Posts in: Longer writing

Finished reading At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine. This book is worth your attention. Dougald is best known—to me anyway—as the co-founder with Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project.

This book originated with Dougald’s realization that he needed to stop talking about climate change. Not that he came to believe any less strongly in the reality and serious threat of climate change—rather, the problem with talking about climate change is the framing. Climate change is a finding of data-driven science but climate change points us to larger issues that science cannot answer. Are our current troubles merely the result of unfortunate effects of atmospheric chemistry or are they the result of a disastrous way of living on the Earth?

Most people who talk about climate change, especially the philanthropists and technocrats who steer the course of governments, see climate change as a problem to be solved by STEM. These are the people on the “big path” that

sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

Yet this is more of the same thinking that brought us to this point of converging crises. It is the program of human control over nature.

Dougald writes in favor of the “small path”, which is

made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a world worth living for nonetheless remains.

The dream of modernity, the technocratic future, may well lie in ruins. But as the title of Dougald’s book suggests, there is work to be done in these ruins. As he and Kingsnorth wrote in the Dark Mountain Manifesto:

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead into the unknown wold that lies ahead.

A word in defense of solitude

Freddie deBoer’s recent essay about the escapism built into much of online life is well worth your attention. When I was first drafting this post yesterday, I wrote that Freddie missed some important points. I’ve now re-read it a few times to ensure I wasn’t misreading him and I suspect he wouldn’t necessarily disagree with what I say below. So just take this post as a “yes, and…” to Freddie’s.

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Letters with @jsonbecker, week three

This is week three of a continuing series of letters with Jason Becker. Week one is here and week two is here. Dear Jason, Your description of Tulum was very interesting. It’s the first I’ve heard of it. And, yes, I can see what you mean by it being a contradiction. I like the idea of lifting people out of poverty; at the same time, it sounds like the usual corporate greenwashing.

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Letters with @jsonbecker, week two

This is week two of a continuing series of letters with Jason Becker. More information and the letter from week one can be found here. Dear Jason, It was interesting to read about your history online and a little more about the motivations for this project. I sincerely hope this project leads you to the interactions you are looking for. With that, let’s move in the direction you’re wanting to go.

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It’s Candlemas!

I reserve the right to celebrate holidays in my own way, and today is no exception. Candlemas appears to be another of those holidays that is a mix of traditions. (In my mind, there’s no need for this to be a controversial statement. Blending and adapting traditions is just what humans do. To be clear, this is different from the colonial impulse, which is about force and monocultures.) In the Christian tradition, Candlemas is a remembrance of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple as well as the ritual purification of the Virgin Mary.

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Letters with @jsonbecker, week one

A couple of months ago, Jason Becker created the Letters project in which he and a volunteer correspond for a month via email. I volunteered and was given the month of February. We will be cross-posting these between our blogs. Here is the link to his post containing these letters. Dear Jason, I was immediately interested when I saw your post about a letters project for 2023 and grateful that you accepted me when I volunteered.

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The open future of the Tao

In Hunger Mountain, David Hinton describes the Taoist cosmology as it developed in ancient China as a “spiritual ecology” in which the Cosmos is divided into two elements: Presence/Being and Absence/Nonbeing. Presence is simply the empirical universe, which the ancients described as the ten thousand living and nonliving things in constant transformation; and Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges, although it should not be conceived in a spatial sense, as if there were a pool of emptiness somewhere in the universe.

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Refusing Empire, telling a new story

One of the main goals of the functionaries of Empire is to bring everything and everyone into the imperial system. Totalization is, in fact, the motivating impulse behind Empire. Empire has a remarkable ability to assimilate threats to the system. Protest movements turn into think tanks. Rebels become a marketing segment. Empire will validate your criticism as a healthy expression of free speech and award you with a position guaranteed to shut you up by paying you off.

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The most important book I read this year: Wild Mind, Wild Earth

David Hinton’s new book is an exploration and treatment of the wound deep in our culture—the illusion of separateness from the natural world. Our Greek and Christian cultural inheritance tells us that we are spirit-centers standing outside and above our fellow-travelers on the planet and our truly important kinship is with the divine, immaterial world. The result has been climate change, deforestation, pollution, mass extinction, and the malaise within humans themselves.

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