The sun is shining on Cumbria today, so it seems a good moment to post a few more festival reactions up here.

I’ve come across three more blog reactions since my last festival post, all of which are worth a read. Here, the Part Time Peasant analyses his reactions to the festival, and provides an account of what being there was like. Here, Charlotte Du Cann, who wrote the recent Independent article about the festival, reflects on the links between the Transition approach and that of Dark Mountain. There is some very interesting stuff here, not all of which I quite agree with, and I might come back to this soon. Food for thought, though.

This post from Jeppe Dyrendom Graugaard, finally, does a brilliant job of encapsulating some of the key parts of the Dark Mountain experience, and defines the project’s essence better than anything I’ve read (or probably written) for a while.

But first of all, the Dark Mountain Project is the crumbling of myths and the formation of others. It is what we are currently living through. In this way, the uncivilisation festival took me to the Outer Hebrides, through economic collapse in Iceland to the overcrowded prisons of Russia, to civil unrest in Tottenham and squatting around London, on a sinking sail boat across the channel, and to the songlines of West Papua. I now think of it as giant watercourse, a flood of stories, thoughts, ideas and reflections, and we were all contributory streams flowing into the river gathering pace as we went down towards the ocean.

Great stuff.

Some of the contributions to the festival itself are now beginning to appear online also, and might well interest those who missed them (and those who didn’t.) Here are three transcripts:

• Sharon Blackie’s talk about living, crofting and publishing in the Hebrides, ‘Stories that connect.’
• Mario Petrucci’s talk on eco-poetry, ‘Staying Awake.’
• Eleanor Saitta and Smari McCarthy’s contributions to the Saturday morning panel ‘Comparing collapses’.

Some days it all gets hard to bear. All of it, I mean, all of it at once. Today is one of those days, so you’ll excuse me if I take a brief break from posting about the recent festival and deal instead with one of the threads that, I think, runs most constantly through this movement: despair, and how to manage it.

It’s no secret that a feeling of despair was one of the things that brought me to this project, and that led to its creation. It was the despair of an environmentalist who could see that environmentalism was failing and who had to work out how to deal with that. It was the despair of someone who felt he had no-one to talk to about his despair because, though many other people were feeling it too – oh, you could see it in their eyes however hard they tried to conceal it – it was never talked about. Activists do not talk about despair. No-one talks about despair. Despair, in a progressive society, is taboo. We do not want despair. We want hope. Hope, all the time. Hope, like a drug. Do not look down – look away.

The Dark Mountain Project began with a sense that we needed to look down, and not to flinch as we did so. This Project was created to build a place, a scene, a space, where people could mass to, among other things, talk openly about what they saw when they looked down and, if necessary, share that sense of despair without feeling that they had to leaven it with talk of hope, campaigning for change, goals, movements or activism. It was enough just to admit it, and see where it led. It was enogh just to talk about it.

It is hard to live in this world sometimes, and it has become harder for me, personally, since I had children. I have two of them now, the youngest less than a year old, and I don’t like to think about their future. What I like to think about least of all is that they will never see some of the great wonders of the natural world that we are busy, all over the planet, eliminating from existence.

I live in England. It is where I was born, and I never seem to be able to escape from it, though often I want to. England is the most densely populated country in Europe. Every year, more of our green space disappears under housing, roads, superstores and warehouses. Our population continues to increase – nearly a quarter of a million new people moved into the country last year alone. We have no obvious way to support them; we have no obvious way to support ourselves. The southeast of England is officially arid. We plan to build millions more houses, a high-speed rail network, new roads, new retail parks. The government is in the process of unveiling a new planning system, the first in seventy years, which will contain one instruction and one alone: build. Any obstacles to ‘economic growth’ are to be effectively barged aside, even if they include hedgerows, fields, human communities. England’s Empire has long been dead but its legacy – the legacy of forward momentum, contempt for stillness, a dislocation that leads to a hunger we can never sate – that legacy will curse my kids generation as it has cursed mine.

I wonder where to go. I wonder whether to try and escape to some hill farm with my family. But I couldn’t afford it. A tiny cottage with a small field attached would set me back a quarter of a million pounds, if I had it. And there is no escape, anyway. Look out to sea and watch the turbine ranges march out across what was once empty water, teeming with fish. Most of the fish are gone now, like the hedgerows and the wild flowers and the wild birds and the butterflies. I still remember the butterflies. When I was a kid they were everywhere. When I was a kid, the milk bottle tops on our doorstep were pecked open every morning by blue tits after the cream. The blue tits have gone now, and the cream. We are officially healthier.

I apologise for my mood. I know it’s maudlin. I’ve just come back from a meeting of a community group that’s been eating up so much of my time over the last few months that it’s hard to keep on top of it all. We’re trying to stop a superstore being built in our market town, which would wreck the place – the kind of proposal I documented exhaustively a few years back in this book. We were fighting one superstore – now it looks like we’re fighting two. Sainsburys is coming too. It is fighting over some green fields with a bunch of housing developers. Hardly anybody really seems to care.  I wonder, often – I wonder when this ever stops. And the thing is, that I don’t think it does.

Increasingly,  there is no escape. I had planned an escape; a short one. Next month, my family and I are going away for two months. We are going to Chile, to the ancient temperate rainforests and then to the deserts of Patagonia. For once, we have the time and the money, and though I know I shouldn’t fly I am going to damn well fly this once because the wilderness in my soul is in danger of being developed to death by the suburbia of my mind. Patagonia: escape! These two words must be synonymous in the minds of many. Bruce Chatwin has a lot to answer for.

But there is no escape even at the ends of the Earth. Here is today’s news: construction of massive dams and powerlines is to go ahead in some of Patagonia’s wildest places, so that the Chilean economy may grow by its required 6%, doubling its energy provision to do so. Chile must, as we all must, compete in the global economy. My wife told my three-year-old daughter about this, unable to keep it in. My daughter suggested that all the animals which would be drowned or made homeless by the new dams could get on a plane instead and come over here. She said some of them could live with us.

She’s a hoot, my girl, and though I sometimes despair about her future, I know she’ll make it work, whatever it brings. Sometimes the people can get you through; people can be amazing. But her suggested solution to the damming of the wildlands seemed to me no more unrealistic than our global attempts to stop this Machine from rolling onwards, over everything that lives, until everything that lives is either gone or made Useful, ordered and silent.

Derrick Jensen asks a question of every audience he speaks to over in the US. ‘Hands up’, he says, ‘anyone here who believes that this society will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.’ The kind of people who go to Derrick Jensen talks never put their hands up, perhaps because they have gone through the despair themselves and found honesty on the other side. But most of society raises its hand to this question everyday, including most environmentalists. They have to. They are not ready not to, because keeping your hand down when that question is asked means accepting openly what you have long known privately: that this Machine will not be stopped, not by us and not by anyone. It will stop only when it wears itself out, because its engine is constructed from greed and ambition and restlessness and these things do not go into voluntary retirement. Every religion, every spiritual tradition there has ever been has recognised this, with good reason.

So that is my despair. What should I do with it? I can talk, perhaps with you. I can share it. I can write it down. But I can’t and won’t pretend that I don’t feel it. And I won’t replace it with something called ‘hope’ just because I can, or think I should. I can live my life well, be happy, love, work, do the things that matter to me. I can save some of the good things, if I try, I hope. But I can’t hold back the despair all the time. Why should I? It’s a response – a rational response – to what we are doing; to the world we are levelling. It’s the only honest response.

The despair leads me to the mountain, and the mountain shows me the lights of the city as it spreads and the mountain is dark, at least for now, because the lights have not yet come. If they do not come it will not be because we chose not to send them this way; it will be because we fell back into our own fires before we got a chance to send them out here, and profit from them accordingly. Increasingly, now, I hope the lights never come. I hope the world goes dark again and that when the morning comes none of the lights work ever again. Only the sun, and at night the stars, reflected in the undammed rivers. Now that – that would give me hope again.

The Sacred, by Elizabeth Hudson

Responses to the festival have begun to pop up in various corners of the virtual world. It’s always fascinating to see how differently people arrive in places – where they have come from, actually and metaphorically, what they hope to find and what they do. I’ll keep posting these reflections up here as they come in. If you have written one, or come across one, please let me know.

Over the next few days I’ll also be posting links to transcripts and videos of some of the festival’s sessions.

So far we’ve had one review of the festival in what we still call, despite all the evidence, the ‘mainstream’ press – a nice, understanding piece in the Independent last week, which is better than its title suggests it should be. Now we also have a two-part series in Amelia’s Magazine, which reports separately on the Saturday and the Sunday of the festival. The reports are accompanied by some excellent photos and illustrations, including a mildly disturbing one of Dougald-as-messiah, which he assures me he had no hand in

Elsewhere Marmaduke Dando, who played  a stonking musical set on the Friday night, reflects on landscape, childhood and place, Cat Lupton reflects powerfully on ritual journeys,  and Zoe Young reflects on the tensions and serendipities of the event in her blog. Terry Wassall explores camping, conviviality and conversation and Alabaster Crippens takes a walk into the woods. Vinay Gupta explores the fallout from his session on the sacred, and asks what sacred means, while Mike Mertens asks persuasively whether an Uncivilised response to our current crises might involve less argument and fewer words.

If you want fewer words, London Permaculture offers a pictorial analysis of the event by way of his sketchbook. And if you want the perfect soundtrack to all of this reading or an escape from it – try this recording of the Friday night performance of the Feral Choir, deep in the woods, rending a strange, unsettling, free-spirited hole in the Home Counties air which didn’t close up again until the last of us had wended our weary way home.

There is a lot to say in the wake of this year’s Dark Mountain Festival: so much, in fact, that I’m not going to attempt to say very much here at all, other than that, for me and I think a lot of other people, it was a really remarkable weekend. Moving and stimulating in equal measure. I certainly can’t remember coming across 300 such interesting people, with such varied experiences and such honesty and smartness to share around, in one place, ever before. I’m really pleased that it came together, and I want to thank everyone who came, and everyone, in particular, who helped make it happen. You know who you are.

Over the next few weeks I’d like to share on this blog some thoughts and reflections on the event, and some reports on some of its key moments. I’d like to invite anyone who has something to say – about the event as a whole, or a particular session – to please drop us a line and talk to us about featuring it on this blog. It would be great to produce, if possible, a series of reports and reflections from different angles. Please email us (info@dark-mountain.net) if you have something you’d like to see here.

In the meantime, I’ll content myself with pointing you towards this report on the festival that appeared earlier this week in The Independent – and with posting a series of photographs that go some way towards capturing what it was like to be there. Thanks to Bridget McKenzie, Colin Perrett and Svenja Meyerricks for permission to use them.

'Liminal': Saturday night in the woods

The woodland space

The farewell, Sunday afternoon

Benny Wenda, 'songlines of West Papua'

Rima's tent. Warning: contains magic

Martin's woodworking tools

Beth and her scythe

Teepees at dusk. Or is it dawn?

Nick Hunt's new myths workshop

Wildwood

Tickets for Uncivilisation 2011 have now sold out. There will be none available on the door, I’m afraid, as the site capacity is now full.

Thanks to everyone who has got hold of one for your support – we look forward to seeing you on Friday. We’ll be reporting back here on what comes of our weekend in the woods. It should be a cracker.

England’s cities burn, the financial system continues its inexorable slide towards the pit, taking the real economy with it,  socio-economic chaos stalks the declining West, and I am reading a poem. Specifically, I am reading The Purse Seine, by Robinson Jeffers. It was written in 1938 – over seventy years ago - and, like many of Jeffers’ poems, it is a prophecy. Jeffers revelled in issuing dire warnings of future horrors from his fastness on the cliffs of California. Sometimes the resulting poems were unnecessarily bleak and self-indulgent. Sometimes they were fire-and-brimstone sermons disguised as poems (his father was a  protestant minister.) Often they fascinated and revolted his countryfolk in turn, and perhaps even at the same time.

But Jeffers was a prophetic poet, and he had little interest in what others thought about what he was doing. And because he had little interest, many of his poems, over seventy years on, are more relevant than ever, while much of the work of his contemporaries is forgotten.

I cannot tell you how beautiful
the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into interdependence;  we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape.

Prophecy is a strange thing, often a foolish one. This morning, I was re-reading our manifesto, Uncivilisation. I sometimes need to do this to remind myself  where we came from and where we’re going. At the time it came out, just over two years ago, the manifesto – which was, I suppose, a kind of prophecy, though that wasn’t what we started out trying to write – divided opinion. Some people, including us, of course, saw it as an attempt to tell a number of truths which seemed self-evident but were rarely if ever voiced. Others saw it as hysterical doom-mongering. Some people mocked the talk of collapse and decline and – probably above all – our acceptance of the fact of our powerlessness in the face of much of it. Times were different, then. The belief that we were experiencing a temporary disruption of normal service was still widespread. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that that belief – that faith – is starting to fade away now. As a result, I feel also that the manifesto is more relevant than ever:

Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.

That’s from page 3. What we have seen on the streets and in the markets over the last few weeks is likely, I fear, to be just the beginning of what the next few decades will bring us, and the great unravelling continues. Not many people are laughing any more. The mockery – and the time for mockery – seems to have passed. This is a time for seriousness.

But what does seriousness lead to? Action? Inaction? Nihilism? Riots? Recently I was having an argument with an environmentalist friend of mine (these arguments never seem to stop. It’s my fault. I’m training myself not to rise to the bait, but I’m not responding well to the training.) He is involved in a campaign to industrialise the upland landscapes of Britain with enormous wind power stations in order to ’save the Earth.’ I shot him an angry, and doubtless clumsy, summary of my feelings about people who destroy wild and beautiful places in the name of ‘the environment’, but he wasn’t having any of it, and he responded with the ultimate dismissal. ‘ Nice poems’, he said, ‘but you’re not really helping.’

Earlier this year, I had a book of poetry – Kidland – published. Since I was 19 I’ve wanted to be a Proper Poet with a collection to my name, and getting to that point, though it’s taken nearly twenty years, has been enormously exciting. It’s also been a strange lesson in the value of words. I’ve published two non-fiction books in the past, and their publication was attended by a lot of activity. The wait for reviews in the newspapers, the tours of bookshops and book festivals, the launch, the following of the hopefully-increasing sales figures, the promotion, the media interviews and extracts. Bringing a book like that out is a job in itself.

Poetry is different. My publisher organised a reading for me, in London, which went well, and after that I was on my own. Poetry publishers don’t have huge marketing or publicity departments (if they have any), due to the fact that hardly anyone buys books of poetry. I’ve organised my own readings and events based on my book (and I’m always open to offers!) and they seem to have gone well. But the impact a book of poetry makes cannot be measured in sales figures, reviews or any of the other standard ways of calculating a book’s ’success.’

This is because poetry is difficult. It is – or should be – refined thought, refined experience, refined spirit, refined writing; boiled down to the bare minimum, the least and the most of what words can do. Poetry takes work, and it takes time, and work and time are both things we are unprepared to commit much of in our current culture. Recently, when I interviewed the (now late) poet Glyn Hughes, he told me of how, just a few decades back, poets like him used to sell books in their thousands. These days we might sell a few hundred and be considered a success. What happened? I don’t know. What I do know is that poetry still matters.

I would be happy as a minor poet.
The ballads of my ancestors come to me in dreams.
Duty to them a girdle or a burrowing root,
mine only to write them down.

In an essay in our new Dark Mountain anthology, entitled ‘Poetry first, engineering second’, Wilfried Hou Je Bek quotes the American poet Jerome Rothenberg on the central error of the progressive narrative – which includes the eco-progressive narrative promulgated by my turbine-pushing friends – in attempting to measure what is done or not done, what is action or inaction, what is worthwhile and what is not:

Measure everything by the Titan rocket and the transistor radio, and the world is full of primitive people. But once change the unit of value to the poem or the dance-event or the dream (all clearly artifactual situations) and it becomes apparent what all those people have been doing all those years with all that time on their hands.

To me, this is the worldview, and perhaps the purpose, of poetry. This is what it means: to counter the progressive narrative with all its fixations on expansion and control, on windfarms and transistor radios and electric cars and superstores and growth and measurement by results. To have time on our hands to sink into other ways of seeing. Poetry is the still point, the pole around which the chaos runs and circles, and the duty of the poet is to remain still, to watch, to report back in language which distills the essence of the movements all around her.

Of course, this is the kind of thing you say only after you’ve written the poems. Only after I’d brought Kidland together as a collection did I begin to see not only its human influences – Jeffers, for one, but various Thomases, too, and Merwin and Lawrence and Wordsworth and Hughes, and I could go on but won’t – but what I was trying to do with it. If you write a poem with a purpose in mind, it’s usually dreadful, but it’s always interesting to see what your purpose turns out to be, after the fact. Nothing in poetry is an accident.

Here you are, you sit between two worlds,
you are an animal.
The Earth is exposed to you as rock
beneath a spring.
You see more than you speak
because that is how it is done.

The purpose of the Dark Mountain manifesto was clear enough: we talked about fostering a new, ‘uncivilised’ writing, which saw the human, and the human world, from the outside rather than from within. Kidland, it turns out, does – or tries to do – exactly that. This poetry collection, in other words, is my first real act of uncivilised writing – my first attempt to do it, rather than to talk about it. I hope that, in parts at least, my attempt has succeeded.

i cannot speak to the whale
and the porpoise will not listen
i have mined and quarried the seas
but there are cultures in the depths that do not need me

Of course, whether a poem ever really ’succeeds’, and what ’success’ means is a question for someone else to answer. John Berryman made his views on that matter clear to W. S. Merwin in the 1960s, and Merwin later transmuted them into a poem which every poet should read. Its last lines are:

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

Me, I don’t have to be sure of anything much, other than my need to try and speak in my poetry from a viewpoint that is as uncommon in this culture as the landscapes and beings it comes from, and to see where that takes me. That, I suppose, is the aim of my work. While a poem itself should perhaps not have a purpose, I do think that a poet should have an aim. After all, the engineers do, and someone has to stand in their way, however green they think they’re being as they build on.

I have flown
through tears of smoke, through waterfalls
of forest dust and home.

If you’re coming to the Dark Mountain Festival next week, you can hear me talking more about this in a joint reading event with three other poets whose work also leaps two-footed into that green void: Em Strang, Adrienne Odasso and Susan Richardson. In the meantime, if you want to read the poems I’ve extracted the above snippets from, you can buy my book and keep me in oatcakes for another few days. You can be assured that I’d appreciate it

After much (we hope) anticipation, here is the full programme for this year’s Dark Mountain Festival. Putting it together has brought home the diversity and range – not to mention eclecticism – of what we’ve got to offer. It’s very exciting.

See you there!

Sharon Blackie is a crofter, author and publisher – founder of the eclectic and highly-praised Two Ravens Press and a smallholder on the Isle of Lewis. In August she’ll be talking at Uncivilisation about the meeting point between creativity and the land, and what rooted writing and publishing could look like. In this guest blog, she gives a taste of the crofting life and its meaning.

Okay, so we all know it’s going to hell in a handbasket. We just don’t know when. And so the question becomes what we do in the meantime – how do we live now, clinging as we all are to the fraying edges of a ‘civilisation’ that is so cut off from anything real that, if it were an individual, it would be diagnosed as clinically insane? To me, in some ways, it’s the only question that matters: the urgent one, the one that requires us to find an answer now, while we’re still living, while we still can. Some people choose to look for the answers in philosophy books or meditation classes; David (my husband) and I look for it in the land, and our relationship to the land. More specifically, we look for it – and find it – in crofting, a very special way of living on the land that is unique to Scotland.

What is crofting, anyway? Lots of people have heard of the word, think of it maybe as just a weird Scottish term for smallholding, but very few outside of Scotland know what it’s really about and the astonishingly radical and oddly enlightened thinking that brought it into being – and that (sometimes …) still keeps it alive. I’ll skip the detailed history lesson and say simply that crofting came into being in the Scottish Highlands in the 18^th century, following the demise of the old almost totally communal ‘runrig’ system of farming.

Most crofts consisted – and still consist – of a few acres of what’s called ‘in-bye’ land – the actual smallholding itself, on which the croft house is usually situated – along with rights to put livestock out onto the ‘common grazings’ of the crofting township. In the 19^th century, following the Clearances and several pretty serious revolts by a number of local communities (some of the most celebrated being here in Lewis, where we live now) the Napier Commission and the Crofters Act of 1886 gave crofters the rights to security of tenure, fixed rents, the right to compensation for improvements to the land, and the right to inherit or assign crofts pretty much in perpetuity. The Crofters Act also set up an organisation called the Crofters Commission to safeguard these rights and ‘manage’ crofting lands on behalf of the government. The current functionality of the Crofters Commission is a matter of some controversy … but happily there are more enlightened organisations that fight on behalf of crofters themselves, like the Scottish Crofters Federation, to redress some of the balance. Crofting land is never freehold, it is always subject to crofting law and must be crofted – it cannot usually be developed.

The historical image of a crofter is that of a smallholder who built a stone ‘blackhouse’ (no windows, a central chimneyless fireplace with an escape route for smoke – on a good day – through the roof) on the croft and who kept a few sheep, a cow or two, and maybe a few chickens. Oats and potatoes were usually grown on the arable in-bye land, and the crofter supplemented his income by fishing or with other work depending on where he lived (here in Lewis and Harris, the weaving of Harris Tweed in a loomshed on the croft was a major way of earning). It’s not necessarily so different today, except that lots of crofters now make their extra income at home at the computer. Today, there are estimated to be somewhere around 17,000 registered crofts in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and these are clustered in crofting communities or ‘townships’ throughout the area.

One of the remarkable things about crofting is that it provides the best of both worlds: the crofting system is both individualistic – a crofter runs and manages his own croft – and collaborative – the elected township Grazings Committee manages the communal land and can often fulfil other functions as well; in many townships the gathering and clipping of the sheep at shearing time is still carried out by the whole community, just as peat-cutting and its transportation back to the township can become a whole community activity. Which makes it all the more sad that this communal way of living is falling away. The reasons for that are many and complicated and would take more space than I have here to explain. But as we observed first-hand in the mainland crofting community I first moved to in 2003, one of the major reasons for the demise of the crofting way of life is the selling on of crofthouses – or building sites on crofting land – to incomers (often retirees) who bring completely different values with them when they move into crofting communities. Who don’t use the land, but see it as an extended garden or let it go wild and ruin it rather than allow anyone else to use it for its intended purpose.

(This latter point raises an interesting issue, and warrants a small digression. If you let previously long-grazed land simply go wild in the kind of places we’re talking about, you won’t suddenly regenerate precious forests or even promote the growth of habitats worth keeping. What usually happens is that invasive species like bracken or dock or silverweed take over, and the previous, often surprising, biodiversity of the grazed land disappears. This was recently confirmed in a major report on the environmental impact of the decline in hill farming in Scotland commissioned by Scottish National Heritage.)

And then they start to complain about cow pats and sheep droppings on township streets, or about the noise of cockerels crowing or the keeping of bees (those rabid, petrifying creatures) on the croft next door. Such people move to crofting communities precisely because crofting land is protected from development. They want the idyllic scenery and the freedom from fear of development, but they don’t want the less picturesque realities of small-scale farming that go along with it. Or if they do, they just want to watch it, like television, from a picture window. They don’t want to actually do it. And of course, you don’t have to love sheep or manhandle cows to be a crofter – there are many gentler ways of using and being on a croft. But a croft, to us, is almost a sacred thing. To neglect it or misuse it is a betrayal of something unique and very special.

So, crofting – and specifically, the active crofting community – is under threat. And its demise would be, to me, a real tragedy. Not because of the history or traditions surrounding it, but simply because it represents a remarkable system of land use, enshrined in Scottish law. What else is remarkable about crofting? The right, now part of crofting law, that crofters (either as individuals or as communities) have to buy back their land from the landlord if they wish to. Starting with the Assynt community buyout in the North-West Highlands, continuing with the buyout of the Valtos estate just down the road from us here in Lewis, through to the much-publicised buyout of the island of Eigg, a number of high-energy communities are coming into being around the country who are doing very fine things to retain all that is good about the crofting way of life, while branching out into other projects such as renewable energy.

So what is it like to be a crofter? Well, David and I previously lived on a croft just outside Ullapool, in the North-west Highlands of Scotland, and a year ago moved to a croft here in the beautiful and wild region of Uig, right at the very end of the last road south on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, near the border with Harris. We have about 5-6 acres of in-bye land and the rights to graze a few dozen sheep (and a handful of cows, if we should choose to do so) on the common grazing. We keep two small breeding flocks of pedigree sheep: Hebrideans, and Jacobs. We have two breeding sows, and a miscellany of poultry. We have a polytunnel and grow our own vegetables. In our spare time we are writers (David is a poet, I’m a novelist) and we run Two Ravens Press, a small but high-profile literary publisher, from the croft.

To us, it’s the perfect way of life. We are remote enough from the ‘civilised’ madness that we can simply refuse to participate in those parts of it that we abhor. We have no television (widely quoted by elderly crofters as the single most important thing that contributed to the demise of much community life in these islands), and we require no manmade costly ‘entertainments’ – everything that we could conceivably need is right here. We produce as much of our own food as is feasible – meat, vegetables, supplemented with the occasional fish – and when we’re not working we’re outside, drinking in the spirit of this place until we feel we’ve merged with it. It is a completely different – and absorbing – way of life. We weren’t born to it, of course – David spent 26 years flying fast jets in the RAF, and I’ve been everything from a neuroscientist to a practising psychologist. But precisely because we’ve inhabited the madness, we can appreciate so much better what it is that we have here: a life that can so easily be stripped of everything superfluous and artificial. I’ll be talking more about that life – its content, its qualities – at this year’s Dark Mountain Festival in August. Talking about the stories imbued in this land, the way we have refashioned our own narratives as a result, and how all of that influences not only the way we choose to be, but the way we choose to publish books.

Sajay Samuel, The Hague, 30th June 2011

Last month, I had the privilege of spending two weeks hanging out with some of the friends and collaborators of Ivan Illich. It started with a week of conversations in Pescia, Italy, after which we travelled on to The Hague to take part in the Nature Inc? conference.

More than any other thinker, Illich’s work marks the paths which led me to Dark Mountain, and I continue to find it a rich ground from which to think about “the shadow that the future throws”, how we face that shadow honestly and what it means to live well in the face of it.

If the name of Ivan Illich is still familiar in certain circles, it is mostly for the books he wrote during the 1970s: ‘Deschooling Society’, ‘Tools for Conviviality’, ‘Medical Nemesis’. Brilliant critiques of the institutions of modern industrial society, for a time these texts gave him the status of an intellectual celebrity, not so different to that of Slavoj Zizek today.

From around 1980, for various reasons, he largely fell from public view. However, it is his writings from that period onwards which have influenced me most deeply. In those years, he turned his attention to a historical enquiry into the buried assumptions on which modern industrial societies were founded. He saw that the industrial age was coming to an end, and that in its ending, other ways of being and knowing the world might emerge from the shadows of history and play an unexpected role in the years ahead.

Before we parted company last week, I sat down with Sajay Samuel, one of the group that lived and travelled with Illich in the last decade of his life, to record a conversation about Illich’s understanding of those shadowed ways of being and knowing — what he termed “the vernacular”. Together, we do our best to tease out the difference between this Illichian attitude to the past, and the kind of romanticisation of a “golden age” for which it might be mistaken. From there, we trace the increasing relevance of his arguments, as the economic and ecological crises he anticipated become harder to ignore.

Since we met in Cuernavaca in 2007, at the gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of Illich’s death, I have found Sajay’s philosophical rigour a vital counterweight to my own wandering, storytelling approach to the world. I often feel like he is clearing the ground and doing the hard intellectual work which makes my own thinking and writing possible. Yet very little of his own work has made it into circulation — something I hope I can help to rectify over the next few years. As a first step towards this, it is a pleasure to be able to share our conversation, and hopefully with it a glimpse of “the cultivation of conspiracy” towards which Illich calls us:

Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

The conversation is about fifty minutes long and we do our best to explain the specific concepts and references to Illich’s work and elsewhere as they come up. But this is also a fragment from a larger conversation, stretching over many years, to which Sajay and I are making one small contribution — and to which I hope Dark Mountain, through our publications and our gatherings, can offer some hospitality. For those new to the conversation, I have added a set of references to key passages from Illich’s work, and to other parts of that wider conversation which came to mind as we spoke.

(Apologies for a few issues with the audio quality, due to wind on the microphone.)

This audio is also available to download under a CC license from the Internet Archive.

Notes

1. The concept of ‘the vernacular’ emerges as a key term in Illich’s thinking with ‘Vernacular Values’, an essay written for Stewart Brand’s Coevolution Quarterly in 1980.

2. The ‘sliding scales’ which Sajay and I discuss — between State and Market, and between Dirty and Clean technology — correspond to a diagram in that essay, on which Illich adds a third axis, between Industrial and Vernacular modes of activity.

3. When Sajay and I talk about ‘systems administrators’, we are not singling out the community of SysAdmins who keep our electronic networks running. Rather, I introduce this as a looser term for the style of management which arises when we treat the world, or ourselves, as ‘systems’. The critique of ‘the age of systems’ emerges in Illich’s later work, and is perhaps most clearly summarised in this passage from an interview with David Cayley.

4. More generally, Cayley has played an important role in documenting the conversations and ideas of Illich and his friends. Besides the two books of interviews with Illich — Ivan Illich: In Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future — there is also an excellent radio series, ‘How to Think About Science’, several of whose contributors were part of our conversations last month.

5. Two of these programmes offer case studies in the critique of systems thinking: Dean Bavington’s work on fisheries management, and in the work of Silja Samerski and Barbara Duden on the gene in popular culture.

6. In a third programme, Sajay discusses in more detail his work on the intellectual origins of modern quantitative rationality and the loss of our senses, which we touch on in the last ten minutes of our conversation. For another route through this story, see the discussion on William Petty in my dialogue with David Abram (in Dark Mountain: Issue 2 or online as a text and as a video). Abram himself spent time living with Illich and his friends at Penn State during the 1980s.

7. We also make some connections between the Epimethean attitude of ‘walking backwards into the future’ and the return of the vernacular, something I’ve written more about in ‘Remember the Future?’ (in Dark Mountain: Issue 2 or online here).

8. For the critique of ‘the view from nowhere’, which Sajay and I touch on, check out the recording and transcript of my talk from Nature Inc?, ‘It’s wrong to wish on space hardware: The power and failure of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth mythos’. This is a theme I will be returning to in my contribution to the commemoration and reexamination of the Luddites at this year’s Dark Mountain festival. (By the way, it’s worth underlining – in the light of that talk – that Illich’s first statement on “the vernacular” was written in response to a request from Brand.)

9. Many of Illich’s later writings remain unpublished, but an online archive of them is available here, thanks to the work of David Tinapple.

10. Finally, for a broader sense of the many paths explored by what I like to think of as the Illich Conspiracy, the website Thinking After Illich gathers together the work of some of his friends and co-conspirators.

History seems to be in a hurry these days. The speed at which the unthinkable becomes the inevitable creates a sense of vertigo. When we started out on Dark Mountain, drawing attention to the radical precariousness of our social and economic fabric got you called a “crazy collapsitarian”; two years down the line, a wider range of people are ready to listen.

Along the way, I’ve met some fascinating individuals who, for one reason or another, have spent years thinking seriously about what happens when the pattern of ordinary life is suddenly disrupted and the structures we take for granted break down. The most memorable of these conversations have been with people who combine two things: an inside understanding of the powerful and precarious systems around which our societies are built, and a personal experience of acute economic and social disruption.

In planning for this year’s Dark Mountain festival, I was keen to bring together some of these people for a public conversation — and I’m delighted to have four of the most interesting thinkers from the world of “collapsonomics” sharing a stage for an open discussion about the realities of collapse in different parts of the world. All four speak with both technical and cultural understanding, about the reasons why the world as we’ve known it is coming apart, but also about the practical possibilities for making the best out of the uncertainty and disruption which lies around and ahead of us.

Smari McCarthy’s history includes wiring up improvised internet systems for Afghanistan, helping Tunisian activists distribute early footage of the uprising which launched the Arab Spring, and working with Wikileaks on the release of videos from Iraq. (He left in mid-2010, after disagreements with Julian Assange.) On his own doorstep, he has lived through the middle of the Icelandic economic collapse and been deeply involved in the attempts to build something new in the aftermath.

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist and writer. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems work and fail — and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Based in the United States, she is a sharp observer of the unravelling of the American empire.

Arthur Doohan is an engineer by training, a banker by experience and a “computer nerd” by choice. In his home country of Ireland, he has been applying his insider’s knowledge of the world of finance to design and lobby for alternative responses to economic disaster — proposals in which the banks themselves would have to share the cost of the crisis they caused.

Anton Shelupanov is a criminal justice specialist who works on research and policy development in the UK, and rewrites the penal codes of central Asian countries in his spare time. He grew up in the USSR and began his career as a prison reformer working with the post-collapse realities of the Russian prison system. (Those who attended last year’s festival may recall his memorable performance in his other guise, as lead singer of “death blues” band Bleak.)

All four panellists will share stories from their personal and professional experiences, leading into an open discussion in which they respond to your questions and contributions.

This is one of the sessions Paul and I are particularly looking forward to at this year’s festival. I can’t imagine another event this summer where you’d find a discussion like this — and to be able to set it alongside stories, performances and reflections from the likes of Mario Petrucci, Melanie Challenger and Jay Griffiths is a measure of the breadth of what Dark Mountain has become over the past two years.

Whatever fresh surprises history throws at us between now and August, Uncivilisation will offer a space to reflect and reorient ourselves to the changes we’re living through.

UNCIVILISATION 2011 takes place from 19-21 August at the Sustainability Centre, Hampshire. Find out more and book your tickets now from our festival website.