Tag: climate change

42. Michael Trussler, 10:10

A book titled '10:10' by Michael Trussler, featuring a white cover with circular images and text, placed on a wooden surface.

I haven’t been reading much for a couple of years, and that’s bothered me–a lot. The reasons aren’t hard to understand. I’ve been working too much and not sleeping enough, which has meant that when I get home, I’m too tired to concentrate. I still don’t get enough shuteye, but my job has eased up a little, and so I’ve been able to get at a few of the new books that have found their way into our house. Yes, even though I’ve struggled to read anything, I’ve still been buying books; I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s one of the things writers do.

I ordered Michael Trussler’s 10:10 when it came out last fall. Michael is a colleague and a friend, and I admire his writing. It’s erudite, thoughtful, concerned with the ways we are damaging the planet and ourselves, our horrific histories of genocide, and yet it also takes visual art–Vermeer, Rothko, Brueghel–as a sign of our potential, as a species, to do good things, to make beautiful things. Unlike me, Michael doesn’t seem to struggle to find time or energy to read, if the dense texture of allusions and quotations in 10:10 is any evidence–and it is. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a year, and I was finally motivated to open it when I learned, early yesterday morning, that it has been shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Literary Award. Yes, of course, many worthwhile books don’t get that kind of recognition, and yet I am so happy that Michael’s work is being recognized. He’s been prolific over the past several years, publishing three books of poetry and a memoir since 2021, and I know how much hard work and sacrifice has gone into that productivity. I knew 10:10 was on the shelf at work where I keep poetry, and I brought it home last night. I ended up devouring it in one sitting. It is a wonderful book.

The title made me think about time–Timex watches used to always be advertised with the hands showing “10:10,” and that’s true of other analog timepieces as well–and sure enough, the passing of time, and the way it is experienced in simultaneous layers, are both themes here. That simultaneity is hard to evoke in writing, since language tends to be linear (one word, one sentence, following another), but Michael plays with punctuation, enjambment, and textual interruptions of various kinds to suggest the way he might be sitting in his home office, writing, while remembering standing outside the building where Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz, lived, while also recalling things she wrote about the experience of living in Nazi-occupied Holland. “The Edges of What’s Known?” includes lines from other poems or essays in the book–I’ve learned from Tanis MacDonald not to force genre categories onto hybrid texts, and I’m going to be careful not to make this mistake here–as another way to indicate a slightly different form of simultaneity. But that’s not exactly what 10:10 means. It’s a reference to Edward Kienholz’s large 1965 installation The Beanery, a life-size interior of a bar in which all of the human figures have clock faces, set to ten minutes after ten, where their actual fleshly faces would otherwise be. The title essay/poem, “10:10,” recalls different visits to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where Kienholz’s installation is located, in different decades of the author’s life, and it considers how his relationship to visual art has changed over time, as well as its connection, however oblique, to human violence: the war in Vietnam, the Holocaust. It ends with a couple of lines of poetry that interrupt a story about a 2014 visit to the Stedelijk, lines that seem to situate the text right here, in Regina, on a wintery day, far from Amsterdam, and yet on the following page we see a photograph (the author’s photographs appear at key points in this book) of a canal in that European city, “impossibly far from / here–.” Complexity, simultaneity, violence, and visual art as a kind of compensation: it’s all here.

So too are the climate crisis and the extinction event humans are causing, notably in “Solastalgia.” That title refers to Glenn Albrecht’s neologism, a word that combines nostalgia, solace, and desolation, or so I learned in a poetry workshop this week; it’s the sense of loss we experience when a place or ecosystem has been destroyed by human activity. The fragments in that text juxtapose different moments in Michael’s life, all of them suggesting the inexorable and accelerating passage of time, the need to love what remains NOW, because it’s leaving: “Better order now, the sky recommends, restaurant’s closing.”

I could go on about this book, which to be honest deserves a better, more skilled reader of poetry than I am. The winners of the Governor-General’s Literary Awards will be announced in a couple of weeks. I haven’t read the other nominees–that would be a worthwhile project, wouldn’t it?–and so I have no idea how 10:10 compares to them, but I’m happy that yesterday’s news prompted me to bestir myself to read it. Congratulations, Michael–you deserve the recognition.

37. Kit Dobson, Field Notes on Listening

Like Jenna Butler’s Revery: A Year of Bees, I’m teaching Kit Dobson’s Field Notes on Listening this summer, and rereading it in preparation for last week’s classes was a revelation: I had forgotten it was so good. The book is structured like a musical composition, with three movements bracketed by a prelude and a coda, . The prelude and coda present a sonic history, in 100 fragments, of the first months 2020, when Dobson was working on this book. Those sounds are arranged chronologically, so that the prelude ends with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the coda explores the sounds and, more importantly, the silences of that experience.

Where the prelude and coda present sounds in an impressionistic way, the book’s three movements constitute a long braided essay that considers the links between listening and the land. Field Notes on Listening, Dobson writes in what constitutes the book’s thesis statement, argues “that listening, or a lack thereof, has become a social and environmental problem,” and that “listening to landscapes, and doing so with dedication over a long period of time, is one path through this thicket.” Such listening is deeply political, “an act of defiance,” since “[w]hat remains unheard remains unacknowledged.” For Dobson, learning to listen has been energizing; it has allowed him to make connections and identify patterns.

The process of learning to listen to the land, Dobson argues, is open-ended and unfinished, but the twin themes he identifies at the outset, listening and land, pull the deliberately fragmentary text together. In fact, the sounds presented in the prelude and coda, which convey the effects of climate change, genocide, populism, and human separation and community, are amplified in those three movements. Sometimes, as with “the grinding of celestial music just past the bounds of hearing” in the night sky, those sounds are metaphorical; mostly, though, they are literal. They include the music he loves (the Beatles, Jeremy Dutcher, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Gould’s version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations), weather forecasts celebrating unusually warm winter temperatures, the sounds of family stories, the muffling silence of fresh snow, the crunch and rumble of equipment at a landfill, the cheers of protestors greeting Greta Thunberg outside Alberta’s Legislature, the “glomp glomp glomp” of tires rumbling over knots in the wooden deck of the bridge across the Athabasca River in his parents’ home town, the sounds recorded in his grandmother’s master’s thesis. Listening to all of these sounds, cataloguing them, becomes analagous to reading, to bearing witness to the world, to communicating. 

It’s worth mentioning the quality of Dobson’s writing. In her review of Field Notes on Listening, Calgary poet Micheline Maylor notes that while Dobson isn’t himself a poet, his prose has a “lyrical and poetic heft.” Another reviewer, Bill Arnott, argues that Dobson’s “passion for poetry comes through in this writer’s elegant, metered prose.” They are both absolutely right: the writing in this book is beautiful, its language sonorous and vivid. Dobson’s careful, lyrical prose brings the sounds he hears, and the arguments he makes, alive to his readers. Read this book, then, but take care: it might change the way you relate to the world you inhabit.

Zoe Todd, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory”

Plastiglomerate sample collected by Patricia Corcoran and Kelly Jazvac (Todd 102)

Métis/otipemisiw anthropologist Zoe Todd begins her essay, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory,” with the 2016 oil spill on the North Saskatchewan River, in which Husky Energy Inc. spilled some 200,000 litres of oil mixed with diluent into the river near the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan (103). Cities and First Nations on the river had to take emergency measures to protect their drinking water, and “the oil and diluents killed many more-than-human beings within the river,” including beaver and herons (103). Todd reports being horrified as she watched news coverage of the spill from her home in Ottawa (103). “I grew up along the kisiskâciwani–sîpiy (North Saskatchewan River), in the city of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta),” she writes:

To speak of Edmonton/amiskwaciwâskahikan is to speak a water truth. It is nestled along, and spans, the banks of the mighty kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, which has carved its way deep into the soil and clay and sand and stone to yield steep banks that cut through Edmonton like an artery, supplying the city with water, with life. The river binds Edmonton to a broader watershed. The clear mountain waters, which originate deep in the Rocky Mountains at the Columbia Icefield, become turbid and inscrutable by the time they flow past the factories and sewage plants and homes and bridges of amiskwaciwâskahikan. But upstream of Edmonton, a four-hour drive south-west of the city, near Rocky Mountain House, you can still see the river running clear and with promise. (103)

Todd’s family is “deeply bound up with” that river (103). As it cuts through Edmonton, its banks conceal “dinosaur bones in secret pockets” which “act as reminders of an order of existence in this place that today churns and turns on the risks and riches of Alberta’s oil and gas economy” (104).

“The fossil fuels which animate the political economy of my home province are a paradoxical kind of kin—the bones of dinosaurs and the traces of flora and fauna from millions of years ago which surface in rocks and loamy earth in Alberta act as teachers for us, reminding us of the life that once teemed here,” Todd writes. “But, the insatiable desire to liberate these long-gone beings from their resting place, to turn the massive stores of carbon and hydrogen left from eons of life in this place, weaponises these fossil-kin, these long-dead beings, and transforms them into threats to our very existence as humans” (104). In addition, the plastics we make from those fossil fuels end up in the air and water and land, and the oil itself moves through “pipelines that pervade every corner of my home province” (104). In 2016, “the oily progeny of the petro-economy breached the banks of the river that four generations of my Métis family has been born alongside,” she continues. “This watery violation of the river prompted many people to take stock of the socio-political, economic and legal-governance responsibilities we hold to the lands, waters, fish, beavers, herons and other more-than-human beings of the prairies” (104). Todd describes the glaciers and the rivers as “watery bodies,” suggesting their animate quality, and she traces their flow into Hudson Bay—a destination that makes “the struggles of unassuming prairie rivers a matter of global concern” (104). 

Todd describes her birth in a hospital in Edmonton, and the births of her ancestors along that river (105). She only knows her grandfather through stories, the way she only knows “past-Edmonton” or “the waters and fish that were once healthy and abundant” through stories (105). Fish have been her teachers, she says, although her grandfather “was animated by a different animal, horses,” but she has a similar passion for fish (105). She brings her grandfather’s love of horses “to bear on the urgent and entangled challenges of the settler-colonial and petro-state violations of the waters” of her homeland (105). She is concerned about “our reciprocal responsibilities to more-than-human beings within landscapes that had been heavily violated by settler-colonial economic and political exigencies” (105). 

Elsewhere, Todd has written about how working with the Inuvialuit community of Paulatuuq in the Northwest Territories taught her “about the dynamic and creative ways in which Paulatuuqmiut (Paulatuuq people) assert their own legal-governance paradigms and Indigenous legal order to protect the well-being of fish in the face of complex colonial and environmental challenges” (105-06). That work taught her that her Métis upbringing had oriented her “to a Métis legal order which informs my responsibilities to fish, water and the more-than-human beings that populate Treaty Six Territory along the North Saskatchewan, Red Deer, Battle and Athabasca Rivers” (106). That upbringing also taught her “the necessity of thinking about and thinking with fish in the urban context” (106). Now she understands how that teaching “was an instructive form of philosophy and praxis which imbued within me a sense of my reciprocal responsibilities to place, more-than-human beings and time,” she writes (106). “But what of my responsibilities to ‘inert’ or polluting materials, like the oil that spilled into the North Saskatchewan River this summer?” she asks. “What does it mean for me to dwell in an active and philosophical way in the realities of the ‘modernist mess’ and ‘toxic vitalism’ which provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan have been saddled with through extractive settler-colonial political economies?” (106).

In order to “tease apart” her “relationality to the various agents involved in, and impacted by, the breach of the Husky pipeline,” she engages the political philosophies of the fishermen she met in Paulatuuq (106). “Having come to understand fish as nonhuman persons, it is possible for me to situate fish within the legal-political landscapes of Indigenous de-colonial resistance and refraction in Canada,” she writes. “Far harder for me to address have been the ways in which the very pollutants involved in the Husky oil spill are themselves the extracted, processed, heated, split, and steamed progeny of the fossilised carbon beings buried deep within the earth of my home province” (106). “What does it mean to approach carbon and fossil beings, including those spilled into the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, as agential more-than-human beings in their own right?” she asks (106). That strikes me as an odd question, since they are long dead; I was expecting the perhaps more obvious question of how Todd, like the rest of us, is implicated in the carbon economy that is destroying our planet—changing its climate, polluting its waters, causing microplastics to end up in every ocean? Perhaps that question is too obvious, but it strikes me as more vital than the agency of the fern forests that decayed into coal, oil, and gas.

That’s where my mind goes, but it’s not where Todd’s goes. She turns to the work of her colleague Heather Davis, who calls upon us “to tend to our relationality and reciprocal responsibilities to the progeny of the petro-capitalist state”; in her work, Davis “explores how humans are making sense of, and tending to, the growing global geologic presence of plastic” (106). We might as well ask how we make sense of and tend to the cancer that is eating away at our bones. Davis asks us to consider plastic and other “offspring of our petrochemical politics as kin” (106). Todd compares Davis’s approach to plastic as kin to Kim TallBear’s discussion of pipestone as kin, and suggests that both have forced her to reorient her relationship to fossils and stone (106-07):

I have, admittedly, viewed oil and oil-progeny as contaminants, or pollutants, and the oil itself as imbued with messy human politics, which extract it from the ground and flood pipeline arteries stretched across the entire continent. Davis’s work challenges me to train my attention not only towards the fleshy beings I am so intimately familiar with—fish and birds and beavers and moose—but to also mobilise those aspects of Métis law that I grew up with in the service of imagining how we may de-weaponise the oil and gas that corporate and political bodies have allowed to violate waters, lands and atmospheres across the prairies. (107)

I’m not sure what that means, or what it means to “weaponize” oil and gas: even if we viewed it as a sacrament, it would still be toxic. 

But Todd presses on, asking what “oil/gas pluralities look like” (107). I’m sensing a philosophical or theoretical intertext in the word “pluralities,” but I don’t know what it might be. “It is not the oil itself that is toxic,” she writes, since it stayed underground for millions of years without causing any trouble (107). “[T]hese oily materials are not, in and of themselves, violent or dangerous,” she continues. “Rather, the ways that they are weaponised through petro-capitalist extraction and production turn them into settler-colonial-industrial-capitalist contaminants and pollutants” (107). That’s true, but only because surface seeps of oil—which would’ve occurred for millennia before it was discovered that petroleum could be used as a fuel in the nineteenth century—were too small to cause much ecological damage. Not everything that is natural is wholesome: think of plants that are toxic to some species—the blue-green algae that appear on prairie lakes in late summer, for example. I’m tempted to complicate my response to Todd by veering off into a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon, the medicine that can also, in the wrong doses or for the wrong person, be poisonous—but I’m not sure that would be useful: I’m not sure there’s a safe environmental exposure to plastic or to the fire retardants or pesticides developed since the Second World War. Some things are just bad.

Todd disagrees with me. “It is here that I am challenged to reconsider my reactions to the oil flowing along the river,” she writes (107). The oil spilled into the North Saskatchewan is a contaminant, she admits (107). “But it is not this material drawn from deep in the earth that is violent,” she contends. “it is the machinations of human political-ideological entanglements that deem it appropriate to carry this oil through pipelines running along vital waterways, that make this oily progeny a weapon against fish, humans, water and more-than-human worlds” (107). Again, I’m not sure “weapon” is the right word, since I doubt oil companies deliberately destroy those living creatures; rather, they accept their destruction as a cost of doing business, as an economic externality that doesn’t figure in their balance sheets. “Weapon” suggests intentionality, does it not? Are oil spills deliberate or are they negligent? If the oil had stayed in the ground where, arguably, it belongs—since releasing it into the environment, especially the atmosphere, is likely to return our climate to what it was in the Mesozoic Age, which will end much of life as we know it—would there be a problem? No—except for the whales, which were being hunted to near extinction by the need for lamp oil before petroleum was discovered as a substitute. 

“So what other worlds can we dream of for the remnants of the long-gone dinosaurs, of the flora and fauna that existed millions of years ago?” Todd asks. “What legal-governance and philosophical paradigms can we mobilise to de-weaponise oil today?” (107). She’s not sure she has an immediate answer, “other than that we must shift the logics of the petro-economy, which are emboldened to contaminate whole rivers and watersheds with oil and diluent, because those narrow conditions of existence are narrowing ever more in the context of the so-called Anthropocene” (107). If we don’t do that, then “we may go the way of the dinosaurs, and it will be because the dominant human ideological paradigm of our day forgot to tend with care to the oil, the gas and all the beings of this place. Forgot to tend to relationships, to ceremony (in all the plurality of ways this may be enacted), to the continuous co-constitution of life-worlds between humans and others” (107). I’m not sure what ceremony means in the context of oil and gas, and I wish Todd had given an example; the best thing we could’ve done would have been to have known, in advance, what damage using petroleum would do, but that foreknowledge is beyond the capacity of a limited and fallible species like humans.

Todd’s immediate response to this situation is to continue drawing fish (that’s her art practice) while engaging “with the complex responsibilities that come with re-framing fossils and fossil-beings—including the petrochemical products of decayed matter buried deep within the earth of my home province—as a kind of kin” (107). “This is a difficult philosophical and political negotiation for me to make, for I have throughout my entire life, seen oil solely in its weaponised form,” she concludes. However, the lessons she has learned from fish and Indigenous Elders can “bring this necessary philosophical and practical engagement into focus” (107). Her hope is that she can “encourage settler Canadians to understand that tending to the reciprocal relationality we hold with fish and other more-than-human beings is integral to supporting the ‘narrow conditions of existence’ in this place” (107).

I agree that settlers need to see themselves in relationship with “more-than-human beings” in this place, although I’m still not sure that including petrochemicals in that category is particularly helpful. I suppose I’m drawing lines around what I’m willing to accept as kin: fish, yes, but invasive carp, no; little bluestem grass, yes, but quack grass, no; crude oil left in the ground, maybe, but the mess left in the North Saskatchewan River by Husky’s negligence, hell no. And I wish Todd had considered the way she is implicated in the “weaponised form” of oil as well. Yes, the petroleum companies are responsible for most of the carbon emissions, and yet most of us drive cars that burn gasoline, heat our homes with fossil fuels, eat food grown with fertilizers derived from petrochemicals and shipped to stores in diesel-powered refrigerator trucks. My point is we’re all part of the weaponization of petroleum, and thinking about the way we are implicated might be more thoughtful than the fingerpointing and self-exception implied by the term “weaponised.” Or is thinking of a kinship relation to petroleum a form of self-implication? I’m not sure. Is there a contradiction between “weaponized” and being kin to petroleum? What would “non-weaponized” oil look like? What would we do with it–aside from leaving it in the ground?

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Todd, Zoe. “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory.” Afterall, vol. 43, 2017, pp. 102-07. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692559.

71. Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

I don’t recall where I got the idea to read this short book (or booklet) as part of my project. I think Phil Smith mentioned it somewhere in passing, but my notes are not forthcoming on the question. I’d heard of the Dark Mountain Project before but knew little about it. And I’m terrified by what climate chaos is going to mean for everything living on this planet. I just looked at Facebook and there was a Guardian article in my feed telling me that the ice in Antarctica is melting even faster than the ice in the Arctic, where it’s 90 degrees and the permafrost is turning to mush (releasing more methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as it does). And meanwhile Canadians are squabbling over a tiny carbon tax. We are in big, big trouble.

Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto begins with an introduction to the 2014 edition written by one of its authors, Dougald Hine. (The other author is Paul Kingsnorth.) Hine notes that when the manifesto first appeared in 2009, it received a two-page lead review in the New Statesman, and started a cultural movement that the New York Times suggested was changing the European environmental debate (vii)—quite a response to what is essentially a pamphlet. “We get emails most days from readers who have found something here that resonates with their own experience,” Hine continues. “They write about hope, recognition, a sense of feeling less alone” (vii). But there are also attacks: “We have been called all sorts of things: Romantic dreamers, crazy collapsitarians, defeatists, utopians and nihilists” (vii-viii). “Putting all these different reactions alongside each other, trying to make out the pattern that they form,” Hine writes, 

what strikes me is how little it resembles a taking of sides over a recognisable argument. Something else is going on: something that reaches into murkier corners of ourselves than are generally given space on the shores of public debate. The lines of thinking that run through this manifesto are also the contours of a dark shape, an inkblot shape of our puzzlements, doubts and fears—so that, even more than is always the case with the slippery substance of language, every reading is also a veiled reflection of the reader. There are monsters here, if you look for them; there are dead ends, but there are also slender threads of possibility waiting for someone to pick them up. (viii)

Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto was written in 2008, just as the financial crisis began (viii-ix). At that time, Hine contends, “we found ourselves in an age where crisis has become the new normal. An age of widening extremes and darkening horizons, when outbreaks of hope spark sporadically like broken power lines across networks and onto the streets, but the future no longer holds the promise it used to” (ix). Hine and Kingsnorth tried to make sense of their own experience, and in doing so, Hine writes, 

it seems that we put words to a feeling that others shared and that has become more widespread in the years since. A feeling that there is no way through the mess in which we find ourselves that doesn’t involve facing the darkness, and being honest about the scale of the unraveling that is underway, and the uncertainty as to where it will end. A feeling that it is time to look down. (ix-x)

At the time, the co-authors were disillusioned with the state of environmentalism: “It seemed that sustainability had come to mean sustain the western way of living at all costs, regardless of whether this was possible or desirable” (x). They were also disillusioned “with the state of literature and the cultural landscape,” feeling that the books celebrated in the Sunday newspapers “were going to look irrelevant or offensive in a generation’s time, given what we already knew about where things were headed” (x). Something different was needed, they decided—and that is what this manifesto calls for.

Uncivilisation does not offer suggestions about what to do—although the succeeding Dark Mountain books provide one possible answer (xiii). Instead, Hine writes,

at the heart of this manifesto is a hunch that sometimes it is right to walk away, to withdraw, to give up on hopes that no longer ring true, even though you have no answer to the accusing questions that will follow. Sometimes retreat is the only action left that makes sense. To give up on things you have held dear—beliefs, identities, habits—is an end, but it can also be a beginning, though it makes you no promises in advance. Only the chance that, having let go, as your eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, you may catch sight of something that your bright certainties had hidden from you” (xiv)

This manifesto was their first attempt at saying something, at working out where our society is going, and they are still discovering its “fuller significance” (xiv).

The manifesto proper begins with Robinson Jeffers’s 1935 poem “Rearmament,” which ends with the lines,

The beauty of modern

Man is not in the persons but in the

Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the

Dream-led masses down the dark mountain (qtd. 1)

Its first chapter, “Walking on Lava,” begins with these words: “Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die” (3). Ordinary life is fragile, and when its pattern is broken, “by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric,” many of the activities in which we are habitually engaged “become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives” (3). War correspondents and relief workers report on the speed with which that fabric can unravel (4). Civilization is fragile—and that realization is nothing new (4). Take, for instance, Bertrand Russell’s comment about Joseph Conrad’s writing. Russell suggested that Conrad thought of civilization as “a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths” (qtd 4), a quotation that lends the chapter its title. For Kingsnorth and Hine, human civilizations are fragile, as any historian can confirm; they are “built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; above all, perhaps, belief in its future” (5). Once those beliefs begin to crumble, “the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable”—and all civilizations do fall, sooner or later (5). “What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning,” the co-authors continue (5). They believe that it’s our civilization’s turn “to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. “ (5). 

Our story, they write, is one of a people who believed that their actions did not have consequences, of how that people “will cope with the crumbling of their own myth” (5-6). Without the myth of progress, our efforts cannot be sustained; our civilization is the optimistic Enlightenment grafted onto Western Christianity, resulting in a belief in an earthly paradise, where each generation expects to live better than the one before: “History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up” (7). The 20th century, though, “too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on earth,” and even prosperous Western societies have failed to deliver: “Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before” (7). “Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built”—beyond the edges of our civilization, there is something it was never able to understand (8).

The second chapter, “The Severed Hand” (the title is taken from another Robinson Jeffers’s poem), begins with a discussion of the myth of progress. That myth, they write, “ is founded on the myth of nature”—a myth that claims that greatness comes without costs (10); that we have been able to attack nature and win (10). “Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries, but it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent”: we are now surrounded with evidence that our attempts to separate ourselves from nature are “proof not of our genius but our hubris” (10). “We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence”—and the result is a crisis of extinction, of overexploitation of resources (10). “Even though the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us,” they write (11). And, looming over everything else: “runaway climate change,” which “threatens to render all human projects irrelevant” while demonstrating that we don’t understand the world in which we live, even while we are utterly dependent upon it (11). “Climate change,” they write, “brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness” (11). 

We hear about technological solutions, about our ability to manage the situation, about our need to become “more ‘sustainable’”—but built into those suggestions is the notion that that everything will be fine and that growth and progress will continue (11-12). “We do not believe that everything will be fine,” Kingsnorth and Hine write. “We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be”; that’s because “we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test” (12). “We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down,” they continue (12). We sometimes imagined there would be a Plan B, that we might live under bubbles on the moon, but there is no Plan B, and the only bubble is our civilization (12).

That civilization is based on geological foundations—coal, oil, and gas (13). Above that are industrial abbatoirs, burning forests, and wasted soil (13). Finally, on the top layer, we stand, “unaware, or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have been accustomed; occasionally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated, on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend” (13). “We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age—the age of ecocide,” they write (13). “Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become—and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch” (15). Now, they continue, “we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it” (15). Their questions are these:

what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?

We believe it is time to look down. (15)

The shape that looking down might take is the subject of the third chapter, “Uncivilisation” (16). “If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world,” Kingsnorth and Hine write, “then we were led to this point by the stories we have told ourselves—above all, by the story of civilisation” (16). That is the story of our mastery over nature and our glorious future, a story about “human centrality” (16). “What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story,” they continue (17). Stories have always been important as a way of approaching reality, but, “as the myth of civilisation deepened its grip on our thinking, borrowing the guise of science and reason, we began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as something primitive, childish, outgrown,” and the old tales, the ones “by which generations had made sense of life’s subtleties and strangenesses,” were abandoned  (17). “Yet for all this, our world is still shaped by stories” (17); most of them are entertainment, “a distraction from daily life” (18), which cannot “make up the equipment by which we navigate reality” (18). “On the other hand,” they continue, “there are the serious stories told by economists, politicians, geneticists and corporate leaders,” which are presented as “direct accounts of how the world is,” and not as stories at all (18). 

“So we find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality,” Kingsnorth and Hine argue. “In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play” (18). Now it’s time for those storytellers and artists to “bust” the last taboo: “the myth of civilization” (19). “We believe that artists . . . have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling”—the decoupling, that is, of our position on the earth and the ecocide we are creating. “We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken—and that only artists can do it” (19). The ongoing ecocide demands a response, and that response “is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed” (19). “We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind,” they write (20). They call this response “Uncivilised art,” and they are particularly interested in what they call “Uncivilised writing”: “writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence,” who “have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project,” which has been “to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when the exploit their fellow creatures” (20). “Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective,” they continue, “but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves” (20-21). “It sets out to paint a picture of Homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own . . . might recognise as something approaching a truth,” and it aims “to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards” (21). “It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation—and us—into perspective,” they write (21).

Uncivilized writing, though, is not environmental writing, or nature writing; it is “more rooted than any of these” (21). “Above all, it is determined to shift our worldview, not to feed into it,” they argue. “It is writing for outsiders. If you want to be loved, it might be best not to get involved, for the world, at least for a time, will resolutely refuse to listen” (22). They offer poet Robinson Jeffers as an example, an exemplar (22). In his work, they write, we see “[t]he shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing” (23).This is the literary challenge of our age, and few have taken it up (23), although there are those whose writing approaches the shores of the Uncivilized, such as Wendell Berry or Cormac McCarthy or W.S. Merwin (24). Uncivilized writing, they continue, is

[h]uman, inhuman, stoic and entirely natural. Humble, questioning, suspicious of the big idea and the easy answer. Walking the boundaries and reopening old conversations. Apart but engaged, its practitioners always willing to get their hands dirty . . . that keyboards should be tapped by those with soil under their fingernails and wilderness in their heads. (25)

Kingsnorth and Hine are resolute on the need for this kind of writing and of art:

We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God’s steward; then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records—this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing—for art—to meet. This is what we are here for. (25)

In the fourth chapter, “To the Foothills!” they suggest that a movement needs a starting point, and while they hope their book has “created a spark,” they need others to get involved (26). “It is time to look for new paths and new stories, ones that can lead us through the end of the world as we know it and out the other side,” they proclaim. “ We suspect that by questioning the foundations of civilisation, the myth of human centrality, our imagined isolation, we may find the beginning of such paths” (26-27). They name their project after that line from Jeffers’s poem that begins the booklet: the Dark Mountain Project (27). They intend to collect Uncivilized writing (27), although they don’t know where that will lead (28). And they cannot do anything by themselves: “Uncivilisation, like civilisation, is not something that can be created alone. Climbing the Dark Mountain cannot be a solitary exercise. We need bearers, sherpas, guides, fellow adventurers. We need to rope ourselves together for safety” (28). They end with a call for others to participate: “Come. Join us. We leave at dawn” (28).

That’s the end of the manifesto, but not of the booklet. There is an appendix which outlines “The Eight Principles of Uncivilisation”; these principles are a summary of what we’ve already read. First, “[w]e live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling” and our way of living “is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it” (29). Second, they reject the faith in “solutions” (technological or political) to “problems” (29). Third, they believe the root of the crises we face “lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves,” and so they intend to challenge those stories and the myths they express (29). Fourth, they assert that storytelling is not entertainment, that it is the way “we weave reality” (29). Fifth, “Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble” and “reengage with the non-human world’ (30). Sixth, “We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time” (30). Seventh, “We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental” (30). And, finally, “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find in the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us” (30). This edition also includes a chronology of Dark Mountain’s activities after the manifesto was published.

In an odd way, Kingsnorth’s and Hine’s belief that something will come after our civilization is rather optimistic; it’s not a belief that, even on a lovely, sunny holiday afternoon, I find it easy to entertain. I wonder if the kind of writing they call “Uncivilised” might not be represented by the essays by Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst that I wrote about here some months ago. Perhaps. I saw Jan Zwicky and Randy Lundy read their poetry last week, and the conversation afterwards quickly turned to ecological grief—and let me tell you, the participants in that panel were grieving. It was moving. I wasn’t expecting such emotion to be expressed. But I don’t know. Sometimes I feel that I don’t know anything any more—except that climate change is going to bring a lot of species to and end, and ours will likely be among them–and that somehow, that needs to be part of my project. I wish I knew how.

Works Cited

Bringhurst, Robert, and Jan Zwicky. Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis. U of Regina P, 2018.

Kingsnorth, Paul and Dougald Hine. Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, Dark Mountain Project, 2019.