After I finished writing about Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (here and here), I found I wanted to follow some of the topics that had caught my curiosity as a result of Kingsnorth’s book. My mind turned to Dougald Hine, Kingsnorth’s co-author of The Dark Mountain Manifesto. I remembered that I had purchased, but never read, Hine’s book At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Climate Crises and Other Emergencies, which had been published about 2-1/2 years prior to Kingsnorth’s book. What route had Hine taken?
The first thing that I noticed was the difference in the emotional feel of the books' titles. Near the end of the Dark Mountain Manifesto, Kingsnorth and Hine made a very clear statement: “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.” It felt to me as if Kingsnorth, in the years since 2009, had changed his mind about this, and that it actually was the end of the world, full stop. “For many people I worked with in those years," Hine acknowledges, “Dark Mountain became a journey to the far side of despair.” Hine, on the other hand, while accepting that our world was going to change, also embraced the lines in the manifesto that immediately followed it: “Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead into the unknown world that lies ahead.” At Work in the Ruins is Hine’s attempt to do so. “I remain convinced that humankind is in deep trouble,” he writes, and dealing with that fact requires a change in the way that we know the world.
The COVID years were “unsettling” for Hine, especially the repeated demands that we “follow the science” as a justification for the lock down. As a resident of Sweden, Hine was experiencing the pandemic in a country that did not shut down and was taking a much more measured approach to the pandemic than the rest of Europe and the US. In his opinion, science had become ideological, and was being used to justify policies and influence attitudes in ways that he had also seen making its way into the environmental movement and its change to an almost single-minded focus on climate change. Climate change fit into a focus on numbers, data, and technology that he started to believe was overlooking something crucial. As a result, he decided he was not going to talk about climate change anymore. “But what became clear to me, these past three years [since the start of the pandemic] is that the way we talk about this trouble is making everything worse.”
" The mobilisation of fear and the language of emergency, the elevation of science into an article of faith and an overriding source of political authority – even when the intentions are good, even when the sense of urgency is sincere and well-founded, these moves push forward the project of making this living planet and its inhabitants into an object of technological management and control. For those of us who want no part in that project, yet who remain convinced of the depth of the trouble that climate change represents, there is a need to find other ways of talking and other moves worth taking.”
He instead began focusing on what he called “upstream” questions, questions that “cannot be answered by science alone.” In fact, “they cannot even be asked in a clear way as long as we allow what we are talking about to go on being framed in terms of science.” Our fixation on data analysis and technology had supplanted the stories we use to define and communicate our values, emotions, beliefs, and our relationships with each other and nature. Hine suggested that we might start a discussion of upstream questions by asking “how we came to be in the trouble we are in: was it just bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry or are we faced with the consequences of a way of approaching the world?” In other words, are we making things worse through the values we have adopted as a society? If so, the next question is clear: “how do we identify this way of approaching the world? What name should we give it?” Paul Kingsnorth called it, following in the wake of historian Lewis Mumford, “the logic of The Machine.” “Potent language,” Hine admits, but once again it suggested a technological frame. “For my part,” he says, “I tend to talk about it as the logic of ‘modernity’ because this is the language used by the friends and teachers in whose company I learned to recognise it.” [For information on some of the “friends and teachers” that influenced him, see the note at the bottom of this post.]
Hine does not discount the importance of science, but simply sees it as providing a partial vision of our world. When we begin discussing upstream questions, “We may no longer see climate change as the problem, but as an especially alarming symptom of an underlying condition.” Modernism’s orientation leads us to believe we can “limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.” In other words, the goal is to maintain version of the status quo, albeit perhaps a bit “healthier;” this Hine calls the “big path.” Instead, Hine points us toward what he calls the “small path,” which involves building “resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world worth living for’ nonetheless remains.”
Therefore, it is crucially important that the stories we adopt going forward “make our lives a part of a cycle of gift, a reciprocal relationship with other living things,” otherwise we risk becoming “an engine of depletion, bringing about a desolation from which we will not escape.” In Hine’s strongest rejection of those who counsel only despair, he writes, “Too many of us have been told that the story is already over, that there is nothing left to play for, and this is a lie.” In this single sentence, I see the crossroads where Kingsnorth and Hine parted company. “No one can stay in a state of freshly awakened panic for years one end,” Hine declares. “We will need to rediscover that any world worth living for centres not on the vast systems we built to secure the future, but on those encounters that are proportioned to the kind of creatures we are, the places where we meet, the acts of friendship and the acts of hospitality in which we offer shelter and kindness to the stranger at the door.”
Hine’s is a vision of localism, of individuals working together in cooperation, with an attitude of “undefeated despair,” devising ways to live that can flourish within the constraints of the changes that will inevitably arrive. He paraphrases a Brazilian saying that writer and climate activist Vanessa Machado de Oliveira shared in a talk she gave: “when there’s a flood coming and the waters are up to your ankles, you don’t start swimming; when the water reaches your knees, it’s still not time to swim; when the water gets up to your ass, that’s when it’s time to start swimming. When things get bad enough, types of action that were previously impossible become possible.”
In response, Hine asks, “where are the waters deepest in our societies?” His answer surprised me, but inspired me as well. “I’d say,” he writes, “it’s loneliness and lack of meaning, mental health amongst young people, addiction, including addiction to networked technologies, economic precarity and, for an increasing number of those around us, the ability to feed ourselves and heat our homes… It looks like ways of meeting each other’s needs that operate close to the ground, creating capacity that finds its strength in people coming together to make things happen for reasons other than because we have been paid or told to do so.” We must learn to heal ourselves and our communities if we are to become strong enough to face the coming future.
Near the end of At Work in the Ruins, Hine gives a succinct description of the four kinds of work that “makes sense among the ruins.” They are as follows:
- “salvage the good that may be taken with us from the ruins of the world that is ending…this is the attempt to bring with us what we are able to carry.”
- “mourn the good that cannot be taken with us…Part of the work of mourning is to tell the stories of the good things that couldn’t be saved, for those stories can be taken with us and they may turn out to be seeds.” As you may remember, helping a community to grieve was one of the tasks of the prophetic imagination.
- “discernment: notice the things within our ways of living that were never as good as we told ourselves they were and the chance we are being given to walk away from these.”
- “look for the dropped threads, the moments earlier in the story that have something to tell us… look for the skills or practices or knowledges that have been marked as extinct and obsolete, for some of these may yet make all the difference.”
I found Hine’s book inspiring, challenging, thoughtful, and profound. It demonstrates how two people can start at a single point, as do Hine and Kingsnorth, and diverge in their response to it. I found Hine’s approach more persuasive, especially since many of the tasks are things particularly relevant to artists. I will write about that in my last post in this series.
NOTE: Some of the people mentioned by Hine include:
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Vanessa Machado de Oliviera: “My friend Vanessa Machado de Oliveira wrote a book called Hospicing Modernity. The title invites us to a kind of work in which the focus is not on saving modernity, or bringing it down, or rushing to build what comes afterwards, but doing what we can to give it a good ending. To let it hand on its gifts and teach the lessons that may only become apparent as the end approaches.”
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Martin Shaw: “Certain encounters are too large in significance to do justice to in lines like these. Meeting Martin Shaw was such an encounter.” Dr Shaw is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University. Of particular note: Liturgies of the Wild: Myths that Make Us and Bardskull.
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Anna Loenhaupt Tsing: “The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote a book called The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. That could be a role to take in times like these, to go looking for possibilities of life among the ruins around and ahead of us.”
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Amitav Ghosh: “Over the last few decades, the arc of the Great Acceleration has been completely in line with the trajectory of modernity: it has led to the destruction of communities, to ever greater individualization and anomie, to the industrialization of agriculture and to the centralization of distribution systems. At the same time it has also reinforced the mind-body dualism to the point of producing the illusion, so powerfully propagated in cyberspace, that human beings have freed themselves from their material circumstances to the point where they have become floating personalities ‘decoupled from a body’. The cumulative effect is the extinction of exactly those forms of traditional knowledge, material skills, art and ties of community that might provide succour to vast numbers of people around the world – and especially to those who are still bound to the land – as the impacts intensify. The very speed with which the crisis is now unfolding may be the one factor that will preserve some of these resources.” The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
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John Berger: “The great Marxist art critic, novelist, essayist and storyteller John Berger spent the second half of his long life exploring what it means to live after the failure of the promises of progress. Where others of his generation retreated to the seminar room after the disappointment of the hopes of 1968, he settled in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie and rethought his political commitments in the light of what he learned over decades living and working alongside the last generation of peasants in Western Europe, becoming his continent’s counterpart to the grassroots postmodernists of Mexico, India and Palestine.” See Pig Earth: Book One of the Into Their Labours Trilogy
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Jeremy Seabrook and Trevor Blackwell: “Another pair of salvage workers of the European left are the British journalists Jeremy Seabrook and Trevor Blackwell, who wrote a series of short, prescient books together in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In The Revolt Against Change: Towards a Conserving Radicalism, they trace the origins of the modern left to a moment of historical defeat.”
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Bruno Latour: “A few years before the pandemic, the French philosopher Bruno Latour published a fascinating book called _Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime_. He offers a set of maps that reveal how much messier our situation is than the familiar axis of choice can show us. The first of these maps suggests that both right and left have had their versions of ‘progress’, one focused on market freedom and the other on social rights; in both cases, the direction of progress has been away from the local and towards the global, and this has been pursued in the name of ‘modernisation’. Yet this direction of history is no longer available, since climate change has called time on it.”
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Chris Smaje: “One of the most widely debated essays we ever published at Dark Mountain was Chris Smaje’s ‘Dark Thoughts on Ecomodernism’, written in response to that manifesto.4 Chris is a British social scientist who walked away from a career at the University of Surrey to take up farming and ended up combining his practical experience of agriculture with his academic training to write about the search for viable paths into a climate-changed future.” Books include [Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work, and Craft[(https://chrissmaje.com/book/finding-lights-in-a-dark-age/) and A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
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Anthony McCann: In the acknowledgements of At Work in the Ruins, Hine says he hopes McCann “finds something even a tenth as helpful here as his thinking on commons and the politics of gentleness was for me.”
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Alastair McIntosh: “A deep thank you, then, to Alastair McIntosh for writing the only book that ever made me sit right down and write to the author, and the blessing you gave when you wrote back.” The book was Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being
I also recommend the works of:
- Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
- John McKnight, especially his book The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits;
- Leopold Kohr, in his books The Breakdown of Nations and The Overdeveloped Nations;
- Rob Hopkins and his Transition Towns Movement;
- Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth;
- Alan Jacobs, “How Not to Save the Planet”
- and any novel, poem, or essay by Wendell Berry