely by bumbling amateurs. Though of course bumbling amateurs will still be playing an important role.

So we’re beginning a process of reorganisation. We have some new people coming onboard, all of whom have all been involved in a more ad hoc basis with Dark Mountain for some time and are now able to commit more time and energy to the project. This means we’ll have a larger editorial team for the forthcoming book, and two people – myself included – working permanently and regularly on pushing Dark Mountain forward. It means we will be able to take the Project to new people and places, plan better for the future and move into areas we’ve not yet managed to be involved in, though we’ve wanted to – writers’ workshops, for example, and collaborations with other people and organisations. It means our systems will be (more) organised, and that we can work more efficiently.

It means, in short, a new phase of operations for 2012. It’s exciting – and, I think, needed. The Dark Mountain Project is, as someone recently put it to me, ‘exploring the space between two paradigms.’ History is being made right now, and the world is transforming itself rapidly – into quite what, who knows? But the work that this Project is doing is not being done anywhere else. The cultural response to what is becoming an increasingly global crisis of civilisation is still negligible, unreal, lacking understanding. Our task is to keep agitating for more depth, and to keep working to bring it about.

So: new things. The first noticeable change you’ll see will be to this website which, early in the new year, will be redesigned and reorganised, so that it both works and looks better. Before then, in the next fortnight or so, we’ll also be making another announcement about next year’s festival.

In the meantime, as you all bate your breath, there are are two immediate things which will be happening. Firstly, the blogs on this site will take on a more regular format. I plan to post a new blog up here at least once a week, and I am looking actively for guest bloggers. Anyone with whom Dark Mountain resonates will be considered, and any subject is fitting if it comes under the umbrella of our concerns (which are still best defined in the manifesto and the eight principles.) If you are interested in contributing, or have ideas about writers or artists or makers we should approach, please drop me a line. I would like to make this blog more than simply a diary of the concerns of this project’s founders, and I am actively looking for new people and new approaches to make that happen.

Finally, we are still encouraging submissions for the third Dark Mountain book. Much of what I have seen over the last couple of months has convinced me more than ever of the importance of its chosen theme – our estrangement from nature, and our need to ‘come home’ again, whatever that implies in this world. We have had some good work submitted, but would like to see more. Please do send your work in and/or advise us of others we should pursue whose work you admire.

Again, then: sorry for our silence, but welcome to a new chapter of the story.

This time around, we’re very pleased to have Adrienne Odasso joining our editorial team. Her poetry featured in the first two collections, and she’s been a close supporter of the project. (Those who were at this year’s festival might remember the session she hosted with Em Strang, Susan Richardson and Paul Kingsnorth.)

The first two books did not have any specific theme beyond their engagement with the wider concerns of this Project. They were responses to the manifesto, and their content came from, and went in, any number of different, intriguing directions. This time around, though, we are going to do things a little differently. We are looking for contributions which head, broadly, in a similar direction – or which at least start from the same place.

Things have changed a lot since we published our manifesto, and are set to continue changing. For one thing, we’ve heard a lot over the past couple of years about ‘collapse’ – it seems like everyone’s talking about it, these days. It’s no longer necessary for us to explain that our way of living could fall apart, because it is happening all around us. Similarly, we have laid out, in our first two books, a good case for the inadequacies of the ways of being and seeing that we’ve taken for granted in this civilisation. We don’t need to do so much of this any more. We can move beyond.

What can we move to? In short, a deeper search for the new stories we called for in the manifesto. A deeper search for new kinds of writing, ways of looking and seeing, which take us beyond the orthodoxies of our times and into channels which broaden out into the oceans of possibility which lie ahead. The world is changing fast, and the time is ripe for new ways of seeing it. We want to publish them – to get them out into the world. They are badly needed.

In particular, this time around, we want to focus on the world beyond the human. We want to publish writing which strives to see the world not simply as the territory of our species, but as a canvas for all life. We want the kind of Uncivilised writing we called for in the manifesto. Writing and art which re-connects, re-grounds us in place and time, takes us out of our over-civilised skins, back to the bare bones of who we are. Writing and art which:

sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own – a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare – might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds.

… that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing.

In calling for this kind of contribution, we are not calling, necessarily, for essays about ecocentric politics or for ‘nature writing’ in its traditional sense (though we’re not ruling these out, either.) We’re talking about something slightly beyond this. We’re talking about work which, in stepping away from our purely human-centred preoccupations, allows us – paradoxically – to explore once more who we really are.

We present, then, an invitation to you all:

We got lost somewhere along the way. Took a wrong turning, followed a bad map. Felt the exhilaration of a runaway child, gradually turning to fear as night approaches.

It is time to tell the stories of how this happened. The many different stories of how we found ourselves so far from home, how we almost forgot what it meant to be at home — in our own skins, in our animal bodies, in the landscapes of nature and of our own nature; in the places we came from, or the places we have found ourselves — and how we begin to find a way back.

There is no rewinding, of course; no perfect state to which one could dream of returning. Home is something humbler: the place you find yourself when the dream is over, the place you always were. In the old tales of heroic journeys, this is always the hardest part. The re-entry into the atmosphere; the return to the grounded reality you left behind, which has been going on without you. Harder and more uncomfortable than the adventures that have gone before.

We are not who we thought we were. We are something older, wilder, more untamed, more real. How do we find our way back home?

On to the practicalities:

As in the past, we’re looking for all kinds of writing and images, fiction and reportage, conversations, essays, poems, photographs, or anything else. We’re particularly open to work that’s not easily categorised, that straddles the boundaries of form, and to collaborations that bridge different worlds and ways of working.

While the first two books have featured some outstanding established writers — people like Naomi Klein, David Abram and Jay Griffiths — many of our favourite pieces have come from people we’d never heard of, and in some cases people who had never previously seen their work in print. We’re keen to see more of this, and to hear about writers you think we should approach for submissions. If there’s someone whose work makes you think of Dark Mountain, tell us about them and we’ll look at approaching them to contribute.

The book will be in English, but we are keen to hear more voices from beyond the Anglosphere – and we’d be very open to translations of work from other languages that resonates with or brings new frequencies to the themes of Dark Mountain.

Finally, we should say that we generally get overwhelmed by the volume and the quality of work which we receive, so please forgive us if we are slow to respond — it will be early in 2012 before we make the first round of editorial choices for the new book, but we will acknowledge receipt of your work as it comes. We are always careful to read everything and take time discussing and making decisions, and we do respond to every submission, whether or not it makes it into the book. (Last time around, we had about five times as much work submitted as we had space for, so the decision-making can be difficult!)

Please send us your work by the end of 2011. Email it as an attachment to info@dark-mountain.net with the subject header ‘DM3 Submission: your name.’

We look forward to reading it.

Last year, after the first Uncivilisation festival/experiment, it took the festival’s organising team about six months to recover. It wasn’t until the end of 2010 that we could bear to even think about whether, or how, to do another festival. We got there in the end, but it took us a while to gird ourselves and regather our energies.

This year is different. The energy that has flowed out of this year’s festival, and is beginning to gather in all sorts of wonderful and unexpected places, is really exciting to see. To me, it feels as if the Dark Mountain Project is now starting to genuinely become what we’ve long  hoped it would: a real movement, a many-headed hydra, fanning out from the words in the manifesto to occupy crevices all across the cultural landscape.

So this year we’re going to strike while the iron is hot, and announce the time and place of next year’s festival. Uncivilisation 2012 will take place on the same weekend, and in the same location, as this year’s event. That is, at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire, on the weekend of 17th – 19th August 2012.

It’s early days yet, but we’re already planning a few changes for next year, designed mainly to widen out the curatorial responsibilities of the event. We’ve had two years in which the project’s two founders have laid out the agenda, and now it’s time to invite others to do so as well. There will be more on exactly how we plan to do this later in the year.

One thing we already know that we plan to do, though, is hold open a specific area of the festival site as an open, uncurated space.  There will be outdoor space available, and an indoor space too, similar to this year’s Free Space tent, and this section of the festival will be completely open and unplanned. What happens in it will depend on what festival goers bring along. They – you – might choose to bring a talk, a reading, an art exhibition, a show, a lecture … it’s nothing to do with us. We just plan to stand back and see what happens.

We’ve been inspired here by the approach that governs the Burning Man Festival in the US, which a number of people have been talking about for a while over on the DM network. Have a look here at how that approach works. We won’t be running the whole festival this way – just a part of it – but if it comes off, who knows what might happen next time? We’ll put together a loose set of principles which people will be expected to abide by in this uncurated space – a broad sympathy with DM’s aims and manifesto, for example, a ban on hate speech and the like – but beyond that, it’s up to you.

This isn’t the only way in which the organisation of the festival will differ from this year, but we’ll announce some more details towards the end of the year when we have pinned some of them down! I wanted to open this proposal out now so that anyone thinking of putting something together for the festival could start thinking about it. It’s never too early. That’s what we seem to have convinced ourselves, anyway.

Tickets for next year’s festival will go on sale in the new year, and we hope there’ll be more places available than this year. As ever, we’re open to ideas about things that could happen at Unciv 2012, and we’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts on that.

For now though – save the date!