His views are officially fringe, as he would be the first to acknowledge. However, they are interesting, especially to those of us trying to scope out the apocalypse.
These excerpts are about a third of the original article, “It’s the End of the World as We Know . . . And He Feels Fine.” (April 17, 2014)
* * *
The Dark Mountain Project was
founded in 2009. From the start, it has been difficult to pin down — even for
its members. If you ask a representative of the Sierra Club to describe his
organization, he will say that it promotes responsible use of the earth’s
resources. When you ask Kingsnorth about Dark Mountain, he speaks of mourning,
grief and despair. We are living, he says, through the “age of ecocide,” and
like a long-dazed widower, we are finally becoming sensible to the magnitude of
our loss, which it is our duty to face.
Kingsnorth himself arrived at this
point about six years ago, after nearly two decades of devoted activism. He had
just completed his second book, “Real England,” a travelogue about the
homogenizing effects of global capitalism on English culture and character.
“Real England” was a great success — the first of his career. All the major
newspapers reviewed the book; the archbishop of Canterbury and David Cameron
(then the opposition leader) cited it in speeches; Mark Rylance, the venerated
Shakespearean actor, adopted it as a kind of bible during rehearsals for his
hit play “Jerusalem.” Yet Kingsnorth found himself strangely ambivalent about
the praise. “Real England” was a painful book to write. For months he
interviewed publicans, shopkeepers and farmers fighting to maintain small,
traditional English institutions — fighting and losing. Everywhere Kingsnorth
traveled, he saw the forces of development, conglomeration and privatization
flattening the country. By the time he published his findings, he was in little
mood to celebrate.
At the same time, he felt his
longstanding faith in environmental activism draining away. “I had a lot of
friends who were writing about climate change and doing a lot of good work on
it,” he told me during a break from his festival duties. “I was just listening
and looking at the facts and thinking: Wow, we are really screwed here. We are
not going to stop this from happening.”
The facts were indeed increasingly
daunting. The first decade of the 21st century was shaping up to be the hottest
in recorded history. In 2007, the Arctic sea ice shrank to a level not seen in
centuries. That same year, the NASA climatologist James Hansen, who has been
ringing the climate alarm since the 1980s, announced that in order to elude the
most devastating consequences, we’d need to maintain carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere at a level of 350 parts per million. But we’d already surpassed 380,
and the figure was rising. (It has since reached 400 p.p.m.) Animal and plant
species, meanwhile, were dying out at a spectacular rate. Scientists were
beginning to warn that human activity — greenhouse-gas emissions, urbanization,
the global spread of invasive species — was driving the planet toward a “mass
extinction” event, something that has occurred only five times since life
emerged, 3.5 billion years ago.
“Everything had gotten worse,”
Kingsnorth said. “You look at every trend that environmentalists like me have
been trying to stop for 50 years, and every single thing had gotten worse. And
I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit here saying: ‘Yes, comrades, we
must act! We only need one more push, and we’ll save the world!’ I don’t
believe it. I don’t believe it! So what do I do?”
The first thing that Kingsnorth did
was draft a manifesto. Also called “Uncivilization,” it was an intense,
brooding document that vilified progress. “There is a fall coming,” it
announced. “After a quarter-century of complacency, in which we were invited to
believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall . . .
Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.”
The initial print run of
“Uncivilization” was only 500 copies. Yet the manifesto gained widespread
attention. The philosopher John Gray reviewed it in The New Statesman.
Professors included it on their reading lists. An events space in Wales invited
Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, Dark Mountain’s co-founder, to put on a festival;
400 people showed up. Doug Tompkins, the billionaire who started the
outdoor-apparel company the North Face, and his wife, Kristine Tompkins, the
former C.E.O. of Patagonia, offered financing and invited Kingsnorth and his
family to spend two months on land they own in southern Chile.
There were others, however, who saw
Kingsnorth’s new work as a betrayal. With waters rising, deserts spreading and
resource wars looming, how could his message be anything but reckless — even
callous? He and his sympathizers were branded “doomers,” “nihilists” and
(Kingsnorth’s favorite epithet) “crazy collapsitarians.” One critic, a
sustainability advocate, published an essay in The Ecologist — a magazine
Kingsnorth once helped run — comparing Dark Mountaineers to the complacent
characters in the Douglas Adams novel “The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe”: “Diners [who] enjoyed watching the obliteration of life, the
universe and everything whilst enjoying a nice steak.”
Kingsnorth regards such charges
with equanimity, countering that the only hope he has abandoned is false hope.
The great value of Dark Mountain, he has claimed, is that it gives people
license to do the same. “Whenever I hear the word ‘hope’ these days, I reach
for my whiskey bottle,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “It seems to me to be
such a futile thing. What does it mean? What are we hoping for? And why are we
reduced to something so desperate? Surely we only hope when we are powerless?”
Instead of trying to “save the
earth,” Kingsnorth says, people should start talking about what is actually
possible. Kingsnorth has admitted to an ex-activist’s cynicism about politics
as well as to a worrying ambivalence about whether he even wants civilization,
as it now operates, to prevail. But he insists that he isn’t opposed to
political action, mass or otherwise, and that his indignations about
environmental decline and industrial capitalism are, if anything, stronger than
ever. Still, much of his recent writing has been devoted to fulminating against
how environmentalism, in its crisis phase, draws adherents. Movements like Bill
McKibben’s 350.org, for instance, might engage people, Kingsnorth told me, but
they have no chance of stopping climate change. “I just wish there was a way to
be more honest about that,” he went on, “because actually what McKibben’s
doing, and what all these movements are doing, is selling people a false
premise. They’re saying, ‘If we take these actions, we will be able to achieve
this goal.’ And if you can’t, and you know that, then you’re lying to people.
And those people . . . they’re going to feel despair.” . . .
For Kingsnorth, the notion that
technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is
not just wrong, it’s repellent — a distortion of the proper relationship
between humans and the natural world and evidence that in the throes of crisis,
many environmentalists have abandoned the principle that “nature has some
intrinsic, inherent value beyond the instrumental.” If we lose sight of that
ideal in the name of saving civilization, he argues, if we allow ourselves to
erect wind farms on every mountain and solar arrays in every desert, we will be
accepting a Faustian bargain. . . .
Kingsnorth and Hine’s aspirations
for their manifesto weren’t revolutionary, but neither were they nihilistic.
Each man draws a distinction between a “problem,” which can be solved, and a
“predicament,” which must be endured. “Uncivilization” was firm in its
conviction that climate change and other ecological crises are predicaments,
and it called for a cadre of like-minded writers to “challenge the stories
which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human
centrality and the myth of separation from ‘nature.’ ” . . .
“People think that abandoning
belief in progress, abandoning the belief that if we try hard enough we can fix
this mess, is a nihilistic position,” Hine said. “They think we’re saying:
‘Screw it. Nothing matters.’ But in fact all we’re saying is: ‘Let’s not
pretend we’re not feeling despair. Let’s sit with it for a while. Let’s be
honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the
darkness, what do we start to notice?’” Hine compared coming to terms with the
scope of ecological loss to coming to terms with a terminal illness. “The
feeling is a feeling of despair to begin with, but within that space other
things begin to come through.” . . .
* * *This is not exactly Smiling Through the Apocalypse, but it's getting there.
There was an extended debate in 2009 on these issues between Kingsnorth and George Monbiot, columnist at The Guardian.
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