Hope in the Age of Collapse

An exchange with Paul Kingsnorth, founder of the Dark Mountain

Project
Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it
has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk.
Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other
critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social
crises, creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.
- State of the Planet Declaration, London, March 29, 2012
Thats the warning issued last week by a high-level group of scientists, business
leaders and government officials at the Planet Under Pressure conference in
London. As The New York Times Green blog reported, The conference brought
together nearly 3,000 people to discuss the prospects for better management of the
earth and to build momentum for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development, known as Rio+20, to be held June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro. (The
Times Andy Revkin offers a good wrapup at his Dot Earth blog.)
Earlier last week, at the start of the conference, visitors to the website were greeted
with this short video, Welcome to the Anthropocene, charting the growth of
humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes
(the idea that the planet has passed from the Holocene into an Age of Man has, of
course, gained wide acceptance):

Its certainly an arresting video. And many might see in those images a call to
action, however belated.
Not Paul Kingsnorth. An English writer and erstwhile green activist, he spent two
decades (hell turn 40 this year) in the environmental movement, and hes done
with all that. Hes moved beyond it. If anything, his message today is too radical for
modern environmentalism. Hes had it with sustainability. Hes not out to save
the planet. Hes looked into the abyss of planetary collapse, and unlike, say,
imprisoned climate activist Tim DeChristopher, who might be seen as Kingsnorths
radical American opposite he seems to welcome what he sees there.
Not everyone is quite ready to hear, or accept, what Paul Kingsnorth has to say. In
2009 he co-founded, together with collaborator Dougald Hine, something called the
Dark Mountain Project, a literary and cultural response to our global environmental,
economic, and political crises. Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto
appeared that summer, and got some attention in the UK. He and Hine have
summed up the Dark Mountain message this way:

These are precarious and unprecedented times. Our economies crumble, while
beyond the chaos of markets, the ecological foundations of our way of living near
collapse. Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century
intact.
We dont believe that anyone not politicians, not economists, not
environmentalists, not writers is really facing up to the scale of this. As a society,
we are all still hooked on a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the
present. Somehow, technology or political agreements or ethical shopping or mass
protest are meant to save our civilisation from self-destruction.
Well, we dont buy it. This project starts with our sense that civilisation as we have
known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a
cancerous economic system and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human
world. But it is driven by our belief that this age of collapse which is already
beginning could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.
Some would call Kingsnorth indeed have called him, in The New Statesman and
The Guardian a catastrophist, or fatalist, with something like a deathwish for
civilization. Others would call him a realist, a truthteller. If nothing else, Id call him a
pretty good provocateur.
Not well known here in the U.S., Kingsnorth tossed a bomb in the January/February
issue of Orion magazine, in the form of an essay entitled Confessions of a
Recovering Environmentalist. (The magazines current issue features America the
the Possible: A Manifesto, by James Gustave Speth the first of two parts! But the
editors must know that Kingsnorths piece is the real manifesto. I have a thing about
manifestos.)
In that essay, Kingsnorth gets to the heart of the matter:
We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called sustainability.
What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the
nonhuman world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though
some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means
sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the worlds rich peopleus
feel is their right, without destroying the natural capital or the resource base
that is needed to do so.
Provocative stuff, indeed. Down with sustainability! But then Kingsnorth goes on to
say this:
If sustainability is about anything, it is about carbon. Carbon and climate change.
To listen to most environmentalists today, you would think that these were the only
things in the world worth talking about. The business of sustainability is the
business of preventing carbon emissions. Carbon emissions threaten a potentially

massive downgrading of our prospects for material advancement as a species. They

threaten to unacceptably erode our resource base and put at risk our vital hoards of
natural capital. If we cannot sort this out quickly, we are going to end up darning
our socks again and growing our own carrots and other such unthinkable things.
Safe to say that stopped me cold. Carbon and climate may not be the only things in
the world worth talking about I can think of one or two others but this much is
certain : if we dont keep talking about them, and start acting in a serious way to
address them, the consequences will be a whole lot more unthinkable than
darning socks and growing carrots, and for a whole lot more people (especially
those who have done nothing to cause the problem) than Kingsnorth acknowledges
here.
But it was Kingsnorths conclusion that really threw me. His answer to the whole
situation comes down to one word: withdrawal.
Its all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching,
I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false
assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.
Withdraw? Are you kidding? That Kingsnorths piece appeared in the same issue as
Terry Tempest Williams long, morally bracing interview with Tim DeChristopher,
What Love Looks Like, only made it harder to take. This, I felt, is what giving up
looks like.
But this story doesnt end in bitterness. After I read the essay, Kingsnorth and I
engaged in a spirited exchange (on Twitter, where else?), and it has led to some sort
of mutual understanding. It also led me to the Dark Mountain Project and its
publications. So when I launched this blog, I invited Kingsnorth to engage in an
email exchange, an invitation he graciously (even enthusiastically) accepted. Below
is my opening missive to him. Ill include his response in a post to follow.
It may be that what Paul and I have in common is more important than our
differences. I see us each striving to define what hope looks like.
-Wen Stephenson
.

From: Wen Stephenson

To: Paul Kingsnorth
Dear Paul,
Thanks so much for engaging in this exchange.
I confess that Ive only recently come to know your work. You caught my attention
with the essay in Orion. Its a beautiful piece I honestly think so, despite my
reaction to it. The thing that initially hooked me is the way your trajectory is almost

precisely the inverse of my own. Whereas youve grown deeply disillusioned with
modern environmentalism, and whats universally known as sustainability
including urgent and necessary efforts to cut carbon emissions Ive never been
an environmentalist in the first place (if anything, Im a recovering journalist!).
And yet here Ive gone and become an advocate for climate action. Strange times
we live in.
But while there are many things about the essay that I genuinely admire
especially the way it nails the state of anxiety in which environmentalism seems to
find itself today, the internal tensions and contradictions I found your
dismissiveness toward the climate movement, and especially your conclusion,
profoundly frustrating and discouraging. That conclusion appears, essentially, to be
a resigned withdrawal: I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching. I am
leaving. I am going to go out walking.
Look, Im all for walking especially if it means clearing ones head and
reconnecting with the reality outside our windows. But not as withdrawal, not as
running away. The idea that in the face of climate change humanitys greatest
crisis (and I mean all of humanity, especially those who have done little or nothing
to cause it, including future generations) someone with your experience, and
your conscience, could simply choose to withdraw well, it was
incomprehensible to me. And it was especially ironic given that the same issue
contained the interview with Tim DeChristopher.
That interviews title is drawn from DeChristophers now-famous words to the judge:
This is what love looks like.
And so, of course, I turned to Twitter and responded to you and your essay: This is
what giving up looks like.
Whereupon you accused me of naivete for joining in a worldwide rally for climate
action (and organizing a walk to Walden Pond) last September. Touch!
So, yes, you might say our correspondence got off to a rocky start.
But weve patched things up! And your essay and our Twitter exchange has led me,
Im glad to report, to the Dark Mountain Project. I think I now have a much better
understanding of where youre coming from, and where youre trying to go, and I
have to say, once again, that were largely in agreement up to a point. I think its
quite likely that youre right about the situation in which civilization now finds itself,
given what science is telling us and the state of our political and economic systems.
As you encapsulate it in Dark Mountain Issue 1:
[The manifesto's] message that its time to stop pretending our current way of
living can be made sustainable; that saving the planet has become a bad joke;
that we are entering an age of massive disruption, and our task is to live through it
as best we can

Indeed. But its the live through it as best we can part, and how were going to do
that, where our viewpoints begin to diverge because you seem to reject the
possibility that any combination of mass political engagement and human
technological (and yes, industrial-economic) ingenuity might help us do just that:
live through it as best we can. For a literary project, that seems like an odd failure of
imagination.
So Id like to pose a series of questions for you, in reaction to specific passages in
the manifesto.
You write in part one that the the myth of progress is the engine driving our
civilisation. Then, in part two, you suggest that our response to climate change and
environmental crisis has yet to give up this myth:
We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on the environment (like nature,
this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we
hear, too, of the many solutions to these problems: solutions which usually involve
the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human
technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is
nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. There will still be growth, there will still
be progress There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine.
We do not believe that everything will be fine.
Nor do I. But to dismiss the search for solutions which I assume must include
efforts to stabilize the climate in the coming century seems a bit too cynical, or
fatalistic. As if to say that nothing can be done. The task, we agree, is no longer to
prevent or avoid the perfect storm, but to live through it, and still maintain
our humanity. At the very least, we can still work urgently to minimize the human
(and non-human) suffering that is coming. Unless you believe that compassion is
also a myth.
You write that time has not been kind to the greens. And then,
Todays environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences
hymning the virtues of sustainability and ethical consumption than doing
anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has
absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical
challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity
for shopping.
This is followed shortly after by one of the manifestos central (and most
memorable) passages:
And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a
change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to
look, but all of us know not to look down.

Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we
imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?
We believe it is time to look down.
This is a striking passage. But wait Would it be as bad as we imagine? Could it
even be good for us? Do you mean that the future could in fact be better than the
present? That it might be (gasp) sustainable? Does that imply your own myth of
progress? Before you answer that, heres another question.
Your project is fundamentally a literary and cultural one. Its based on the idea that
our stories the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are what make us who
we are. And so you want to change the story, the myth, of civilization. You write:
Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians,
economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to
activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response
has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there?
What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What
gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has
discovered the secret chord?
These are excellent questions. But art and storytelling wont stabilize the climate.
The only way to do that is to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Are you
suggesting that art and storytelling can help spur the transfomation of our energy
systems. Or do you dismiss the idea that such a transformation is possible?
You say that Uncivilised writing is not environmental writing It is not nature
writing And it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for
politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within. You
then conclude that the project of Uncivilisation will be a thing of beauty for the eye
and for the heart and for the mind, for we are unfashionable enough to believe that
beauty like truth not only exists, but still matters.
Theres something almost hopeful about that last page of the manifesto, and the
last lines: Climbing Dark Mountain cannot be a solitary exercise. Come. Join us.
We leave at dawn.
But it occurs to me that beauty and truth (like politics) are human confections
anthropocentric categories. And this seems to imply a belief that something like
civilization, which gave birth to art and philosophy, will not only survive, but is
worth fighting to preserve. And yet, how does one propose to preserve beauty and
truth, these human constructs, unless the climate is stabilized? And how does one
propose to do that without engaging in politics? Are you suggesting that a new art
and philosophy will give rise to a new politics? Maybe it will. But do we really have
time to wait for that?

All the new storytelling in the world will change nothing without politics. In fact, it
seems to me that the ultimate cynicism is to give up on politics because it means
giving up on the possibility of change. Not necessarily progress (i.e., material
progress). I mean the preservation of what makes us human.
You write: The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.
But unless we find ways to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, it will be the
end of the world (or of humanity), full stop.
All best,
Wen

Hope in the Age of Collapse (Part 2)

Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth responds
(See part one of this exchange.)
.

From: Paul Kingsnorth

To: Wen Stephenson
Dear Wen,
Isnt the Internet a strange thing? Sometimes I think it is a symbol of what our
culture is becoming. It gives us abilities that we never had even ten years ago. Here
we are, two men from separate continents who have never met, never spoken to
each other, but we are responding to each others work almost instantaneously. We
have a capacity for research, for discussion and for intellectual exploration that is
unprecedented, thanks to this advanced technology.
But it is also a technology which isolates us from the rest of nature, and which,
oddly enough, isolates us from aspects of ourselves even as we use it. I have lost
count of the number of times I have had arguments or spiky exchanges with human
beings over the net which I would never have had in real life. We are able to
communicate in words, but because we are not relating to each other as human
animals because we cannot read each others body language or facial signals or
the innumerable tiny, intuitive responses that humans have to each others bodies
in physical spaces, we get off on the wrong foot time and time again. We are, in
other words, able to communicate far more widely than ever before, but the way in
which we communicate is far less fully human.

This combination: a technologically-accelerated ability to achieve certain goals and

a simultaneous disconnection from much of the rest of nature is the world we now
live in. And it is the context in which I would like to respond to your email.
Id like to start this response with your very last line. Here it is:
Unless we find ways to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, it will be the end
of the world (or of humanity), full stop.
This is an interesting statement for this reason: that it elides modern human
civilisation and the living planet. They are not the same thing. They are very far
from being the same thing; in fact, one of them is allergic to the other. If we dont
start to realise this really get it, at a deep level there will be no change worth
having for anyone.
I have spent twenty years and more as an environmental campaigner. My feeling,
my philosophy, if you like, across that whole period has been rather different to
yours, and rather different also to that of Tim DeChristopher, who you mention in
your e-mail, remarkable though his current stand is. My worldview has always been,
for want of a less clunky word, ecocentric. What I care passionately about is nature
in the round: all living things, life as a phenomenon. Thats not an anti-human
position it would be impossible for it to be so, because humans are as natural as
anything else. But my view is that humans are no more or less important than
anything else that lives. We certainly have no right to denude the Earth of life for
our own ends. That is a moral position, for me, not a pragmatic one. Whether or not
our current (temporary and hugely destructive) way of life is sustainable is not of
great concern to me, except insofar as it impacts on life as a whole.
You might find that an odd position, or even a dangerous one, but I see it as quite
cogent and rational. The fact is that pumping carbon into the atmosphere will not
cause the end of the world. The world has endured worse. It has endured five mass
extinctions and half a dozen major climate change events. I do think that climate
change campaigners like yourself should be more upfront about what youre trying
to save. Its not the world. Its not humanity either, which Id bet will survive
whatever comes in some form or another, though perhaps with drastically reduced
numbers and no broadband connection. No, what youre trying to save, it seems to
me, is the world you have grown used to. Perhaps its the Holocene: the period of
the planets history in which homo sapiens sapiens (cough) was able to build a
civilisation so extensive and powerful that it energetically wiped out much nonhuman life in order to feed its ever-advancing appetites.
Sustainability is, as far as I can see, a project designed to keep this culture this
lifestyle afloat. I have two problems with this. Firstly, I am not convinced it is a
good idea! To put it mildly. The modern human economy is an engine of mass
destruction. Its ravaging of all non-human life is not incidental; it seems to be a
requirement of the program. Economic growth of the kind worshipped by our
leaders could be described as a process of turning life into death for money. With
nine billion humans demanding access to the spoils, there is not going to be much
life left to go around. Of course, I am conflicted about this. I live at the heart of this

machine; like you, I am a beneficiary of it. If it falls apart, I will probably suffer, and I
dont want to.
But I do feel the need to be honest with myself, which is where the walking away
comes in. I am trying to walk away from dishonesty, my own included. Much
environmental campaigning, and thinking, is dishonest. It has to be, to keep going.
The journey I am on is intellectual and, perhaps, spiritual too. Im not sure I will find
any answers. Certainly I wont come up with any better ways to save the world.
But what world are you saving, Wen, and why? Do you imagine that Thoreau would
have looked out of that window at this Machine and determined to put all his efforts
into marching about trying to keep it afloat? I think he would have kept on growing
beans. His retreat from activism, after all, produced the words which now inspire
yours.
I sense in your response a lot of the confusion, and the passion, that drove me for
many years (I am still both passionate and confused, of course, though perhaps for
different reasons.) There is a plaintive quality to your questions. Are you suggesting
that art and storytelling can help spur the transformation of our energy systems?
you ask. Or do you dismiss the idea that such a transformation is possible? The
answer to the first question is, of course, no, and the Dark Mountain Project has no
such end in mind. Art and storytelling are worthy in their own right, and we need a
cultural response to the collapse of our world, if for no other reason than my
personal desire to have an honest story to tell my children about how we destroyed
beauty for money and called it development.
But as for the transformation of our energy systems: the minute you ask this
question in this way, you are trapped in a paradigm, with no hope of escape. What
are our energy systems for? Who is us? Us, Id guess, is the bourgeois consumer
class of the developed world, and our energy systems are needed to provide us
with our cars, planes, central heating, Twitter feeds, ambulances, schools, asphalt
roads and shopping malls. How are we going to transform these systems, in short
order, globally, busting through economic vested interests and political stalemate
and cultural patterns, in less than 100 months, to prevent more than a 2 degree
climate change? How, in other words, are we going to change the operating system
of the entire global economy in a decade or so?
Answer: were not, though well do a lot of damage trying, not least to much of the
natural world we want to protect. I notice that a US-government backed plan to
cover much of the Mojave desert in solar panels is currently running up against
resistance from both conservationists and Native Americans; and lets not even get
started on the battles over carpeting vast areas of mountain, rangeland and
countryside with giant wind power stations. This new world of yours is beginning to
look a lot like the old one: business-as-usual without the carbon. The beast must be
fed; the only question is what it will eat.
As for the climate movement which you believe is necessary to prevent this: well
I know I am beginning to sound cynical, but its not exactly cynicism, its a raw
realism born of 20 years of wanting to believe in such movements and not seeing
them. There is no climate movement. Sure, there are a few thousand people who
may take to the streets in the wealthy West, or on the odd threatened atoll, and

there are many more people who, when asked in opinion polls, will say they want to
stop climate change. But how many of these people will be taking to the streets to
demand personal carbon budgets? How many of them will be taking to the streets
to demand much higher gas prices, limits on their holiday aeroplane flights and
their daily electricity use, and radical reductions in their ability and right to consume
at will? And how many of the two thirds of the planet not living in the rich world will
be taking to their streets to demand that they do not have access to the consumer
cornucopia that we have, and which we are using so effectively to destroy nonhuman life without even really noticing?
I dont think any climate movement is going to reverse the tide of history, for one
reason: we are all climate change. It is not the evil 1% destroying the planet. We
are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation
we find ourselves in. Here I am writing to you on a laptop computer made of
aluminium and plastic and rare earth metals, about to send you this e-mail via
undersea cables using as electricity created by the burning of long-dead deposits of
fossilised carbon. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is
climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if
youll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to
the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be
living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural
levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25% of the worlds wildlife in the
last four decades alone.
Im afraid my current beliefs are going to seem to you rather bleak. I believe that
our civilisation is hitting a wall, as all civilisations eventually do. I believe that the
climate will continue to change as long as we are able to pump fossil fuels into the
atmosphere, because I believe that most human beings want the fruits of that
burning more than they want to save the natural world which is destroyed by it. I
think we have created an industrial techno-bubble which has cut us off from the rest
of nature so effectively that we cannot see, and do not much care about, its ongoing
death. I think that until that death starts to impact us personally we will take very
little interest. I think we are committed to much more of it over the next century. I
fear for what my children will experience and sometimes I wish I was not here to
experience it either. I am not yet 40 but I have seen things that my children will
never see, because they are already gone. This is my fault, and yours, and there is
nothing that we have been able to work out that will stop it.
How do we live with this reality? Politics is not going to do anything about it, Wen,
because politics is the process of keeping this Machine moving. What do we do? I
dont know. The reality is that we have used the short-term boost of fossil fuels to
give us a 200 year party, which is now coming to an end in a haze of broken bottles,
hangovers and recrimination. We have built a hugely complex society which now
cant be fuelled and is, in any case, responsible for a global ecocide. Living with this
reality living in it, facing it, being honest about it and not having to pretend we
can solve it as if it were a giant jigsaw puzzle seems to me to be a necessary
prerequisite for living through it. I realise that to some people it looks like giving up.
But to me it looks like just getting started with a view of the world based on reality
rather than wishful thinking.

Sometimes people say to me: But you have children! How can you say all this?
Dont you want a better world for them? Other people say other things to me,
things like: We know this might not work, we know its a long shot but its better
than doing nothing! Its better than giving up! I find this kind of thing very telling,
because what is actually being said is: doing something is better than doing
nothing, even if the something being done is ineffective and powered by wishful
thinking! I dont agree. Sometimes, I think stepping back to evaluate is a lot more
useful than keeping on for the sake of keeping on.
I dont want to sound like a nihilist. There are a lot of useful things that we can do at
this stage in history. Protecting biodiversity seems the crucial one. Protecting nonhuman nature from more destruction by the Machine, for example. Some of the best
projects I know of creating islands and corridors of wild nature and trying to keep
them free from our exploitation. Standing up in whatever small way we can to
protect beauty and wildness from our appetites is a worthy cause if ever there was
one: probably the most vital cause right now, Id say. Im all for fighting winnable
battles. But we need to do so in the context of a wider, bigger picture: the end of
the Holocene, the end of the world we were taught to believe was eternal; and,
perhaps, the slow end of our belief that humans are in control of nature, can be or
should be. You asked me about hope for the future: the thought that the disaster we
have created may help us see ourselves for what we are animals and not what
we believe we are gods gives me a kind of hope.
There is much that is noble about being human, but we have a big debt to pay back,
and debts, in the end, always have to be paid.
All the best,
Paul
Hi Paul,
So, just as I sat down to write this reply, I reached for the remote to turn off the TV,
and realized I was looking at a concert video of Arcade Fire. They were playing (I kid
you not) their anthem Wake Up to an enormous outdoor crowd of beautiful brightfaced young people in Galicia, Spain, in 2010. As the camera panned over the
audience, you could see that these kids were whats the word? rapt? ecstatic?
(Was religion in Europe ever this good? The band certainly seemed to relish a
revivalist role.) But where will those young people be in twenty years? Thirty years?
50? And are they to blame for whats in store? Those 20-year-olds? (I wont even ask
what responsibility the culture industry bears. whoops, I just did.)
Children wake up.
So, yeah, for whatever thats worth.
I want to pause for a moment and emphasize what we have in common, before
venturing another question or two about where we differ. Ill try to keep this brief.

We agree that humanity is headed for a cliff, that climate change cannot be
solved, if that means stopped or prevented. Its too late for that. We have to
live through it now, as best we can. I dont claim to know with any certainty how
close we are to the cliff, or how much time we have to prepare. I also, to be clear,
still hold out the possibility (the hope?) that well avoid going off it entirely. So,
were heading for a cliff whether we actually go into free fall, and how soon,
remains to be seen.
We agree that human beings are, as Thoreau once wrote, part and parcel of
Nature. You (and others) call this perspective ecocentric, but I dislike that term
its weighted toward the eco-, as something distinct from the human, the
anthro-, and so still clings to a dualistic man-vs.-nature mindset. Personally, I
value the human every bit as much as the non-human. I believe there are aspects of
human civilization beauty, truth worth preserving and fighting for. I think
you do as well. It may only be language thats dividing us on this point.
We agree that the environmental movement, per se, for all its hard work and best
intentions, has failed. (Never had a prayer, is more like it.) What I mean is, it has
failed in the fight against climate change. Of course, it has won countless other
battles, especially local ones, all around the world in the past 40 years and more,
and I have great respect for those achievements. But climate is simply too great a
challenge for the environmental movement, by itself, to tackle. I think this is largely
because of its historic ecocentrism, which failed to inspire the sort of broad-based
political movement necessary. This may explain why so many mainstream
environmentalists (and climate campaigners, not always the same folks) have
moved away from an ecocentric message.
Where I think we differ and please correct me if Im wrong is that you are
driven primarily by a desire to restore what youd say is a proper relationship
between humanity and non-human nature. (This is why, as I remarked at one point
in an earlier exchange, your Dark Mountain Manifesto reminds me of the American
jeremiad form, if you substitute nature for God: it suggests that the green
movement betrayed its sacred covenant with nature, and must now return to the
truth faith: ecocentrism.) And its as though you welcome an inevitable collapse in
so far as it aids or hastens this correction. Am I wrong? But why should we think that
collapse would do anything to improve humanitys relationship to the non-human
world?
While I believe correcting our relationship to the non-human is a noble ideal, Im
primarily driven and I know plenty of others who are as well by a desire to
prevent as much suffering as possible in the decades to come. I guess Im with Tim
DeChristopher on this. As he tells Terry Tempest Williams, I would never go to jail to
protect animals or plants or wilderness. For me, its about the people. Its a
humanitarian imperative. As Bill McKibben and I recently discussed, the climate
justice movement (and of course it exists, whether or not its in the streets at any
given moment) has more in common with the 19th-century abolitionist movement
than with modern environmentalism. It transcends environmentalism and
environmental politics.

(And speaking of 19th-century abolitionism, Thoreau didnt retreat from activism, as

you say. He remained engaged even while living at Walden, and became even more
so thereafter. He sheltered runaway slaves. He spoke forcefully in public. He
championed John Brown and put his own body on the line. His awakening in nature
led him back to society and to political activism. People think he was the first
environmentalist but he was at least as much a human-rights activist. His legacy
is as much Gandhi and Martin Luther King as Greenpeace or EarthFirst!)
So its simply wrong to suggest that someone like Tim DeChristopher went to prison
to save our consumer civilization to save shopping malls. He went to prison to
save lives. You might argue that his tactics are hopeless, that his radicalism is selfdefeating that could be a useful debate but it doesnt change his motivation,
which is plenty clear. I take him at his word. And I hope youll take me at mine. (Not
that I possess half DeChristophers courage.)
But the most important way in which we differ, I think, is on the question of what is
to be done, right now, in the present moment, given the pressing reality that we
face. Were not going to stop global warming at this point. But we may still be able
to preserve a livable planet. Theres every reason to think that a last-ditch effort to
cut carbon emissions together with serious adaptation efforts at all levels, and
local grassroots movements to create resilient local communities will help
prevent or alleviate the suffering of countless numbers of people in the latter half of
this century. People who will have done nothing to cause the situation they inherit.
Its not about sustaining our current lifestyles, or getting ourselves off the hook. For
Christs sake, no. Its about giving future generations a fighting chance. Its about
giving my own children and everyone elses a fighting chance. Its not their
debt, but theyre the ones who will have to pay it. Dont we owe them something?
So my question is, what would you have us do? If not something like what Im
suggesting (unoriginal as it may be) rapid carbon mitigation at national and
regional levels combined with serious adaptation and resilience-building at local
levels then what?
Its not enough, if you ask me, to merely look down. We need to look up and out,
too, and find the horizon. We owe it to those who come after us.
Peace to you,
Wen
.

From: Paul Kingsnorth

To: Wen Stephenson
Hi Wen,
There is a lot I could say to you, but Im having a strange sense of dj vu. Three
years ago, when we launched the Dark Mountain Project, I engaged in a debate very
similar to this one in the Guardian newspaper here in Britain with its resident

environmental writer George Monbiot. You might have heard of him. George took a
very similar position to yours, though he took it much more aggressively, and we
ended up arguing each other to a standstill. It was frustrating, which was my fault
as much as his, and perhaps the fault of the format most of all. I have lost count of
the number of debates like this I have come across. I try not to get involved in
them these days, because I think they generate much more heat than light.
So what am I doing here? Well, I think Im talking to you because you are an openminded writer. You dont seem to be taking a position which you then feel obliged to
defend. This seems less a debate than a conversation. You seem to be genuinely
exploring this stuff, which is what I try to do these days. A question that interests
me when I do explore it, especially with other people is: whats going on behind the
politics?
What I mean by that is that it seems to me that political arguments are mostly a
cover for much deeper, psychological battles. When we argue about whether we like
nuclear power or not, or whether we are liberal or conservative, or whether we
believe in climate change or taxation or invading the Middle East, we are really
arguing about our inherent worldview, our temperament, our psychology, our
prejudices. Are we hopeful people, or are we cynical ones? What are our values, how
do we see others, how do we balance community versus individual, freedom versus
authority: all that stuff. All the stuff that makes us who we are and what we want
the world to be. The facts, and the politics, are the decorations we use to make
these deeper currents seem rational in the eyes of others.
In that context, I wonder what it is that makes me so ecocentric, and you such a
humanist? I wonder what fuels my sense of resignation, and my occasional sneaking
desire for it all to come crashing down, and what fuels your powerful need for this
thing called hope. I am struck by the title that you have given to this exchange:
Hope in the age of collapse. Whenever I hear the word hope these days, I reach
for my whisky bottle. 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?
This may sound a strange thing to say, but one of the great achievements for me of
the Dark Mountain Project has been to give people permission give up hope. What I
mean by that is that we help people get beyond the desperate desire to do
something as impossibly as save the Earth, or themselves, and start talking about
where we actually are, what is actually possible and where we are actually coming
from. We have created a space, possibly accidentally, in which people gather who
are disillusioned with our current cultural narratives. Not just the business as usual
narrative but the sustainability narrative too. I find that a lot of campaigners are
trapped in hope. I used to be. They believe - they feel pressured to believe, from
within or without - that they must continue working to achieve goals which are
plainly impossible, because not to do so would be to give up hope. What they are
hoping for is never quite defined, but its clear that giving it up would lead to a very
personal kind of collapse.
I dont think we need hope. I think we need imagination. We need to imagine a
future which cant be planned for and cant be controlled. I find that people who talk

about hope are often really talking about control. They hope desperately that they
can keep control of the way things are panning out. Keep the lights on, keep the
emails flowing, keep the nice bits of civilisation and lose the nasty ones; keep
control of their narrative, the world they understand. Giving up hope, to me, means
giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be
improvised, messy, difficult.
None of us knows what will happen, and Im certainly not making any predictions.
But whether or how this civilisation falls apart and it looks to me like it is already
happening is, to me, less important than whether it takes the rest of nature with
it. This seems to be the main place where you and I differ. The Tim DeChristopher
quote which you use approvingly is something which divides us. I admire anyone
who can go to prison for their beliefs (well, not anyone, it rather depends what
those beliefs are) but Im of the opinion that the last thing the world needs right
now is more humanitarians. What the world needs right now is human beings who
are able to see outside the human bubble, and understand that all this talk about
collapse, decline and crisis is not just a human concern. The main victims of the
disaster we have created in the name of development are not humans, they are the
other lifeforms we are pushing into extinction by the day and the year. When I look
to the future, the thing that frightens me most is not climate change, or the
possibility of the lights going out in the lit-up parts of the world, its that we may
keep this ecocidal civilisation going long enough to take everything down with it.
And what really keeps me awake at night is the possibility that this civilisation could
survive having destroyed 90% of the rest of life on Earth. I guess it would be
possible, theoretically, in that situation to create a perfectly fair society of the kind
of which you and TimDeChristopher would approve, but I wouldnt want to live in it. I
dont suppose you would, either. You take my point.
I suspect Im rambling. Perhaps Thoreau would approve. I wonder if he would
approve of what either of us are saying? I find it interesting how Thoreau is
interpreted by so many people. I dont really see him as an environmentalist at all,
I see him as a spiritual explorer. After all, his Transcendentalism seems to have been
what defined him most that and his refusal to be slotted into anyone elses boxes.
What I think I like most about Henry David was his refusal to be bound by what
other people constantly told him he ought to be doing.
This is how I feel when I am exhorted to get involved in politics again to try and
save the world. Again, we should distinguish between the personal and the political.
One reason I have walked away from activism is because I want to concentrate
more on my creative work. Its what fulfils me most and its what I think I am best
at. So thats purely selfish. The other two reasons, as Ive explained already, are
straightforward enough. Firstly, I dont think what youre calling for will work (as an
aside, Im struck by the declaration you open this exchange with; it could have
come from any report from any global eco-conference over the last 40 years. There
have been so many. Rio +20 indeed! Another UN beanfest at which nothing will be
agreed and nothing will be done. Theyd all be better staying at home and saving on
the carbon emissions). Secondly, I just dont feel part of the movement that is
calling for it. I dont feel part of it because its main concern is keeping humans
happy. Everything else comes second. I dont think we can afford this kind of
mediaeval thinking any more.

At last, then, let me get to your question (thanks for bearing with me.) You ask me:
what would you have us do? My answer, which sounds a little like the kind of thing
Thoreau would have written, is simple: do what you want. Do what you need to, and
what you have to, and what you feel is right. Im not an evangelist; thats one of the
things I have walked away from. I cant give myself to this supposed movement
because it is not sustaining anything that I think is worth keeping. And I dont think
we will stop burning fossil fuels until there are none left. So: I dont think it will work,
and I suspect its motives. But I dont expect anyone to follow me. I dont want
anyone to follow me. Who wants to be followed when they go out walking?
Im not a politician. Im a writer. I could make any number of soapboxey
pronouncements or demands here, but would it matter anyway? There is no
shortage of hot air in the world. No shortage of demands, plans, insistent calls for
more action from people with no power to do anything at all to make it happen.
Where has it got us? Its twenty years since the Earth Summit. In that time,
everything has got worse for the Earth. I wonder where Rio +40 will be held?
Somewhere hot, Im sure, with nice hotels and easy airport access.
You spoke in your last letter about a covenant with nature. You suggested I saw it
as having been broken by humanity. I think its a lovely phrase, and I think its
precisely what has happened. If you are uncomfortable with any religious or spiritual
overtones which that idea might carry, you could just as easily see it through the
lens of science. We had a very practical obligation, as a species, to maintain the
ecosystems we found ourselves part of in some semblance of health and balance.
We have spectacularly failed to do that. Now climate change, ocean acidification,
mass extinction and, possibly, economic collapse are going to be the result. I dont
welcome any of this as a way to restore balance. Im not that naive. Collapses
bring many things, but balance is rarely one of them, at least initially. Still, I think
thats where we are. Covenant broken; consequences upon us. Its too late to start
worrying about the approaching army when its already encircled the city.
I feel I have to respond to all of this by giving up hope, so that I can instead find
some measure of reality. So Ive let hope fall away from me, and wishful thinking
too, and I feel much lighter. I feel now as if I am able to look more honestly at the
way the world is, and what I can do with what I have to give, in the time I have left. I
dont think you can plan for the future until you have really let go of the past.
Heres to more exploration,
Paul
.

From: Wen Stephenson

To: Paul Kingsnorth
Paul:

Thanks so much for this. Its lovely. Its heartfelt. I appreciate the tone and tenor of
it so much more than your first response. I feel youre no longer giving me the Dark
Mountain platform, no longer debating, but are really speaking to me as
yourself, as one human being to another. If nothing else, I find hope in honest
human connection, even technologically mediated!
Im not sure we can bridge the serious differences youve rightly identified, but Id
simply offer that my humanitarian impulse doesnt preclude caring deeply about
what happens to the non-human world. I dont see it as an either/or proposition.
And we finally agree about HDT! I think youre absolutely right in what you say. And
trust me, its his spiritual search that Ive always thought is the key to
understanding him and to coming to grips with our crisis. Thats what my personal
essay, Walking Home From Walden (which led to my blogging here at Thoreau
Farm in the first place), is all about.
Hope. I can understand the need to let go of hope, conventionally defined. But I
think what youre doing here is redefining it for yourself, at least, and maybe for
others gathering with you for your dark mountain trek. If you want to jettison the
word altogether, as a piece of that past we must let go of, very well. But youve
clearly found something or at least started the search for something! which
keeps you going. And who am I to take that away from you or anyone?
Peace,
Wen
p.s. Im heading up to Concord and the Farm this morning, along with my Transition
Wayland colleague Kaat Vander Straeten, to meet with one of the farmers at
Gaining Ground the community food project that shares the Thoreau Farm
property and donates all of its produce to hunger-relief in this area (yes, shamefully,
hunger in America). I plan to volunteer there this season, and bring my son and
daughter along. As I wrote in my very first post on this blog, I cant imagine a better
neighbor to Henrys birthplace: a small, organic farm with a social conscience. And
as you like to say, its good to write with some dirt under our fingernails. I have no
doubt Henry would agree.

I offered Paul the final word here, but he felt this was a good place to conclude the
conversation. I hope others have found it useful. Please let us know. Wed love to
hear from you.
-Wen Stephenson