#dark mountain

We've been creating the Anthropocene over centuries now. In a much, much shorter interval, we've come up with a complex symbiotic relationship between humans and computing machines that allows us to create models that have changed our consciousness. We look at these interpretations of climate and we see ourselves. All of a sudden we know who we are and what we are doing. All of that happened so quickly. It would be wrong to say that we aren't capable, in light of yesterday's transformation of our understanding, to begin to change the infrastructure of human existence. Yes, it's clear that we're living through a new mass extinction event that we've created, but because our machines can travel even faster than us, the speed and leverage that our prosthetics give us might very quickly enable another way of living.

I talk about things I’ve learned over the past decade with Dark Mountain: about how despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs, nor an end state; about how much of what makes human existence endurable lies beyond the reach of the state and the market, unmarked on the maps we’ve inherited from recent generations; about the role that art has played as a refuge for those aspects of reality that retreat from the gaze of those who would measure and price everything, that slip away like deer into the forest; about the hunch that, whatever hope is worth having today, it lies on the far side of despair, where the maps run out, at the margins or hidden in plain sight.

We are not very good at telling stories about a hundred people doing things or considering that the qualities that matter in saving a valley or changing the world are mostly not physical courage and violent clashes but the ability to coordinate and inspire and connect with lots of other people and create stories about what could be and how we get there.

Our liberation from the constraints of the seasons is assumed to be progress, but it might be wiser to call it an illusion. All that food in the supermarket is coming from places where the seasons still count. We still live off soil and sun and rain. There is no question of going ‘back to the land’, because we never left: we just stretched the chains that link us to it so far, we lost sense of what lies at the other end. --- This is how climate change arrives, not as a clean case of cause and effect, but tangled up with the cruelties of dictators and the profits made from commodity market speculation, washing up in boats on package holiday coastlines.