I am exhausted, and doubtless I’m not the only one. I found UNCIVILISATION an intense experience. A knackering one too. Over 400 people gathered in Llangollen over three days and made something quite special happen. There was a wide range of voices and questions, and a lot of fertile ground was explored. It was, I think, a very good start.

I’d really like to know peoples’ thoughts on the event. It was hard to evaluate an kind of general mood – if there was such a thing – as I was run so ragged. I’ve started a feedback thread on the Uncivilisation network, as have other Mountaineers this morning (thanks all). Please let us know what you thought and what you think about the future. Or post on this blog, or send us an email.

I’m about to take a holiday until my head stops buzzing. At the moment I am full of ideas and thoughts provoked by the many people I met at the weekend. Thoughts, too, about how Dark Mountain is developing. One in particular stays with me right now: something Chris Wood said on stage during his intense and mesmerising set on Sunday night, and something which I’d discussed with him over some beers beforehand.

‘I wonder’ he said, ‘whether you’re trying to reinvent the wheel.’ He was referring to our declared search for ‘new stories’ with which to negotiate the age of decline. As a folk singer, Chris suggested that the stories we need might be out there already – that in past human experience we could find the narratives we are looking for, dust them off and re-engage with them.

The same point seemed to come up, from different directions, all weekend – from Alastair McIntosh, Adrienne Odasso, Jay Griffiths, Vinay Gupta and many others. I think they were right. While in many ways the things we are facing are entirely new – climate change, for example, or human-induced mass extinction – in other ways, they are ancient. Civilisations have fallen with regularity in Britain alone over the last millennium, and as they did so people wrote stories, sang songs, told tales to help them relate to what was happening. Those tales are still out there. Even the age of ecocide is not entirely unpredecented – humans have been doing the same thing, on a more local scale, ever since they evolved. Those tales are still out there too.

Digging, I think, is what we need. We’re not so much looking for something new as looking to re-engage in a new way with something very old. This is the image I’ll take away with me from this weekend – digging, looking for treasure beneath the soil, trying to unearth something that’s been there waiting for us. We excavated a good bit of topsoil this weekend, I hope.

Yesterday, a friend sent me over this graph, which shows the levels of carbon dioxide emitted by the USA over the last twenty years. As the accompanying report explains, it shows that 2009 was an ‘exceptional’ year – exceptional in that emissions levels fell by more than they had fallen in a single year since 1949. The reason? The economic crash.

It’s not news, of course, that greenhouse gas emissions are intimately linked with economic success. To a degree, it’s basic common sense. Industrial economies run largely on fossil fuels. To understand just how dependent on those fuels we are, and how ‘renewables’ and even nuclear are currently nowhere very significant on a global level, have a look at this breakdown of global energy use:

Source: Edro

The global economy, in other words, is fossil fuels. To put it another way, it is climate change. Economic growth equals more emissions. Economic collapse equals fewer. The most famous example of this was the collapse of the Soviet empire after 1990. Its economic apocalypse caused a huge drop in greenhouse gas emissions. To this day, the former USSR still doesn’t pollute as much as it did at the height of its economic pomp.

Source: Chris Vernon

What to make of this? Well, if you’re Derrick Jensen, say, the conclusion you draw is that industrial society itself is inherently toxic and must be destroyed, in order to save the biosphere. From the point of view of global ecological health, as opposed to human happiness, there’s clear merit in this argument. It’s clear that the global human economy is an engine of ecocide. The trouble is, of course, that even if you can make yourself comfortable with the massive human costs of bringing down industrial society, there’s no conceivable way of actually doing it. When we interviewed Jensen for issue 1 of Dark Mountain, I thought he did a good job of unintentionally demonstrating this. It seems to me that most people in industrial societies, and perhaps outside of them too, will always choose human comfort and safety above what they see as some vague concept of ‘ecological health’. If we are asked to choose between giving up our cars today and giving up the existence of coral reefs in two decades, I think I know what we’d choose. I think we have already chosen.

What to do then? Another approach – far more fashionable and on the surface more ‘realistic’ – is that of ‘eco-pragmatism.’ Eco-pragmatism is very much the in thing right now. Assuming that some grand shift in human consciousness is unlikely, that most people on Earth seem to aspire to Western levels of affluence and over-development and that this is hard or impossible to stop, especially in democracies (and even in dictatorships – look at China), its proponents therefore put their faith in two things: techno-fixes and ‘decoupling’.

The techno-fixes are easy enough to understand: they’re everywhere, and the mainstream green movement has abandoned most of its other aims in order to shill for them. Whether they be giant windfarms or solar arrays in Cornwall, the idea here is to get enough renewable energy sources up and running quickly enough to replace fossil fuels as a significant energy source, and thereby prevent the worst impacts of climate change. I find this narrative utterly unconvincing for a number of reasons we’ve covered here before, and of course I’m not the only one. But questioning it right now is almost impossible; we may have to wait until its proponents hit the brick wall of their own over-excitement before we can have a proper discussion about it.

The second part of the eco-pragmatist equation is the idea of ‘decoupling’ economic development from both emissions and, more broadly, from the material intensity of the economy. As the human economy grows it consumes more stuff. It consumes more fish, wood, ore, fossil fuels, animals, plants, metals and the rest. Some of these are replaceable, some are not, but all of them, taken from the Earth and consumed by us at current rates, has a knock-on effect on the health of the biosphere, of which climate change is only the most all-encompassing example. And it will get worse, for sure. If the projected global population, by 2100, was to live the same kind of lives we currently live in countries like the UK, the global economy would need to be 40 times bigger than it currently is. That’s right: 40 times bigger. It has been calculated that if the world economy grows at a rate of 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period  resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first evolved. Think about that. Sit back and really think about it.

So – runs the eco-pragmatist argument – this being the case, we need to work out how to develop without doing all this bad stuff. Obviously we need to develop, because it’s everyone’s right to have a telly and a dentist. So we need to work out how to run an economy that doesn’t constantly need to grow, and therefore strip-mine the world.

This argument – that we can ‘develop’ in much the way we are now developing without economic growth – has become a kind of last redoubt for the rhetoric of ’sustainable development.’ Those who push it are well aware of how destructive the human economy is, how democracy colludes in it, and how rising population growth and rising human wants are combining to eat the world. But they see no real way out of the capitalist, materialist society we have built, and they see discussion of alternative systems as ‘unrealistic’ – which often they are.  So they alight instead on attempting to maintain the garden of earthly delights that we call modern civilisation without the engine of its creation – economic growth.

It sounds tempting, but I’m not really convinced.  For starters, though I’m no economist, I know that the modern economy can’t currently function without growth. Amongst other things, growth is needed in a capitalist economy to offset labour productivity – in other words, to provide new jobs for people made jobless by the economy’s relentless drive towards increasing labour efficiency, which itself is stimulated by the need to grow in order to outcompete others. How you get around this, I don’t know, though various learned people who know a lot more about economics than me think it could be done.

But I think they’re missing something. I think our current societal worship of economic growth, while posing as a piece of economic rationalism, is nothing of the kind. For some reason, this thought crystallised in me this morning when, reading the John Fowles novel The Magus, I came across this short passage, spoken by the central character to his young, idealistic, egalitarian protege:

But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfil itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a high pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.

This, I think, is what we believe growth will give us; it’s why we cling to it as to a liferaft. Far from being simply a boring but necessary component of a capitalist economy, growth has become the defining purpose of our political leaders. Nobody sensible questions it, and anyone who does is immediately dismissed as a ‘Luddite’ who wants to ‘have everyone living in caves.’ I see growth as an offshoot of progress, or perhaps a new, more contemporary version of it. Progress – the idea that the future is always better than the past, that everything always improves and will continue to do so, that we have ’some destination’ which will take us to ‘a higher state’ – is the defining myth of the modern world. It is beneath all our skins, and without it we are lost. We have nothing to believe in; nothing to strive for.

Our pursuit of growth is not rational – it is atavistic.  I don’t think this is just a dry-as-dust debate about how to decouple energy intensity from job creation. I think it is the potential toppling of one of our founding myths, and I think it will take more than pragmatism to knock it off its pedestal.

Some of you may have seen George Monbiot’s article in yesterday’s Guardian about the Dark Mountain Project. It was good to see it, and it was fair and balanced. There are issues we take with it, of course, and Dougald I have taken them up in a response column to be published in the paper tomorrow.

The comments underneath articles like this are usually a pretty depressing example of the worst tendencies of the internet, and this time round was no exception. As ever, a common criticism of Dark Mountain was that we were a group of people who had ‘given up.’  Interestingly though, this criticism was rarely if ever extended beyond those two words. In other words, it was never made clear what we were supposed to be giving up on. This is largely because it’s generally a knee-jerk, defensive reaction – in this case from environmentalists, who assume that giving up on the platitudes of environmentalism is the same thing as giving up on, well, life.

What interests me about much of the wider debate around Dark Mountain  is how often confusions and conflations like this arise. The overarching one is our unerring ability to confuse the world with the Earth. The Earth is the planet we live on, of which we are one species amongst billions. The world is human society – civilisation. My bone of contention with environmentalism is that it has moved seamlessly from defending the former to defending the latter whilst pretending that they are the same thing – and that many of its footsoldiers don’t seem to have even noticed.

I’ve written an essay examining this in more detail for the first issue of Dark Mountain. It’s one of the essays George quotes from in his piece. We’ve been talking on this blog for nine months about this first collection of Uncivilised writing. It fulfils one of the missions we set ourselves in our manifesto – to seek out a new kind of writing, and send it out into the world. We’re very excited to be able to announce that the book has now arrived in our hands, and can be ordered now through this site.

We hope this book fulfils some of our promises, and we’d like to hear thoughts about that, positive or otherwise. If you’ve already ordered a copy, it will be on its way to you in the next ten days. After the festival, we’ll put our minds to the next one.

The festival, meanwhile, is now only sixteen days away, and it will hopefully fulfill another of our initial aims – bringing together a wide group of people, to take this project forward. Today we have also put the full festival programme online. I hope you’ll find it exciting – I do, and I can’t wait to see it come together, and what comes out of it. We have arranged some of the big sessions around two key themes – ‘time to stop pretending’ on the Saturday, and ‘new stories’ on the Sunday. The former will see, amongst other things, Dougald acting as Jeremy Paxman to George Monbiot’s man from the ministry, which should be worth the ticket price alone.

What I’m really looking forward to though is the conversations that will be going on throughout the weekend, and in the Dark Mountain camp in the runup, around the campfire, in the bar, on the grass and all around the site. There’s going to be a lot happening. If you’re still planning to come but haven’t bought your ticket yet, now’s the time, before they all go. Any questions you still have can hopefully be answered by the Uncivilisation network.

Living in Britain in the last week has been an interesting object lesson in how cherished assumptions and seemingly fixed situations can change faster than our ability to come to grips with their meaning or significance. I don’t imagine it’s done yet, either.  It seems like a good time for us to be coming together. There’s a lot to talk about.

Dark Mountain has always been about starting conversations, rather than pushing an ideological line. Conversations that start with questions like “What do we do when stuff we take for granted breaks down?” The kinds of questions which become increasingly relevant as the latest round of financial chaos continues to unwind.

UNCIVILISATION 2010, the Dark Mountain Festival, is a chance to invite more people into those conversations. It’s not intended as a one-off event, though, but as part of an ongoing, rolling discourse that moves backwards and forwards between ideas and actions. I shared one example of that yesterday, the interview with Vinay Gupta which we’ll be publishing in Dark Mountain Vol.1, in which he invites us to consider the prospect of a future in which “we’re all Mexicans”.

Here’s another example – a session which Vinay and I recorded earlier this week with Pat Kane (author of The Play Ethic – and frontman of Hue & Cry!), Mike Bennett of risk consultants Buttered Side Down and psychologist Alex Fradera. This was part of The Agora, a series we’re recording at Brixton Village.

Pat was due to discuss the Digital Economy Bill and the broader crisis of the music industry – but as that morning’s headlines were about the crisis in Greece, we soon found ourselves discussing the parallels between the two situations, and the lessons from Brixton Village itself. The result may be a bit obscure in places, but hopefully it gives some sense of the flow of ideas in this corner of the Dark Mountain network:

…

Join in the conversation on the UNCIVILISATION Network – or in the flesh in Llangollen next month.

Following the opening days of the UK general election campaign, I can’t avoid a sense of unreality. The scale of the issues likely to play out within the term of the next parliament is so much vaster than the ground on which the parties are picking their fights.

Looking at the issues which defined recent parliaments, you can excuse the politicians for not anticipating 9/11 during the 2001 campaign – and even the economic chaos of the past two years was of a scale not widely foreseen in 2005.

But look at the issues being flagged up by major, mainstream voices as likely to hit us between now and 2015:

- The US military now warns of a real chance of Peak Oil leading to major global instability by 2015. (Remember the political impact of our little local fuel crisis in 2000?)

- Currency markets see a real prospect of a sovereign debt crisis which could throw the UK and other economies into a chaos deeper than the financial crisis of 2008. The response to that crisis has had the effect of nationalising risk from failing institutions – not getting rid of it, but transferring it onto the nation states on which we rely for public services and basic infrastructure. Two years ago, we were bailing out banks – today, we’re bailing out countries.

- Then there’s the scale of cuts in public services in the near future – not a risk, but a certainty, which is being ignored while parties argue about “efficiency savings”. People I talk to in local authorities are gearing up for 20-30% cuts across many areas of spending. None of them believe that these can be achieved in a way which isn’t felt, often painfully, by the public – and the kind of dishonesty about this that we’re getting from politicians can only increase the likelihood of social unrest as the cuts start to bite.

None of this is to say that we’re heading into immediate social collapse – though, as Paul and I wrote in opening of the Dark Mountain manifesto, the fragility of much that we take for granted is underestimated. But it does mean it’s time to get real. In the words of Vinay Gupta – who’s organising Dark Mountain Camp, in the week leading up to UNCIVILISATION – “If the risk of an event is higher than the risk of a housefire, our governments should be preparing for it – and if they aren’t, then we need to.”

So while UNCIVILISATION should be a hell of a lot of fun, it’s also about building a stronger community of people who are thinking hard about what we do in situations where “life as we know it” is seriously disrupted.

There’s never been an event which brought this kind of network of people together – and it’s not just for a weekend, but it should be part of the fabric of something which exists year round, which leads to conversations, collaborations, new ideas and new work which wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

For me, UNCIVILISATION matters because it’s a chance to bring together some of the most high profile people thinking and working in this area with brilliant, radical thinkers and projects which have been relatively isolated until now. If things get as difficult as they could well do over the next five years, the existence of informal networks of people working on these problems from the kind of outside perspectives Dark Mountain invites could end up making a real difference.

That’s one of the reasons why – if you’re feeling as frustrated as I am with the unreality of those who want to lead us – I’d encourage you to join us in Llangollen at the end of next month.

In an interesting piece over at the US website Truthdig, former war correspondent Chris Hedges wonders whether America is ‘yearning for fascism’. It’s worth a read. Hedges wrote a book a few years back which I can recommend, entitled War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. As the title suggests, Hedges built on his decades of experience in war zones to ask questions about humanity’s proclivity for conflict, and provide answers which looked beyond the usual pieties about war being A Bad Thing to the reasons (‘war is the most potent narcotic invented by humankind’) why it starts.

In this latest piece, Hedges does the same job of asking uncomfortable questions. Though he’s writing for a website which, in the main, is a straight-down-the-line mouthpiece of the American liberal left, Hedges challenges the accepted views and values of his audience more than he challenges the Tea Partyers and angry Sarah Palin fans. Instead of simply condemning them, or laughing at them, he wants instead to listen to them.

This interests me a great deal, because I have seen, and written about, a similar kind of liberal blindness here in the UK, particularly in regards to the rise of the BNP over the last year. We are experiencing, in the UK as well as in the US (though in different forms – ours is both more ineffective and strangely more genteel) a rise in disaffection and alienation, which is birthing a new kind of ‘far right’ politics. I put ‘far right’ in quotation marks, because this kind of notation is increasingly misleading. The BNP, for example, is like many of its European sister parties in that it combines the kind of statist economic policies associated with the old manifestation of the Labour party with a racist authoritarianism. This recent interview with Nick Griffin is quite revealing on this score (as well as being amusing, to his detriment).

Situations like this are always specific, but at the root all of this, it seems to me, is the historical big picture of the decline of the West. Our economies are tanking and our populations are ageing. Immigration is changing the face of nations, political parties are increasingly identikit and ineffectual, and post-banking crisis it is apparent to more people than ever that in any case the people who run politics are not the same people who run the economy. Flexible labour markets and demographic changes shear people away from places, hyper-capitalism sets the terms of engagement by which we live, and states become increasingly authoritarian in order to deal with the challenges posed by atomised populations.

Add all this up and you get a deep insecurity which manifests itself as a fury aimed at anyone seen to be part of an ‘elite’ which is screwing people: politicians, most obviously, and bankers, but also journalists, civil servants, businesspeople – anyone who seems to be lording it over ‘us.’ This anti-elitism manifests itself in support for the BNP here, the Tea Party in the US and far right parties across Europe – they are surfing a wave of unfocused, popular anger which is only going to grow.

What confuses the liberals and the left is that this anger is also directed at them. For a socialist, anti-elitism  is supposed to lead to disaffection with capitalism and rising support for the radical left, even for revolution. For a liberal, it’s supposed to lead for a support for leftish political parties which will enact ‘reforms’ to the constitution and the economy to make things fairer for everyone. What’s happening instead is that the comfy liberal establishment is being targeted by the anti-elitists just as much as the bankers and the fat cats.  This is in part due to the fact that the left has no popular base anymore, which in turn is due to the fact that it has no clear programme after the failure of both statist Marxism and capitalist democracy.

But it’s also because the liberal left, in particular, is unwilling or unable to listen to those who express grievances it doesn’t agree with. ‘Our educated elite,’ writes Hedges, ‘wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs.’ This is certainly the impression one gets in Europe today. Complain about homophobia or racism and you’ll get onto the front page of the Guardian. Complain about street crime, immigration, unemployment or the collapse of ‘family values’ and you’ll be written off as dinosaurs or worse. But there are a lot of dinosaurs out there now, and the demagogues know how to speak their language in a way that metrovincial progressives don’t. Witnessing the bemusement of the liberal establishment here at the rise of the BNP was grimly amusing. They really had no idea what was going on, and still don’t. It seems the same is happening in America. If you don’t listen, you won’t understand – and those who do listen will end up winning.

Where Hedges falls down, for me, is in his apparent attachment to the idea that ‘radicals’ (the Green Party, say) have any useful answers to this paralysis, or that ‘the system’ can respond to what he thinks ‘needs’ to be done (how, for example, is a near-bankrupt US expected to ‘immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt’?) What is telling about these times is that no-one seems to have a programme – and that includes the far right and the populists, who know what they hate but not what to do about it (except in cartoon terms – see that Griffin interview again). This is why it’s important to be cautious about comparisons with what happened in the 1930s, when the failure of liberal democracies to deal with a crisis of capitalism led to the first wave of fascism. Fascism like that could never happen again, for the simple reason that it happened then: it’s a stark warning. Don’t expect to see jackboots and flags.  On the other hand, don’t expect this to go away either.

There is plenty of time, after all, for authoritarian anti-elitists to develop a programme, and plenty of reason for them to do so. Back in the 1930s, quotes Hedges, there was ‘a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.’  Perhaps we are again seeing a worrying yearning for something which is not yet clear but could become so, to the detriment of all of us. Clinging to daddy is a natural reaction to a fear of the dark; it may also be the reaction of many to the converging crises we face.

Those crises will only become clearer. To the decline of the West, a historical arc from which there is no escape, we need to add the decline of the fossil fuels which support our lifestyles, converging ecological disasters, a rising population, growing economic inequality and a failure of our old cultural narratives. We could also throw in a wild card: collapse in the East too. The fashionable narrative at present is that China and India are ‘rising’ as the West falls. But they are rising by following the same fossil-fuelled development path as we did, and that goes nowhere, fast.

We are already seeing a steady ramping-up of authoritarian rhetoric and a steady tightening of authoritarian politics in many ‘developed’ countries. In the UK, with our recent slew of anti-terrorist legislation, police brutality, ID cards and security cameras, this is already advanced, and I expect it to continue (and if Gordon Brown remains prime minister even after losing our forthcoming general election, we could see an explosion of popular fury: it would top even MPs’ expenses as a focus for hatred of ‘them’.) I have long believed that the authoritarianism of the right is likely to be increasingly popular as our descent becomes increasingly obvious.

Six years ago, at the height of the economic boom, I remember attending a session at the European Social Forum on ‘life after capitalism.’ It was full of hopeful young Turks planning the revolution and the utopia which would follow. Up on the stage, though, a sober note was sounded by the brilliant economist Susan George who, at 70 years old, had seen more of the world than most of us. I can quote what she said because I wrote it down; it seemed so obviously worth listening to even in those halcyon days:

There is a serious possibility that this unstable global economy could actually collapse. We could then be faced with a Weimar-type situation. We could experience war, dictatorship, instability and military takeover. Remember that life after capitalism could be worse than what we have now.

I don’t think many people took this on board at the time, but today it seems prescient. We are in a period of global narrative failure: nobody’s stories have convincing plots, and none of them knows how they end. Marxism, conservatism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, environmentalism – none of them has legs. New stories will come, because new stories are needed. In the short term, though, I’m not sure we’re going to like what they have to tell us.

As promised, we’re launching today the website for UNCIVILISATION, the Dark Mountain festival. You can find it here. We’re also now putting on sale the main batch of tickets. There are various combinations to choose from.

We’ll be updating the site as the programme settles into its final shape.

What is this about? Well, on one level it’s a simple festival, of the kind we’re all familiar with. We’ll be staging talks, debates and readings, holding workshops, showing films and giving over evenings to music. There’ll be walks and expeditions, and all of these things will feature the best people we can find of their kind. We hope they’ll stimulate, entertain and provoke. What holds them together is a focus on taking the themes of the manifesto and the the Project and running with them, in all and any directions.

But the more I think about it, the more I understand that the festival is – has to be – more than this as well. I’ve been to plenty of festivals in my time, and performed at some myself. They vary in quality, but what they have in common is that they are largely consumer experiences. You pay your money, you come along, and if you’re lucky you have a good time.

If this is all that UNCIVILISATION provides, then to me it will have been a failure, even if an entertaining one. To me this is about gathering together a group of people who are united , or at least stimulated, by a common project, and seeing how they – we – shape it. It needs to be about participation as well as consumption. We hope the menu we provide will stimulate your appetite, but we hope too that you’ll bring your own ingredients.

On that note, we have spaces left in the programme to be taken up by willing mountaineers. If you have any ideas for workshops, talks, demonstrations, discussions, collective endeavours, schemes, experiments or anything else, please get in touch. Outside the programme, we’ll be providing spaces all weekend for the continuation of conversations, for plans and for meetings.

I suppose what I am getting at is that the festival is a joint enterprise. It will stand or fall on the energy we all bring, and the conversations we have. I hope that afterwards that energy will feed into this website, and our next journal, and will hopefully also stimulate other Dark Mountain projects and activities that haven’t even been thought of yet.

None of which is to say that there will not be good beer and even better music also. Oh, there will! Come and take part. Fill in the maps with us.

Some of you have discovered that the first 100 tickets for UNCIVILISATION, the Dark Mountain festival, have now sold out. We’ll be putting the main tranche of tickets on sale this coming Thursday, at the same time as we launch a stand-alone website for the festival, with much more about what will be going on.

Dougald and I have just come back from a day at the festival site, walking the boundaries and sketching out plans, and we’re really excited about how it’s all coming together. Personally, I’m really looking forward to meeting many of the people I’ve had contact with by email or through this website since we launched but have not properly met. It’s going to be a great weekend. If you’re still after tickets, watch this space.

As the lazier half of the Dark Mountain team, when it comes to blogging, I’m delighted to see the richness of the conversations developing in recent comment threads – and the mixture of voices coming into dialogue.

I was particularly struck by the discussions following from Paul’s post about high-speed rail – and by the picture painted in Dan’s most recent comment:

I wonder if we’ve been set up – just at the moment where global communication might allow us to sees ourselves in enough clarity to realise our connection to each other, everything collapses and that vision disappears, leaving us all as isolated as ever.

It’s that last phrase that gets me – “leaving us all as isolated as ever.”

My mobile phone is now hooked up to email which keeps me connected every waking hour, unless I let the battery run out or exercise self-discipline by switching it off. I am mildly addicted to this kind of connection, and yet I also know how much good it does me to disconnect for a few days. I suffer regularly from overload at the sheer volume of unanswered messages in my inbox, even as I love the way that these technologies allow me to organise lightly with others and achieve things that a decade ago would have taken lumbering institutional structures. (Although I wonder about the newer, huger structures without which my internet connection wouldn’t exist.)

I can’t be “globally connected”. To connect to even a fraction of the 7 billion people on this planet is inconceivable. I’m lucky if I can keep up meaningful friendships of the week-in, week-out sort with more than a dozen or so people. I’m very lucky that, despite living in one of the world’s busiest cities, I find myself in a neighbourhood and with a role which means that most days I meet dozens of people I know by name and have time to talk to, besides my immediate colleagues.

Part of me wants to resist the whole language of “communication” applied to me as if I were a node in an information network. Ivan Illich used to react passionately against this language, telling a questioner: “I have absolutely no desire to communicate with you. You may not interface with me, nor do I wish to be downloaded by you. I should very much like to talk to you, to stare at the tip of your nose, to embrace you. But to communicate – for that I have no desire.”

How many meaningful encounters do you have a day? How does that compare to people’s experience in other times and places?

What do I mean by a meaningful encounter? One which is enjoyed for what it is, rather than as a means to anything – or one whose practical purpose comes embedded in a ritual or a playfulness which slows you down, which is inefficient from the point of view of that purpose, which reminds you that you are here now, wherever you might be going.

I don’t buy this religion of connectivity, this worship of the global. No one has persuaded me that we have all been “isolated” for ever, or that there is less isolation in the world today than there has ever been. These ways of thinking are widespread and influential, but historically very recent. I doubt they will be much help in navigating the years ahead.

Following on from Sunday’s post, and the conversations beneath it, I’m going to urge everyone who can to watch the hour-long BBC documentary Requiem for Detroit, which can be seen online until this coming Saturday. Having seen it last night, I understand why people kept urging me to watch it.

I’m not going to summarise it, because this remarkable film can tell its own story. Suffice it to say that what was, a few short decades ago, the world’s biggest and most ambitious manufacturing city is now literally a ruin in many places. 40% of it has simply started to rot back into the Earth. The images are astonishing, and the statistics and interviews that go with them equally so. This, the film suggests, perhaps with some exaggeration but probably not much, is ‘the world’s first post-industrial city’, and is unlikely to be the last.

It’s probably unwise to draw too many general lessons from Detroit’s fate, as the circumstances of its fall were specific ones. Almost entirely dependent on one industry – motor manufacturing – the city simply died when globalisation pulled the rug out from under the US car industry. Add to that a history of deep and grim racial segregation and violence, and the hollowing out of the city by the flight to the suburbs which the private car enabled, and today’s picture emerges.

Nevertheless, this film provoked thoughts in me. One of them was that talk of some ‘collapse’ coming along in the near or distant future is out of whack with reality. Collapse, in places like Detroit, has come and gone, and people are already living with its consequences. It’s telling that the recent film of The Road was filmed in the US rust belt; the film-makers found all they needed there for their dystopian tale, and didn’t even need to build sets. Collapse is a process, not an event, and in parts of the world’s greatest superpower it is already advanced.

But what this film, which starts out so dark and hopeless, also reinforced was the undying ingenuity of people, and the necessity of imaginative responses to the failure of the Machine. Henry Ford built Detroit, and grew unthinkably rich from the proceeds. When the industry he created had no further need of the city and its people it simply left, leaving the residents to square miles of ruins, 30% unemployment and the highest murder rate in America.

Yet something, small still but growing, is rising from the ashes. There is the artist who grew up in the midst of the race riots and now runs a project providing both creative spaces and rehabilitation to some of the city’s hardest-hit people. There is the small company that has been set up by ex-cons to strip down and recycle materials from abandoned buildings. And there are the urban farms springing up where suburbs used to be.

This last is a surreal sight, and jarring: rows of sweetcorn and beans taking over from streets of once-neat houses. It’s a reversal of what we assume the process of development to be, and it takes me back to Robinson Jeffers poem ‘Carmel Point’, about the suburbanisation of the wild in California. ‘It has all time’ he writes of the land, ‘it knows the people are a tide.’ In Detroit, as one guy in the film puts it, the ‘high water mark’ is visible everywhere.

And here is the hope beyond hope that we talk of in the manifesto, and here too is one answer to the ‘what next? what hope?’ questions we have been considering here for the last few days. Hope has sprung up in Detroit because all hope had gone, and it has sprung up not from government (though, interestingly Detroit’s city government seems to be exploring ways of creatively bowing to the inevitable in a way I’ve not come across before on this scale) or from companies, which have fled, but from all there is left: people, trying to build new their communities after the bubble which built the old ones has burst.

Like the fate of Detroit itself, it is specific, this response, and small and scattered. But because of that, it gives me, at least, a lot more hope than our current stories do. To me, the ’sustainability’ narrative we are presented with at present as our path to a better future, though it is intended to give us hope and something to work towards, seems quite hopeless: impossible and deeply disempowering and in some cases ugly and destructive. At least partly, I think this is because, as Alastair McIntosh suggests under our last post, it is so inhuman in its scale and ambition. It is like handing over the keys to the future to a low-carbon Henry Ford.

Nobody would wish the fate of Detroit on anyone, but versions of it are beginning to happen across the once-industrialised world. Perhaps the water has to recede before the hope can be seen clearly, above the waves.