First evening of frogs croaking at our little pond. What a lovely, lovely sound.
First evening of frogs croaking at our little pond. What a lovely, lovely sound.
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.
The crude choices offered at the ballot box encourage us to reduce politics to such us-and-them challenges. What goes missing is the possibility that we live in a time that is stalked by multiple dangers. Beyond the judgments we are forced to make on election day, the question is not which of these dangers is least bad but how we try to evade them: what paths might lead beyond their double bind.
We need other stories than the ones we’ve been told. Alternative modes of living.
We added a dozen bullfrog tadpoles and a dozen large snails (species unknown) to our little wildlife pond today, along with a few more plants. Been looking forward to this for months. A good day.
It’s good to hear the music of the ice cream truck rolling through the neighborhood.
Finally feeling better after a back injury and flu/covid–but now I’m so far behind on everything during an already busy time. I’m blocking my calendar ruthlessly. I’m also behind on my mail so my apologies to those of you waiting on a return letter.
The fossil economy breaks the possibility of such a cycle [of human reciprocity with other living things]. How many million years of dying in the forests and seas of the ancient world go into one generation of living the way we have been doing around here lately? How could our lives ever be worthy of so much death? What could we possibly give back? And what would giving back even mean, when all that dying happened in the deep past of geological time? Committed to dependence on these vast underground reserves of death, the only response that remains is to silence such questions, to extinguish the ways of living which embody them, to make them unthinkable.
It’s as if we’ve discovered some powerful necromancy and we now we need a taboo on the practice. How is such a taboo established? How is it taught and enforced?
The universe is getting entirely too literal for my taste.
In 2024, we face the likely prospect of two old men representing two dying ideologies competing for the presidency of the United States.
On the one hand, we have an old man representing those who would resurrect a past in which a certain version of Christian morality is enforced on all. Add to this a strongman ideology of law and order, national cohesion, etc. I don’t need to go on—we all know what I’m referring to.
On the other hand, we have an even older man representing the ideology of Progress, the vision of a technocratic elite bringing in an ever-more-glorious future. An ideology in which the experts are anointed to rule over us in the name of science and efficiency. And if you’re lucky and go to the right schools you can become one of the ruling elites too.
The only thing that unites these two groups is their absolute devotion to the capitalist imperative of continual economic growth.
Both of these ideologies are dying. They are dying because neither of them can or will face the actual future.
In a recent podcast episode, Dougald Hine mentioned the work of Frederico Campagna. (I haven’t read him so I can’t say whether Dougald’s summary of his ideas is correct.) Campagna apparently says that sometimes humans are born into the ending of a world. It is important to note that the ending of a world is not the end of the world but it may feel like it is. In any case, the way you know you’ve been born into the ending of a world is that the future doesn’t work anymore. In a more normal time, you’re able to look at the past and present and project into a future. When you’re at the ending of a world, this is no longer possible.
In some real way, the world ended in 2016. In America, we were watching the close of the age of Obama. It hadn’t quite delivered on what we had hoped, but it seemed like a time we could be proud of. (Never mind all those bombs.) Now the first woman president seemed all but assured of taking office. Then it all came crashing down.
The feeling I most remember from that time is that nothing made sense. I was a Bernie voter. I didn’t like Hillary. But the idea that Trump had won was crazy. None of the rules seemed to apply anymore. And that feeling only got worse.
The world ended in 2016. American life has now entered a zombie state. Wildfires. A plague. An attack on the Capitol. Climate change as a present reality. Hell, we can’t even make original entertainment anymore.
Now these two old men with their old ideologies present themselves before zombie America and ask us to choose. It’s no wonder that both men have had their mental competence called into question: they represent insane ideologies. It’s even literally the same two guys. We have to give one of them a second chance.
Hey, Cosmos, isn’t this getting a little heavy-handed? Try for a little nuance, maybe.
We cannot see the future from here. Don’t trust anyone who says they can. But I suspect it is out there, if we are willing to let the dead bury the dead.
“A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.”—Lord Summerisle, and me.
Happy May Day! Around here that means its time to watch Wicker Man. Possibly repeatedly.