Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Looking back over the last few years, I didn’t really know what to do about this realisation that we can’t fix climate change, that so much of the impact for our civilisation is already locked in. I didn’t know how to work on that. And I realised that one of the reasons was the lack of a framework to get your head around all this.
This is a series called Dark Kitchen: a set of pieces that will look at and question the culture of food in times of fall. This is a story about food and powerdown. It could seem like a personal story except that it is not: it is a social story about how everything changes when you break the illusions your civilisation is wrapped in.
If your copy of our twelfth book has already landed, then you’ll know that we’ve shaken up the form of Dark Mountain in a whole lot of ways. Not least, where a typical issue would contain forty or more pieces ranging from short poems to longer essays or stories, this time around we have built the book around twelve longer texts – and having introduced the other elements of this issue, it seems like time to tell you a little more about these.
I tell this story now because one of the results of that experience, one of the things I have learned, is that it is time now for me to step back from my work with the Dark Mountain Project, which I helped to found. It’s time for me to come down off of this mountain and see what I can do with what I found up on the slopes. It’s been a long, strange journey.
What distinguishes Dark Mountain from grassroots Earth-defending organisations and progressive movements is that it is a creative response to prevailing crises—and lacks an evangelical agenda to fix them. The project’s manifesto can act as a frame, but there is no drive to act in the space that frame creates—no pressure to shut down power stations or convince your neighbour to stop flying, or your community to reduce its carbon emissions.
What can writing do about this? What problems can art solve? In one sense, the answers are: nothing, and none. But in another sense, these are the wrong questions. ‘All civilisations’, we wrote in the manifesto, ‘are built on stories.’ When the stories fail, we need to know how to tell different ones. We need to have the perspective to understand the failure, and the imagination to offer up new ways of seeing.
The regular mechanisms of political narration are breaking down. The pollsters lose confidence in their methods, the pundits struggle to offer authoritative explanations for events that they laughed off as wild improbabilities only months before.
When it comes to manifesto ‘narratives’, I want to find the stories that lie beneath the words, and compare them with my own.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote recently of the floods that have hit the UK, arguing that they represent the beginning of "a gradual, messy, winding-down of everything we once believed we were entitled to".
I want to ask: what are the arts of uncivilisation? What happens outside the gallery and the multiplex, what are the barbarian images that might liberate our vision, that bring us home?
If the fossil fuel era has been about anything it has been about acting; doing. Whenever we have a problem, we do something. But when are we ever encouraged to reflect? When do we apply a filter to our thoughts that allows us to sort the good ideas from the bad? Rarely. Instead, we’ve papered over these cracks in our thinking with billions of years of concentrated solar energy. Fossil fuels have allowed us to be lazy, turbo-charging all our activity whether or not it is good or useful. But when activity is the sole measure of success, reflection isn’t valued. In political or activist circles, not ‘doing’ is likely to bring an accusation of failing to deal with a problem.
