74 thoughts on “On the correct management of despair”

1. For me, it is in the “things that matter” that you talk about – love and work and following that heart-feeling towards them – where I find hope. The despair is important and really an honest response to all this, but there’s a wild hope too in the un-worded earth… which I see reflected in the hearts of those who love and are loved, and in the words of your daughter too…
   I myself felt ignited to fight the blandness and the Bluewaters by reading your excellent “Real England”… and I will try to do it in the way I do things… that is the best we can do :)

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2. Thanks RIma. You are right. And when I do find hope, I find it in the small things, and in working with nature, whether it by scything the grass or whittling a stick. Things that can be grasped. Your art, for me, works on that level.

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3. Is what you speak of despair, or a greater sense of awareness? A different way of viewing the world and what people are doing to it? The Dark Mountain Project is attractive and appealing (to people like me at any rate!) precisely because it does not shy away from issues that are despairing. Through despair we must have courage to apply meaning, and this meaning is that what exists now cannot and should not be saved just because it is what we have now. Despair is not the absence of meaning, but the absence of courage. I do not think you are lacking in courage to have established the Dark Mountain Project.

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4. Great post Paul. Direct, honest and to the point. I also have a daughter. She is 6 and of course, like you, I am concerned for her future – for all our futures.

   However, between hope and despair there is another possibility, an inner stillness, a silence at our core that we all possess but that this frantic world veils from us. This space, beyond thought, beyond the agitations of hope and despair, is our birthright though we have forgotten how to go there, easily and naturally. Our despair is as much to do with this loss of inner silence as it is with the loss of whatever we mourn in the outer world. At this time when we face the oncoming rush of collapse and crises we more than ever need a personal (but ideally shared) practice of being in this space. We need to nurture an inner ecology with just the same concern we have for the world around us.

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5. I don’t have an answer. I have a suggestion. Sorry if this sounds a bit “self helpy” “cognitive behavioural therapy”-ish:

   write down what you believe. In simple english. Try not to say anything that isn’t strictly true. Examine the words. Be precise. Ask yourself “how do i know this?”

   the best antidote to despair that I know of is reason.

   you are overly pessimistic. But still you are right about many things. you need to reign in some of it.

   …maybe.

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6. I also doubt capitalism in is current form can persist. Something should change- and it might do so, well. come on 70 years ago half of europe was run by nazis! theres been no war in western europe in over 50 years! these are good things!

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7. actually that last post was shit. sorry. first one better.

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8. I think, Paul, that this is the key existential question of our generation. We are inescapably part of this civilisation and yet we are fully aware of the scale of destruction that it causes. How can you not despair? Especially if you have no faith in orthodox religion or the pick’n'mix spiritualities of the ‘new age’. I think yours and Dougald’s willingness to acknowledge this despair, to look down, is what drew many if not most of us to DM. Not looking for answers, for there are none, but at least hoping for solidarity, a chance to sit by the fire with others who also know how dark it is beyond the flames.
   That could easily sound glib, and I know at times solidarity does not console, but I also know that it’s one of the few things we can do; and I do believe it mostly helps, even if it’s only to share the grim humour intrinsic to the absurdity of these times…:]

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9. I had a similar day of despair myself, as happens from time to time. I live in a city and it seems to me that the man-made landscapes we have constructed to surround and support ourselves, full of concrete and the roar of engines, are the epitome of the dream we live in, separating us from the real world and the environmental consequences of our actions. The dream is seductive and persuasive, and is often difficult to resist, but what I find most frustrating is that even when awake and aware I feel like however I live and whatever I do, my actions are a token futile effort compared to the scale of the damage we are doing.

   My hope comes from watching the weeds growing between paving stones and in walls, surviving in the niches and on the margins. Nature can be resilient and so can the good in humanity. Every forest starts with a seedling…

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10. I feel the same way and appreciate your homesty in admitting this. I work to try and mitigate the despair but I feel more and more that my efforts are futile. Occasionally I feel we have achieved something but more often than not money takes over, lack of funding, budget cuts, domestic budgets drving people back to the supermarket. Projects are driven by bureaucracy which sucks the life and energy out of them – I don’t have children and I’m glad but I do have step-grandchildren and I worry for them.

    I do however find respite in the English countryside still – I live in Somerset and still see blue butterflies, stoats, badgers (although the thought of the cull breaks my heart), buzzards and dragonflies. Everything comes to an end eventually and the planet will survive even if we take many species down with us. Unbearable things happen to people all the time and I’m one of the lucky ones so far. If I was living in Libya, Iran, Burma or Iraq my life would be so much more difficult and maybe I wouldn’t have the time to worry about this. I’m trying to accept the global loss and just enjoy my time on earth in the same way you make the most of the last days with someone you love who is dying in front of you. All we can do is tread as lightly as we can and encourage others to do the same.

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11. I feel the same about the children. A mix of amazement at their ideas and those unbearable questions that always come at night, about their future. My daughter came up with the idea of the Unextinction Machine (http://unextinctionmachine.wordpress.com/about/) which could combat the loss of biodiversity by churning out creatures as fast as possible. She knows it won’t work, that it’s just art. She also knows that somehow machines have been the problem not the solution. You could say that it’s typical of a naive childish inventiveness, and that it’s not far removed from the mentality that thinks cloud-seeding, nuclear power and widgety eco-gadgets will solve the problem. But there in the grasping at an idea, a ‘what if’, there is a path. The machine might not work, but the empathy that stirred the idea and the creativity that brought it to life are something. We have to invent our machines that might fail. We have to keep learning skills that we won’t be very good at. We have to write our books even if they make us sad.

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12. I feel the same despair regularly. I stopped trying to think of ways of fighting climate change early on in my teens, and concentrated on trying to make myself as numb as possible. Quite successfully really.
    But for years now I’ve been working on traveling in the opposite direction, and my sense of incredulous despair is getting worse and worse. I love being in nature, but now every time, I feel so sad about what is being lost: the wildness that I may never know again. And my children will not even know what it is that is missing. I suppose that makes me feel a little better – they don’t know. There is still a lot that is beautiful in life. Hell, even a dying sun is beautiful. And they will make the best of things. But I too hope that one day all the lights will go out, almost as much as I hope all the cars will stop.
    And I now know something that you also clearly know: despair is no reason not to try and make things better.

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13. I love this post, Paul.
    In the deeper darknesses of that despair, there’s a great power for you. Down in the murky underbelly of it all, you’ll find a gift, I’ll warrant. The transformation that comes from going through the bottom of the despair is immense – the mystics knew it and the psychotherapists have names for it and all the shamans there have been are well acquainted with it. The navigation of it isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, but you’ve got the resources, for sure, from what I’ve gleaned – go deep: in the way through that dark underworld, that’s where things change from being an activist to being an agent of power. Seems to me you’re doing a great job already. Hold steady: keep your face to the rock: there’s light, but it’s far below and a different kind of light. Power to you.

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14. Heartfelt thanks to you Paul for writing it as you felt it. I think the same way about the machine. I will be happy – as I’m sure most of us on here would be – to be proven wrong and for things to turn around before they get even worse, but I can’t see it. All I can say is sometimes I let the pain about it all wash over and through me completely. For a time. And then I always come back to the bits of beauty that are still around and inside. Seeking them out wherever possible. And looking to the non-human world and human solidarity. As you say, the simple stuff. And I’m always reminded, when nothings seems to help, of Alastair McIntosh’s idea that we all may have to be very good planetary hospice workers, if that is what will be asked of us.

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15. The Peace of Wild Things

    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.

    — Wendell Berry

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16. Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Paul. Despair, or perhaps the die back, felt like a key theme of DM2011 to me, not always voiced but emerging spontaneously, like the tears and welling up in Zoe’s stories workshop. John Berger (see, for example, his “The Spectre of Hope” film with Sebastiao Salgado http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8413022422665609737#) might be helpful here: he does not see “hope” as being the same as “optimism” or some kind of blind faith. Instead, it’s more about facing the horrors and keeping them present, rather than casting them out of our minds. Not being in denial, keeping “a flame burning in the darkness”, as he puts it, creates the possibility (although perhaps little more than that) that things may change. This “bearing witness”, and trying to do the right thing, is perhaps all we can do.

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17. As most above have said, thanks for this, Paul. That others are openly talking about the difficulty of what to do with this despair, and how to fashion some kind of positive agency (I don’t want to say hope) amidst it, is what brought me to DM. I love that there is a tribe of people here trying to whittle some kind of vessel for it. None of the contributions entirely settle this for me or seem convincing, because I keep coming back to the knowledge that what we’re in is unprecedented: an eroding of the very ecological foundations from which all past meaning has been derived. We can learn about how past cultures have forged meaning from their place in their landbase (as Jensen or Abram might put it). But to learn about these for me leaves the aching sensation that we have less to work with than past cultures. The erosion of ecologies is full spectrum and it is hard to locate any underlying stability capable of sustaining any new stories that can help us navigate this. That’s my despair.

    But that the contributions above are not just prescriptions, pep talks or counselling, but are rather a kind of communing – well, that for me is what I’m clinging to and what, since Unciv Fest #2, has been sustaining me and giving me a sense of where meaning might be sought.

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18. Gavin – thanks for this. Your contribution gets to the bottom of much of what I have been feeling but have found hard to pin down. You are precisely right, I think, when you say:

    ‘… what we’re in is unprecedented: an eroding of the very ecological foundations from which all past meaning has been derived. We can learn about how past cultures have forged meaning from their place in their landbase … But to learn about these for me leaves the aching sensation that we have less to work with than past cultures. The erosion of ecologies is full spectrum and it is hard to locate any underlying stability capable of sustaining any new stories that can help us navigate this.’

    The impossibility of locating an underlying stability is what brings it home hardest. I often think that the solution is to get hold of some land, work it, imbue it with meaning, draw meaning from it, learn about its history and mythos. I hope I can do this. But even that, somehow, seems to have an emptiness in it – that lack of an underlying stability. That lack of belief that the solidity is there anymore to sustain us.

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19. Despair is part of it all. We have to feel it and we have to acknowledge it. Part of the problem, in fact probably the main problem we, as a species, face is the denial of despair. We wipe away the tears, we apologise for making a fuss, we keep calm and we carry on. Or we pretend nothing’s gone wrong in the first place – that all our actions are fuck-up free. That there are no consequences.

    But when we stop, if we stop, and we look down and we turn and look back over our shoulder at the wake of our actions, ofcourse we despair. It is the natural way of things.

    But I think we have forgotten how to despair properly, how to grieve, we have forgotten how to wail and roar like the wind when the storms come. We are told it is unseemly, improper, a sign of weakness maybe, i don’t know, different myths ring true for different people… We think that despair is a bad thing, it will consume us, destroy us, but in reality pretending that it is not there is the very thing that will lead to our destruction.

    We’re about to have a new baby any day now (we have one bright shining four year old boy already). And now, another life in amongst the billions on this already too crowded planet, is soon to be birthed and I am filled with joy at the prospect, I’m brimming with love at the moment. What is this? Is this hope? Hope for the future? A false hope?

    I certainly don’t expect our children to fix it all, to clear up our shit. I know this new soul will not be the messiah as surely as the latest technological whizzbang genius invention will not deliver us from evil, but yet I am full of joy and love and, yes, hope for the future, perhaps because they do not see it, they do not envisage a future, they live solely in the now, but with a wider awareness than we manage, an animism that we have somehow had severed – a cord that we have had cut too soon.
    When I look at my shining blue eyed boy running down the woods to the field where the blackberries grow,I feel that that change of consciousness, that ‘voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living’ is possible. Because it is not a step into the unknown, it is a return to the innate. Regardless of the state of the ecological landscape around us, in the child’s eyes there is a stability.
    I believe so much at the moment in the wisdom of the children, as a way to get closer to our own knowing. I’m put in mind of something the anthropologist Hugh Brody talked of in a workshop I was at once. He had visited with an indigenous tribe that lived in a shanty town on the outskirts of a major conurbation (I think it was San Paulo – though I maybe wrong). And he asked them how they as a society were able to subsist with their culture and ways of life intact when they lived so close to the city. And they told him of how every morning the whole community would gather together. And the elders would ask the pre-pubescent children to sing their dreams. And on the basis of what they sang, the elders would decide what would be done that day…

    If we look around the campfire at our fellow mountaineers, we can see that this shift of consciousness is happening. On an individual basis. And society is only ever a collection of individuals. We have to stop visualising society as a separate indomitable force (is this just another symptom of our separation form nature, from each other, from ourselves?)

    We have a duty to our children, as we do to our kith and kin, to educate. Educate in the true sense of the word. From the latin to ‘draw out from’ not to impose upon. We want to draw out that inner wisdom. We all know everything because we are all part of everything. A true conversation where we listen to each other, where we share our thoughts is an education, where we are encouraged to draw out from ourselves what we think, what we feel. Is it a coincidence that the increase in destruction of our planet from capitalist industrialisation coincided with the growth of state-led education? We hand over so many responsibilities to this illusionary bigger than us society. We as individuals must take it back, come together, share skills, stories, magic, the warmth of fires, the warmth of each other standing together making up the whole.

    That is why i see hope and love at the moment, but the despair is part of it, a natural and vital part. It is real, but so is the hope. One does not deny the other.

    I was about to apologise for going on bit. We all have things we apologise for – crying, feeling sad, talking, writing too much! Perhaps it’s time to stop apologising – to stop believing other people don’t want to hear – and to talk of how we’re feeling with clarity and honesty in amongst the snot and the tears and the moans. Because that’s real. And that breaks down the barriers of separateness that make us all feel so powerless. So thank you Paul for sharing your despair – it gives me hope!

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20. I’ve always found that despair is the home of the phoenix.

    I think you’re overestimating the strength of The Machine, Paul. Its engine might be ‘constructed from greed and ambition and restlessness’, but it’s held together by laws – and it’s actually very fragile, because many of those laws have become detached from the principles they were based on and only continue through habit. If we poke it in the right place, it’ll fall apart – the challenge is in having something ready to replace it.

    As an example, the whole problem of access to land (in Britain at least) has its roots in a tiny flaw in inheritance law; the fact that a landowner’s power to bequeath land is regarded as a right, which he can exercise for private benefit, rather than as a responsibility delegated to him by the state, which he should exercise for the common good. That simple shift of perspective, if the courts could be brought to it, would open the way for recognition in law of a right to land – because the sticking point at the moment is the fact that all land is already owned by someone. The present custom came about at a time when law existed to maintain the division between ruler and ruled, and it’s so obviously incompatible with modern values that, if it’s attacked from the right angle, nobody’s going to seriously try and defend it.

    There are other examples – I’ve blogged about this one (http://uncivilisation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/passing-on), and one or two others, on the Uncivilisation site – where small but fundamental changes to the system, in areas where it’s highly vulnerable, would have huge consequences which could transform the social landscape over the course of a generation or so. But we do have to be able to offer an alternative; to be able to say in some detail how a genuinely fair and sustainable society should operate.

    Sorry if this clashes with your mood!

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21. Thank you for this. I have been struggling with despair a lot lately in regards to the future of the natural world. As much as I worry about my own survival if our society collapses, I would still prefer such collapse if it stopped the Machine and let the earth return somewhat to pre-industrial norms. I definitely don’t see humanity doing this voluntarily. In the meantime, I try not to let despair sap my energy to do what I can – live well and sustainably, care for the land and the spirits of the land where I can, be a voice calling for a different way of life.

    I do think we need to acknowledge this perfectly reasonable reaction to the state of the world, though, and make room to really express it, let it out, so that we can find the strength to keep going.

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22. Great blog post.

    I think there are many of us who share the same sentiments and vision, it’s just a matter of time until the majority of us reach our threshold and drive in our Picket Pins.

    It will be then that this insane culture will be destroyed before it destroys what little is left.

    That is my hope.

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23. “I wonder whether to try and escape to some hill farm with my family. But I couldn’t afford it. A tiny cottage with a small field attached would set me back a quarter of a million pounds, if I had it. ”

    The way to do it is in collaboration with several families. That makes it more manageable financially, and helps with the labour to run the place. The way to do it is to set up a housing association. There’s a formal legal procedure for doing that, which produces a legal instrument which then owns the property.
    Bit like a charity or a trust.

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24. Paul, thanks yet again for this.

    I do not think that despair needs to be managed, what it mostly needs is to be articulated – otherwise it curdles and poisons.

    I was a Green Party activist from 1986 to around 2005/6, in London and Wales, making a huge effort to make a difference. Even before this work began I was in despair, and the more I learned and saw the more that despair grew.

    In 2007 (see below), I began to tell the truth, as I saw it, which necessarily involved parting company with the Green Party. I have persisted with this (see further below), as an activity that feels to me as though it is of considerable importance, even though I continue to circle mistrustfully around my own motivations. Do I need to make futility and powerlessness into a kind of activism? How sick would that be?

    What I can say is that I feel a lot better than I did – more energetic, more robust, more jolly. More appreciative of the moment and the day.

    Where despair means renouncing lies and deceptions and admitting to yourself what you really see, it is a profoundly positive force. Maybe good things can come out of embracing this process – there is certainly nothing healthy to be gained by trying to avoid it.

    best wishes, Dave Bradney

    ———————————————-

    Published in Resurgence magazine, Nov/Dec, 2007

    Spinning over the edge
    YOUR heroic attempt to spin the end of the world, by rebranding the point of no return as “the point of return”, was worthy of New Labour (Resurgence 243). Realistically, there is not the slightest chance that any of the measures you espouse might be happening soon on a global scale. Least of all the “profound introspection” into the human psyche.
    Have you not noticed that every new symptom of the impending collapse is met with more scapegoating and displacement activity? The deckchairs on the Titanic just get rearranged faster and in more elaborate patterns. We are like the cartoon character that wanders off the edge of the cliff: the only reason we stay suspended in midair is that we haven’t yet realised that we must fall.
    The late Kurt Vonnegut believed that humanity’s evolutionary flaw was that it had become too intelligent, but I think he got it slightly wrong. As a species we have become dependent on intelligence, but we have not been able to develop it quickly enough. Intelligent beings do not wreck their own life-support systems.
    There is one last thing that people who have been activists could try. We should all announce, together, that we are stopping, because it is too late to make any appreciable difference. If we withdraw our reassuring clamour for change, and instead maybe organise a “Wake for the Planet”, that just might make people in general sit up and start to think and feel for themselves.
    Dave Bradney, Ceredigion, Wales

    Below was sent to the Guardian on 4.5.11, not published of course

    Future unstoppable
    GEORGE Monbiot has finally seen the light (Let’s face it: none of our environmental fixes break the planet-wrecking project, 3 May). What we have been struggling to avert or to overcome is irredeemable and unstoppable. The worst, or most of the worst, is going to happen after a while, whether we like it or not.
    I own a rather lovely coffee-table book, replete with mouth-watering photographs illustrating good and bad environmental and social situations, authored by the editors at that time of The Ecologist magazine. The title is “5000 Days to Save the Planet”. Five thousand days is about 15 years. The book was published in 1990.
    In December 2009, the UK Met Office’s Avoid programme concluded that it was “almost impossible” to keep the rise in global surface temperatures below 2C unless carbon emissions begin to fall – that’s *begin to fall* mark you, not begin to rise less quickly – within a decade. Above 2C, or sooner for all anyone really knows, we are looking at the massive release of methane from the tundra and the ocean beds, initiated by and initiating positive feedback mechanisms.
    Meanwhile we are well into the third great species extinction on this planet, the first one that will have itself been created by a species. Underlying the specific explanations for why some species are declining, the general mechanisms are the annexation of more and more surface area for exclusive use by human beings and the spread of generalised environmental degradation. These effects correlate closely with population size, and so the continuation of our great extinction can be read from global population projections.
    Think steering a supertanker. Think momentum. Think inertia. And apply those concepts not just to vast geophysical systems but also to global social systems and movements. We cannot steer away from disaster quickly enough, even if we were to decide right now that we should. We are nature’s first endangering species. We are a failed evolutionary experiment, if intelligence was the Big Idea that nature was “trying out”.
    When I was a Green Party activist I was fond of arguing that Green politics was the only type of politics based on truth, so of course I would welcome a shift to “an honest environmentalism”. However, I fear that the Green movement’s massive vested interest in being able to provide “solutions” and “reassurance” and “alternatives” makes this most unlikely. Reputations, self-images, incomes, careers and the continuation of of institutions are all at stake.
    But what interests me most is this – how should our behaviour change if and when we do accept that some survival threshold has definitively been crossed? Can we just go on mouthing the same nannying platitudes, as the people we are addressing trudge on down their ecological dead-end? Or shall we all take the chance to finally learn something about ourselves, before we are swept away by nature’s wrath?
    Dave Bradney, Llanrhystud, Ceredigion

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25. @ Malcolm

    “The present custom came about at a time when law existed to maintain the division between ruler and ruled, and it’s so obviously incompatible with modern values that, if it’s attacked from the right angle, nobody’s going to seriously try and defend it.”

    Do you seriously believe that ?

    “Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.” G. Orwell.

    I think that if you believe that the people who own most of the land will not fight to the last inch to keep it, then you don’t understand how power works in Britain…. they aren’t interested in your ‘modern values’ !

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/who-owns-britain-biggest-landowners-agree-to-reveal-scale-of-holdings-443956.html

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328270/A-Britain-STILL-belongs-aristocracy.html

    http://www.who-owns-britain.com/

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26. @ Dave Bradney

    Well said. I grew up at Aber, so knew Llanrhystud well. Now I’m about 30 miles south. Want to set up some sort of West Wales DM thingee ?

    I wonder how much of the despair is feeling sorry for one’s self ? which is not the same thing as feeling sorry about what we are doing to the planet…

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27. When Eugene Gendlin looked at what made therapy work, it was the ability of the person to listen to the ‘felt sense’ of how they carried their problem or challenge, how it truly felt, and wait upon an image that allowed it to shift. The shift might be, usually was, very small but it could only come out of bodily honesty, no illusion (or easy acceptance of the therapist’s cute interpretation).

    You cannot start real navigation of your circumstance from anywhere else…

    My small glimpse of what might be hoped for is, paradoxically, a visit to a tragic disaster – the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, primarily emptied of people (though older folk have returned). It is so abundantly resilient, cleared of us, nature is resurgent: you catch a glimpse of the underlying fabric, waiting to be left in peace.

    If we can over-estimate the machine, we can under estimate the sheer living of life (I suppose this underpins Robinson Jeffers) and, hopefully, through the other side of the wreckage, some of us, chastened, might be able to find their place in a renewed abundance.

    But navigating the breakdown begins in an honest facing of our reality, and in small steps…

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28. I loved this blog. Thanks for sharing, Paul. I’m pretty much with Rima on this. And Winston Churchill (on this occasion): Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy!

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29. @ Wolfbird

    “I think that if you believe that the people who own most of the land will not fight to the last inch to keep it, then you don’t understand how power works in Britain…. they aren’t interested in your ‘modern values’ !”

    I don’t think this is the right place for a debate on the issue of landownership, but I will clarify that point.

    I’m quite sure that the current owners of land will try all sorts of arguments to maintain the status quo, but I doubt that they will seriously try and argue that the present custom of inheritance has any basis in Right. They basically have two options; one would be an explicit repudiation of Right; the other would be a pragmatic argument that no other system would work.

    I said ‘if it’s attacked from the right angle’; that would have to include having both a viable alternative to offer, and a strategy for migrating from the current system with the minimum of disruption. I don’t regard either of those requirements as being beyond our reach.

    As I said, I don’t think this is the right place for a debate on the issue, but if you want to go into it further, feel free either to comment on my blog post on the subject (http://uncivilisation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/passing-on), or to start a discussion on it on the forum.

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30. Wonderful, Paul. More despair, not less. Despair is the glorious end of hope. The final shaking off of the burden of hope. The idealogues of progress and consumption have always hated despair. They have succeeded in chaining it to idea of weakness. Yet despair is an empowered state – one of the most powerful modes of being that a human can achieve. At this most singular point in history I believe it is the only driving force capable of producing the men and women who can turn our world around. Despair should be cultivated, studied, admired. We are all amateurs at despair. We feel disheartened and sad and we think we are in despair. But we have many levels of enlightenment to go before we can achieve genuine despair. Then we will have people who can go out into the world and turn it away from its present madness. The sight of them will be terrifying. The sound of them will turn the spectacle-hungry onlookers to stone.

    You are just here looking in the right direction , brave mountaineers. But the truly,greatly,completely despairing are needed. And time is short.

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31. If you hope, you get despair – isn’t that the case? For me it is. Its the same with anger, a consequence of expectation. People spend a lot of time excusing their negative emotions because they refuse to see the cause is the positive ones. You get excited – price – you get depressed.

    Not that the solution is the suppression of emotion, of course, replacing a hot emotional insanity with a cold mental one. The solution is letting go of thoughts and emotions entirely.

    The problem is that most people perceive themselves as their thoughts and emotions. The idea of letting go of thought and emotion is insanity and death. Thought thinks that not-thinking is a state of madness, and emotion feels that absence of emotion is suicide.

    And that’s why the world as it is must end. This world is a self, and selves die. Why is it depressing that someone dies? Because you think they’re going to live forever! You hope they’re going to make it!

    What is coming, is death and lots of it – the loss of everything. And the only antidote to death is absence of thought and emotion, letting it all in. Either you learn this now – as an experience, not as a fact to agree with – or you go through the horror of it when the fall comes.

    The ending world, the almighty horror we’re falling towards is nothing but an opportunity to experience life as it is, without the distortion of abstraction, belief, memory, hope, desire – any of it. Just the naked fact, as empty as the pure perceiving I when the realisation comes that this really is IT, I am dying. NOW.

    Selves die. The experience is sad and awful – but also remarkable and speechlessly not wrong.

    Its only agony while you look away, into your thoughts and emotions, into your hopes and dreams. Turn fully towards what is, and there is no death.

    All the best,

    Darren

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32. Paul, I think this is the subtle element that detractors of Dark Mountain fail to grasp: despair is not pessimism, and the eternal serving up of hope, by both mainstream environmentalists, progressives and capitalists alike, is at best a cloying idiocy, since it prevents looking at things in a clear-sighted way, and at worst a perversion of being just human beings. To examine the wound is hardly to deny either its existence or its pain; to pretend we are well when our health is almost totally compromised is the true irrationality, whereas the former response is sober, thoughtful and brave.

    Some of the criticism, or rather, quite a bit of it, that is directed at ‘deep ecologists’ is that we somehow dovetail with the cultural pessimism of the Right in the 1920s and 1930s. I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time repudiating that facile association (even though I have already seen stuff that purports to discern links between the far-Rght and the anti-NPPF lobby); instead, I think we can resolutely claim that different banner, cultural despair. When we say of somebody “I despair of you’, it means that we have given up on the prospect of that person ever ‘getting it’ – it does not mean that we have given up on anything else. We have despaired, not of ourselves, not of humanity (which the pessimists have done) but of the Machine ever having any solutions. We are immediately thrown back on ourselves, for every material and metaphysical resource thereafter. That vista is indeed daunting, overwhelming, and in that terrible moment when we understand the enormous effort this new life might require to realise, at that moment we may erroneously equate our cultural despair with a sense of our own weakness and unpreparedness. The two are different; cultural despair is for me a way of viewing things as they are, and it could almost become a technique, like ‘wild writing’. Our sense of personal aloneness is however soon over, as that solidarity which others have already spoken of, makes its presence known. The pessimists, those who give up on humanity, devise further instrumental solutions, and continue therefore to mesh with the Machine, with their own mechanistic philosophies. I think we precisely return to humanity (“there is no nature without people”) and are trying to recover what will allow our being mere humans flourish again. Bearing this distinction in mind, we should clamour for more despair!

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33. I admire Derrick Jensen’s work, and have given “Endgame” to many of my friends, but given the actions he advocates, when he asks whether anyone believes that this society will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living, I often wish he’d ask the followup question:

    Does anyone believe that this society will undergo an *involuntary* transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?

    If not, then as many have said above, perhaps the best we can do is to sit honestly with that, share it, and see what course of action feels most appropriate. As Rilke put it,

    “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”

    Love.

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34. Paul

    Just got to this. I am spending the weekend in my new home in Pembrokeshire with my visiting youngest daughter – aged 25 – who is beautiful and hopeful and possibly naive. She wants to share the optimism that it will be all right, but somehow knows in her bones that it won’t. And that makes her anxious. Very anxious sometimes. At some stage in her life she too will feel that despair and she wants to fend it off. I don’t really blame her – but it won’t change anything.

    Most people are like that and I used to. Now I find optimism distinctly depressing. As a psychotherapist the thing I love most about my clients is their existential realism. The people who choose to come and see me have an instinct for despair that is, in my opinion, psychologically healthy in the circumstances.

    What drew me to Dark Mountain (YOUR vision) was the inherent existential realism of it – it seemed to mirror – from a cultural and narrative place – the things I was experiencing in my therapy room. Its the new version of ‘the personal is political’.

    At Dark Mountain 2011 I had a very brief conversation with you about doing something about the need for a new psychology – an ‘un-psychology’ – that could underpin the movement. I think its really needed, because nothing in psychology at the moment – even the eco-psychology movement really validates despair. Its a denial of reality – or at least denies the one emotion that might focus our creativity and stories in a necessary different direction.

    My psychological journey started with my daughter 25 years ago, and it was her future, but also her inherent nature that convinced me that there was something psychological that had to be said that wasn’t so bloody optimistic – but somehow capture the depth and beauty of her nature. It was her soul that led me to integration of words, politics, activism and psychology that seems the only way forward in carving out a future for us all.

    And that might, in the end be, hopeful.

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35. Hi Paul,

    Thanks for the discussion.

    I’ve just finished reading Deep Green Resistance and, with it fresh in my memory, I can’t help but think of what their thoughts would be regarding your will “to get hold of some land, work it, imbue it with meaning, draw meaning from it, learn about its history and mythos”

    One relevant quote is: “the murder of my planet is not a story: it’s an ongoing outrage that demands committed action, and now.”

    And regarding withdrawal and despair: “Perhaps the biggest problem with withdrawal as a strategy now is that civilization is global. Where are you going to go? Where do you think you can escape climate change, for example? And what real effect will withdrawal have on the dominant culture? There is no shortage of labor, so huge numbers of people would have to withdraw in order to make a difference. Not buying things will not end the capitalist economy, and refusing to pay taxes will not bring down the government.

    If you did have enough people to do such things, you would
    become a threat, a dangerous example, and would be treated accordingly.

    As soon as enough people withdrew to become a bad example,
    civilization would go after them, thus ending their withdrawal and
    forcing them to engage with it, either by giving in or by fighting back.

    History already tells us that withdrawing is not an option that the
    civilized will allow. First Nations people across Canada and the US, for instance, were not allowed to remain outside of the invading European civilization. Their children were taken by force to be abused – “enculturated”- and forced into settler culture. It’s a paradox. Withdrawal can only persist when it is ineffective, and so is useless as a resistance strategy.”

    After spending the last week at the sites of some famous “back-to-the-land” communities, I was inspired by their way of life, yet disappointed at their lack of wider engagement to at least slow civilisation’s death march. Perhaps we really should be considering that well-organised resistance may be our only hope for the “involuntary transformation” mentioned by Shaun above. It’s suggested reading anyway.

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36. I just want to share that I strongly resonate and agree with Nick Stewart’s comment (31 Aug), where he eloquently said:

    “However, between hope and despair there is another possibility, an inner stillness, a silence at our core that we all possess but that this frantic world veils from us. This space, beyond thought, beyond the agitations of hope and despair, is our birthright though we have forgotten how to go there, easily and naturally. Our despair is as much to do with this loss of inner silence as it is with the loss of whatever we mourn in the outer world. At this time when we face the oncoming rush of collapse and crises we more than ever need a personal (but ideally shared) practice of being in this space. We need to nurture an inner ecology with just the same concern we have for the world around us.”

    This place of inner silence Nick refers to is the realm of no-ego, our natural state. Rumi referred to it in his poem as a place beyond duality: “Out beyond the realms of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I will meet you there.”

    Oliver Wendell Holmes also, I believe, was speaking to it (or might has well have been) when he stated: “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I’d give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

    Giving one’s life for the simplicity on the the far side of our complex world is the realization of the Great Paradox: “One must lose their life in order to save it.” We die to who we thought we were and wake up to who we’ve always been but had forgotten. Awareness. Consciousness itself. That which is watching.

    Abiding in this natural state isn’t a retreat from the world. Quite the contrary: it is a full immersion into reality with all of the senses fully alive, in the moment, unblinking. It isn’t passive, it is completely responsive to the need at hand, whatever it is. Responsive, not reactive. Unencumbered by the reactive mind and pull of emotions.

    Attaining this awareness isn’t from learning more, or adding to what you have, but just the opposite. It is from letting go of what you think. It is not identifying with your thoughts and emotions (as Darren Allen says just above), it is shedding illusions and false beliefs. It is profoundly simple, so much so that when it happens one can’t believe it has been so elusive.

    And as Nick Stewart says, it is everyone’s birthright. Within everyone’s capability. Stillness, beyond despair, beyond aspiration, complete, fully present, fully at peace. Pure witnessing consciousness. It is a grace that is so titanic that once tasted, it can never entirely be forgotten, and ultimately draws one ever closer. “The peace that passeth all understanding.”

    This consciousness of oneness is the way beyond the dualistic paradoxes built into our contemporary consciousness, but it doesn’t involve escape, or transcending this reality into another realm. Right now, most people live their lives like a Chinese finger trap, pulling ever harder with no possibility of escape. The solution is to stop pulling, and to release, to let go, and then one is free.

    The esteemed author Parker Palmer, who suffered from his own despair, said, “The way to God is down.” And it is down, into the earth, into the senses, as deeply as one can go, that this stillness, this presence, is waiting for us to let go into it, to surrender our suffering identities so we can truly live.

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37. Excellent post, Paul – I think I’ll send a link to anyone who ever again queries my ‘pessimism’! What I loved about Uncivilisation 2011 (my first) was the fun, friendship and laughter. Yes, we were all talking about things like global economic collapse but we were dealing with it. Living it, maybe. I have not been so energised by an event since I added resource depletion to my palette of things to despair about. The power of not feeling alone is awesome. For that alone Paul and Dougald deserve much praise for setting up DM.

    Are despair and hope opposites? A lack of hope may lead to despair but does a lack of despair lead to hope? Is this why so many environmentalists refuse to engage with despair, because it would drain their reserves of hope? Would thinking about DM-esque collapsonomics issues make it impossible for some activists to maintain that essential veneer of optimism that a fairer world is possible? Of course a fairer world is possible but is it probable? That’s what bothers me these days – what’s probable, not what’s ‘possible’. You can’t make a profit out of living sustainably. If you do, you’re not doing it right! The future of humanity will be shaped by psychology, not technology, and overcoming denial and false stories will be key.

    A friend in London, who works her ass off campaigning on climate change, reacted with mild horror when I said I was going to Uncivilisation 2011. She is seeing a drift of people away from climate campaigning but not to other campaigns – they just seem to be drifting away. Has despair got them? I used to write energy policy for the Scottish Green Party (10 years ago now?) but stopped when I realised that my conclusions would never be vote winners! Fortunately, I never expected politics to be ‘the answer’ so I wasn’t too disappointed and took my energies (but not my votes) elsewhere.

    Most of us don’t know how to live on this Earth anymore, partly because we’ve wiped out those who do. That’s not a glib comment – surely our cultural psyche knows, at some level, what we did to achieve our western wealth? At this crisis point, despair is to be expected, not avoided. If you want to rant, rant. If you want to cry, cry. But don’t ever forget that you have something that so many others don’t – you love life, all of it, whole ecosystems, probably rocks and clouds and stars too. You know what it is to be alive. As long as some of us think this way, there is hope. Expectations may be the root of all sorrow (I’m misquoting someone here) but surely that depends on what you expected the future to hold? If my expectations are proved wrong, I’ll be delighted!

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38. Pingback: Aurélien Réal – L’espoir tue | singularite

39. Although I’ve been involved in Dark Mountain since the manifesto appeared, only now am I beginning to appreciate what it’s actually asking of us. I don’t ‘asking of us’ as in ‘ordering us’ or ‘demanding,’ I mean simply ‘asking of us,’ because Dark Mountain is a question.

    It’s asking us simply not to flinch, not to seek escape in delusions, to look squarely and honestly at what’s happening. Asking us to look down. Of course, I understood these words as I read them in the manifesto (and they resonated very deeply), but until recently, it’s clear to me now that I didn’t truly FEEL them. And now I can feel them, now I understand what they mean on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one, the gulf has really opened up and I have to admit, it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying to look down there, and tell yourself that we’re falling in – our society and our world, and the worlds within our world – because honesty is the most terrifying thing we can face.

    But, although I recognise this fear, I also feel joy and love and hope, as Simon Lys put it above. Why? I have no idea, really. I certainly couldn’t articulate why. Perhaps it’s the feeling of freedom that comes with being honest. Uncivilisation 2011 was a catalyst for this realisation, the experience of meeting so many people talking about the same thing from such wildly and wonderfully different angles acted to connect things had hadn’t (for me) been connected before. It made me understand what it was we have actually been discussing.

    Some amazing things are coming out of this discussion (in general, and particularly this thread). Am I just imaging that a lot of other people are experiencing this realisation now, a wider opening up of brains, or am I just projecting this from my own growing understanding? I’m especially interested in Mandy’s comments about despair and hope – they are not polar opposites somehow, we expect them to be but they don’t quite repulse one another that way. It seems that optimism and pessimism are not such simple opposites either. Many of the things I think, and the things I say and write, might sound ‘pessimistic’ to people (and I’ve seen that kind of horrified look on the faces of friends when I talk this way sometimes, the look that says ‘No! You can’t say that! It’s not something you’re allowed to say!’). But I don’t consider myself a pessimist. Optimism is boiling in my blood. Not the pithy optimism of ‘I’m sure this will all get sorted out, somehow,’ but a deeper kind of optimism that feels more like joy.

    It’s still hard for me to explain why, but Dark Mountain gives me optimism, and it gives me hope. Mandy puts it simply and well when she says ‘the power of not feeling alone is awesome’ – in awesome’s original sense.

    I cycled from London to Uncivilisation (now there’s a good opening line for my autobiography), and on the very final stretch, coming up that crumbling green chalk flank towards the top of the hill, in the midst of that ancient-looking green-looking English landscape, saw two rabbits with myxomatosis shuffling blind and bewildered down the road. I don’t know why, but even that doesn’t translate into despair. There’s beauty among the myxomatosis, not myxomatosis among the beauty.

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40. There is a place between hope and despair. Step toward it. Now there is another place between hope and despair. Step toward it. Step, step, step.

    You write, “I wonder when this ever stops. And the thing is, that I don’t think it does.”

    And yet nothing lasts forever. Certainly you, your wife, your daughter won’t last forever. So why should you think that the human destruction of that which supports us will never stop?

    All the things that cause despair are also the seeds of the undoing of The Beast. Peak oil, climate change, financial chaos… these are not bad nor good; they just are.

    We’re in the omega phase of a panarchy loop. This too will end, and something new will arise from it.

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41. I know this post is several days old, so maybe its author won’t see this comment, but I have a question (which I hope won’t be taken the wrong way.) I’m struck by the fact that someone who sees such a dark future ahead has nevertheless chosen to have children. I’m genuinely curious how someone could come to make such a choice (and if this has already been addressed in any essays, articles, blog posts, on this site or any other, I’d appreciated a link.)

    I’m in my twenties, that age where almost everyone you know starts having kids. Yet, I don’t really know any people who have such a dark view of the future as myself and the people on this site, so I guess I’ve just never thought about whether those people too are reproducing despite the mess we’re in. I’ve chosen NOT to reproduce myself, not because “I wouldn’t bring a child into a world like this” (a statement that always sounded like a cop-out to me before I realized how bad things are, and which still seems a little disingenuous since it’s often uttered by people who actually don’t know the half it, who in fact are quite content with “this world” as far as I can tell) but because I, personally, couldn’t bear to watch a child grow up in this world (the distinction here is that it’s myself I’m sparing, not the hypothetical child) and wouldn’t want to take on the task of explaining such a screwed up society to a child. So I haven’t had any kids, and don’t plan to have any, and when I see everyone popping out babies around me I just assume it’s because they’re those hand-raisers mentioned above who don’t realize how bad things are. But I find myself suddenly struck by the notion that people who are in despair over a world that is getting worse and will continue to get worse for generations to come would choose to have children.

    So, I guess I’m just curious if anyone–the author of the post above or anyone else who has made the same choice–could tell me about the thoughts process that goes into making such a choice.

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42. I haven’t managed to visit this thread for a few days now, so not sure where it has gone, but I wanted to add this Edwin Morgan poem, which addresses the common, perhaps despairing sentiment that ‘I don’t want to bring a child into a world like this’. It’s an angry, unspun response by an old poet, known for his playfulness and humanity and dark-mountainous approach to concepts of time.

    The War on the War on Terror

    This woman, I heard her say she could not bear
    To bring a child into a world so dreadful
    It scoops up smoking body parts like that.
    Did she mean she would rather leave them lying?
    Of course not, that’s just twisting what she says.
    Well, let’s be blunt, let us be damnably blunt.
    Would you rather not have a baby in a body-bag,
    Are you listening? – bits of a baby
    In a body-bag, would you rather not have that,
    Not see that, not touch that, not know that,
    Is it too much for you, for your sensibilities,
    Come on, I know what I am talking about,
    I have been right through life like an arrow.
    What child would welcome such a grudging mother?
    Stay in bed then; count the hours and wars.
    It really is a very simple question:
    Would you rather have something, or nothing?
    Sit with your back against some tomb, altar,
    Observatory, if that’s what it is, Callanish
    Will do, and empty your mind of everything
    But Callanish, and then give Callanish
    The kick, it takes at least a day and a night
    For strongest ancient markers to dissolve
    With all their people, artefacts, lastly all power
    If you believe me, as I think you should –
    And there is no word left –
    Imagine an eternity of this –
    You, childless woman who wants to remain so,
    You are frowning in this tawdry restaurant
    And I do not know your beliefs, if any,
    But I outstare you with my unspoken thought
    That the greatest gift it is possible to make
    Is life itself.
    Gather your things, off
    Into the grimy evening,
    Woman unknown, best so.

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43. I have to clarify that I hadn’t read Wainscot Smith’s comment before I posted that poem!

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44. Good, Paul, thanks.
    And I feel right near many of the responders too.
    The despair is the natural response to our situation.
    What to do about it is harder.
    I favor the surf metaphor. My father styled himself an intellectual and thought the surf metaphor was impossibly dopey when I told it to him, some years before he died. That made me like it all the more.
    It goes something like this: Surfing is an athletic activity, but unlike all the others, it is not just an exercise of our own motive power. The driving force in surfing is the ocean – the surfer’s job is finesse. Great expense of muscular effort to turn the power of the ocean to a delightful result, however fleeting. But the most important part of this picture is that the ocean doesn’t give a shit if you live or die. Will easily kill you if you aren’t careful. Actually doesn’t even notice your existence.
    So there is the trick. The practice is to swim among those great forces and not get killed, and sometimes make something wonderful in them. I take despair to be one of those forces.

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45. @Wainscot Smith: Yes, I wonder the same thing, as a man of 31. I have decided not to have children, and am also amazed that others who share my view of the future decide otherwise, and curious to understand it.

    I have always had a profound love for children, but should I choose to raise a family in future I would hope to adopt (although I am aware that this requires far more bureaucracy than raising your own children), as there are so many children in our world who lack a loving family, and certainly no need for greater human numbers.

    I too would be very interested to hear the views of other Dark Mountaineers who have chosen to have children.

    The one person I do know to have written about this at length is the Peak Oil blogger Sharon Astyk (four kids):

    http://sharonastyk.com/2005/09/14/the-population-issue-from-a-women-with-four-children/

    http://sharonastyk.com/2007/07/19/talking-population-with-the-old-men/

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46. What if we upgrade our “reality tunnel”…? What if we are dying of a cognitive understatement about the nature of reality…? A shift in consciousness could unfold unexpected possibilities…what if it’s happening NOW…?

    “I could not see the specifics of what the future held. What I experienced was overwhelming light and bliss, and though these may sound disappointingly vague, they in fact revealed more to me than any details possibly could. I knew the brilliant light to be the radiance of enlightenment and the bliss was the joy of liberation. The human species was poised on the brink of a profound and
    inclusive spiritual awakening.(…)

    From this perspective I saw that our culture’s scientific “knowledge” about the origin of life was profoundly incomplete in two respects. First, our materialistic understanding of the actual mechanism of evolution is pitifully incomplete, and second, we have been basing our interpretations on what has emerged just up to this point in time, ignoring the obvious fact that we have seen only the early scenes of a much larger play. Imagine someone from antiquity who was completely ignorant of cars observing the early stations of
    an automobile assembly line and trying to comprehend what was being built.
    We simply see too little to guess what is coming and therefore do not properly understand what has gone before.(…)

    I then moved deeper into the unified field of existence and experience the dynamics of humanity’s awakening as movements initiated and orchestrated by a single, integrating Intelligence. Previously my frame of reference for understanding these processes have been individual human beings, and the themes of individual evolution are the skilful exercise of free will over vast epochs of time. Now I was drawn into a superordinate level of reality that revealed a deeper organisational pattern, a pattern that paradoxically did not contradict the reality of individual agency. From this perspective, I experienced the evolution of our species as the systematic growth of a single organism, a unified and unifying Being that all of us were part of. The subtlety of the co-operation of the parts with the whole was extraordinary. Nothing in our theological or philosophical systems does justice to the facts. To
    experience the incredible diversity of our species as a single unified field made many events clearer. New patterns sprang into view and the patterns made transparent sense.

    What I “saw” was that the unified field was moving decisively and
    precipitously to become more aware of itself in spacetime. Whereas previously it had existed as an extended fabric of being, largely unconscious of itself at the physical level, it was now waking itself up. Visually this took the form of energy coming together in swift, contracted spasms that created bright flashes of awareness. I repeatedly saw extended webs of energy suddenly contract and explode in brilliant flashes. In the past these flashes had not endured long and had been swallowed by the inertia of the collective unconscious of our species.
    Now, however, the flashes were beginning to hold their own. Not only were they not dissolving, but they were beginning to connect with other flashes occurring around the planet. (…)

    From the centre of this experience, it seemed to be the case that our current generation had been deliberately karmically configured to precipitate an intense cycle of collective purification. The poisons of humanity’s collective past were being brought to the surface in us, and in transforming these poisons in our individual lives, we were making it possible for divine awareness to enter more deeply into future generations. We had volunteered for this role for both our personal benefit and the collective good. We were cells in a Superorganism intent on rapid change. As such we were heavy with
    both the burdens of our collective past and the promise of our collective future. I saw that this century formed something of a watershed into which the karmic streams of history were flowing, and I knew that as this process came to fruition, our future condition as a species would be beyond anything we might project from our current state of fragmentation.
    Just as my previous work had mediated the experience of collective anguish out of the collective field, my current task now seemed to be to mediate the experience of no-self into the collective surround. I experienced this primarily in terms of a flow of energy moving through me into the species-mind. To the extent that this flow took cognitive form at all, it took the form of becoming comfortable with the loss of boundaries. This had many aspects to it-being comfortable surrendering the boundaries of race, the boundaries of socioeconomic distinctions, the boundaries of nationality, the boundaries of religion. Wherever we had drawn boundaries around ourselves in history, there was fear. I seemed to be mediating a common energy that encouraged the dissolving of these boundaries and the softening of these fears. This went on for a very long time as boundary after boundary fell to a social melding.
    Soothing energies moved through me and reached into the human field,
    making it a bit easier for persons to relax and yield to the flow of historical events that were challenging and dissolving the unreal divisions humanity had drawn upon itself. Together we were paving the way for a future that was a radically unlike the present.

    There is a social awakening coming, a time when we will have dropped our attempt to live in the atomised cells of our historical past and we have appropriated the truth of our inclusive nature. Everything we are currently undergoing both privately and collectively is paving the way for this future.”

    ~Christopher Bache, “Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind”

    ***

    ” (…) a compensatory evolutionary shift wherein the western psyche is in the process of being reconnected to nature from which it began its psychic split over 3.000 years ago. In essence, the western ego is being pushed into that reconnection with nature by an evolutionary process in the name of species preservation – if not the preservation of all of life as we know it. This reconnection is not a regression.

    (…) One by-product of this evolutionary process appears to be the emergence of a new kind of consciousness, which I have called the Borderland. Some of the characteristics of what i have defined as the borderland personality have been evident in individuals past and present. However, historically, its prevalence has been far from the mainstream consciousnes of western culture. To review, I will remind the reader of the particular characteristics of this emergent Borderland consciousness are:

    * A western ego at a high level of psychological development with an elastic ego boundary capable of being in connection with nature without falling into a state of participation mystique with nature.

    * An ego capable of containing its own fragmentation complex.

    * A resultant greater capacity for maintaining a simultaneous connection and dialogue with, and integration of, the rational and transrational dimensions of life.

    * An evolutionary process that holds the prospect of a new kind of collective consciousness that will be familiar not only to the few, but that will be common to the many. Indeed, it may become the predominant form of consciousness emergent in the 21st century”.

    Living in the Borderland

    Jerome Bernstein, Jungian analyst.

    http://www.borderlanders.com/in-depth.html

    ***
    http://www.organelle.org/ca/ca1.html

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47. What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities.
    ~Sri Aurobindo

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48. Eduardo Galeano, speaking from the uprising in Spain (and increasingly, in many other places…):

    “…the energy of dignity and enthusiasm (‘keeping the gods inside’) ”

    “there is another world in this one’s belly, waiting…”

    http://blip.tv/acampadabcn/eduardo-galeano-english-subtitles-5240552

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49. The Sure Eyes of the Sickly Child

    Although illness consumes her,
    There is a carnality of future
    In her eyes,
    As if already their murdered nostalgia
    Were re-peopling a world.

    (In the hollow of desire,
    She seems to stand,
    In a second health,
    In the permanent mind.)

    Her parents do not explain it.
    They are simple folk,
    Pillars of fear,
    Leaning upon one another
    In sterile reluctance

    No, hers is a convalescent’s faith,
    Her vision, the something that survives
    The rape of wonder,
    Witnessing to me with a love
    That affirms even dying.

    Greg Mogenson

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50. I agree that despair should be articulated, understood and discussed.

    There are plenty of less environmentally damaging ways (books, films, music, art, family and friends) to alleviate and deal with despair than flying off around the world. If you want to fly though, that’s your choice. Trying to dress it up as some kind of soul saving imperative that you must do so, I don’t really understand.

    I haven’t come on here to attack you but I cannot tell you how depressed I feel after reading this blog entry. What’s the point of any of this, when it seems that we can justify doing anything – regardless of the impact it may have – as long as the aim is to make ourselves feel better.

    Richard

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51. Pingback: Despair « The Karma Diet

52. @Richard

    Sorry to depress you, but I think you missed the point a bit. Though you’re right, I should probably not be flying, and very rarely do – haven’t for years.

    @Wainscot and Shaun

    The kids thing is interesting. It is not rational. I note you both talk about a ‘decision’ to have kids as if it were something that could be weighed with the mind alone, but it’s not, really. This surprised me too. For years I didn’t want to have children, and then … I did. If I want to rationalise this, I can. I can say, for example, that my wife and I have two kids – that’s known as ‘replacement level’, in population terms. If everyone who has kids replaces themselves but doesn’t add extra souls, then population begins to steadily fall. I wouldn’t have more than two kids myself, because I think that is not easy to justify.

    But of course, having kids means more resource consumption, right? Right, of course, but then so does using the internet – that’s a vast amount of energy, actually, and we’re all still doing that, by choice. So it’s not a decision that can be isolated from others in ecological terms.

    But there are much broader and deeper things than this. Having kids is not a ‘decision’, like buying a car. It’s a commitment to a whole life change: in attitude, in experience, in the meaning of love and commitment. For me, having kids has deepened my commitment to working out how the hell to live through this, and to finding out what can be saved and bettered, because it gives me a sense of being part of this world for generations to come, my decisions and impacts echoing on in others after I’m gone. Having kids has connected me more deeply to the world. It’s made me feel, and understand, how to teach the right values, and how to learn them. It forces me to answer questions I would otherwise never ask. It shows me what unconditional love is and it provides me with human beings I would unquestioningly die for if I had to, and with that I learn selflessness too, and all of these things make me better equipped for being in this world, even as it falls apart. All told, it shows me what life means, better than anything else ever has.

    In the end, for me, this is a large part of what being human is about. I’m not saying it should be that way for others, but for me it is the continuation of the cycle of life, and my contribution to it. It can’t be measured in terms of utility and reason, though its impacts can be responsibly minimised.

    But perhaps Edwin Morgan, via Gavin, said all of this, above, better than I could. That’s what poetry does best!

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53. Hey all, great discussion!

    I just wanted to butt in on the kids topic with this: What’s the point of all this struggle, all this learning, all this hard-won wisdom if it just dies with you when you’re gone? Who are you doing it for if not for the kids, if not for the future generations? Is it for your own satisfaction, knowing that you were ‘right all along’?

    And this: What is the next generation going to look like if you choose not to procreate and all the other assholes do, filling their kids’ heads with garbage all along the way? Why wouldn’t you do everything you can to fight for sensitivity, biophilia, awareness, honesty against the relentless assault of the Death Culture? What better way to expand your representation in the memepool than raising children? Haven’t you learned that it’s about maximising your (social) impact; about leaving the greatest possible footprint? …

    (I should say that I say these things mostly to myself – another white male in his late twenties – as an effort to get over my own post-Christian feelings of guilt, and the lingering self-minimising impulses left over in my environmentalism.)

    Otherwise: @Mandy, I think you’re a badass :)

    Lastly, if you’ll forgive the long quote, I had some of Derrick Jensen’s words echoing in my mind while reading the initial post. Here he is responding to the question ‘What do you say to readers who fall into despair when they read one of your books?’:

    Personally, I’ve actually found it quite liberating to simply feel despair. Despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation.

    One day I was just sobbing, and I called up a friend of mine, Jeannette Armstrong, who is an Okanagan Indian activist. I said to her, “This work is just killing me. It’s breaking my heart.” She said, “Yeah, it’ll do that.” And I said, “The dominant culture hates everything, doesn’t it?” She said, “Yeah, it does. Even itself.” And I said, “It has a death urge, doesn’t it?” She said, “Yeah, it does.” And I said, “Unless it’s stopped it’s going to kill everything on the planet, isn’t it?” She said, “Yeah, it is. Unless it’s stopped.” And then I said, “We’re not going to make it to some great new glorious tomorrow, are we?” She thought for a moment and then she said the best thing she could possibly say, which was, “I’ve been waiting for you to say that.”

    The reason it was the best thing she could say was that it normalized my despair. It let me know that despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation; the sorrow is just sorrow and the pain is just pain. It’s not so much the sorrow or even the pain that hurts as it is my resistance to it. It let me know that I can feel all those things and it wouldn’t kill me. I could feel that pain and still feel love.

    There’s this idea that if you really recognize how bad things are you have to go around being miserable all the time. But the truth is, I’m really happy. I am full of rage and sorrow and joy and happiness and contentment and discontent. I’m full of all those things. It’s okay to feel more than one thing at the same time.

    Some people say, “If things are so bad, then why don’t you just kill yourself?” Part of the answer is that I’m having a lot of fun. It’s tremendous fun to fight back. What a gas!

    [Interviewer] I think most people resist despair because they see it as a surrender, a letting go. You’re suggesting that letting go might not be such a bad thing?

    If it means letting go of our hope that civilization can save us, then yes. You see, Jeannette helped me realize that not only could I feel rage and sorrow and despair and it wouldn’t kill me, but even better, I could feel all those things and it would kill me. There’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that once you’re dead they can’t touch you anymore. Not through threats or violence or promises or buying you off. You can still sing and dance and make love and fight like hell, but they can’t touch you. (source)

    Personally, it helped me a lot to have an ‘enlightened witness’ normalise my own despair in this way. Hopefully someone else might find it useful, if not my ranting above!

    best wishes,
    Ian

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54. I don’t understand when you say:
    “Our population continues to increase – nearly a quarter of a million new people moved into the country last year alone.”

    Look down not away you have 2 children – do they not count as coming into what you say is “the most densely populated country in Europe”?

    You write: “We have no obvious way to support them; we have no obvious way to support ourselves.”
    Those are very clear lines you draw between us and them. How do define this us/them?

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55. @ET

    By ‘us’ I mean those who were already here (of whatever background) and by ‘them’ I mean those who have arrived here from elsewhere (ditto). It’s not hard to understand. Immigration is currently the main driver of population increase in the UK, but it is not the only one – another one is a mini baby boom caused by people like me having children. I’m not pointing fingers or making political points about the goods or bads of migration. Migration is a fact of life, everywhere, and increasingly so. But it, like everything else we do in hyper-industrialised societies, has impacts, and we can’t brush them under the carpet. How would you manage a population increase of a million people every four years? Any thoughts?

    @Ian M – thanks, you put that very well, and I agree.

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56. I gave up after the 18th letter saying “I know we can’t do anything”. It only takes a little imagination to work out that this is precisely why our world is falling apart at an accelerating rate. Imagine what the world might be like if all those who say “I know I can’t do anything” woke up one morning and said “I know I can do something” and did it..

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57. A population increase could be mitigated by not having children. It’s hard to say that too many people (here, now) is bad and then add more of your own.

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58. In response to the question of population expansion/immigration – I think that it is a useless point of speculation which essentialy creates a cul-de-sac on Blake’s ‘crooked road’ of life. One will deal with the extra millions if and when they appear at one’s door.
    A lot of population growth and immigration spikes are a direct result of the huge inequalities perpetrated by empire building nations like “Great Britain”. The fact that those once displaced from their own homes by Western invaders now turn up in the Countrty of Western invaders is called “karma”.

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59. @Julian

    Actually, I think it’s called ‘capitalism.’ Most population growth spikes are not a result of inequality but of improvements in healthcare and technology which arguably turn out not to be improvements in the long term. Ever since we invented agriculture we have been in a spiral which has turned into a trap. I recommend Spencer Wells’ book ‘Pandora’s Seed’ for a good history of how this has happened.

    It’s fashionable at present to ignore human population levels, which itself is a reaction to the way it was discussed in the seventies. It’s short-sighted and irresponsible in my view to take that attitude. But whatever we choose to believe, the fashion won’t last. It’s too late to get a grip on this now. I suspect that nature will do the gripping for us. That’s usually what happens.

    @ET

    I’m wondering whether you’ve read the article and the thread, or have just decided to swoop in at the bottom with a pre-recorded opinion.

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60. For Dark Mountain

    What a great debate. The feeling of this shared connection is very helpful, because with current news of the break up of the EU, the planning laws etc it would otherwise feel quite lonely worrying that all we talked about at the festival are going so fast.

    As Malcom says, the machine is fragile, and the evidence is that it’s falling apart quite rapidly. At the festival we were talking of what will replace it when it does, and how we can join that discussion. That might be a good way of countering this despair Paul is talking about. I feel it too.

    Caroline

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61. @Paul

    Yes, I agree that nature is likely to take control where we don’t. Most of Europe is currently experiencing a fall in national birth rates, suggesting that indigenous populations will fall back while
    the dispossessed of expanding Southern hemisphere Countries try to gain access to Europe.

    Perhaps the reason why it is so diffcult to take a position on the ‘population growth’ issue is because it is dependent upon taking a largely intellectual position on something which is anything but an intellectual issue.

    Also, it depends on what set of statistics one believes. As a farmer, I know that fellow farmers bodge the national agricultural census which required one to state how many sheep, pigs, cows etc one had on the farm at a given time. The practice is to do one fairly accurate one and then use it as the slightly tweaked model for subsequent census forms. In many Countries of the world there is no accurate birth count and only limited resources for record keeping. World population guestimates are therefore a very inaccurate way of assessing population numbers.

    One thing is for sure, those who say that we won’t be able ‘to feed the world’ without GM and agrichemically assisted crops, have got it badly wrong. The truth is that we won’t be able to feed the world with them and expect people to stay alive for very long.

    9 billion by 2050? These sort of statistics are arrogant nonsense.. especially since they are based upon the supposed advances of a ‘civilisation’ in collapsamonics mode. Maybe 2 billion in 2050?

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62. Join Climate Reality #Reality @ClimateReality.
    The Loire is drying up, the dry lands are becoming deserts.
    CO2 is pulling water from the land and the sea – and is dumping the water in floods.
    In the 1920′s Robinson Jeffers could write – “corruption
    Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
    are left the mountains.” (from Shine, Perishing Republic)
    This is no longer true – almost anywhere. Technology has done us in.
    So the cry to leave England is of little use. We have to care for the earth.

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63. After asking my question about children on Sep 5, and then checking for replies for a few days, I forgot about this discussion until today when I remembered to check again–so once again I’m a week behind the discussion.

    I want to thank Paul and others for answering my curiosity. However, I would like to point out that my question actually had nothing to do with population increase. I was surprised to see that so many people assumed that a criticism of adding to the population by having children was behind the question (I suppose it’s a case of people being in the habit of associating certain kinds of questions with certain kinds of criticisms.) My own curiosity was really just about how people who see where the world is heading, and see how bad life is now and is going to be for some time to come, could stand to see their own children born into such a world. I wanted to know why someone would choose to go through that (to whatever extent they DO have a choice in the matter), aside from any moral or ethical issues having to do with population.

    That said, lot of what Paul said in his third paragraph did speak to the question I asked, and I appreciate the thoughtful response. I guess the only thing I’m wondering, that wasn’t really addressed, is: what about the experience of the children themselves? Everything you said was about what having children changes in YOUR mind as a parent, but nothing was said about how you feel about the children themselves having to grow up in this hell-on-earth. (Speaking for myself, when I look back on my own childhood with the knowledge and understanding I now have about the world I was born into, I feel like I WAS born into a hell-on-earth, a situation in which it seems like it would have been impossible for my parents or any others to really teach their children any of the things you talk about teaching the next generation–and after all, neither I nor anyone else in my generation that I know of WAS taught any of that–we had to figure it out for ourselves in our twenties and thirties, didn’t we?)

    And that also brings me to Ian M’s comments about the next generation and what we must do for them. I guess my confusion about such responses is: I thought what distinguished communities like the Dark Mountain Project from more “mainstream” ecological awareness was the very fact that we think it’s already too late to salvage this civilization and turns things around in the next generation into some transition toward a better world. I thought the point is that we’ve already overshot that possibility, we don’t see any hope in the next generation or two getting their shit together, and what we’re concerned with now is how to endure the really long, really bad time ahead? I find it interesting when people in communities such as this one revert back to the “but we need to teach the next generation how to change everything!” kind of mentality.

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64. Wainscot Smith: you said it better than I could. Thanks you.

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65. @ Wainscot Smith
    You said “I thought what distinguished communities like the Dark Mountain Project from more “mainstream” ecological awareness was the very fact that we think it’s already too late to salvage this civilization and turns things around in the next generation into some transition toward a better world. I thought the point is that we’ve already overshot that possibility, we don’t see any hope in the next generation or two getting their shit together, and what we’re concerned with now is how to endure the really long, really bad time ahead?”

    I think Dark Mountain appeals to a much broader spectrum than that; I certainly don’t think it’s too late to make a better world.

    As the manifesto says “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop”. Life will go on (though probably for a smaller population than currently), and individuals will continue to experience as much joy and despair as they have throughout history.

    Personally, I’ve been wrong about so many things that I’ve felt certain about, that hope never quite disappears however bleak the outlook seems. After all, there have been people prophesying the end of the world pretty much since the beginning, and somehow it’s kept going – but only because people kept having children!

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66. Hey Wainscot, thanks for dropping back in with that interesting follow-up.

    I guess the only thing I’m wondering, that wasn’t really addressed, is: what about the experience of the children themselves? Everything you said was about what having children changes in YOUR mind as a parent, but nothing was said about how you feel about the children themselves having to grow up in this hell-on-earth.

    This strikes me as an important point, and one that I failed to consider in all my earlier ‘bluster’… I’ve come to much the same conclusions about the ‘hell-on-earth’ conditions that most kids face every day in the modern world. Digging back into my own memories of compulsory schooling (inundated by boredom, forced to learn things I had no use, or enthusiasm, for) and nuclear family life (any expression of ‘wrong’ sentiment or action met by punishment and/or withdrawal of love from people who have control over every fundamental aspect of your existence) proved much more difficult than I ever expected. I think it was Alice Miller who helped me get to the powerful insight that everything in our culture is geared against taking the child’s experience seriously or as valid in its own right (check out ‘For Your Own Good’) I found it a real struggle to take even my own experiences seriously in this way – I think I probably had to ‘zone out’, basically abandoning body and mind back then in order to make it through. Even today I still find it difficult to stand up straight, breathe, occupy space confident in my own worth and not consider myself a piece of meat that other people can use or abuse as they see fit.

    Would I put my kids through that? Not if I could help it! I’ve learned about this stuff expressly so I don’t pass it on unthinkingly to those in my care in the future. At least with that cycle ended it won’t be ME brutalising my kids united with the rest of the culture – maybe I could even (*shock*) take their side and face down the deathliness in solidarity!

    Also, you wrote:

    I thought what distinguished communities like the Dark Mountain Project from more “mainstream” ecological awareness was the very fact that we think it’s already too late to salvage this civilization and turns things around in the next generation into some transition toward a better world. I thought the point is that we’ve already overshot that possibility, we don’t see any hope in the next generation or two getting their shit together, and what we’re concerned with now is how to endure the really long, really bad time ahead? I find it interesting when people in communities such as this one revert back to the “but we need to teach the next generation how to change everything!” kind of mentality.

    I didn’t intend for my comments to advocate any kind of ‘salvaging’ of civilisation. I agree that most of the cultural inertia is driving people headlong into the blackness and don’t see any way of stopping that on the large scale (most are materially trapped in those situations and thus beyond rational persuasion IMO). Does this mean the rest of us who see alternatives should just curl up and die (and certainly not consider procreating!)? Maybe a lot of us will. That seems like a waste to me though. Personally I feel impelled to fight for the survival of me & mine; to teach the ones I care about how to survive while everything else goes to hell; to hold on fiercely to the life-affirming knowledge & wisdoms I’ve acquired. Maybe nobody gives a shit about that stuff today, but I’m betting a lot of it will assume a central place in the lives of those-who-come-after.

    best,
    Ian

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67. Hello Ian M and others.

    This is a very intersting discussion which, in many respects, gets to the heart of the matter. I have two ‘children’ now 27 and 25 years old – who seem more than able to take on the world they find themselves in.. but in very different ways. One very outgoing and one more intoverted. They have been quietly ‘advising’ me for years and I have discouvered much of great merit in their wise words.

    It is said (in spiritual circles) that “We choose our parents” as well as the place and time of arrival. This may seem strange at first – but reflect on it and you may come to the conclusion that it makes sense. I believe that our ‘memory’ is based on the sub conscious retention of happenings in bygone times – our previous incarnations.

    It is also said (in spiritual circles) that the evolution of human beings into states of greater awareness and more responsible life actions comes about through a ‘burning-off our historical karma.” It is a ‘karma’ accrued over many life times. Life times in which we may have killed and looted and life times in which we may have resisted such actions and striven to raise our game.

    Depending upon how far we have succeeded in ‘raising our game’ we return to a situation that will present the appropriate challenges to raise it further and thus to ‘burn-off’ previous karma which otherwise holds us back.

    Under this regime, a child is born into the family that it choses as the most appropriate stepping stone for its onward journey. If we see our parents in this light we may well come to the conclusion that being sent to a hellish boarding school and receiving no education other than what we taught ourselves – was exactly what was needed to get us angry enough to bring about a radical change in the education system. Something that we would not have felt necessary under other circumstances?

    So, in this view of the way forward, we each have an action to perform in this life in order to ameliorate the situation for the next generation of children and to move forward in our own evolution. Standing still or regressing is simply not an option.

    I would argue that if one is not prepared to make that effort – one should not have children.

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68. A couple of poems, or poem extracts, by Edward Thomas, followed by some Alasdair Roberts lyrics, which for me seem to express something about the confluence of despair and acceptance which we have to face, and of past mistakes having left us somehow exiled and mapless, having to entrust and surrender ourselves to the forest’s silence, the rivers’ wendings, to find a place that no living traveller has ever been. We have to leave behind our selves, our clothes, our sires’ wrongdoing, to listen, to drift like river flotsam and to wait for what emerges. Even if what emerges has no place for us.

    There is not any book
    Or face of dearest look
    That I would not turn from
    now
    To go into the unknown
    I must enter, and leave,
    alone,
    I know not how.

    The tall forest towers:
    Its cloudy foliage lowers
    Ahead, shelf above shelf:
    Its silence I hear and obey
    That I may lose my way
    And myself.

    - from Lights Out

    This is my grief. That land,
    My home, I have never seen;
    No traveller tells of it,
    However far he has been.

    - from Home

    I took my only young son
    And my only daughter
    Down where the willow wands
    Weep into the water

    And Walter my young son
    He reached up and caught her
    As away like a seedling
    The gentle wind brought her.

    I had a daughter and a son
    But in the undergrowth I lost them.
    For I am made of blood and bone
    And they are made of bud and blossom.

    And all the sorrows of their sires,
    Their sinning and wrongdoing cost me.
    Upon the thorny, thorny briars
    May the wild waters toss me.

    And so I’ll leave my native land
    Clad in birch and rhododendron.
    In Caerlon, Albion and Man
    May rivers flow and ever wend on.

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69. And one more quotation, whose relevance I don’t think I need to expand on. Isak’s story, from Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander:

    A young man and many other people travel an endless road. It leads across a stony plain where nothing grows. The fiery sun burns from morning to evening. Nowhere can they find coolness or shade. A scorching wind stirs up huge clouds of dust.

    The young man is driven forward by a strange anxiety, and he is tormented by raging thirst. Sometimes he asks himself or one of his companions about the goal of their pilgrimage. But the answer is uncertain and hesitant. He himself has forgotten why he ever set out on his journey. He has also forgotten his native land and the final goal.

    Suddenly one evening he is standing in a wood. All is quiet; perhaps the sunset wind soughs in the tall trees. He stands in astonishment, but he is also anxious and suspicious. He is alone, and he hears nothing because his ears are blocked up by the dust of the road. He sees nothing, because his eyes are dazzled by the day’s merciless glare. His throat is parched and his cracked lips are pressed around curses, so he does not hear the ripple of flowing water. He does not see the flashing stream in the dusk. Deaf and blinded, he stands beside it and does not know it is there. Like a sleepwalker he threads between the pools. His skill is remarkable, it is almost like a sixth sense in the fading, shadowless light.

    One night by the campfire he is sitting near an old man who is telling children about forests and springs. The youth remembers what he has been through – but faintly and indistinctly, as in a dream. He turns incredulously and politely asks the old man:

    “Where does all this water come from?”

    “It comes from a mountain whose peak is covered by a mighty cloud.”

    “What kind of cloud?”

    The old man replies: “Every man bears with him hopes, fears, longings. Every man carries his despair aloud, or carries it in his mind. Some pray to a particular god. Others utter their cries into the void. This despair, this hope, this dream of deliverance, all these cries, all these tears, accumulate during thousands and thousands of years, and condense into a vast cloud around a high mountain. Out of the cloud rain streams down the mountain, forming the brooks and rivers that flow through the great forests. So the springs are formed, where you can slake your thirst, where you can bathe your burnt face, where you can cool your blistered feet. Everyone has at some time heard of the springs, the mountain, the cloud, but most people remain anxiously on the road in the glaring light.”

    “Why do they stay?” asks the youth, in great astonishment.

    “Indeed, I do not know,” replies the old man. “Perhaps they believe they will reach their unknown destination by evening.”

    “Which unknown destination?” asks the youth.

    The old man shrugs. “Probably there is no destination. It is a deception, or imagination. I myself am on the way to the forests and the springs. I was there once when I was young, and now I’m trying to find the way back. It is not so easy.”

    Next morning the youth set out with the old man to seek the mountain, the cloud, the forests and the rippling springs.

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70. Thank you for starting this thread with such honesty and to almost everyone who’s added to it so thoughtfully. I just came across it this evening and have read every entry, and although I would love to have read more contributions from women in it, it’s the book I was looking for when I picked up a copy of Dark Mountain.

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71. I’ve tasted it too
    Salt tear
    Thinking of the Earth and Her People
    And the blood that is on the hands of our civilisation
    I’ve seen the hungry beast
    Devouring
    Humans, Forests, Seas, Spirits, Dreams
    Guns spitting bombs dropping bodies burning
    All of that
    I’ve seen it too
    And will turn from it no longer
    Yet I do not despair
    For I am Her too
    And She is True Power
    And in her own time,
    She will turn
    And say
    Enough
    And She will say it with the Earth
    The Water, The Air and The Fire
    And she will say it with our Voices with our Bodies and Being
    Enough
    No more
    I have no more to give
    Yet, She does not despair
    She still beats our hearts
    Whether we are Saints or Sinners
    She gives to us just the same
    Sends the blood running through our veins
    She still sets the sun to rise
    To warm the skin of Earth and Man
    She does not despair
    Why should you?
    I smell self-indulgence in your words
    This is not a time to give up
    To retreat
    This is a time to stand up
    To organise
    To talk
    With the poor and the oppressed, with the other
    With the Earth
    This is our time
    This is Her time

    Make of your despair a fuel,
    Not an excuse for lack of imagination.

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72. Pingback: matthew henry john bartlett » Paul Kingsnorth on having kids (in an overpopulated country)

73. I was born and spent my youth on the Southern end of the Great Rift Valley – Southern Africa. In a certain place the Wildebeast would gather in there thousands in autumn in prepartion for their migration inland. I went back there recently with my kids and we found twenty or so kicking at the dust behind a barbed wire fence and I said to my kids, “there use to be thousands here ……….” They gave me a knowing look and said , “ooh ye”. I figure, you only miss things when they are gone and you only give a shit when it makes a difference to your view of the world. KIDS HAVE A VIEW OF THE WORLD THEY ARE BORN WITH – THEY BUILD ON THAT. Why worry about them, they don’t.

    Do yourself a favour, instead of taking a trip to Patagonia or some other yet to be discovered “Eden”. Come to Lagos – Nigeria. It is a city of 14 million people with zero service delivery. Nobody lifts a finger for the good of society. For most of you it IS your worst nightmare – the end of civilization has come to Lagos and a lot of the rest of Africa. The kids in Lagos play in the delta while the crocodiles feast on dead bodies and they are probably better off than your kids on their playstations.

    I read somewhere of an inscription that was found on a Babalonian temple from around 3000BC. When translated it read, “Alas, alas, alas, it is a wicked, wicked, world”.

    I have moved further south now, where some vestiges of civilization still linger but right here on the coast near to where I live are middens of shells left by people (Homo Sapiens like you and I). They lived here for thousands of years, in fact they came and went between the ice ages and the amazing thing about them other than the fact that never changed there lifestyles is that they owned nothing. Read my lips – NOTHING. They lived on what could find in the rock pools and when their teeth wore out from crunching shellfish – they died. They only died out when the likes of you and I came along and forced them into a “better” way of doing things.

    Now I suspect that the reason why most of us are fearful of the looming Armagedon, is the the huge discrepency between what most of us have (in the the so called first world) and nothing. Nothing is such a long way down.

    So what can one do – is the plaintive cry! DON’T BUY THE SHIT that is perpetrated on us all – including airfares to Chile to sniff at bits of jungle. Live on a whole lot less – and don’t say, “all of this is for the good of my children”. Your children will thank you for nothing.

    This blog is probably the most cost effective way of getting us to feel less lonely while desparation gets the better of us. Besides, depair is good as every shrink will tell you – it leads to healing.

    “One day when I am wise
    I will do everything
    With nothing
    In no time at all”.

    i.e. I will be happy with the way things are and my happiness will make the world a better place.

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74. An interesting post on Climate Access touches on the issue of managing despair and hope.

    “I’m starting to think, like Randall, that relying too much on a stoic or optimistic approach is flawed.

    “As climate leaders, it may well be time to be honest with each other and with the publics we work to engage about the sense of loss we are all dealing with. In revealing our own struggles and fears, we may well present the opportunity for others to do the same. This may in fact, be the key to letting go of our current attachments and moving into planning for the next phase of human life on the planet, regardless of the many uncertainties we face.”

    http://www.climateaccess.org/blog/acknowledging-our-sense-loss?utm_source=Climate+Access+Newsletter&utm_campaign=df4f513ad9-Weekly_Update_12_6_1112_6_2011&utm_medium=email

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