Facing up to the slow collapse of our planet is hard, but
thinking apocalyptically could help us prepare for the crises to come.
This weekend the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire will be
home to Uncivilisation 2013,
which describes itself as "a gathering of people searching for answers to
questions about our collective future in a rapidly changing and depleting
world". At Uncivilisation about 400 people are expected to attend sessions
including a wild-food foraging workshop, a talk on moving beyond a
monetary-based economy, and a ceremony of singers and storytellers leading the
group in a "liturgy of loss".
I've been thinking a lot about the future lately. I've got
two daughters. The youngest turned two this spring, an occasion that gave me
the opportunity to carve out the mental space to start a new writing project
and reflect on what the world is going to look like in 40 years, when she's my
age. Most popular imaginings of the future veer to extremes: the future is
going to be a hi-tech paradise of machine-human mindmeld; or it's going to be
an overpopulated disease-ridden desert of zombies and armed zones of privilege.
The rhetoric around the future swirls endlessly but almost effortlessly
gravitates to the hyperbolic of Hollywood and the hype of Silicon Valley.
But the more I look into how and why we think the way we do
about the future, the more it has become clear to me that neither future scenario
has been helping me find a way forward; I'm left still looking for a way to
understand what comes next for a planet so obviously under severe stress it
seems hardly histrionic to worry about what will be left for my daughters when
they're 40 and I'm on my way out.
The Uncivilisation festival is put on by Dark Mountain, a
publishing venture founded in 2009 with an annual journal and ongoing blog. One of Dark
Mountain's primary sustainers is Paul Kingsnorth, a disillusioned former
environmental journalist who has come to the conclusion that we are in an
inexorable period of "slow collapse". To Kingsnorth and his Dark
Mountain followers the problems are intractable. There is no turning back, halting
global warming, ending our lifestyle of rampant overconsumption and
environmental destruction. The Dark Mountain goal, then, is to give a forum to
voices willing to acknowledge that no matter how ardent we are about recycling
and voting green, we will still be living in a time of disintegration, a time
of ongoing loss.
Kingsnorth's Dark Mountain reminded me of a short tract I
had come across written by journalism professor and activist Robert Jensen. Jensen
teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and recently self-published a
manifesto called We Are All Apocalyptic Now. In it, he argues that
"responsible intellectuals need to think apocalyptically". For
Jensen, thinkers and environmentalists need to reclaim the apocalypse from
survivalists, religious fanatics and pop culture. As he writes: "Thinking
apocalyptically can help us confront honestly the crises of our time and
strategise constructively about possible responses."
My take is a bit of a hybrid – part Kingsnorth's Dark
Mountain spirituality and part Jensen's pragmatic acceptance. Kingsnorth wants
to reclaim apocalypse, create a space for people to celebrate what they still
have and lament what they have lost. After that, it's up to them to decide how
to go forward. Jensen believes we can and should do something to prepare for
the coming collapse. For Jensen, how we live now is going to determine how well
we'll do when the great factories of Guangdong fall fallow. Jensen says people
should "prepare for it on a local level", rebuild communities as much
as they can, put in place alternative systems of local governance, think about
their food supply.
It's hard to imagine people around the world rising up to
embrace slow decay and the local apocalypse. Both men seem to sense that, and
neither is claiming they are at the helm of any looming revolution. Dark
Mountain's slow decay is more like slow food – a metaphoric way to
reconceptualise our lives. The reclaimed apocalypse of Robert Jensen is more
like the buy local movement – incremental actions we can do that remind us of
our inherent humanity more than they challenge the terms governing our lives.
For both, that seems to be the goal: the retaining of our humanity during and,
possibly even after, the collapse. For me, it's a revelation and a relief. I
can mourn the spectre of future and celebrate what I still can.
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