cartoon from Amy Lenzo

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Our Belief Systems at a Turning Point?: Gail at the Oil Drum suggests that the Enron/Worldcomm frauds, the bailout of greedy financial corporations, and now the incompetence and deception of BP and its cohorts have finally pushed the majority of us to a turning point where we no longer believe (a) businesses can ever be trusted to self-regulate or act in the public interest, or (b) technology and innovation will “save” us when we get into trouble. She may be right, but alas, the majority are still far from the turning point of giving up on charismatic leaders, higher powers or the cult of the individual. Only when we re-learn to self-organize, in community, will we start to make the hard transition to a better way to live, one that will give us some resilience to cope with collapse.

What Collapse Will Look Like: Pulitzer-winning NYT reporter Chris Hedges presents a stunning analysis of civilization’s beginning decline, and a portrayal of its ultimate collapse. Excerpt:

The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The jobs we are shedding are not coming back… The belief that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

America is sinking under trillions in debt it can never repay and stays afloat by frantically selling about $2 billion in Treasury bonds a day to the Chinese. It saw 2.8 million people lose their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8,000 people a day – and stands idle as they are joined by another 2.4 million people this year. It refuses to prosecute the Bush administration for obvious war crimes, including the use of torture, and sees no reason to dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Deficits are pushing individual states to bankruptcy and forcing the closure of everything from schools to parks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have squandered trillions of dollars, appear endless. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.” One in eight Americans – and one in four children – depend on food stamps to eat. And yet, in the midst of it all, we … continue to embrace the illusion of inevitable progress, personal success and rising prosperity. Reality is not considered an impediment to desire…

The decline of American empire began [when] we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17^th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies…

And yet, even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood or by Christian preachers, is magical thinking.

In a second article, Hedges describes the current “Mafia capitalism” and why it is now too late to try to rein in the corporatists who are accelerating the ultimate collapse of industrial civilization in their own, psychotic, short-term interest. [Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the first link and Edgerider for the second]

Advice for the Collapse: Hold Cash Now But Be Ready to Convert to Hard Goods: Ilargi explains that, for now, keeping your investments in cash in your local currency makes sense (stocks and bonds do not), but in the longer run, currencies will probably become worthless too. In addition to the hyper-inflation that’s likely to follow the current deflationary spiral, there is the risk of currency reissuance, as governments with crumbling economies simply replace discredited currencies with “new” currencies. By then you need to convert your currency to useful, durable hard goods. Meanwhile Paul Krugman says the Third Depression and a prolonged period of deflation are coming soon.

Renewables Can’t Save Us: Ted Trainer explains why renewable energy sources, taken collectively, and even assuming technology advances continue apace, cannot even begin to replace hydrocarbons, and why a dramatic and sustained plunge in global energy production is therefore inevitable. Thanks to Bowen’s Don Marshall for the link, and the one that follows.

Coping Emotionally With Collapse: Robert Jensen explains that, before we can act with full energy and intention to make the world a better place, we first have to come to grips with the emotional grief that comes with an awareness that collapse and extinction are coming, and that it is our species that is responsible. An elder, responding to Jensen’s request for ideas on how to cope with this grief, said:

I’m about to celebrate my 70th birthday. I live in a rural intentional community, close to land that feeds us and supports us. I’ve lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn’t grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them. But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won’t understand why. They don’t see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can’t hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can’t imagine that anything else will convince them. My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the ‘collective’ is still in denial.

In a similar vein, Transition’s Sophy Banks explains why support to help cope with this grief is an integral part of the Transition movement (thanks to Tree for that link).

Gulf Sea Floor Ruptured Beyond Repair: Russian scientists working at the scene confirm what the US/UK authorities won’t say: That due to 18 ruptures in the sea floor miles apart, created by the incompetent drilling activities of BP and its corporatist cohorts and government lackeys, the BP oil “spill” will never stop, and cannot be contained [Mother Jones has more detail on this -- thanks to Johnny Moore for the MJ link]. This blot on the environment will join the post-Katrina remains of New Orleans as icons of the unsustainability of Industrial Civilization. Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link, and the one that follows.

An Economist Explains How the US Economy Has Been Permanently Hollowed Out: Henry Mintzberg: “A recent Gallup poll suggested that 55% of the American workforce is not engaged and another 16% is actively disengaged. Perhaps this is best explained by the relentless downsizing of the large American companies… Those left behind, with trust lost in their ‘leadership,’ have been inclined to put down their heads, cover their tails, and soldier on until they burned out or were themselves downsized.”

And a Non-Economist Explains How Economics Really Works: Joe Bageant provides a scathing and hilarious summing-up of economics. Excerpt:

The doomers and the peak oilers gag, and they call it American denial. Personally, I think it is somewhat unfair to say that most Americans and Canadians are in denial. They simply don’t have a fucking clue about what is really happening to them and their world. Everything they have been taught about working, money and “quality of life” constitutes the planet’s greatest problem — overshoot. Understanding this trashes our most basic assumptions, and requires a complete reversal in contemporary thought and practice about how we live in the world. When was the last time you saw any individual, much less an entire nation, do that?

Compounding our ignorance and naiveté are the officials and experts, politicians, media elites, and especially economists, who interpret the world for us and govern the course of things. The go-to guys. They don’t know either. But they’ve got the lingo down. Somehow or other, it all has to do with the economy, which none of us understands, despite round the clock media jabbering on the subject. Somehow it has to do with this great big spring on Wall Street called “the market” that’s gotta be kept wound up, and interest rates at something called The Fed, which have got to be kept smunched down. The industry of crystal gazing and hairball rubbing surrounding these entities is called economics.

Rich Walk Away from Mortgages, Poor Keep Paying: Most poor and middle-class Americans are still paying off mortgages, some of them much greater than the value of their homes, in the hope that prices will recover. The rich, backed by armies of overpaid morality-free lawyers who can find ways to creditor-proof their other assets, are instead walking away from their “underwater” mortgages in droves — and hence becoming even richer.

Embodying Action: Vera Bradova suggests a pathway from inaction, to either earnest outward action (conventional “political” activism) or what she calls  lifestylism (“green quietism”, caught up in the minutiae of political wrangling), to what she calls “embodied action” (including and moving from personal to political activism). “The path of embodiment, of incarnating my values and desires in my flesh-and-blood being, leads then organically into action which is infused by those values and desires.” In a related post, she explains the broad appeal of the Transition Movement.

LIVING BETTER

An Alternative to Open Space?: South African facilitator Allan Kaplan explains an intriguing and involved approach to facilitating groups dealing with complex situations, focused on continuous probing and provoking the group to greater and greater depths of collective insight. It appears to be quite a bit more hands-on than Open Space and other approaches to complex issues, and is based around a challenging series of questions each group must address, that emerges from the direction of the discussions and insights revealed. Based on the work of Goethe, it is called the Proteus approach. Anyone tried this? Thanks to David Derauf for the link.

A Potential Supreme Court Judge of Exceptional Quality: Jonathan Rauch provides a look at the nuanced  and savvy judgement of Elena Kagan and explains why he supports her despite her unwillingness to be a judicial advocate for gay marriage. The US Supreme Court might actually become functional and relevant again if it had more judges like her and fewer corporatist cronies and louts like Clarence Thomas.

Haitians Reject Monsanto Seeds: Haitians, although desperate for seeds in their storm- and earthquake-ravaged country, had the good sense to just say No to the “gift” of patented, invasive, chemical-dependent seeds of Monsanto, one of the world’s worst corporatist scourges. Thanks to Tree for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

What Happens When Cities and States Go Bankrupt: The thousands of municipalities and states in the US are now, mostly, either insolvent or bankrupt. Like the big banks, they will be considered “too big to fail” and will be rescued by a federal government that will print yet more trillions of dollars to fund the bailouts, until finally the world cries “enough” and refuses to accept unrepayable US debt any longer. In the meantime, services will be slashed, bills will remain unpaid for months at a time (as happened in the Soviet Union before its collapse), but, not by accident, taxes will not be raised to help cope with the deficits. The NYT explains why this can and will be allowed to happen.

Obama Condones Arbitrary and Criminal Torture of Canadian: The Obama administration has compounded the utterly disgraceful and contemptuous treatment of Canadian torture victim Maher Arar. The only thing more disgraceful is that the Canadian government puts up with this abuse of one of its citizens.

putangitangi female, from the camera of the remarkable photographer (and friend) pohangina pete

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Bonnie Stewart tells of relationships lost, and, perhaps, found. Her writing is amazing.

Artists, Raise Your Weapons: My latest post on Dark Mountain describes Derrick Jensen’s and Stephanie McMillan’s recent provocations for artists to become more activist, and to eschew all activities not directly focused at fighting against industrial civilization. And I was very pleased to be mentioned by the Dark Mountain founders on their blog, for my earlier post on the role of artists in re-presenting the collapse of civilization and imagining better ways to live.

Cirque Phenix mixes dance and circus acrobatics to dazzling effect. Thanks to Dawn Smith for the link.

Eric Whitaker’s virtual choir. Lots more of his great compositions here. Thanks to Tree for the link.

David Foster Wallace predicted in his novel Infinite Jest that the kind of wifi videophone functionality in the new iPhone 4 would fail to catch on, according to Jason Kottke. We’ll see. Thanks to Chris Lott for the link.

Two by humourist Andy Borowitz: BP develops technology to convert lies into energy; and Angered by steroid accusations Lance Anderson throws car at reporter

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Siona Van Dijk:

These days the present feels wrong. These days I feel wistful for the future, for moments of greater chaos when either we or our chlidren’s children will look back and laugh aghast at what we chose today to dramatize, at our naive concerns about the world, at our tragicomic headlines (so quaint! so misguided!) and fears. I feel wistful for a future as distant as we are from the ancients, one in which all that we consider known and true is wrong. i feel wistful for a future that contains nobody.

From Sheldon Kopp  (thanks to Tree for this quote and the one that follows): “The most difficult part of loving is learning to tolerate the helplessness we feel in the face of a loved one’s suffering.”

From Fred LaMotte: “Sometimes we aren’t called to heal a family member or a sea turtle, or to change them, or to lay on some slick enlightenment: but just to be present to their pain. This is difficult, because it requires humility.”

From Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things ( <– please watch the video — simple and stunning):

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Vermeer’s artist, from ibiblio.org

We are social creatures for a reason: It improves the likelihood of our survival. Together we can do things we could never accomplish alone. Culture, the shared beliefs and behaviours of a group of people working collaboratively, is powerful (though alas, that power, when co-opted by charismatic or psychopathic individuals, gangs or elites, can be terribly destructive and dangerous).

Just as we are part of a culture (and/or subcultures and/or “alternative” cultures), we are also a part of a greater whole, the organism of all-life-on-Earth, which has collectively self-regulated for more than a billion years to optimize the survival, diversity and joy of our lives.

And we are, in turn, made up of organisms, which have given us the illusion of being a single creature by evolving a collective “consciousness”. That collective consciousness is extremely useful, allowing the organisms that make up “us” to act “single-mindedly” (especially useful in times of fight-or-flight crisis).

So we are constantly processing three sets of messages that produce three different worldviews of who we are:

1. Messages from our component organisms, both conscious (directed through our brains) and subconscious (instinctive, programmed and somatic).
2. Messages from our culture, telling us who “we” are, what to believe and what to do.
3. Messages from the global organism (“gaia”) telling us how to adjust our behaviour and adapt to changes for the optimal well-being and balance of all life on the planet.

There is a huge amount of dissonance between these messages. For example, our component organisms (preoccupied with “our” own survival and procreation) might be telling us to make overtures to someone we find sexually attractive, while our culture might be telling us that such overtures are socially inappropriate in the circumstances and should be avoided, and while gaia is telling us that, in light of the horrific overpopulation of humans on our planet, we should not procreate and should be focused on rebalancing the world instead of preoccupied with our personal appetites.

When we fall in love, this dissonance is temporarily resolved in favour of the messages from our component organisms, as our body’s chemistry takes control of us. But only for a while – soon enough, the terrible dissonance returns.

For many of us, I think, this dissonance is paralyzing; it renders us ill, physically and mentally, and ultimately we get exhausted trying to handle it so we become desensitized, shut down. Such behaviour has been observed in rats subjected to severe protracted overpopulation stresses: the alphas become violent and sexually aggressive and hoard scarce resources, while the rest become mentally ill, withdrawn, and suicidal, and many eat their own young.

As a result, I think, when this dissonance becomes overwhelming we tend to dissociate, to start to retreat into and live in our own world, in our head, where we can ignore these conflicting messages and the unsettling and confusing behaviour of the increasingly anonymous crowd around us. We end up telling ourselves oversimplified stories about who we are, and what we’re supposed to do, and ignoring our instincts, our bodies, our senses, our emotions, our physical reality, and people with ideas and beliefs different from our own.

So when I walk down a city street, I don’t really “see” anyone, nor do they really see me. They are, I suspect, accepting as “true”, and engaged by, “news” that I see as nothing but lies and oversimplifications. They are, I tell myself, amused and entertained by “popular” books, music, films and “programming” that I find inane, cultural propaganda, or just plain wrong. The conversations and recreations that seem to enthrall and entrance them, I find meaningless, vapid, unforgivably stupid and a waste of time that, I think, should be spent dealing with the looming crises of our century.

Of course, I can’t really know. We are all, despite our a-part-ness, ultimately utterly alone. We may live in the same place, walk the same streets, but it is as if we all live in different universes.

How can we hope to achieve community when our physical neighbourhoods consist mostly of exhausted people with utterly irreconcilable and profoundly conflicted worldviews, living in private, separate worlds inside their heads? When we live in such an atomized society, how can we really know anyone else, enough to be able to perceive more than an idealized, abstract, outline view of who we think they are, or wish them to be?

And if we don’t know them, how can we care about them or what they believe or do? This is the crux of this dissociation, this disconnection from community and gaia and even our own bodies: we can only care about what, and who, we know.

And what hope is there in this isolated tumult to be able to find the right partners for the life we’re meant to live and the work we’re meant to do? What hope is there, really, to even inform others of what we know about how the world really works, or help them imagine a better way to live, when there is no shared context of reality, of community, and of caring to enable any meaningful communication to occur?

Over on Dark Mountain we’re debating our role as artists in re-presenting the world as it really is and imagining it as it might be. I recently posted an article there asking whether our role is merely to do our job as artists – to put our writing and art out there – or whether we have a responsibility to articulate it in a way that is accessible and understandable and hence actionable to the world.

But I wonder whether the latter is even possible when we’re all living in our own worlds, and whether the perception we have of being a part of social groups, the perceptions of intimacy and belonging and connection are just self-delusions, wishful thinking. With this technology that allows us to have a thousand “friends”, do we really have any at all, or is the friendship of others just something we convince ourselves we have because without it our lives would be unbearably lonely?

As I mention in my Dark Mountain post, Derrick Jenson in this month’s Orion berates us for not doing enough, and specifically for doing anything that does not contribute to the urgent task of trying to save our world from collapse, labeling such activities as “unforgivable”. In the article he cites an essay by cartoonist Stephanie McMillan that asserts:

In times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable… Let us not be the system’s tools or fools. Artists are not cowards and weaklings — we’re tough. We take sides. We fight back…

It is our duty and responsibility to create a fierce, unyielding, aggressive culture of resistance. We must create art that exposes and denounces evil, that strengthens activists and revolutionaries, celebrates and contributes to the coming liberation of this planet from corporate industrial military omnicidal madness.

Pick up your weapon, artist.

Once we’ve learned the truth about this terrible world, is it our responsibility to devote the rest of our lives, every waking moment of our lives, to the work of fighting to prevent it getting worse? Or should we give ourselves a break and allow ourselves time to simply enjoy the wonders of the world and life and love? How much time?

And how far does our responsibility extend beyond doing what we must, what we do well, and what we enjoy doing? What should we do about the billions lost in their own worlds of ignorance and denial and distraction who are not ready to listen or change and never will be until it’s too late, and who are, collectively and indifferently, killing the world we love, even as those who know better and who are listening are working to save it?

How can we let them go on? And if we can’t, how can we stop them?

Lots of questions, for each of us – activists, healers, artists, facilitators, innovators, researchers, builders and connectors – to answer, in our own way. And wonder, as we struggle to reconnect, and to acknowledge our complexity and the astonishing ability of all-life-on-Earth to self-organize in our collective self-interest, just what is possible, now.

Last weekend I attended the Transition Movement 2-day introductory training course in Vancouver, along with three fellow Bowen Islanders. We immediately and unanimously agreed to establish a “Bowen in Transition” chapter, affiliated with the Vancouver Transition network (called Village Vancouver).

For those who might want to know a bit more about the Transition Movement, here’s an overview of what we learned, along with a rough first cut at how we might adapt it to the needs of Bowen Island, where I now live.

The first part of the course provided the facts about our unsustainable energy, ecological and economic systems, and outlined the main elements of the ever-evolving processes and activities that communities around the world are including in their Transition programs. It also outlined why it is so important for communities to  have a Transition program. Here’s a draft of a graphic that we might use to explain the purpose and key elements of a Transition program to the community of Bowen Island:

(click on any of the graphics in this article to see them full size — these are working drafts only and have not been approved by anyone)

We learned how the nature and composition of the Working Groups in any particular community will evolve to meet the unique needs of that community, and why it is unwise to try to formalize or top-down manage the Transition process using the initiating team’s preconceptions of what’s best for the particular community.

Next, we talked about the Principles behind the Transition movement, and our facilitators provided some insights for Transition program initiators about how to get traction in the community (make it fun, keep to the main messages) and how to deal with skeptics and deniers (just tell them you respect their ideas and move on; don’t waste time arguing with those not ready to listen). Here are the principles:

A significant amount of time was spent on the Visioning process – specifically getting your community to envision what life would be like (and how it would be different) if a Transition and Resilience program were developed now. I’m a great believer in future state visioning and scenario development as a means of getting people to really understand the purpose and value of acting now, and I was encouraged that the latest book by the Transition movement organizers is mostly focused on this visioning, and specifically on developing a timeline for future events, and how the Transition program can address, mitigate and help adapt to these future events.

Here’s a first cut at a future state scenario for Bowen Island (by contrast, Bowen is currently one of the most unsustainable and least prepared places for the challenges we face, that I know of):

What is missing here, I think, is the alternative business-as-usual scenario (with a few black swan events thrown in) to demonstrate why inaction is not an option. I’m hoping we’ll do that in the Bowen program.

Another thing missing is a process to help people bridge from the necessary but insufficient personal actions they are taking now, to the more comprehensive approach the Transition program embodies. Here’s an example of how one UK Transition Town (sorry, I’m not sure which one) is building that bridge, as we might adapt it to Bowen’s plan; this is all about encouraging people to continue personal actions rather than simply telling them what they’re doing is not good enough (and risking turning them off):

There is lots more in the Training for Transition course, which I understand is now being taught in countries all over the world. Much of the remainder of the course is focused on (i) the “heart and soul” issue (dealing with, and helping others deal with, the grief and sense of hopelessness that overwhelms many when they realize what is at stake and how hard the task ahead is, and (ii) how to initiate a Transition program in your community, traps to avoid, how to engage others, and how to “trust the process” to run without centralized management or hierarchy.

There were four issues that came up for me during the training, that were either very surprising or remain unresolved in my mind on how to deal with them; if anyone has any experience or thoughts on them, I’d welcome your comments:

1. The degree to which the program depends on acceptance of the Myth of Causality (that changes in beliefs will necessarily produce changes in behaviour and hence changes in results achieved by the program). My concern is that in many cases in complex systems I don’t think belief change is sufficient to bring about behaviour change, nor is behaviour change always sufficient to bring about significantly different results from business as usual. For example, many people have come to accept that significant climate change risks lie ahead, but believe there is nothing they can do, or that it’s governments’ job to “fix” the problem.

2. The claim that there is a Tipping Point beyond which a community consensus on the validity of assumptions and actions is sufficient to basically blow away the skeptics and deniers, and produce broad-based support for even radical projects and programs based on those assumptions or actions. The numbers tossed out for this Tipping Point were 15-20% of the population. I’m not so sure this is enough. In the US, a majority favour universal publicly-run health care and publicly-funded election campaigns, among many other progressive ideals, but inertia, and campaigns by a small but wealthy and powerful minority, have prevented any of these widely-supported changes from occurring.

3. How do we deal with the enormous challenges that we face in any attempt to bring about radical change quickly:

• most people’s addiction to the status quo (oil use, consumption and debt),
• endemic learned helplessness, fostered by those in power,
• most people’s sheer “busy-ness”, fear of insolvency, fear of unemployment, and fear of “not having enough” that prevents them working on anything other than family commitments and their exhausting jobs (working mostly for unsustainable employers)
• the propensity of anyone whose power is threatened to act quickly and violently to stop the change (Charles Handy, business consulting guru, famously said “No one willingly gives up power”), and
• Pollard’s Law, that says that despite what we believe should be done, it is human nature to exhaust all our time and energy doing what we have absolutely no choice not to do, doing what’s easy, and doing what’s fun; most Transition work doesn’t qualify by those criteria, and so it remains for most just a good intention, even among those who “get” the need for Transition.

4. My astonished realization that most young people attending the Transition training do not seem to feel the degree of grief, pessimism, and hopelessness that pervades the “heart and soul” of the boomers (who tend to make up the majority of Transition leaders, from what I gather). What is behind this generation gap – boomers’ exhaustion and cynicism, or young people’s naivety?

I think these four issues are absolutely critical to the success of the Transition Movement beyond its current early stages. Nevertheless, the momentum the movement has is remarkable, and it’s catching on all over the globe.

More on the subject of Transition as we move forward with our Bowen program.

Thanks to the course leaders Lena Soots and Bill Aal, their support staff, and all my fellow Transition training participants, especially Bowen’s Carol MacKinnon, Don Marshall, and Bob Turner.

[This article is cross-posted from my blog at Dark Mountain. In my preamble to the other artists in the Dark Mountain network I wrote:

Over the last couple of weeks there has been a flurry of attention in the blogosphere given to the Dark Mountain project. This has been accompanied by some criticism of what we're doing, of what happened at the Festival, and some serious misunderstanding, I think, of the entire focus and purpose of Dark Mountain.

So I thought it might be useful to go back to the Manifesto and to re-articulate why we're here. I've done so in a new Dark Mountain blog post called This is Why We're Here.

My thesis is that the work of Uncivilization has three roles, each of them vital but distinct: Activists, Healers, and Artists. I believe, as the Manifesto says, our role is the Artist's role, and that when we get distracted from that we lose our focus and fail to do our best work.

I hope you find it a worthwhile contribution to Dark Mountain.]

.     .     .     .     .

THIS IS WHY WE’RE HERE

(cartoon by Hugh Macleod from GapingVoid.com)

Like many of you, I was drawn to the Dark Mountain project by and Paul and Dougald’s amazing Manifesto. I have recently come to realize that our civilization is beginning a collapse that will be complete by the end of this century, and no amount of technology, innovation, political action or global consciousness-raising is going to save it. As John Gray put it so well in Straw Dogs:

Political action has come to be a surrogate for salvation; but no political project can deliver humanity from its natural condition. However radical, political programmes are expedients — modest devices for coping with recurring evils. Hegel writes that humanity will be content only when it lives in a world of its own making. In contrast, Straw Dogs argues for a shift from human solipsism [belief in our aloneness and our disconnection from everything else]. Humans cannot save the world, but this is no reason for despair. It does not need saving. Happily, humans will never live in a world of their own making.

Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

My blog How to Save the World has been labeled by some readers as “doomer porn”, because it accepts this collapse as inevitable. Most of the world is not ready to acknowledge this, but in the founders and followers of Dark Mountain I feel I have found kindred spirits, people who have the understanding and intuitive sense to appreciate that most of what we are told (in school, by politicians and business, and in the media) are lies, and that we have a responsibility as artists to accept and represent — to hold a mirror — to our civilization’s inevitable collapse in this century.

My concern is that, because what Dark Mountain represents is so threatening to the worldview and belief systems of so many, we run the risk of trying to defend and argue what we intuitively know, and that such debate is not only useless (like the debate over abortion or veganism, it almost never changes anyone’s mind) but a drain on our creative energies, a diversion from what we, as artists and dreamers, do best: representing and chronicling our civilization’s collapse and, with our imaginations and perceptions, not our rhetoric, provoking the majority out of their ignorance, denial and lethargy of how the world really works and how we might find better ways to live. Daniel Quinn warned us of this, in Beyond Civilization, when he wrote:

People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

So now we are debating, with brilliant debaters like George Monbiot no less, about whether civilization can and should be saved. We are caught up in the arguments about whether we should devote more time to activism, even if it won’t “save” civilization, because we have a responsibility as knowledgeable, privileged members of our society to do what most lack the information or resources to do.

Have we forgotten the message of the Manifesto so quickly? Are we so easily unsettled by the attacks of the ignorant, the technophiles and the hopeless idealists that we lose focus on the whole, vital purpose of Dark Mountain before we’ve even begun our essential work? Here’s what Paul and Dougald told us:

We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it.

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so deep, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

This, dear brave comrades, is why we’re here. Not to engage in debate, in rhetoric, in analysis, in conceptual thinking, but to be artists — to re-present the world as we see it, in all its terrible beauty, when everyone else is seeing only manufactured illusion and hearing only relentless propaganda, and to imagine and present possibilities through our creative stories and art that most of our fellow humans, stunted from childhood imaginatively and creatively by civilization’s brutal and homogenizing systems, can no longer conceive of. Our responsibility is not to respond to doubters, deniers and apologists, but to show our weary human comrades that the world is not as they’ve been told, and that the only life they know is not the only way to live.

I have enormous respect for activists, and the courage and perseverance they show, every day, in their valiant struggle against empire, to speak truth to power. And I have enormous respect, too, for the healers, those like Joanna Macy and the hard workers in the alternative culture who work relentlessly to heal the anguish, the disconnection, the grief and the suffering that so many of us are afflicted with in this terrible world.

But that is their work, not ours. Ours is the third way, and we are the third force in the uncivilization revolution. Our work is, as Paul and Dougald say, the artistic response. Our work is to show the world, in our art and stories, as it really is, and to imagine it as it might be. Our work is the creative work of poetry, song, film, and story. The activists have the Transition Movement and the Permaculture Movement, the healers have the Work that Reconnects and the Intentional Communities movement.

And we, dear colleagues, have Dark Mountain. Let’s not forget why we’re here. Our work is at least as important as that of the activists and the healers. We must not get distracted. We have waited our whole lives for this moment, this responsibility, this realization, this charge. Remember who you are. This is why we’re here.

(remind you of someone you know? — photo posted anonymously on imgur)

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Return to Dark Mountain: The current structure of these Links of the Week/Month (starting each set of links with articles on “preparing for civilization’s end”) took form with my first post on the Dark Mountain project. I don’t know whether it’s coincidence or not, but this past week, just when I signed up on their Ning site and mentioned them in Friday’s post, there’s been a flurry of articles on Dark Mountain on many of the blogs I read. About a year ago, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine began a movement of writers and artists to tell the story of civilization’s current demise, and to imagine possibilities for the world that will follow, a world with a much smaller, Uncivilized human population. Their Manifesto is long, moving and brilliant, and their blogroll and the authors of the first edition of their journal are a who’s who of post-civ thinking.

They describe themselves as artists and as “curators”, rather than activists, and (unlike me) are unapologetic about that. In light of my recent declaration that I am at heart more artist and dreamer than activist and organizer, I’m going to be focusing more of my time on the kinds of things Dark Mountain is doing, so perhaps you’ll see me in the second edition of their journal.

Some of the recent responses to Dark Mountain’s message and activities from some of my favourite bloggers suggest Paul and Dougald might have lost a bit of focus (perhaps I could help? no, forget that):

• Ran Prieur is ambivalent about whether just art is enough: “Guard against passive hope”
• John Michael Greer warns to avoid magical thinking: “There is no ‘brighter future’ ahead” (thanks to Rick Wolff for the link)
• Vera Bradova lamented that the recent Dark Mountain gathering was male-dominated and too much presenter-audience focused (or as another attendee put it “white men with microphones”)

Should You Move Now Before the Crash?: My fellow “post-civilization” blogger Sharon Astyk has written a fascinating and well-considered piece on whether, in light of the coming collapse of our economy, energy and ecology, it makes sense to stay where you are or move now. She says you should move if:

1. Your mortgage is way more than the value of your house (especially since house values are likely to go lower)
2. You have young children or are elderly, and the people you’re closest to live far away
3. You have children you want to spend time with, or parents who need your care, living far away
4. You live in an extreme climate and are not adaptable to living without inexpensive heat, air conditioning, water, and imported food
5. You live in a community with people with mostly lousy (by your standards) values
6. You don’t think your children have a future where you live
7. You are planning on moving anyway (sooner is probably better than later)
8. You aren’t going to be happy or viable where you are if everything based on oil (transport, bought food, plastics, clothing, heat) gets much more expensive, or if your ‘commuter job’ disappears and you have to take (cheaper) employment locally
9. You live in an exurban area with no viable public transit, no locally produced food, and few close neighbours
10. You are not truly ‘native’ to where you live — never really fit in, called it home — and someplace else has always beckoned

If we all acted on this list, who would leave your community and who would come to take their place?

Collapse, Transition, Great Turning: Why Words Matter: Joanna Macy “Work That Reconnects” practitioner Carolyn Baker says we shouldn’t be afraid to use the word “collapse” in conversations, even when it may provoke awkward, angry or defensive responses.

More on Walking Away From Your Mortgage: Even the NYT is writing about people who have found new life by just stopping their mortgage payments — for people whose homes are worth less than their mortgage, it can take years for mortgage companies to navigate the huge foreclosure backups in paperwork and legal authorization, and many mortgage companies are now writing off the amount of mortgages in excess of current property value, just to keep from having to foreclose. About time.

UN Urges World to Go Vegan: For all the reasons I cited in my recent post, the UN says a move to global veganism is essential to forestall climate change. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian and three others (including Sharon Astyk, who thinks the UN is too dogmatic about this) for the link.

LIVING BETTER

Living Lightly: Pay attention and notice when you become upset, and then recognize your judgements and expectations, and let them go, says Leo Babauta. I’ve started trying to do this, and it doesn’t always work, but I am becoming much more aware of when I am upset (anxious, depressed, angry, frustrated, impatient — all the situational reactive emotions), and that in itself is helpful. Thanks to Chris Lott for the link.

Joe Bageant Zen: An apparently angry and depressed Joe Bageant rages at the machine, and then proffers some spiritual advice:

[By] right action in the moment [I mean to] locate one’s heart in that particular day. Then proceed toward the least harm one can discern to do, with full knowledge that we always do harm, whether we intend to or not (the world is full of subtle unintended violence). Eliminate whatever suffering in sentient beings one encounters… Compassion is sublime. Besides, this is what the heart is designed for — to serve as a compass for the spirit.

Sculpting Your Own House: Joseph Diliberti built and decorated his own clay house for free, and says anyone can do it (photo above by Allen J. Schaben from LA Times.) Thanks to Tree for the link.

Ten Reasons You Should Start Running Barefoot: Take a look at the explanation from a Harvard prof about why landing on the front of your foot is healthier and more natural than landing on your heel.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Corporations Sue Online Commenters for Telling the Truth: In an ominous development, some of the millions of overpaid worse-than-useless lawyers in the US have started helping corporations launch frivolous, intimidating lawsuits against anyone who criticizes their client company’s products or services online. So much for free speech.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Das Rad (The Wheel): Two rock piles witness human civilization. Subtitled. Thanks to Chris Corrigan (and three others) for the link.

Beatbox Revival: A hit Swedish song brings back the 1970s beatbox. Then, of course, YouTube makers had to show that you can make all those beatbox sounds with your own body. And finally, thanks to a Swedish phone company you can operate your own beatbox online. Great, silly fun.

Little Dee, Second Time: *Sigh* Chris Baldwin’s heart-warming coming strip Little Dee has ended. But you can read it all from the start. Read it to your grandchildren.

First Peoples’ Language and Community Map: For the area now called British Columbia. A wealth of information about Northwest indigenous peoples, their language and culture, prior to the theft of their land by Europeans.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Michael Meade (excerpt from The World Behind the World); I stumbled on this in an art gallery in Ashland Oregon:

So-called reality is the child of an ongoing love affair between time and eternity. Time begins in “all eternity” and returns there when it needs to be replenished. It only takes a little imagination to break the linear, literal spells of time and arrive back at the Once Upon a Time that is the origin of the soul to begin with.

Not just citizens of the world, not merely statistics without inherent meaning, humans are living metaphors, bodies and spirits conjoined with the glue of the soul and shaped by invisible threads of imagination and story. We cannot rescind this ancient and immediate heritage of imagination, for it is buried in the bones and laced into the body cell by cell. We are imaginative beings doused with eternity before our eyes ever opened upon this earth. From the beginning we see more than we can express and our last words fail to conclude the stories that live through us.

For we are lived through by energies, ideas and emotions that flow from the unseen world behind this world. We are overloaded by our own dreams, saddled with unusual fates and driven by unseen destinies. Were it not for the gravity that rests in our bones and vital organs, we would take flight. Were it not for the tangled relationships of past, present and future, we would escape every atmosphere and become the Unseen.

Despite the collapse of the immediacy of mystery into the confines of history, this down-to-earth world is also a mythic place, an ongoing production fashioned and staged by eternity. Despite the pressing problems and mounting concerns, the issue isn’t so much saving the planet as saving humanity from itself again. When times become dark and difficult the issue for those on earth comes down to living authentically, to authenticating the purpose and meaning already present in each soul.

No solitary idea, no matter how great, no single notion or shared belief can shift the weight of the world towards a meaningful future; but the accumulated vitality of many lives lived more fully might become a meaningful makeweight in the balance between time and eternity. Strange as it may seem, individual consciousness forms the makeweight, and living out the hidden meanings within life helps to balance the weight of the world. Each living being wrapped around an invisible, eternal thread, each a story breaking out of the wall of time to sing its own unfinished song.