The Future We Deserve an excellent project!

The Future We Deserve is a collaborated book about possible futures that takes account of the very real possibility of castastrophic climate change and economic disintegration. It will be a collection of writings from dreamers, pundits, thinkers, inventors, campaigners, and activists looking at ideas, answers, technologies, culture, feelings, economics, and social strategy for an uncertain future.
Vinay Gupta is the inventor of the Hexayurt (a portable, lightweight house deployed in Haiti after the recent earth quakes) and a curator of The Future We Deserve. He contacted me recently saying he loved the Age of Warlords blog title and asked me to write an essay for the book. Needless to say I am very excited as I have been following the Dark Mountain Project as it develops and would be glad to make a contribution to discussion around their challenging ideas.
The Future We Deserve book will be made reality using Creative Commons licencing and funded using Crowd Sourcing through Kickstarter

GeoMon vs The Dark Mountain

This weekend may see the most significant public debate about the future of the earth and the West's role in helping to save the environment or at least saving some semblance of life after civilisation.


The first ever Dark Mountain Festival will be held in Llangollen north Wales and George Monbiot (GeoMon) who has had a running debate with the Dark Mountain Project will be there to debate in person. George has always insisted that the West take responsibility for environmental destruction and Dark Mountain Project founders Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine head an ever growing movement that is deeply critical of Western civilisation and recognises that we may well have missed our chance to stop catastrophic climate change. Both GeoMon and the Dark Mountain Project are highly critical of the West's actions in it's stewardship of the earth but differ over the message that should be delivered to the people.

I admire George Monbiot a lot. He lives his values and writes articulately, always providing useful references. Most importantly he doesn't fly around the world giving talks and attending conferences instead choosing limited travel by train. George has been the steady voice of eco-reason for me which is why this particular conflict is so significant. The Dark Mountain Project came into my field of view only a few months ago but given the changes in our knowledge of the current and imminent threats to the global climate and the obvious lack of international will to act, their point of view continues to become more and more relevant.

Musician Chris TT who has an association with the Dark Mountain Project sums up the debate quite well in this article. He argues that the essence of the debate is about the reluctance of environmentalists to admit they are privately pessimistic about the future and don't share this pessimism due to the perceived need to grow public optimism. I'm inclined to agree with him.

While I have much admiration for GeoMon I feel that he has got his knickers in a twist over this debate. In his May 10/2010 article in The Guardian GeoMon responds to the Dark Mountain thesis contending that Western civilisation is much more resilient than they assert listing a range of new fossil fuel resources and extraction methods. I didn't find his argument compelling. It seemed that he was arguing that the very practices that he rails against would sustain the system he knows to be the problem.

Paul Kingsnorth in his May 19/2010 article The need for growth makes a strong argument for how utterly dependent Western civilisation is on economic growth and that such growth is necessarily dependent on eco-destructive practices. Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine sharpen their critique of the green movement in their reply to GeoMon entitled The environmental movement needs to stop pretending asserting that more than anything else our lifestyles need to change.

I find this debate to be exciting and extremely important! While I feel that the Dark Mountain Project tend to grandstand a little and GeoMon is defending what may well be a lost cause I feel that between them they have begun to flesh out the defining issue of our age. What seems a little amusing here is how GeoMon comes out looking a bit like an establishment figure.

The Dark Mountain Project have taken a very radical position which I find attractive. There is something very positive to me about new culture and contingency plans for a future that lack of political will seems to make very possible. While I wish for global cooperation and renewable energy solutions for the future I very much see the need for a critique of Western civilisation and the world that it has delivered to us.

As we crumble

"Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century intact."
The Dark Mountain Project has as it's goal "uncivilisation". This does not involve a fixed set of objectives but the process of recognising and responding to our dramatically changing future. A future without the abundance that we in the west have come to expect and manifestly co-opt from the world.
Literature, art, and other expressions of culture commonly characterise modern times as "a struggle to reach the mountain top" or "standing on the shoulders of giants", or we contemplate "Oh how far we have come!". Somehow while we all admit to human frailty but seem to blindly accept the idea that as time moves on we inevitably become less brutish and more enlightened. We lionise the present but do we think with favour about our future? Do we truly comprehend what our present is predicated upon?
Larry Elliot of The Guardian contends that the fall of the Berlin wall represents the beginning of the pre-eminence of capitalism, a mere twenty years! He paints a picture of a veritable steeple chase of obstacles set before the globalised economy without getting into the likely constraints supplied by depleting resources like oil, coal, silicone, and the rare metals on which our affluence has come to depend.
We battle and poison religious, social, and political relations over oil and many say we will do the same over water. We destroy lives for food. What else? How will we respond to true constraints? Where will we who have known only unconstrained growth for sixty years find the resourcefulness we need to endure?