Breaking the fall
Paul Graham Raven
Present tense
A new breed of survivalist is preparing for the imminent collapse of Western civilisation – easy to mock, but Paul Graham Raven thinks the collapsonomic crowd will have the last laugh
I n a little valley halfway between the idyllic Hampshire villages of East Meon and Clanfield, the second Dark Mountain festival is in session. The August sunshine is swiftly drying up an hour’s worth of rain, but the loud music and debauch usually associated with the word "festival" are largely absent.
Dark Mountain is a coltish British hybrid of Glastonbury’s Healing Field and an academic symposium. There is music, sure, but it is predominantly folk or roots-based. There is poetry. There are writing workshops, and a bicentennial commemoration (very well attended) of the Luddite uprising. A practical introduction to the hand scythe punctuates discussions about how to survive the socio-economic collapse of the nation-state. (The panelists hail from Ireland, the former USSR and Iceland; this is not hypothetical material to them.)
One can hardly move for movements at the moment. The international hacktivist group Anonymous rattles its digital sabre at governments and corporations alike; the Occupy protests against economic and social inequality have metastasised, bonding seemingly disparate events and locations under a common – if deliberately ill-defined – banner. Serious newspapers talk grimly of endemic distrust in the political process, while politicians themselves seem increasingly detached from the reality the rest of us inhabit.
All of which raises a big scary question: how are we going to manage when the world we know breaks down?
The mathematics is pretty simple: there are seven billion human beings on the planet right now, and we expect that number to peak at around nine billion. The planet’s resources are renewable up to a point, but if everybody on the planet consumed at the rate of the hypothetical average North American, we would need eight planets’ worth of resources. A world of average Europeans requires four.
We don’t have four planets, or even two. We have just one. Either we all consume less, or a lot of people will have to die. This isn’t politics. This is home economics. Politics is merely the mechanism by which we decide who eats and who starves: a brutal calculus concealed behind the prestidigitations of politicians and economists.
Climate change, economic instability, political myopia, corporate corruption: if these sound like prompts for a dystopian novel, it will come as no surprise that one of the ur-movements informing apocalyptic futurism and collapsonomics was the brainchild of the writer and arch-cyberpunk Bruce Sterling.
Sterling founded the Viridian Design movement in 1999. Viridian promoted a "bright green" design aesthetic that addressed environmental challenges in a progressively technocratic way. Its can-do approach and global vision distinguished it from the "leaf green" of more traditional environmental movements, and ran quite counter to the "dark" or "hair-shirt green" thinking of back-to-the-land primitivists. Contributors included Alex Steffen, Jamais Cascio and Jon Lebkowsky, who went on to found the now-defunct Worldchanging blog and the book of the same name . All three have become regulars on the global futurist talking-head circuit.
Sterling wrapped up Viridian in 2008, around the time the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst. Three years on, we’re still trying to clean up the mess. Defibrillatory bailouts and quantitative easing programmes have failed to produce more than a handful of weak pulses before the world market’s death spiral reasserted itself. More depressing still, few of our current economic crises arrived as unexpected guests. Inequalities and overconsumption have been carefully mapped since at least the 1970s. The writing has always been on the wall. In the last decade, the spray-can strokes have simply got thicker and darker.
Radicals thinking
On the first floor of a former embassy at the foot of Haymarket in London’s West End, a dozen people are sat around the remains of a Chinese buffet takeaway and a few bottles of wine. In the foyer the glass and steel and expensive furniture spoke of diplomacy and corporate sheen; up here, cheap Ikea light fittings dangle between exposed cables and ductwork, and there’s hardly an interior wall to be seen, except the ones that surround the central lift shaft. Whiteboards are plentiful, as are small clusters of chairs, mute testament to earlier discussions. This is one of those "start-up hubs": unconstrained spaces whose founders hope to nurture new businesses for a changing world. By day the place attracts architects and designers with big ideas, but every few evenings a week the collapsonomics crowd shows up.
Globetrotting security consultant Eleanor Saitta is perched on the backrest of a chair, addressing the other diners: progressive businesspersons, policymakers, futurists, writers and a young trio who’ve wandered up from the OccupyLSX camp . She’s been describing the social projects that have grown out of the Scandinavian live action role-playing scene – powerful and occasionally disturbing experiments in social (de/re)programming. There are some wild, Neal-Stephensonish ideas being mooted in Iceland, too, as that tiny country attempts to redefine itself for a changing world.
Saitta argues that our global communications networks are inextricably bound up in the radical changes sweeping the world. "When the internet encounters an institution," she says, "it eviscerates it, then replaces it with something that looks a lot like the internet." This has already happened to the music industry, and it’s currently happening to journalism and publishing. Who’s next in the firing line?
Saitta identifies the revolution’s next two within-our-lifetime targets. The banks will be the first to go; then the governments.
Saitta’s visit is being hosted by Vinay Gupta, best known as the inventor of the Hexayurt, an open-source disaster relief shelter design taken up enthusiastically at the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. Gupta’s genial manner and Scots accent belie the seriousness of his hobby-horse topics: radical carbon footprint reduction, for instance; and multilateral nuclear disarmament. Nor is he the sort of fellow who, at a glance, you’d expect to have worked with the Pentagon.
Gupta has led an eventful life, mixing spiritual self-discovery with adventures among every sort of community under the sun, from disaster-relief consultants to train-hopping latter-day hobos. His activism, which is more of a peripatetic lifestyle than a career or hobby, is informed by those experiences, and by his long-standing interest in magical practice and a certain school of Hindu mysticism. This lends a spiritual dimension to his outlook on the underlying resource-consumption issue. In a 2011 blog post he wrote: "I cannot see that this doesn’t all root back into the desire to end the world in pursuit of something better than life. That’s what we’re buying at the mall: little unitised packets of the death of the world, packaged into products, and enjoyed not in spite of, but because of, the worldeath they represent."
Gupta was also inspired by reading Sterling’s story Green Days in Brunei , whose cast of post-national characters are muddling their way to a hard-scrabble but sustainable future. For Gupta, some sort of global civil collapse is inevitable. The open questions are how severe and swift it will be, and how gracefully we can ride it out. "I don’t know how you dig 6000-years-plus of bad software out of a system without doing a reformat."
The same question occupies John Global Guerrillas " Robb, a former USAF major and counter-terrorism operative turned writer and theorist, who delights in pointing out just how much more suited the open-source methodologies of terrorist organisations are to the world we live in, compared to the top-down approaches of armies and governments.
Robb is currently developing and publishing online guides for creating "resilient communities" that will survive the unavoidable collapse of "hollow states" like the US. A lot of influential people in the United States pay attention to Robb. So do increasing numbers of ordinary folk: people who doubt that the state can or will help them nail down the shutters. For those who feel powerless, Robb’s message is: stop waiting to be helped. Help yourselves, and each other.
Robb is also vocally supportive of other efforts toward building sustainable independent communities and businesses. A recent favourite of his is the Global Village Construction Set , an open-source laboratory producing DIY designs for the sort of cheap, durable tools you would need to go "off-grid" as a community: tractors and backhoes, wind turbines, baking ovens, CNC routers and 3D printers. Download the design for free, or buy a finished product if you’re in a hurry.
Back in the UK, the Transition Towns movement is attempting to spread awareness and preparedness in communities of all shapes and sizes for the arrival of energy shortages and disruptive climate change. The movement flatly refuses to tell people what to do or how to do it; its whole ethos is to encourage and disseminate independent thought, to share experiences, and create a local momentum for change.
If that’s all a bit too "Blitz spirit" for you, the Dark Mountain manifesto might be more up your street.
Dark Mountain is the brainchild of Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, writers, activists, and co-founders of the Institute for Collapsonomics. Dark Mountain assumes that civilisation as we know it is gasping its last. It attempts to address that gloomy future with art, music and literature to "conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world".
In their manifesto, Uncivilisation , they write: "The last taboo is the myth of civilisation. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species… We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it."
Section Four of the manifesto is titled To The Foothills! marking its fundamental break with current ecopolitical narratives. It is, in some respects, an admission of defeat, advocating an exodus from the city, a great expedition into the unknown. Uncivilisation ’s map of the future burgeons with blank spaces and long arduous journeys. It does not promise the comforting denouements of progress. In fact it promises little more than hard work in hard times. Its honesty is stern and unflinching: "We write with dirt under our fingernails."
Alongside that extensive and gloomily eloquent manifesto, two well-received anthologies of creative writing have emerged from the Dark Mountain camp, plus – of course – the festival. This arty angle on apocalypse attracts a distinct demographic: one drawn neither to the rugged practicalities of Transition Towns, nor to the fevered network-centric brainstorming of the futurists. The teepees and lentils of the environmentalist old guard don’t float their boat, either. There are some classic hippie variants here, of course, but no more than you’d see at any other festival. There’s also a goodly streak of old punks, travellers and ravers, some more reintegrated into the mainstream than others.
But I’m surprised by the number of normal-looking Gen-X people present: Guardianista liberals who’ve lost their faith in the shibboleth of Progress and are coming to the unsettling realisation that buying the recycled kitchen roll at Waitrose isn’t making the difference they hoped it would. These aren’t the sort of people I’ve encountered in the protest and ecology movements of the recent past; these are the people we always felt we were failing to reach, failing to engage. Somehow, an urge toward personal resilience and preparedness has replaced the hope that the government will get it all sorted. Instead of reassurances, they’re looking for new stories into which they can write themselves, and new solutions they can take home with them.
Solutions are thin on the ground, but the festival supplies the ingredients for baking your own. Discussions about bootstrapping a post-money economy and panels on the second-order effects of economic collapse in the Russian Federation are interspersed with poetry readings, live music and talks on the idyllic slowness of the ancient crofting lifestyle. (It sounds charming, in a windswept getting-up-early-to-feed-the-sheep kind of way, though the speaker didn’t mention how those of us unable to purchase an isolated croft in the Shetlands might invite permaculture into our lives.) It’s a curious admixture of the wistful and the pragmatic, the speculative and the practical.
And that, perhaps, is the common thread running through all the movements and ideologies currently sprouting from the cracked concrete of neo-liberal capitalism. No one knows quite what’s going to happen, though everyone’s got a sign or portent of doom to share. No one knows quite what we should do, but as the storm clouds gather on the horizon, everyone knows that we have to do something , if only to dispel the creeping sense of futility.
"My take on it is that each of us has our own Dark Mountain to climb," Vinay Gupta remarks, "and that we must face it individually, isolated, alone, but together. In that respect, it’s a lot like life."
We’re waking up to the problems presented by our unsustainable consumption patterns. But accepting hardship and preparing for privation isn’t second nature in the former First World just yet. Beneath the awning of the festival catering van, there are bitter complaints that the baked potatoes have sold out.