The Dark Mountain Blog
Re-wilding the human
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
7th September, 2012
What kind of civilisation can change the climate of an entire planet – as far as it knows, the only planet in existence which sustains life – and yet find the evidence of this so uninteresting that it relegates it, in its hierarchy of ‘news’, below the latest murder, the inevitable re-election of one of its increasingly meaningless political figureheads and a lot of people running around tracks for a week in a big aerodrome?
What kind of civilisation can tip the web of life into a ‘death spiral’ and then spend its time arguing about whether or not this is a good thing? What kind of civilisation can embed something it calls ‘economic growth’ so deeply into its sense of self-worth and meaning that when it dimly becomes aware that this growth is turning the Earth itself upside down, it responds with calls for more of it? What kind of civilisation arrives at a point of no return, and then insists that the only ‘pragmatic‘ response is not to change the way it operates but to remake nature itself, from the genetic level upwards, in its own image? Anything rather than change. Anything rather than face the impossibility of change. Anything rather than look down.
I wrote a while back about feeling like a caged animal; like a wild creature living in captivity. I think this is a common feeling across the modern world; it is modernity’s gift. I also think that many of the crises we are currently precipitating spring from this detachment from our wild natures, which is also our detachment from wild nature. It’s both an internal and an external crisis, in other words: we repress the wildness within our selves as we repress the wildness outside our cities and our farmland. Which leads to the other? I don’t know. Maybe they go together. But both seem to be linked. Increasingly, we live within a bubble, insulated by air conditioning, cars and online tech. We don’t have to know, see or feel anything that we don’t want to. We can close our eyes to it, and we do. It’s how we got here.
It’s becoming increasingly fashionable in environmentalist circles to promote a concept called ‘rewilding‘ – taking land that was once agricultural, or even urban, and letting it run wild again; letting nature take over. Up here in Cumbria, where I live, there’s a genteel version of this going on at the moment. It’s all good stuff, though if human numbers and appetites continue to rage onwards, it’s going to be hard to make it work on any significant level. But it strikes me that we need to re-wild ourselves too. I’m all for the releasing of wild animals back into newly wild areas. Beavers, wolves, bears – and humans.
This winter, the Dark Mountain Project is running a small event that, to my mind, is one faltering attempt towards this necessary rewilding of our spirits. We’re joining forces with the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, whose founder Martin Shaw spoke at our festival this year, for a writing, myth-making and wilderness workshop on Dartmoor, as the winter closes in. It’s a first for us, but it goes to the heart of what we called for in our manifesto: that un-civilising of our spirits, of our expression, of our writing, of our ways of being.
So we’re going to retreat for a weekend to a small hostel near the foot of the moors, and pose ourselves a simple question: can we stand outside the wires and lights of modern living and, however briefly, re-forge a visceral engagement with the intelligence of the wild? Can we look at the human story, as it were, from outside? Can we look beyond our solitary intellect, ground ourselves in the weather patterns and the badger trails and the deep pools of water? What will this mean for how we attempt to write about, tell stories of, communicate, these times?
Martin and I are going to collaborate on this: we’re going to put together a weekend that will combine writing with storytelling, exercises with exercise. We’ll talk about and try to create some form of Uncivilised writing and story that works for us. We’ll all learn from each other what the land has to teach and what we have to say. It will be something of an experiment. And it should be fun.
There are twenty places available on this weekend, seven of which have already been filled. There are more details about it here. If you think you might be interested, do get in touch.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 7 September, 12
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I will mention this as i came across it this morning and for me at least it chimes.
ChuangTzu wrote:
The reality of the tao lies in concern for the self. Concern for the state is irrelevant, and concern for the world is cowshit. From this standpoint, the emporers work is the sage’s
hobby and is not what develops the self or nourishes life.
Which i take to mean that if we have been furnished with a certain lens in order to make sense of things and it conveys mostly nonsense then it is quite likely the focus that needs tinkering with.
I suppose we should be reading ‘self’ as something more expansive than our ‘solitary intellect’ and that looking ‘as it were from the outside’ could be at the same time looking from a place somewhere deeper within.
The workshop sounds like it will be be very rewarding and a lot of fun and maybe with this whole, to my mind, very creative and refreshing movement of question and debate coupled with some inspirational imagining, it might not after all prove to be too hard to shift the shackles.
The wild and the pastoral, where the intersection is the fence; many poets lost their will to live once fences dominated the landscape here in the islands, and I can understand their chagrin. Nothing is more offensive to the landscape than fences in my mind. The inner equivalent, what is that? What is the fence we carry inside of ourselves – I believe it is belief (yes irony intended). It sets our inner markers, and from our ideas we can start pruning the great rainforest of the mind and ignore that which we do not like etc. The wild self suddenly becomes a pastoral sheep. For our wild self to be found, these fences of belief has to be torn down, dogma has to be removed, and there lower the notion of self to enable the meeting of the other – and then start a most eloquent and intriguing waltz.
Tearing down beliefs is a great way of re-enforcing their reality.
Chris
Can’t wait!
Wild Ennerdale is being eyed up for The worlds biggest nuclear dump …….
“The wild things will mutate but natural selection will take care of the mutations.”……James Lovelock
Action replaced by apathy??????
http://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/momentous-decision-for-cumbria-democracy-nuked/
Years ago i extracted a great line from a David Whyte poem , i cannot remember the poem , but this one particular line flawed me . I scrawled it upon our toilet wall and every day , i ponder it ,i live with it.
“I look out at everything growing so wild and faithfully beneath the sky and wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation priveledged to refuse our flowering….”
These days i dont look at life in quite the same way , the wild isnt out there , its not over the hill, its not in the screech of the night birds or the last deep forests , its not some far of uninhabited stretch , untouched by our soiled little mitts . We are the wild ones we are that that has become feral , soiling our homes , destroying and polluting and hoarding . For Truly, to really enter nature, to really arrive in country, it is not a wild place , it is not some alien place beyond our kin .it speaks warmly of a distant home , a place long since forgotten . Paul no wonder we feel like caged annimals … Why do we refuse our flowering ?
Cheers Simeon.
‘Action replaced by apathy??????’
The question marks surely emphasise a most bewildering complexity.
Lovelock seems to be referring to an inevitable endgame that is dedicated to a constant rebalancing; a matrix and overview that encompasses one and all. But the other side of the coin is the everyday moment that demands a response and belongs distinctly to the individual, altering and shaping our world as it happens.
I read Pauls’ questions as particularly penetrating as to the source of the apathy:
If we are sensing the need to ‘rewild’ ourselves it illustrates our ‘detachment’ or disconnection, but also points to an awakening sensitivity. It sheds light on the ‘fact’ of detachment and without that spark of sensitivity detachment is somehow complete. This would explain the extent of the distortion and one needs to remember that because we live in the world we are more or less used to it and we might expect seemingly rational people to grasp rational priorities. Pauls’ questions aptly belie that notion.
Cooperative uncivilizing and rewilding is surely in itself redolent of mutation and maybe it is a kind of natural selection that will bring potent minds to the edge of dartmoor to play with some interesting and perhaps less rational energies.
Have folks here read the poetry of Gary Snyder?
I’m a big fan of Gary Snyder, Bill – not just the poetry, but the essays also. In fact, possibly the essays more than the poetry. ‘The Practice of the Wild’ is a terrific book.
Yes, agree – I’ve read and love all his stuff!
Planning to make this – looking forward to it.
I don’t know if any of you have come across Clark Strand, an ex Zen Monk in the US who has been proposing something he calls ‘green meditation’, as an ecologically-inofrmed reframing of traditional approaches to spirituality, including his adaptation of the 12 Step programme around the notion of ‘Ecological Recovery’.
I first cam across Clark through the piece below, in which he suggests the invention of electric light may have been a decisive moment in our dislocation from the dark, from the earth, from reverie. That our technologies may have been hard wiring us for insanity for longer than we think. A good example of the progress traps you talk about in ‘Dark Ecology’ Paul.
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/turn-out-lights
Mat
I have never read ‘The Practice of the Wild ‘ but it has been recommended too often recently not to look it out for some winter reading. I shall put it on the list along with Dark Mt. 3.
I like very much the concept of ‘finding ones place’. He is obviously coming from his own place of rare personal equilibrium and reflects a broad appraisal of tradition coupled with the honest practice of living on his own terms. Not bound by culture and clearly not a man to sit around and parrot for the sake of it.
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Hi, Paul,
this summer I was watching people dumping garbage on the rocks of the wild beaches in my country, and I and my fiancee were patiently collecting that in the late afternoons and carrying it to the nearest trashcans…I watched gigantic, dozens of miles long cloud of smoke from the uncontrolled wildfires in Bosnia hovering over the eastern horizon for days, just like the Tolkien’s description of the cloud from the Mountain of Doom. I see people around me, within the corporate world, transform from caring human beings to the frightening creatures (Orcs!), cold and cruel towards their fellow humans. I don’t see the hope. Oh, sorry, there always is the hope, but I fear I will not live to see the renewed world, or at least the world recovering from our terror. I am scared…I will keep doing what I do, keep talking to people, but now I know it will not make a difference. To re-wild ourselves demands a huge effort of will, it takes a conscious effort to FORGET all we’ve been taught in schools and the family, and listen to the World and learn anew. Too late for that, at least for the mankind. In my vanity, I think I reached that maturity, but I don’t know what to do with it now. England is too far from me, and as much I would like to attend your festivals, I cannot. So, I wish you all the best, I will retreat. Maybe, immersed in my inner world, I will find a strength to continue fighting. For, as much as we all hate the violence: it WILL come, and we have to be prepared for it.
The murky green
paddle disturbs the water
the kingfisher flew away
We have been domesticating oursleves for at least ten thousand years. Now coperations are finishing the process so that we think we feel free in their cage. We squirm like a drowning fish in the air. Those of us who can percieve and then have the guts to justify going wild will find a salvation of sorts. Everyone will have to deal with this in time. We must hold on to the difference between detachment and non-attachment to treasure the last of what matters. I hope David Pollard comments on the re-wilding. He has much to say about these concepts-especially over the last few months. There is a battle inside our heads between our instincts and our culture…what is the “presence of mind” that animals have, that some/many of us seek? How can we define and then occupy this state when our ansecestors have often successfully seperated us from nature and our natures? It did do it, it’s-self.
I look forward to discussing this face to face. I begin to see that I am in fact quite ambivalent about ‘re-wilding’.
I would say that taming is as ancient and venerable a principle as wilding. Seen from the perspective of geological time, what is it that has run wild here? What were – are – the sophisticated cultures of indigenous peoples if not the ongoing work of taming our innate capacity to get it wrong, to take more than we need, and to take it without asking?
Paul, you ask ‘What kind of civilisation can change the climate of an entire planet ?’ Might one answer that be simply ‘One that has become the victim of its own success’ ? My ancestors were no more or less to blame for this crisis than my children. This is just what ecological rebalancing looks like.
The more convinced I am by predictions of large-scale collapse (the melting of the arctic icecap and the currently accelerating release of carbo-methane seabed deposits seems to have raised the stakes on all other factors to hand) the more I am convinced that the same principles will apply then, as now. If you fear anything, fear your own selfishness, and use the time we have left to arm yourself against that.
Mat
Hello Mat
Thanks for the link to Clark Strands article. I was thoroughly taken by reading about Dr. Whers’ sleep experiments and have been mulling over them ever since. Being the direct opposite of sleep deprivation and providing a surplus of sleep time, they induced what he calls ‘periodic states of rest’ that are what i would recognise as a state of deep relaxation. This is easily accessible to most people through various simple techniques that invest in a suspension of the moment directly preceeding sleep so that the body rests in a sleep state whilst the mind stays awake. Some call this a trance state and it can be useful for various purposes. What interested me was that under the research conditions it became a part of the natural sleeping, waking pattern and seemed to result in a more acute waking state.
However i would suggest that experience in that state is not bound by the terms of the isolated intellect and the narrow rules of the waking state but that, like regular sleep, it has a perhaps more holistic framework. Anyway what i am getting at is that i dont believe the wakefulness that they ascribed to the lengthy periods of rest between sleep periods is dependant on long duration but simply requires a regularity which normal civilized work routine does not allow for. Never mind the electric lights, a few minutes spent dozing at the desk might be all it takes.
It is a forgotten and neglected space and we are left to blunder about with only our solitary intellect to make any sense of things; make money, look for truth, anxt about this and that e.tc. I also suspect that the closest most people come to being in that state is whilst watching t.v which could be interpreted as a serious pollution of that space.
Thanks again for the link.
£200? Blimey guv!.. Nowadays I can’t afford to live within society *or* step outside of it. ;-)
For a more affordable option you could simply stay at home and turn out the lights.
see Mats link above:
Well, I hope we’re making up for the price of this one by running plenty of free events this autumn too! I know it is a bit pricey. But in the absence of sponsorship from Monsanto, which despite my repeated requests they seem strangely reluctant to grant us, we have to bring in some cash somehow.
‘we have to bring in some cash somehow’
That is a big subject for those who fancy dropping out of the mainstream……
Certainly is. Any attempts to drop out, in my experience, bring the question of money right to the forefront of things.
Andy Brewin pointed me towards this group recently:
http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/
Whereas Mark Boyle of course has been on this for a while.
No obvious ‘solutions’ though, as ever …
No the only ‘solutions’, i can think of are pie in the sky. But the financial world definately needs some serious regulation. Money is well renowned for being very dodgy energy. People will kill for a fistfull of dollars and when not blatantly the root of all evil, it is busy fueling the good intentions that pave the proverbial road to hell.
Maybe Mark Boyle has some answers although i wouldn’t see the u.k as quite the right climate for loincloth style renunciation. I see he went to business school and I wonder if they consider him a star pupil. Anyway I should read his book i remember Maddy Harland was very big on it.
I just love the idea of a ‘monastery run by pirates’……Have a good weekend.
At the moment i am looking at practical skills coupled with cooperative part time employment as a model for artistic types. But it needs a good constellation of people and someone who can organise and everyone pulling their weight. and you are still dependent on selling your product or services. It is idealistic but at the least its good education. i guess you have some experience in that area with organising the festivals. A good team makes all the difference.
Enjoy your weekend
Wish you’d mentioned it being a fund-raiser in the original post, I feel a bit guilty now. :-(
Actually, if I’m honest, I think it’s really good value and if my circumstances were different I would be very tempted indeed.
I was joking (even though £200 equates to my entire family’s food budget for the best part of three weeks!), but it’s also worth remembering that the wilds of our world (be they species, habitats, rogue ideas or indigenous peoples) are under threat precisely because they’re not seen as economically viable. It’s highly likely that the stories we so desperately need will be found outside of the economic sphere as well. ;-)
200 pounds is a complete bargain for what is being offered and the level of all sorts of experience of the facilitators. We are mostly still living in a world where money is our major bargaining and transaction tool so I can’t see why you should sell yourselves short. It is not pricey, which is not to say everyone can afford it, just that it is worth that price. If I was not in Australia I would be there with bells on.
Wish wish wish….
Quite right there Warren. Most things that matter are outside the economic sphere, as would I be if I could work out how to survive! Having been brought up to believe that getting an academic degree was important than learning to do anything with my hands though, I am not in a good position. Bah.
(Good blog post coming up about that soon, by the way, by Simon Fairlie.)
On the lack of economic value of the wilds: this is tricky. Valuing them so they are not seen as expendable is one way to go. Trouble is, you then get nature being treated as a resource to be bought and sold; the whole ‘ecosystem services’ thing that is running through the green movement like cancer at the moment. Monbiot was quite good on this recently (nice to see him dropping the logos for once), though it’s an argument as old as the hills.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/06/price-rivers-rain-greatest-privatisation
I saw Simon’s piece in The Land and have been running with the idea of ‘Dystechnia’ with regard to some projects I’ve been organising in Doncaster. As Simon quite rightly points out this is a problem which is no longer confined to the middle classes… even cookery classes in many modern comprehensive schools are overwhelmingly ‘theory’ for fear of the rod of ‘health & safety’.
In fact I’d go as far to say that issue 12 of The Land is one of the most important they’re produced (although they’re obviously *all* very good ;-) ). The problem of ‘Growing Up Dystechnic’ does help highlight why we need to aim for some form of self-created festival… that UK Burning Man affair we’ve discussed before… something which seeks to answer the question of Dystechnia as well as open access.
More terryfyfing even than ‘ecosystem services’ is the whole ‘biodiversity offsets’ thing… no further evidence necessary for the death of environmentalism methinks ;-)
This whole idea that ‘money is evil’ or has ‘bad energy’, that we should be offering our skills for free, that working for money is surrendering to an evil system, is one I just can’t agree with. Or that ‘most things that matter are outside the economic sphere’. What is ‘the economic sphere’ anyway? Anything involving money?
Surely sure there are many many miracles and blessings in this wide world that are moneyless and for all. And if we focus on money as the highest good or best endeavor in our lives we will be living blinded. But money is just a tool. It is a trading item, albeit an abstract one. There is no shame in money. Having it, working for it, receiving it in exchange for your skills, passing it on, giving it away…it’s a tool.
I like the positive money link Paul. Very apt.
Let money flow through your fingers, use it wisely, see it for what it is. And when all that is over, move on.
We could learn to value things that are not valued highly enough in our current world; art, food, handskills, teaching… But the fact that they are not valued highly enough does not mean money is evil.
Well put. I have to say i agree with you point for point, especially the last paragraph and now i will backtrack and say i was being a bit tongue in cheek with the proverbs.
We were rather gnawing on the dry bone theme of how to get money if you ‘drop out’ of the wage earning world and the sacrifices one then has to face for doing what one believes in. Like not being able to afford a two hundred quid weekend. Self employment certainly has its advantages as a creative lifestyle but these are not usually of a monetary nature.
It is true that some people do get rather over influenced by the importance of money and it is a mechanism that gets manipulated by the unscrupulous to the detriment of others and to even more dire ends. I hope the ‘positive money’ people manage to make some positive progress with their logic. Thankfully there are fair-minded people working in all walks of life
But of itself money is of course no more the root of evil as are women.
If i could remember i would quote Khalil Ghibran on Buying and Selling but suffice to say he put it very well.
I can’t go either because of distance but if i could, i would barter with Paul and that
pirate, story telling person and i dare say they would go for it and if they wouldn’t then i would pay up because i too believe it will be well worth the price.
I had a brief exchange with someone at Positive Money a couple of years ago, and concluded that they’re firmly within the mainstream. They want to improve the way the monetary system works, but my impression was that they positively didn’t want the kind of fundamental reform which might actually make it fair.
If you’re only talking about its function as a medium of exchange, Rosie, then I fully agree with you. The problem is that (in its current form) it can also be used as a store of wealth, and that function tends to dominate. But using it as a store of wealth means taking it out of circulation, which leads to interest payment (to bring it back into circulation) – and thereby creates a constant flow of wealth from the rich to the poor.
I wrote about this issue in a blog post last year, The Root of Much Evil – http://uncivilisation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-root-of-much-evil – and touched on a strategy for challenging it in the courts. But it’s an indirect approach, and generally people seem to be too busy looking for obvious solutions, to spend time thinking about less obvious ones.
I found Paul’s interview in DM3 with the co-founders of North Face and Patagonia – ‘The Death of Birth’ – thoroughly shook up my preconceptions about money, and about those with lots and lots of it (lots that is, as seen from the already privileged perspective of what I suppose is an average single income family). Especially my assumptions about corporate bosses, all of whom I have tended to tar with the same brush.
I agree with you about money Rosie – I’d also say that looking at my own choices, I don’t see ‘dropping out’ as a very appealing or even creative step. Seems anyway that plenty of dropping will happen of itself soon enough – compared to which, the whole notion of dropping out may come to appear as just one of the many privileges that we once had on the table.
In other words, drop out by all means, but don’t berate others for a failure to grasp the nettle. I remember Lovelock saying recently ‘At this point I’d suggest you just enjoy what good times you have left’. Dropping out may indeed be the best way to do that, but to me anyway thats all it can be, really.
Meanwhile – and as Paul recently put it in a blog – sometimes it seems things not ever quite unravelling is the scariest of all options. Walmart and iPads forever, until its just us, the pigeons and the rats.
I think the dropping out idea was behind my reticence, above, about re-wilding. I tend to get my cloth ears on when invited to drop out in literal terms because I cling still to the romantic notion that we don’t have to go off-grid (in all its senses) to learn to listen to the wild ground of being. There are many ways to turn out the lights, at least some of which we can do even as we walk the city streets.
The more I look at it, the more I see I am shot through with compromise, complacency and cowardice before the large-scale readjustments Gaia is gearing up for. I’ve got three kids, no manual skills, lots of books. Plenty to lose and not much to play with, in that future. Keeping this in focus seems the best basis for any measuring of others’ choices. My beef about dropping out in literal terms is that it can seem, all too easily, to foster a sense of judgemental resentment towards the herd – those sleepwalking cowardly masses who lack the spunk to see the truth. A good part of Jeffers in there somewhere, notwithstanding his truth and beauty.
PS Glad you liked Clark’s piece Jim. It reminds me of a doc I saw once about a theory that the whole edifice of Roman Civilisation fell apart because they were using lead to boil a kind of cassis that only the rich and powerful could afford, all of whom thus went sterile and mad. Oops. And of a definition of Fate that I heard in the excellent online film ‘What a Way to go: Life at the End of Empire”, as “the unintended and unobserved consequences of our moment to moment choices.”
Mat…. Rest assured that i at least am not looking down my judgemental nose at you or any of the rest of the spunkless herds of the world
Seriously, thanks for reminding me that we should be careful of loaded cliches and catchphrases. I mentioned ‘dropping out of the mainstream’ to Paul because it seemed appropriate in terms of the question of income and also because he famously did just that and would get it. But dropping out of civilization for instance doesn’t hold much meaning for me. Dropping out of society-which one? Dropping out of the world-absurd, where would you go. The real changes i believe are the subtle inner ones that reinforce integrity in the self and in the human matrix, and it is just that integrity that counts in the longrun, more so than any lifestyle choice, because it is fundamentaly honest. However i also believe that anyone who is truly uncomfortable with their lot should look into it because they may just be blocking their potential and wasting their precious lives when they could be making a change. But discomfort is not obligatory and some are lucky to have work that they love and are presumably just where they should be. Uncivilization is surely a process, not a posture and i agree it is nauseating when anyone thinks they have got the pope by the balls.
As far as i know, by the time those romans were busy poisoning themselves they had already, long before, come to the point of no return by destroying their soil structure through neglect and bad habit, and were living on imported food, abstract wealth and power politics, much as we do now. I read that all the ‘great’ civilizations have followed the same pattern with the exception of the Moors who were maybe getting it right but got taken down by the pope. Now, having plundered the soils of the globe we are steadily poisoning ourselves with gases, radiation, electric light, reality t.v and whatever else we can let loose on ourselves….. But hey, don’t worry, you can get instant immunity by simply dropping out. Whats more you become truly cool, a master of denial, a builder of mud huts and reassuringly broke to boot….
This is not really me. I am trying out what it is to sound like those awful people who so rudely commented on Pauls article in the Guardian.
Thanks Jim, this makes alot of sense. After my above post, I went back over Dark Ecology, and came to the conclusion that at least as much rubbish might be spouted (by me in this case) against dropping out, as for it.
Seems we are in a deepening bind whatever we do, and with that as the backdrop to all our choices its not surprising discussions here and elsewhere have tended at times to get a bit…surly?…over the years. The stakes seem fairly high. But it seems to me that behaving like a shit to your neighbour feels pretty much the same in bad times and good. If I had to take one article from the thee DM Journals that has helped me get this clear, it would be Taoism and Warring States in DM2. Friendship will always serve us better than fences and guns.
What you said about the Romans seems very apt. We can start with the oil economy, with soil depletion, with collapsing fish-stocks, the big carbon numbers…the issues go and on, but they are all part of the same sweeping gradient it seems.
Onwards and downwards. I think one of the most valuable ideas that I’ve picked up on this thread – i forget who said it now – is that ‘dropping out’ is as often a matter of others’ judgement of our behaviour than an adopted posture. I remember long ago being told I was dropping out – read ‘copping out’ – by leaving London to live in Cornwall.
Despite there never being anywhere comfortable to sit, I daresay it is possible to live in the wilderness, one can take courses and so on. But i rather suspect that, ‘domesticated’ as we are, and as quoted by Ian M. we cannot expect to ‘sense’ the wilds as would a ‘native’.
I like to visit the wilds whenever i can. It makes for an inspiring pilgrimage and helps to stir perspective and it is precisely perspective beyond that of the bound and ‘solitary intellect’ that i find to be important. We may be out of step with the biosphere but we are nevertheless still driven by it and can observe it wherever we happen to be although i too would choose to do my observing in Cornwall rather than London any day.
As a reading man you might like this on the history of civilization and soil depletion. This drops you into the chapter on the Moorish civilization in southern spain, which to me was something of a revelation but the contents are at the bottom of the page.
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Wrench_Recon/Wrench_Recon_21.html
I agree that friendship is the way to go whenever possible and that differences should not promote distrust the way they so often do. In fact i would suggest we try dropping out of the entire human race in favour of a little more human kind.
Cheers
Dropping out completely is really a privilege which only those with the money to buy property in the country can afford. For the other 90% or so of us, we just have to make do where we are.
There’s quite a lot you can do in place, based upon the way people have done things in the past — grow the more expensive vegetables both to save money and to save on transportation costs, revive your home economy (make more of your own foods — jam, canned foods, etc), buy less stuff (electronics especially), travel less (or more sustainably). All of these things both make your own situation more resilient, and reduce your impact on the environment.
It’ll be a long time before we as a civilisation are able to balance our activities with the environment again, and in the meanwhile, you do what you can.
I should add that by the time you’ve completely eschewed car and plane travel, shifted to using only second-hand electronics when you use them at all, and insisted on growing a portion of your food and only buying the rest in season and when more or less locally produced, most members of modern society may view you as having dropped out already.
Nice to see this, Paul. I suspect many people will resist the idea, perhaps murderously so when the suggestion comes to actually put it into practice. There’s a forgotten (or sublimated) hatred of certain kinds of wildlife in this country. As the promised badger cull is showing us, it’s always framed as a threat to our agrarian subsistence methods, no matter how exaggerated these claims are. Just think of the bad press wolves get in fairy tales… The hatred is still there, waiting to be ‘reintroduced’ alongside the long-extinct animals. And wild humans in Britain? Witness the contemporary attitude towards travellers and multiply it by about 100, I’d say.
One point though: you wouldn’t be releasing ‘wild’ creatures at that point, they would be feral, and as such, capable of doing great damage until the point where a new balance was struck and they became bona fide members of the ecological community. You might like to read this similarly titled 2007 article by Jason Godesky which goes into the perils and pitfalls of domestication – in animals, plants and humans – and the painful trials that species have to undergo to undo this process (so far as this is possible) and turn feral or ‘rewild’. Re-reading it, the point he makes about how culture can speed up the process of integration seems relevant to the Dark Mountain mission:
cheers,
Ian
Paul,
A new book on rewilding will be released on 9 Oct in the US:
Unlearn, Rewild: Earth Skills, Ideas and Inspiration for the Future Primitive
By Miles Olson
A preview is here:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/07/unlearn-rewild.html
An outstanding resource on reconnecting with nature is Tom Brown. He’s written a mountain of books, and he runs a busy school.
http://wildancestors.blogspot.com/2012/04/tracker.html
Have fun!
Richard Reese
What kind of civilisation does all these things, which I agree are hysterically inept and self-damaging? Well, that’s our civilisation, the one that we helped make, the one that we’re indissolubly a part of, the one that’s intertwined with the warp and weft of our being. It’s us. We did it. Our species.
I know what you’re thinking now, but this is not an argument for guilt. It’s an argument for taking a position that will help us to see things and respond realistically to what we see. And that position is not “standing outside modern living”.
We are not noble savages, we are not freak rejects, we are just ordinary individuals. As such we perhaps represent some part of the positive potential of our species. We cannot step outside the system to examine it. Our criticality, such as it is, can only be meaningful and relevant within the system that engendered it.
Probably there is nothing useful we can do, that is the sad sense that I have, but I feel sure that if there was anything useful to do – even short-term – the first step on the road to it would be the cultivation of better self-knowledge as individuals within a species.
There is obviously no way I can justify these comments, they are just a strong intuition that I have. If they are sensible, I have no idea where they might lead.
I live in Devon and dearly wish I could come to the retreat, but I’ll be abroad in November. I hope the retreat is such a success that you’ll consider doing another one down this way!
Paul- I have so much appreciation for you and the other artists that contribute their stories. I have found such solace in the stories and comments here. My isolation from the mainstream thoughts of those in the U.S. continue to leave me feeling like an outsider or that ‘caged animal’. But, through the works of Dark Mountain, I find some peace and comfort.
Many thanks,
Carmen