The Dark Mountain Manifesto
Prompted by a couple of friends' interest, I recently read the Dark Mountain Manifesto. It's long but worth a read, because it's a beautifully written expression of some important ideas. In spite of this, it didn't quite sit right with me.
I'll start with the parts I agreed with strongly. The biggest is that we tend to very complacently assume that "civilisation" will continue indefinitely, looking broadly as it looks now, without any evidence to support that belief. The precedents are bad-we only have to go back to the 1930s to see historical events that upended life for a large proportion of the world's people at once-and the portents are too. Maintaining the status quo assumes a growing population (to support our pyramid scheme retirement plans), of which an increasing proportion has a high material standard of living (a simple matter of justice, and a more complex one of buying peace). This could work, if we weren't already living beyond our means. As I noted last week on a work blog, yesterday was Earth Overshoot Day, which marks the day on which humanity is estimated to have exceeded our natural resources budget for the year.
The second key point that struck a chord with me follows on from this. In the face of accumulating signs of how literally unsustainable "civilisation" as we know it and assume we always will know it is, our collective responses are woefully inadequate. In terms of action on the ground this is trivially obvious: screw paper vs plastic; even if the Copenhagen talks had ratified the strongest agreement that had ever had a serious chance of passing it would not have prevented several countries from disappearing under the sea this century. But that's not even what the Dark Mountain Manifesto is talking about. It laments a much deeper problem-a collective failure to comprehend the seriousness of the trouble ahead-and I think it's absolutely right. Every time I hear somebody talk about environmental protection as an unaffordable luxury I realise how far short we are as a society of grasping how little we can afford not to do these things; how utterly catastrophic attempting to preserve the status quo is.
There's other good stuff in there, about the foolishness of compartmentalising "nature" as somehow distinct from "civilisation", how completely "civilisation" hides its uglier workings from us, and how important a sense of place is as a tool to combat these disconnects. So having agreed with so much of what I read, why did the whole not add up for me?
It comes down to a point I disagree with, and one I don't think they took to its logical conclusion. I'm certain they're wrong to assert that "we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth". We could set fire to every oilfield, release every pent-up store of toxins we have, and detonate every nuclear warhead ever made, and life on Earth would go on. We'd be toast, and what would follow would be unrecognisable, but we have no means of trashing the seamounts in the Marianas Trench or the halophiles in the Gulf of Mexico seabed, and I'm not even convinced we'd manage to do away with the humble cockroach.
Given the extent of the destruction we can clearly wreak, this might sound like a petty technicality, but it relates importantly to one of the core principles of the Dark Mountain project: "5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet...." This can be taken two ways: either humans simply don't matter, in which case why bother trying to save us at all, or we only matter to ourselves. I happen to believe the latter, and I think it leads to a very different conclusion from where the Dark Mountain project takes it. It doesn't matter how insignificant we are the grand scheme of things, because human welfare is still what will motivate humans to change. We don't need to worry about Life On Earth since we don't have the ability to destroy it anyway, but it's precisely because we're punier than we like to admit that we need to worry about our own futures.
When I look outside my window, I see some buildings, the sea, an assortment of shipping, and a mountain range. It's the buildings and the ships I worry about, not because they're in some way more important than the mountains or the sea, but because they're the parts we can destroy in my lifetime. No matter what we do, the mountains and the sea will still be mountains and sea, and they'll still be bigger and more durable than we are.
I find that deeply comforting, but it doesn't render humans irrelevant, and it doesn't make any less urgent the project to supply all of us with hot showers and cold beers while living within our absolute natural resource means. And that leads to the other part of the Dark Mountain Manifesto I couldn't agree with: it's even more pessimistic than I am. I think the Dark Mountain people are absolutely right to contemplate a world without "civilisation", and I'm very much looking forward to getting a copy of their first book. In fact, I think this is an essential project, because it is distinctly possible that we'll fail to preserve the conditions on which our way of life depends, and if we fail we'd better have some idea of how to react. But when they talk about all of this as inevitable, they lose me and they risk doing harm. Ultimately the belief that the collapse of our way of life is inevitable is self-fulfilling, because that belief leads to a failure to act to prevent the collapse.
In many ways and for many reasons I am deeply concerned about the future of the comfortable way of life to which I'm really rather attached. I don't know how to make the majority of people understand how serious the problem is without terrifying them into paralysis, and unless that can be achieved we're never going to have the political momentum to fix this. But I don't believe that failure is inevitable, nor that we have to wait for some magickal future technology to come and save us-we've known for at least two years that we can do this with existing technology, at strikingly little cost-so it's not yet time to give up and self-fulfillingly call the whole project doomed.
I'll start with the parts I agreed with strongly. The biggest is that we tend to very complacently assume that "civilisation" will continue indefinitely, looking broadly as it looks now, without any evidence to support that belief. The precedents are bad-we only have to go back to the 1930s to see historical events that upended life for a large proportion of the world's people at once-and the portents are too. Maintaining the status quo assumes a growing population (to support our pyramid scheme retirement plans), of which an increasing proportion has a high material standard of living (a simple matter of justice, and a more complex one of buying peace). This could work, if we weren't already living beyond our means. As I noted last week on a work blog, yesterday was Earth Overshoot Day, which marks the day on which humanity is estimated to have exceeded our natural resources budget for the year.
The second key point that struck a chord with me follows on from this. In the face of accumulating signs of how literally unsustainable "civilisation" as we know it and assume we always will know it is, our collective responses are woefully inadequate. In terms of action on the ground this is trivially obvious: screw paper vs plastic; even if the Copenhagen talks had ratified the strongest agreement that had ever had a serious chance of passing it would not have prevented several countries from disappearing under the sea this century. But that's not even what the Dark Mountain Manifesto is talking about. It laments a much deeper problem-a collective failure to comprehend the seriousness of the trouble ahead-and I think it's absolutely right. Every time I hear somebody talk about environmental protection as an unaffordable luxury I realise how far short we are as a society of grasping how little we can afford not to do these things; how utterly catastrophic attempting to preserve the status quo is.
There's other good stuff in there, about the foolishness of compartmentalising "nature" as somehow distinct from "civilisation", how completely "civilisation" hides its uglier workings from us, and how important a sense of place is as a tool to combat these disconnects. So having agreed with so much of what I read, why did the whole not add up for me?
It comes down to a point I disagree with, and one I don't think they took to its logical conclusion. I'm certain they're wrong to assert that "we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth". We could set fire to every oilfield, release every pent-up store of toxins we have, and detonate every nuclear warhead ever made, and life on Earth would go on. We'd be toast, and what would follow would be unrecognisable, but we have no means of trashing the seamounts in the Marianas Trench or the halophiles in the Gulf of Mexico seabed, and I'm not even convinced we'd manage to do away with the humble cockroach.
Given the extent of the destruction we can clearly wreak, this might sound like a petty technicality, but it relates importantly to one of the core principles of the Dark Mountain project: "5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet...." This can be taken two ways: either humans simply don't matter, in which case why bother trying to save us at all, or we only matter to ourselves. I happen to believe the latter, and I think it leads to a very different conclusion from where the Dark Mountain project takes it. It doesn't matter how insignificant we are the grand scheme of things, because human welfare is still what will motivate humans to change. We don't need to worry about Life On Earth since we don't have the ability to destroy it anyway, but it's precisely because we're punier than we like to admit that we need to worry about our own futures.
When I look outside my window, I see some buildings, the sea, an assortment of shipping, and a mountain range. It's the buildings and the ships I worry about, not because they're in some way more important than the mountains or the sea, but because they're the parts we can destroy in my lifetime. No matter what we do, the mountains and the sea will still be mountains and sea, and they'll still be bigger and more durable than we are.
I find that deeply comforting, but it doesn't render humans irrelevant, and it doesn't make any less urgent the project to supply all of us with hot showers and cold beers while living within our absolute natural resource means. And that leads to the other part of the Dark Mountain Manifesto I couldn't agree with: it's even more pessimistic than I am. I think the Dark Mountain people are absolutely right to contemplate a world without "civilisation", and I'm very much looking forward to getting a copy of their first book. In fact, I think this is an essential project, because it is distinctly possible that we'll fail to preserve the conditions on which our way of life depends, and if we fail we'd better have some idea of how to react. But when they talk about all of this as inevitable, they lose me and they risk doing harm. Ultimately the belief that the collapse of our way of life is inevitable is self-fulfilling, because that belief leads to a failure to act to prevent the collapse.
In many ways and for many reasons I am deeply concerned about the future of the comfortable way of life to which I'm really rather attached. I don't know how to make the majority of people understand how serious the problem is without terrifying them into paralysis, and unless that can be achieved we're never going to have the political momentum to fix this. But I don't believe that failure is inevitable, nor that we have to wait for some magickal future technology to come and save us-we've known for at least two years that we can do this with existing technology, at strikingly little cost-so it's not yet time to give up and self-fulfillingly call the whole project doomed.