Exploring 'uncivilisation'

The exhaustion of the planet and existing ways of life presents a creative challenge: exploring “uncivilisation”. Paul Kingsnorth introduces the Dark Mountain Project.
I often wonder how we would act if we really believed it. How we would act and how we would write.

Every day, we are hit with more news about the human impact on the non-human world. For decades, the evidence has been piling up. If you want to know about deforestation, species extinction, ocean acidification, overfishing or (the granddaddy of them all) climate change, you doubtless know where to look by now. And if you don’t want to look – because you don’t want to hear it – then nobody can make you.
We know these things are happening, and we know why. We know that a rapidly growing human population with rapidly growing appetites is strip-mining the world. We know that industrial capitalism, which eats the world and calls it development, is a weapon of planetary mass destruction.

We know, most of all, that this cannot last. We know we are running out of cheap oil, and that cheap oil in any case is storing up a future of chaos for us. We know that we are likely to see future wars over water, that we will have trouble feeding ourselves.

So why does nothing change? We are constantly claiming some sense of fierce urgency about the future, but we are all of us, even those who claim to be trying to stop all of this happening, mostly still driving, tweeting, flying, using the dishwasher, chomping down the sushi and saving for our pensions as if nothing were really happening. We claim to know the facts, but we don’t really take them in; we don’t internalise them. Comfortable, as all readers of this will doubtless be, none of it seems real to us. “Facts”, wrote Joseph Conrad, in Lord Jim, “as if facts could prove anything.”

True, there is a whole body of people dedicated to solving these problems: the environmentalists. I have counted myself amongst their number for fifteen years. But environmentalism, broadly speaking, is failing. It has become an adjunct to the consumer economy: the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of global capitalism. Environmentalists, at least those in the “mainstream”, seem to have realised that the problems they face in trying to divert our civilisation from its ecocidal course are too deep-seated to overcome. Failing, untrusted democracies, their managerial political parties unable to agree on any significant change of direction; overweening corporate power tying their hands; hungry, demanding consumers who will not vote for anyone who denies them their fix; a political class unable or unwilling to free themselves from the cult of growth.

Environmentalism, faced with all of this, has retreated into a search for techno-fixes. If (it tells us) we can just get the supergrids, the turbines, the carbon-capture systems, the nuclear-power stations (delete as applicable) up and running fast enough, we can keep the ship on course. The failure of Copenhagen [1] is only the latest example of how untenable this last-ditch line is. In any case, keeping the ship on course is precious little use if it is headed for an iceberg.

It took me a long while to admit to myself the conclusion I now draw from all this: that the civilisation we currently take for granted is coming to a stuttering end, that we are unequipped to prevent it, and that it is probably too late to prevent the worst of what climate change, peak oil and ecological destruction will throw at us. I suspect that the great challenge of the 21st century will not be building a great, “sustainable” civilisation to lead us to the stars, but coming to terms with decline, materially and existentially, as the fossil-fuelled bubble bursts and leaves us adjusting to a harsher reality.

Leadership