I'd like to know more about the uncivilisation vision

[John]

Hey guys,

I just found out about this project, and it sounds very promising. I too don't buy the view of the future as a better version of the current world. However, I don't really understand what uncivilisation is saying beyond this. I've read through the brief manifestoes available on the websites and all that there seems to be is a negative message: "this is what our vision of the future should NOT be".

So what should it be? Uncivilisation claims to stand for hope for a new start. But how do we envision this working out? Are we talking apocalypses/near-extinction senarios where the few survivors emerging from their underground tunnels can restart a brave new world without the messy civilisations of the past? Are we talking about new political/economic systems of managing the world? Are we talking environmental disasters or horrific overpopulation? Are we talking about unprecedented levels of space exploration?

If we believe that apocalyptic senarios cannot be averted, then shouldn't we be proactive in setting up help and aid for the future generations that will need to cope with this? I guess one thing I'm confused about is why uncivilisation, which I think rightly sees a grim future for mankind, has decided to deal with this by initiating talks and festivals rather than, say, by initiating the creation of vast stockpiles of long-life food, clean water and medical supplies. 

The background photo for this forum depicts rivers of blood and "last-days-of-the-dinosaurs" type imagery, yet no one seems to be panicked. I'm confused.

Please help me,

John

[Dougald]

Hi John -

Welcome - and thanks for the question. I think you've probably put into words a response that a lot of people have had on encountering this project.

The first thing I'd say is, talking in terms of "apocalypse" gets in the way of thinking clearly about the situation we're in. One of the key phrases in the manifesto is "The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop." What we're facing is, very likely, the breakdown of many of the systems and ways of doing things that we (in countries like the UK or the USA) grew up taking for granted. But this is not going to play out with the speed of a Hollywood disaster movie or the finality of the Christian Day of Judgement.

Some useful things to bear in mind:

1. Change happens more slowly than we expect. Even the most rapid and dramatic changes, as seen from a historical perspective, take place almost imperceptibly slowly when viewed from the level at which we experience them in the course of our (brief) lifetimes. Ran Prieur put this well, during the early days of the financial crisis:

When I say "this is what the crash looks like," I don't mean that we won't get any more changes, but that they won't come any faster than in the last few weeks, and that our world will never resemble The Road Warrior. We will not be fighting off roving hordes, but going through our lives adjusting to changes in the background, and in 20 years we'll look back and say "Wow, what happened?!"

Another of the contributors to Dark Mountain Vol.1, John Michael Greer, makes the same point with a historical example:

Read an account of the French Revolution, for example, and events seem to follow one another like explosions from a string of firecrackers, from the final crisis of the Ancien Régime straight through to the fall of Napoleon. For the man or woman in the French street, though, these happenings were scattered threads in a fabric of months and years woven from the plainer cordage of ordinary life.

Partly this is a function of the way historical narrative compresses time. It bears remembering that a teenage Parisienne who sat daydreaming of her upcoming wedding on the day that Louis XVI summoned the États-General in 1788 would most likely have been a grandmother on the day the Allied armies marched into Paris after the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Equally, though, it’s rare for historical events to have the same apparent importance at the time that they are assigned in the historian’s hindsight, not least because the everyday process of making a living and moving through the stages of human existence plays a larger role in most lives than the occasional tumults that make the history books.

2. It's normal for us, as humans, to take our current way of living for granted. It takes effort to make a distinction between what we're used to and what we need for a liveable existence. One result of this is that we are good at imagining a future which is basically an extension of life-as-we-know-it - and good at imagining an apocalyptic future where things have broken down and life is unbearably awful. We are less good at imagining a future in which lots of the things we take for granted are gone and it turns out that life is still worth living. This lack of imagination is why "sustainability" generally ends up meaning "sustaining a world of supermarkets and superhighways" (whether through electric cars or carbon rationing).

3. Most people alive today live outside of the-world-as-you-and-I-know-it. So when environmentalism becomes an effort to "sustain" today's rich world lifestyles, it is not simply fighting to prevent the death of millions in the future through climate change, but fighting to preserve a state of affairs in which millions die this year and every year through poverty. Vinay Gupta sums this up in the interview I did with him for Dark Mountain Vol.1:

Even in the most optimistic scenarios globalisation is going to get us. Migration of jobs and capital around the world is making the poor richer, and the rich poorer, with a lot of noise on top of that basic pattern. Another thing that moves wealth around is natural resource scarcity: when people start paying top dollar for oil, the oil states start getting rich. Suppose we wind up with a 'global middle class' of, say, four billion people, we're going to see that same kind of auction pricing and wealth transfer for more or less all natural resources: copper, iron, nickel, even wood.

So one way or another, even with all the new high tech stuff you can think of, we're not going to be so much richer than our neighbours on the planet forever. We're all headed, on average, for a lifestyle about where Mexico is today, and possibly a good deal worse if climate or other factors really start to bite.

4. People are good at adapting, making do and muddling through. Rather than picturing Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' or Mad Max, we'd do better to look at how life goes on in the favelas and villages where most of the world lives today. There's nothing romantic about this - but there is a resilience and a capacity for improvisation which we can learn from.

Paul's first book was called 'One No, Many Yeses' - and, in a sense, that spirit also runs through this project. That's one reason why you won't find a single, clear vision of what the future should be around here. But what you will find are people involved in practical projects whose work intertwines with others whose focus is more on ideas and stories.

* Check out the blog post I put up yesterday, which highlights the work of Vinay Gupta's Hexayurt Project (about to be deployed in Haiti).

* Check out the work of Alastair McIntosh (who's speaking at the festival) and the many others who brought about land reform in Scotland.

* On a humbler level, I've spent most of the past six months working on a project to fill a half-empty indoor market in Brixton with grassroots creativity and community-grounded businesses and projects.

These projects have various things in common: an emphasis on doing what we can with what's available; a habit of getting things done using much less money than government or business generally assumes is necessary, by working with the existing desires and skills of communities; a DIY attitude and positive concept of "subsistence", the ability to meet one's own needs and the needs of those immediately around us, rather than being too dependent on complex systems.

There's no road map for the world we're heading into. There are too many unknowns for that to be anything other than misleading. But those projects - fed by the stories and ideas Dark Mountain is nurturing - give some clues to paths we might want to explore.

[Alex Fradera]

Hi John

Answering some of these questions is precisely what the Dark Mountain Project is all about. I think we'll see shades of it in the journal, and Uncivilisation will certainly brim with discussions, each of them hydra-headed.

You posited a few stories about humanity's future. My guesses on how much attention each of these stories will get within the project:

Apocalypse and its cousins: a little. We are drawn to the millenarian but DMP was set up to get beyond this and examine the wider territory. I think the important thing to note about the notion of extinction is that mountaineers are permitted to countenance it soberly.*

New systems of managing the world: I anticipate a lot of time talking about new systems - of governance, of sociality, of economics, of subsistence. I reckon that any talk of managing the world would lead into very interesting territory.

Environmental disasters: Surely - how to live through them, how to understand them

Horrific overpopulation: hard to answer with the word horrific there.
Understanding a world of scarcity and less space - shanty living, alternatives to the nuclear family set-up, most certainly.
Tools and ideas for reducing the risk of horrific overpopulation? On the menu.
Stories/acceptance of horrific overpopulation- probably not so. As I understand the project, mapping out dystopic futures is not seen as a useful enterprise (and I agree).

Space exploration: Inner or outer space? ;)

Just as I post I see that Dougald has beaten me to it, but I'll leave my answers as-is.

Hope this is useful!

Best
Alex


* or not.

[John]

Hey, thanks guys! Those were awesome answers! I think I get the idea better now, and it makes good sense. I guess what we're saying is that if the world as we know it is going to change, then we should be helping to shape it to change in the right kind of directions. I still think it would help to identify exactly what we're going to be dealing with, not necessarily to prevent it, but at least to know what we're working with. I'm not saying that there is any way of predicting the future with definite accuracy, of course!

[Matthew Watkinson]

If the future isn't going to be dystopian, is it going to be utopian? I like what you guys have to say, but if this is about reality then reality is what it should be about, even if it isn't very nice. As it seems to me, a future decoupled from the expanding fossil fuel energy base will revert back to a much more natural, darwinian state where shorter lives will become a much bigger part of society. Indeed, a case can be made for concluding that the temporary reduction in competition within the human species, precipitated by the use of fossil fuels to replace manual labour, has led to the population explosion that is directly responsible for the state of the planet today. I guess it comes down to one question: how relevant is Malthus to the Dark Mountain Project? Or, to put it another way, was Charles Darwin wrong?

"It is impossible not to regret bitterly, but whether wisely is another question, the rate at which man tends to increase; for this leads in barbarous tribes to infanticide and many other evils, and in civilised nations to abject poverty, celibacy, and to the late marriages of the prudent. But as man suffers from the same physical evils as the lower animals, he has no right to expect an immunity from the evils consequent on the struggle for existence." Charles Darwin

Kind regards,

Matthew

[Catherine Lupton]

Hi Folks

Very interesting discussion unfolding here. These are some of the constructive aspects of the Dark Mountain project so far that I've found inspiring - so far, since it's evolving right now out of the corners of literally thousands of minds (judging by Paul's post in the Ecologist on Thursday):

1. It takes us into the deep territory of the stories and myths that we tell ourselves. It invites us to take a hard look at what these stories tell us, about who we are and what our place in the world is. It proposes that we are still largely living through old stories, which are now grievously out of step with where we actually are, as we face the prospect of the familiar systems that sustain our current lifestyles collapsing. And it invites us to create radically new stories, better suited to support our creative adaptation to the new circumstances that will gradually emerge in the wake of collapse.

This is powerful stuff, and not surprising that it's upsetting some major purveyors of the old stories who are keen to bury the good news. Dougald's recent blog post -
http://www.dark-mountain.net/wordpress/2010/04/29/getting-practical...
- has to fend off accusations that DM is 'all about poetry', and deals in 'intellectual abstractions rather than real social mechanisms'.

Global apocalypse scenarios - in which everything collapses at once, most life dies and the few human survivors quickly revert to a state of wretched savagery - are a good example of an old story that doesn't serve us especially well in working out constructive ways to deal with the present and prospective future. Economic growth as an absolute measure of good is another creaking old story. Another is dividing into two, and believing we can only have either one thing or the other. Utopia or dystopia, business as usual or apocalypse.

2. Apocalypse scenarios are really good at filling us with fear and helping us forget how resourceful, creative and adaptable we are as a species, even in the face of adversity. A lot of the practical initiatives around the Dark Mountain, examples of which Dougald gives, are about reminding us of this in a positive and pro-active way, by developing and sharing skills for robust, lo-tech, prospective post-collapse living. So, some alternatives (or complements) to stockpiling food, water and medical supplies against a coming breakdown are: re-learning and evolving subsistence farming and food-growing techniques adapted to the place where you're at, developing low-tech systems for storing and purifying water, and cleaning up water pollution; re-learning how to use local plant medicines and building up training in basic, lo-tech field medicine.

As Dougald points out in his reply here, if we look beyond the insulation of our privileged high-tech western(ised) lifestyles, vast numbers of people in the world are already living more or less like this, and they're doing okay. The other source of examples which has been floating around in the Dark Mountain discussions is our pre-industrialised past, in which people lived rich and interesting lives, and even travelled the world, without the complex and resource-hungry gadgetry that we believe is essential to a worthwhile existence.

I recently came across a terrific piece by Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 'When All Flights Are Grounded' (written before the volcano saga) http://www.ooffoo.com/listing/When-All-Flights-Are-Grounded.aspx She imagines a post collapse world (more dramatised that what's likely to play out, admittedly), in which at first we are angry and fearful and desperate, but then we learn to get on with it. We re-learn the basic life-crafting skills that our present insulated civilized lives don't require us to exercise, and we become richer, stronger and more interesting for it.

3. Alex mentions discussions about new systems for managing the world; I wonder if one Dark Mountaineer response might be that we actually let go - or will be compelled to let go - of trying to manage things systematically at a global level. Resource contraction seems to me likely to mean that we'll end up with a great patchwork of local activities and solutions, among which folks will keep on travelling and interconnecting; but likely not with the infrastructure to manage anything globally. It's an interesting cultural challenge to think about letting go of the human drive to fix big intractable problems (eg population growth), and suggest that perhaps some of them will just get left unsolved by humans and will then sort themselves out over time.

[Matthew Watkinson]

I don't think that anybody should manage anything other than their own approach to the future. Overpopulation will definitely sort itself out without us having to do anything at all, but thinking this will happen nicely or that pre-industrial population growth was limited by anything other than severe hardship or that we can guitar strum our way to world peace, equality and local farming is still ignoring reality. To really understand must, surely, involve an understanding of how nature works and, in nature , sustainability is achieved through severe competition within and between species (particularly within species), not continued faith is man's ability to adapt (that's exactly why we are where we are). We have been shielded (in the western world particularly) from the struggle for life that defines the rest of life on Earth. Indeed, we have decided nature's balance is a model of sustainability when in fact it is actually a function of balanced unsustainability. All species are trying to expand in numbers (as ours was in the pre-industrial age, is now and will continue to do in the future, especially when we need children to support us in old age (if we make it) and when we have lost the convenience of contraception) and the only reason they don't is because large numbers end up dead, thus creating the illusion of 'balance'. In nature, almost nothing dies of old age and we have forgotten this in favour of some utopian fantasy world where we all live in loving 'harmony'. Now matter how much we want it to be true, or how many songs we sing about how much it is true, this isn't how thing's work. If a population is too good at surviving (as we have been for at least two centuries), it will exhaust it's resources and automatically limit itself. A sustainable future therefore involves finding ways of NOT being too good at surviving; unless you accept that sustainability is actually a utopian myth of course, and that collapse might not be the picnic opportunity that some seem to think it will be.

Kind regards,

Matthew

[Alex Fradera]

Hi Matthew,

It's not just large numbers that end up dead. Everything that lives on this earth will die at some point.

Will we die before we had planned to? I expect so.

The problem is not that we won't live to 120, or 100, or 80, or whatever we were promised. The problem is that we were promised it at all, by others or by ourselves.

Mortality rates for pneumonia, and broken bones, and appendicitis, are all likely to skew upwards. Population stabilising or dropping can be the consequence of such undramatic but tangible changes.

Harmony, loving or otherwise, begins with an acceptance of certain facts, such as: life involves death. It's not intolerable that death cannot be dispelled, and that we will have to face it. It's not romantic, either. It just is.

I think the language of competition puts us on a false footing with regards to the future. If we think we are competing with all other species, it's a small step to take to continue to control, subjugate, or obliterate them. Which is basically the model that's gotten into this mess. The views of many of our ancestors, drawing from present-day cultures that share-in-common with them, were not to control and exhaust resources at the expense of other species. Those hunted were revered and their place in their locality properly recognised - limits were voluntarily imposed because of the totally different umwelt they inhabited (owing to language, technology, and tradition).

I agree that there is a struggle for life, rather than a Teletubby kumbaya, but I think competition is too thin and functional a term to do this justice. We borrow too much from the victorian backdrop of commerce when we look at biology - the fallout from evolution coming to fruition and dominance when it did!

Are you coming to the festival? This is the sort of conversation that should be pursued in person!

[Matthew Watkinson]

Thank you for this response Alex. I am undecided about coming to the camp. I need to find a bit more realism about the increase in mortality that will result from a reversion to local subsistence. Medical care will, basically, collapse (you can't have an NHS without a massive pyramid of specialisation based on cheap abundant energy) and that will go some of the way to solving the sustainability problem, but if you really want to consider things properly, there are some much darker realities to discuss as well, because many of the local survival models currently being championed involved or involve significant amounts of infanticide (the bushmen killing one of a pair of twins for example, or the amazonian tribes killing disabled children, or many examples of killing female children), human sacrifice, inter-tribal warfare and other culturally unpalatable realities that promote sustsainability but will quickly turn a campfire sing song a little bit sour. Not because these people are mean and barbaric, but because their existence is a function of reality rather than pampered and idealistic western fantasies. Twins would prevent a bushmen woman from foraging effectively for example. Disabled children would place a huge burden on small subsistence villages living on the edge. Female infanticide is the most effective way of limiting population growth (they are the rate limiting step in reproduction so limiting their numbers rapidly limits the possibility of growth). Unless we are planning to ban sex, the default for all life on earth, including us, is unsustainable population growth. I despise the existence of these things, but this is what sustianbility actually takes. The death rate must equal the birth rate and, as history has demonstrated numerous times, if you are not on a small island with its own intrinsic limits, one of the most effective ways of achieving this is fighting with your neighbours. We may not like the concept of competition, but we are a tribal species and competition within species is a massive part of natural selection. Local survival that doesn't involve universal population control will involve tribal competition. This is the reality. The species concept and the conservation propaganda has presented species as if they are benevolent units made of love and common goals, whereas the most severe competition actually occurs within species (not necessarily involving actual warfare of course). Indeed, this is a fundamental part of natural selection: the strongest outcompete the weakest and I just can't find a way to see how humanity can be different. I know I am repeating this, but the acceptance of intra-species competition is the critical issue for me. Victorian natural history was definitely much more brutal, but maybe that's because they could see things a lot clearer than us. They were living during much harder times for example, while we only have decades of expanding resource conditions to shape our language. Indeed, perhaps we should be returning to the wisdom of the past, rather than trying to create our own without experience. I definitely don't think it should be ignored that's for sure and that's why I am interested in the relevance of Malthus and Darwin.

Anyway, If the DMP can accept that tribalism (already a massive, if slightly ignored part of the human species) will be concentrated by a collapse in resource availability (the moral community cannot exceed the viable community) then maybe there is something in it.

So, will a human future be tribal, or united by a common goal?

“…an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run...” - Garrett Hardin

Kind regards,

Matthew

[Matthew Watkinson]

As well as Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population and almost anything by Charles Darwin (how many people, including environemtal campaigners and journalists, have even read On the Origin of Species?), Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-savage is definitely worth a read:

http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-book46pdf?.pdf

As is The Tragedy of the Commons by Garret Hardin (I think this has been mentioned elsewhere):

http://bit.ly/c7jSKO

Matthew

[Paul Kingsnorth]

Matthew - I hope you do come to the camp and the festival, precisely because it - and DM in general - exists to hold these conversations. I don't know if you've read our manifesto, or the interview with Vinay Gupta which Dougald recently linked to on the blog, but if so you'll see that they reflect some of your concerns here. No-one ever said the future was going to be pretty. For me, that is the first stage of getting real about what's unfolding. I also think that the idea of 'global management' of anything is bunk, and I think there is no escape from grim contraction. Do we know how that will play out? No. Nobody does. Our task now is to weigh up the possibilities, do our best to create resilient systems and new ways of seeing our predicament, work together ... and perhaps hope for the best. But I can promise you that if we see you at Uncivilisation in a few weeks you'll find plenty of people who want to continue this conversation.

[Sonny Khan]

thanks for posting the link to Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-savage - just read through it. I found it a bit of a frustrating read as he makes no attempt to distinguish between gatherer hunters, pastoralists, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, intensive agriculturalists etc. In my understanding, the myth of the Noble Savage largely refers to gatherer hunter cultures, ones that have not had contact with civ or have had only sporadic contact. Whelan seems to lump everything together, including modern day indians, civilised amazonians, pre columbus agrculturalists, etc. Again, he doesn't seem to make any distinction, and also suffers from the same cherry picking (and ignorance) of research that he accuses the noble savage brigade of doing.

He made some very good points, but to refute the noble savage concept (myth or otherwise) he really needs to start with a clear understanding of it, and not hopelessly confuse the matter even more, which in my mind he has!

Still - thanks for posting it.

Matthew Watkinson said:

As well as Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population and almost anything by Charles Darwin (how many people, including environemtal campaigners and journalists, have even read On the Origin of Species?), Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-savage is definitely worth a read:

http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-book46pdf?.pdf

As is The Tragedy of the Commons by Garret Hardin (I think this has been mentioned elsewhere):

http://bit.ly/c7jSKO

Matthew

[Tali Eichner]

Hi all,

This is such an interesting debate I don't really want to interfere, but I just had to answer this one point of Matthew's:

"The species concept and the conservation propaganda has presented species as if they are benevolent units made of love and common goals, whereas the most severe competition actually occurs within species (not necessarily involving actual warfare of course)."

This is not actually a view held by practical conservationists, this is a construct of the green movement. There are many reasons a person may come to the conclusion that humans should respect/protect/have less impact upon other species, but it has always been expected by environmentalists that these arguments will not appeal to others, who may not have come to this conclusion of their own accord. It does not require much argument or explanation, and you do not have to expect much deep-thought from your listener, if your rallying call is "save the pandas - they are lovely and cute!" This is why you don't see slugs as campaign flagship species :)

Tali