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Sitting in the hut, the air stale and the light almost nonexistent, I thought of something Hine told me earlier. “People think that abandoning belief in progress, abandoning the belief that if we try hard enough we can fix this mess, is a nihilistic position,” Hine said. “They think we’re saying: ‘Screw it. Nothing matters.’ But in fact all we’re saying is: ‘Let’s not pretend we’re not feeling despair. Let’s sit with it for a while. Let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the darkness, what do we start to notice?’ ”
Hine compared coming to terms with the scope of ecological loss to coming to terms with a terminal illness. “The feeling is a feeling of despair to begin with, but within that space other things begin to come through.” Yet arriving at this acute state of “awareness of what’s worth doing with the time you’ve got left” isn’t always easy for Dark Mountain’s followers. “Some people come here,” Hine told me, “they get very excited by the fact that people are inspired, and they go: ‘Right! Great! So what’s the plan?’ ” He and Kingsnorth have worked hard to check this impulse, seeing Dark Mountain as a space to set aside what Kingsnorth refers to as “activist-y” urges.
This wasn’t always the case. At the first festival, in 2010, Kingsnorth behaved the way he thought the leader of a new movement ought to behave. He proselytized. He lectured. He gave a talk that he describes as “Here’s what’s wrong with environmentalism, and this is what must change!” But he quickly concluded that a didactic tone was inappropriate for the new group. Dark Mountain had more in common with the anarchism of Occupy Wall Street than with the collectivism of 350.org: everyone was to choose his or her own course of action. Recently, Kingsnorth and Hine decided not to hold any more festivals. They want to focus their limited resources on publishing more books more frequently, but they also don’t want the gatherings to ossify into a predictable program — or worse, an annual party.
For more conventional activists, Dark Mountain’s insistence on remaining impractical can be not only disorienting but also irksome. George Monbiot, one of the England’s most prominent environmental journalists, is among Kingsnorth’s oldest friends. In 2009, after the manifesto was published, he and Kingsnorth held a debate in The Guardian, for which Monbiot writes a column. It was a heated exchange. Kingsnorth argued that civilization was approaching collapse and that it was time to step back and talk about how to live through it with dignity and honor. Monbiot responded that “stepping back” from direct political action was equivalent to a near-criminal disavowal of one’s moral duty. “How many people do you believe the world could support without either fossil fuels or an equivalent investment in alternative energy?” he asked. “How many would survive without modern industrial civilization? Two billion? One billion? Under your vision, several billion perish. And you tell me we have nothing to fear.”
Naomi Klein also sees a troubling abdication in Kingsnorth’s work. “I like Paul, but he’s said rather explicitly that he’s giving up,” she told me. “We have to be honest about what we can do. We have to keep the possibility of failure in our minds. But we don’t have to accept failure. There are degrees to how bad this thing can get. Literally, there are degrees.”
Hine compared coming to terms with the scope of ecological loss to coming to terms with a terminal illness. “The feeling is a feeling of despair to begin with, but within that space other things begin to come through.” Yet arriving at this acute state of “awareness of what’s worth doing with the time you’ve got left” isn’t always easy for Dark Mountain’s followers. “Some people come here,” Hine told me, “they get very excited by the fact that people are inspired, and they go: ‘Right! Great! So what’s the plan?’ ” He and Kingsnorth have worked hard to check this impulse, seeing Dark Mountain as a space to set aside what Kingsnorth refers to as “activist-y” urges.
This wasn’t always the case. At the first festival, in 2010, Kingsnorth behaved the way he thought the leader of a new movement ought to behave. He proselytized. He lectured. He gave a talk that he describes as “Here’s what’s wrong with environmentalism, and this is what must change!” But he quickly concluded that a didactic tone was inappropriate for the new group. Dark Mountain had more in common with the anarchism of Occupy Wall Street than with the collectivism of 350.org: everyone was to choose his or her own course of action. Recently, Kingsnorth and Hine decided not to hold any more festivals. They want to focus their limited resources on publishing more books more frequently, but they also don’t want the gatherings to ossify into a predictable program — or worse, an annual party.
For more conventional activists, Dark Mountain’s insistence on remaining impractical can be not only disorienting but also irksome. George Monbiot, one of the England’s most prominent environmental journalists, is among Kingsnorth’s oldest friends. In 2009, after the manifesto was published, he and Kingsnorth held a debate in The Guardian, for which Monbiot writes a column. It was a heated exchange. Kingsnorth argued that civilization was approaching collapse and that it was time to step back and talk about how to live through it with dignity and honor. Monbiot responded that “stepping back” from direct political action was equivalent to a near-criminal disavowal of one’s moral duty. “How many people do you believe the world could support without either fossil fuels or an equivalent investment in alternative energy?” he asked. “How many would survive without modern industrial civilization? Two billion? One billion? Under your vision, several billion perish. And you tell me we have nothing to fear.”
Naomi Klein also sees a troubling abdication in Kingsnorth’s work. “I like Paul, but he’s said rather explicitly that he’s giving up,” she told me. “We have to be honest about what we can do. We have to keep the possibility of failure in our minds. But we don’t have to accept failure. There are degrees to how bad this thing can get. Literally, there are degrees.”