Ursula Le Guin said it best in her (much-quoted) phrase- 'Realists of a larger reality'. Tricksterism can be seen as a kind of missing piece in the current moment, I think. In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde speaks of trickster as a disrespector of boundaries. Like Hermes, who travels between realms to carry messages, part of trickster's job is to poke their finger through walls, like, 'See? it's not even there.'
Another thing about trickster is that they exist outside of the normal reciprocal relationships- of predator / prey, for instance. Hyde sees trickster as a kind of parasite. Trickster's first trick, across many cultures, is to catch a fish: that's true here where I am, where the demigod Māui fished up Te Ika a Māui, the North Island of New Zealand, where I'm writing from (I live at the head end, near the mouth.)
Trickster energy to me is about being cunning, and funny, and unboxable, and adapting to the moment- any moment. There should be no limit to that adaptability.
Yes to all of this! Love that line from Grandmother Ursula, as Gordon always calls her. And the Hyde book is a touchstone for me. (Incidentally, he spent some serious time hanging out with Illich in the 70s, which is where a good deal of The Gift comes from.)
Fun story - when Caro and Theresa were here this weekend, Anna got out the old fur coat that she inherited and that has always been known as The Wolf. Only Theresa takes one look at it and says, "That's no wolf, that's coyote!" And we're all like, ha! Coyote has been hiding in our house for years disguised as a Swedish wolf, because of course that's what he'd do!
Nov 2, 2023·edited Nov 2, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
Reading Desert Notebooks by Ben Ehrenreich, I came upon this, this morning. (George Laird was the Chemehuevi storyteller Carobeth Laird left her ethnologist husband John Peabody Harrison for.)
…
"In the story time," George Laird told Carobeth, "everything talked."
That Coyote, the ancient one, our great-grandfather, was a shape-shifter and trickster par excellence, curious and impulsive, lusty and mischievous, a schemer and a fool, "capable of all good and all evil, buffoon and hero, benefactor and villain." He was nothing like his brother. Wolf was handsome, dignified, compassionate, all-knowing. Wolf was "the ideal man." His advice for his brother was always prudent. Coyote always ignored it or, if he on some whim decided to obey, bungled things into catastrophe again. Wolf was wise but humorless. Coyote was a disaster but he knew how to laugh. The Chemehuevi had a saying, at once melancholy and proud, that Laird repeats throughout her books. They could have followed Wolf, they said, but they didn't. "We followed Coyote." It's not clear to me if that "we" refers to the Chemehuevi or to all of humankind, but whatever they meant, it goes for the rest of us too. We followed Coyote.
"That is, in effect," wrote [Carobeth] Laird, "the end of the matter."
Excellent! When I was little, I was a hungry reader, and my Mum was always throwing me new books. One of them that I read many times was just a pamphlet, really, typed, missing its cover. It was a book of Coyote tales told in the voice of an old man: I think transcribed. "Well, now I'm going to go over here, I'm going to do this."
Coyote loses his eye, has to make a new one out of pine pitch. He dies from being dumb, has to throw himself in the spring to come back to life. That kind of thing.
Dougald, I'm glad to hear you will be writing about practices. They ring truer than solutions, and I get the sense that you are in touch with many people around the world who have become disillusioned with fixing or saving and begun practicing instead. If fixing promises to reduce heartbreak, practice trusts heartbreak as a guide into the work. Thank you for your practice.
Thanks, Adam, I appreciate your way of putting a finger on the significance of language here. You are certainly one of the people who embodies this kind of practice for me.
Word (less excel). Makes me think of Alastair McIntosh’s essay on tools in issue 8 of Dark Mountain: “But for me, if we are to minimise evil, the central question to keep on asking of any tool or technology is this: What does it serve? Only then can we dodge the pitfalls of idolatry: the worship of false gods.”
Sad to hear of hatchet jobs and attacks etc. on one of your previous courses I remember the phrase a world of many worlds. And of your own phrasing, something like consider the possibility you may not be right.
Thanks, Martin. Always good to be reminded of Alastair's words! I share the sadness over what has gone on with George, above all because he's done a lot of good and been an important voice on the right side of many arguments over the years. I've actually found myself wondering about reaching out to Alastair about all of this, as it feels like he's the one person who might be able to talk to all involved in a way that could bring some deepening insight and healing. At the same time, I do believe there are moments when we all need to follow our convictions, even if they lead to a parting of the ways, and trust that there's more going on than any of us gets to see in the weave of a time like this.
In Alastair’s later works, I think Riders on the Storm (I to this house we’re born, into this storm we’re thrown) he talks about chatting over the garden fence. Feels like this is so important right now.
"If those trees are going to live and flourish, that requires us to show up, to stick around, to get back involved with the land and all the creatures that we share it with."
This echoes a realisation which came to me during one of my lockdown woodland walks a while back. The woods in this valley are new; 150 years ago these hillsides were mostly quarries, and it's incredible to see how much has grown in just the past few decades. But during that walk I was filled with the sense that we had pillaged the hillsides and then left them for "nature" to heal, and that this was a kind of abandonment. If we knew how to care for them - without trying to control their growth or impose any sense of how they "should" be - how much more could we support their flourishing?
For now, I do what I can, which mostly consists of walking, attending, and litterpicking. But I can't shake the feeling there is something more to be learned, or re-membered, here.
Thanks for this one. I have a bit impatient reading recent posts for you to get back to these themes. I very much like 'an approach that is centred on affecting the conditions of possibility... without seeking to control the situation or make it wholly predictable.' Conditioning the present so that something fruitful might arise.
Nov 2, 2023·edited Nov 2, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
I recommend The Ecotechnic Future and The Retro Future books by John Michael Greer. His premise is that our present global technological and capitalistic system is based on the abundant concentrated energy provided by natural gas and petroleum and there aren’t effective alternative energy sources(including nuclear) to continue to sustain in the long run our present energy intensive system let alone expand it. He argues that even the hardware of solar and wind technologies require coal, oil and natural gas to be made, nuclear included. Even the web of digital devices encasing us would decline. He gives a good picture of what life among the ruins would be like in a technological sense. A simplification with much more moderate use of technology dependent on produced energy and electricity.
Dougald! I’ve sent you an email, hopefully doesn’t get lost amongst spam, in response to this, I’ve got a small bunch of Philippine natives planted for you, Anna and Alfie as thanks to letting me join your at work in the ruins course earlier in the year. ❤️❤️❤️
Oh boy! As usual with your writing something resonates so powerfully within me with respect to my experience as a priest in a mainline church here in NZ but the same across the West. That the planting of trees goes into the database but their dying didn’t. I see this everywhere as the churches (the dear old CofE is especially captivated [sic] by this) trumpet ‘all the new things!’ but never comment on the massive dieback in ‘New Initiatives’.
I’ll get round to reading this more fully but the resonance with Iain McGilchrists contention that we are trapped in the Left Hemisphere of our brains, obsessed with the Novel and unreasonably optimistic - and of course the LH loves the hyper reductionism of spreadsheets. . . Well I cant help noticing it. Literally ‘Nothing to see here’. John 9:39-41
Thanks, Gareth. I generally make an audio version for the essays in the main series here (Into the Deep and now How We Make Good Ruins), but don't always manage to for the pieces that come in between. But comments like this are an encouragement to do so more often.
One of the more important insights I've had in recent years is the realization that "thinking like a state" is also thinking like a business corporation ... or just thinking like a businessman or business woman in many cases. Now, of course, this is obvious, but the insight matured into the understanding that "business" and "the state" have been co-mingling and co-evolving for as long as capitalism and industrialism have been emerging.
Being intertwined from the outset (as told in books like The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh and The End of the Megamachine, by Fabian Scheidler), these two institutional forms have fused. Both think in spreadsheet terms. Both have their eyes on the bottom line. And this fact helps tremendously if what we're trying to do is understand why we can never seem to generate a means of applying politics (defined as decision-making in groups) that doesn't just replicate more of the same disasters and failures. It's cultural evolution I'm speaking of when I say the two institutional forms co-evolved. And cultural evolution is an essential key to understanding the political disaster which is "modernity".
Both the state and the business world (a Siamese twin?) behave like a papercliip maximizer (Google it), except what they maximize isn't paperclips but the concentration of economic and political power into hierarchies. And both depend entirely on what economists call "externalization" of costs, especailly "negative externalities". Negative externalities sounds complicated. But it just means harm and damage -- to people, to public health, to ecosystems, to the biosphere.... The Siamese Twin institutions of modernity -- business and the state -- cannot be reformed. They resist reform so intensively and effectively because to reform to the extent necessary would be to put an end to them. And they have a strong immune system.
What we who want the saplings to survive need to do is to look closely at how we can refuse to play the game in accordance with the "rules" of the Megamachine (Siamese Twin).
Why did the community not come to know these saplings were dying and reach out to the dairy farmer to offer collective, community help? Community aid. The saplings had entered the community by entering the soil there. And the community failed the trees and the farmer -- even if the farmer only really cared about the grant money and not so much about the saplings.
Sometimes -- very often! -- the care of saplings has to be done voluntarily. It's not a thing to just throw money at. It often requires communities organized in such a way to come to the aid of saplings on a volunteer basis, as an act of caring for a community -- of caring for life.
Care is not something the Megamachine has, or does. It's not in its design. Only humans living in an "living culture" -- or community -- can do that.
Thanks, James. I do recommend reading Rhyd's original post about the saplings for some thoughtful reflections on what it would take for there to be a community capable of coming to the aid of the saplings. I'm a little wary of the ease with which we conjure a thing like "the community" into being with our words, from the safety of the screens that both of us are sitting at, compared to the work it would take for this to manifest out there on that hillside.
The recognition of the twin nature of the market and the state is an important step in making sense of the puzzle of modernity, isn't it? (If I were making a reading list, I'd add Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Illich's Shadow Work and the work of JK Gibson-Graham.)
If reform is out, then I'm not sure revolution is much help either. But then, who says that binary has it all covered? Making Good Ruins could include other moves: Hospicing, Composting, Hacking... The list can no doubt be extended.
I will read Rhyd's original post, at your suggestion. I was going to anyway.
I hope I didn't seem to come across as insensitive to the enormous challenges of re-establishing (or establishing) communities which function in the way I was speaking to. I have spent a gargantuan amount of time trying -- unsuccessfully, mostly -- to help facilitate the emergence of that sort of community where I live, at the neighborhood scale. So I'm fully aware of how challenging (if not impossible) it is in very many places.
"If reform is out, then I'm not sure revolution is much help either. But then, who says that binary has it all covered?"
Hmmm. Language has lots of functions, including "the expressive" one. So part of what I was saying about "reform" is to express exasperation about the fact that efforts to reform standard / conventional political machinery has failed in almost all important cases for my entire 57 years. So I've pretty much come to believe it just won't and can't happen ..., by which I mean that major transformation of political outcomes won't likely arise in this way.
I advocate for a revolutionary approach, but by "revolution" I am referring to something very different from what that word evokes in the minds of most folks. My guiding idea in using the term "revolution" is to keep pointing out that we need to (collectively) re-imagine what revolution is or can be -- and to do so in such a way to conceive of revolutionary praxes which are neither insurrectionary not violent. That's an imaginative task, and I think it needs to be fully collaborative and involve a great many voices in the dialogue.
Unfortunately, it seems very few people are interested in this shared imaginative task -- or so it often seems to me.
But let me explain just a little more. When I said "reform," I was meaning to indicate a style and approach to the political which emphasizes the use of the existing, mainstream, conventional institutions of politics. I meant to say that I don' t believe these can be of very much of service if one seeks revolutionary transformation. And as a serious amateur human ecologist and eco-cultural philosopher, I'm very nearly certain that only revolutionary transformation could divert this civlization off from its current trajectory toward utter ecocide and catastrophic social collapse. In other words, I think the only plausible response to the present world is a revolutionary response.
Having just read Rhyd's Solstice Letter, I can certainly see why you responded as you did, Dougald!
I share a perspective which Charles Eisenstein has shared many times in his writing and speaking. Some will insist that there was no Golden Age in the past, and I'm sure they are right. But I, like Eisenstein, strongly suspect that there is far less "community" in the modern world than there was in the past. That is, we today are less likely to come together with our neighbors to share in the tasks of caring for ourselves, one another ... and the more than human world (to use David Abram's word for it). And I think the consequence has been a generalized kind of relational trauma -- though too few of us recognize it as such, I think.
No one (no one alone), not Rhyd or you or me ... or anyone ... should carry more of the task of reviving "community". But such a reviving task should be recognized, I think, as necessary. And that's all I meant to convey in my remark about how too few of us are yet doing such collaborative work -- at least in very many places.
i, for one, am proud to call myself an innumerate romantic.
will the Zoom conversations be recorded and made available elsewhere, for those who can't attend in realtime? i would love to participate but 2pm EST is crunch time for at-home parenting.
"i, for one, am proud to call myself an innumerate romantic."
Heh, well, this takes me back to a friendly argument that Paul K and I had in the early days of Dark Mountain. I'm glad to number more than a few proudly innumerate romantics among my friends – yourself included! When it comes to an overall stance for those of us on this side of the fault line, though, I'm reluctant to cede that much ground to those who want to treat reality as if it can be managed by spreadsheet. The dialogues I had with Sajay Samuel and Christopher Brewster in early issues of Dark Mountain were explorations of this – and somewhere on YouTube, there's a talk I gave many years ago to Christopher's students at Aston Business School on 'The Measurable and the Unmeasurable', which was another piece of this jigsaw.
"will the Zoom conversations be recorded and made available elsewhere, for those who can't attend in realtime? i would love to participate but 2pm EST is crunch time for at-home parenting"
Hmm, I'm feeling you on that one! We don't release recordings of these kinds of sessions to people who aren't participants in the series, as it can be quite an intimate space where participants share things they wouldn't always want to put out on the internet. But I imagine that a lot of what I talk about during the sessions will bubble up into future writing on here.
makes sense! i'm definitely looking forward to future posts that deal with some of those strategies and tactics. i really enjoyed your recent conversation with Gordon, and the "not ceding too much ground" theme was in there as well. while i'm trying to take that advice to heart, i'm one of the many who are feeling fatalistic about conventional politics: there is no Left left, and the work of re-aligning opposing sides of the old culture war feels like a bigger job than i can stomach (at least until my kids are bit older).
(also, i'm hereby trademarking The Innumerate Romantics as the name of my apocalyptic folk band. [i will sell the rights to any worthy contenders in exchange for $10 and a well-made roast beef sandwich, provided they can first complete a series of riddles and quests.])
Nov 1, 2023·edited Nov 1, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
i'll pay you $8 and the roast beef sandwich is just okay, BUT the pickle on the side is homemade (and frankly impeccable, this is a great deal, trust me).
haha, sucker. I woulda done it for UP TO $9.25 and thrown in an eighth of shrooms just to spread the good word. no take backsies
edit: i looked at the crow and he showed me two lies and a truth, all visions of my own death. this is the kind of existential horror I come to substack for. 4/5 star transaction, deduction for the first riddle being a train-based math problem.
I’ve heard several variations of this story of mass plantings dying now. Some where they weren’t watered, or were planted in the middle of summer, and another where the entirely wrong trees were planted. On top of the spreadsheet issue you mention, there’s also the disillusionment of those who give their time to help plant trees in these various green initiatives. Spending a day or more of your life trying to do something good for the planet only to find it end in waste likely has a counter effect where people may no longer want to get involved.
I listened to your talk with McGilChrist a while back and loved it. I think a lot about his work and how much it applies to so many of the problems we face. My partner works in software creating decentralized processes and is constantly dealing with left brain rationalists who want to measure individual productivity and force top down measures. Over and over again she will prove and show how they are missing root issues and cannot get better results by simply forcing people to work faster/harder etc. Time and time again the rationalists will come back to the table with the exact same solution as before (faster, more efficient, and measure productivity but only from one side.)
McGilChrist once described the left brain being in a hall of mirrors that will repeat the exact same thing over and over again.
A recent issue has been that one of the company founders where my partner works has been a single source problem for many, many issues. Rather than look honestly at this, the company wanted reports on each individual employee to see how effective they were. If you weren’t at a certain grade you could be fired. Take a wild guess who wasn’t included in the graded system? The entire C-Suite and all the VPs. There’s really no one honestly looking at the competence of the upper managers, the board nor the c-suite has a bottom up perspective, and there is no one measuring how much is lost when people are afraid to speak up and offer genuine solutions. No one is measuring how damaging it is to fear being fired for offering the right solution.
Sadly as James mentioned above I don’t see that these systems were ever meant to work for all, they were designed to extract and create wealth for a few while externalizing the negatives. Start-up culture has managed to exaggerate these issues to such a degree companies more often than not end up devouring themselves and become their own externalities when the venture capital group that owns them takes the remaining husk of a company and combines it with another husk of a similar company in their portfolio and sells the two as a new company(product.)
Sadly, we seem to be getting worse at the spreadsheet issue. The chaos of these structures tends to teach many people how to survive within these systems and often rewards blind ambition rather than acquiring hard skills or legitimately working to improve the systems themselves. I write all this because we seem to be entering the “green tech” phase of your/Rhyds mass planting death story. *Unless of course everything collapses. ::starts tap dancing while holding a copy of “At Work in the Ruins”::
According the analysts at J.P. Long awaited Peak Oil is now truly upon us in the next year and after that a continued shortfall in oil production compared to demand for the foreseeable future. Scroll down the page to see the relevant graph https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/commodities/energy-supercycle
Yes, I know they are spread sheet people but they may be on to something. They are recommending energy stocks as the increased price per barrel will more than make up for the smaller production. And so it goes- the needs of the investor class will be met!
I find myself moved to share a concern as we move into this phase of our explorations, based in Vanessa Andreotti's warning that we who grew up in the "First World"/modernity are too quick to design solutions and don't want to do the hard, slow work of disentangling ourselves from colonial perspectives. As someone who'd written a book three years ago describing what I thought was an alternative view of future possibilities, I winced, and I wonder still about the balancing of being able to envision different ways of being so that we can move towards them vs. our unconscious recreation of what we already know.
And as you, Dougald, well know, community is built by kindnesses -- that much I know for certain!
Thanks, Lisa! Vanessa's work is rarely far from my thoughts, so it's good to have it named in this context. I'd already been reflecting on the "beyond reform" space, as described in various papers by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, and how this relates to some of the other comments on this piece.
What I'm intending to sketch out in this series are some thoughts on (and examples of) what agency looks like in that space. Part of what makes it difficult to loosen the grip of modern/colonial assumptions is that they claim a monopoly on agency and instil an understanding of it which leaves those of us who have crossed the threshold beyond modernity's hopes of "reform" looking and often feeling as though we have no agency at all.
The word that rings out for me from your comment is "balancing". It reminds me of the Climate Sessions series that we hosted three years ago, when both Vanessa and Alastair McIntosh brought up the image of attempting to walk a narrow ridge.
So thanks for bringing Vanessa's work into the frame here. I'm glad to have readers who will keep us all accountable to warnings like the one you bring up here.
It's really sad to read this about George and Chris - I hadn't picked up on that. I have found myself in disagreement with Monbiot for a while now, after previously having found his writing so inspiring and helpful. He is coming across as quite bitter, as well as fixated on technological solutions to problems, and neither of these are part of the future I am hopeful for. And thank you Dougald for introducing those of us who hadn't heard of Chris before to him in your book. I was really pleased I got to hear him speak at the recent Planet Local Summit in Bristol (along with Ian McGilchrist, who was such an interesting contrast in style to Bayo Akomolafe in their conversation on the stage together!).
I have a niggling worry that George is somehow compromised in all this. It's so puzzling that he would be so much on the side of technocrats, and the visions of some billionaires.
Thank you so much for telling them that story. I see them every day when I look out my window and it still feels so deeply sad.
Ursula Le Guin said it best in her (much-quoted) phrase- 'Realists of a larger reality'. Tricksterism can be seen as a kind of missing piece in the current moment, I think. In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde speaks of trickster as a disrespector of boundaries. Like Hermes, who travels between realms to carry messages, part of trickster's job is to poke their finger through walls, like, 'See? it's not even there.'
Another thing about trickster is that they exist outside of the normal reciprocal relationships- of predator / prey, for instance. Hyde sees trickster as a kind of parasite. Trickster's first trick, across many cultures, is to catch a fish: that's true here where I am, where the demigod Māui fished up Te Ika a Māui, the North Island of New Zealand, where I'm writing from (I live at the head end, near the mouth.)
Trickster energy to me is about being cunning, and funny, and unboxable, and adapting to the moment- any moment. There should be no limit to that adaptability.
Yes to all of this! Love that line from Grandmother Ursula, as Gordon always calls her. And the Hyde book is a touchstone for me. (Incidentally, he spent some serious time hanging out with Illich in the 70s, which is where a good deal of The Gift comes from.)
Fun story - when Caro and Theresa were here this weekend, Anna got out the old fur coat that she inherited and that has always been known as The Wolf. Only Theresa takes one look at it and says, "That's no wolf, that's coyote!" And we're all like, ha! Coyote has been hiding in our house for years disguised as a Swedish wolf, because of course that's what he'd do!
Reading Desert Notebooks by Ben Ehrenreich, I came upon this, this morning. (George Laird was the Chemehuevi storyteller Carobeth Laird left her ethnologist husband John Peabody Harrison for.)
…
"In the story time," George Laird told Carobeth, "everything talked."
That Coyote, the ancient one, our great-grandfather, was a shape-shifter and trickster par excellence, curious and impulsive, lusty and mischievous, a schemer and a fool, "capable of all good and all evil, buffoon and hero, benefactor and villain." He was nothing like his brother. Wolf was handsome, dignified, compassionate, all-knowing. Wolf was "the ideal man." His advice for his brother was always prudent. Coyote always ignored it or, if he on some whim decided to obey, bungled things into catastrophe again. Wolf was wise but humorless. Coyote was a disaster but he knew how to laugh. The Chemehuevi had a saying, at once melancholy and proud, that Laird repeats throughout her books. They could have followed Wolf, they said, but they didn't. "We followed Coyote." It's not clear to me if that "we" refers to the Chemehuevi or to all of humankind, but whatever they meant, it goes for the rest of us too. We followed Coyote.
"That is, in effect," wrote [Carobeth] Laird, "the end of the matter."
Ha, wow!
Excellent! When I was little, I was a hungry reader, and my Mum was always throwing me new books. One of them that I read many times was just a pamphlet, really, typed, missing its cover. It was a book of Coyote tales told in the voice of an old man: I think transcribed. "Well, now I'm going to go over here, I'm going to do this."
Coyote loses his eye, has to make a new one out of pine pitch. He dies from being dumb, has to throw himself in the spring to come back to life. That kind of thing.
Dougald, I'm glad to hear you will be writing about practices. They ring truer than solutions, and I get the sense that you are in touch with many people around the world who have become disillusioned with fixing or saving and begun practicing instead. If fixing promises to reduce heartbreak, practice trusts heartbreak as a guide into the work. Thank you for your practice.
Thanks, Adam, I appreciate your way of putting a finger on the significance of language here. You are certainly one of the people who embodies this kind of practice for me.
And for me.
Word (less excel). Makes me think of Alastair McIntosh’s essay on tools in issue 8 of Dark Mountain: “But for me, if we are to minimise evil, the central question to keep on asking of any tool or technology is this: What does it serve? Only then can we dodge the pitfalls of idolatry: the worship of false gods.”
Sad to hear of hatchet jobs and attacks etc. on one of your previous courses I remember the phrase a world of many worlds. And of your own phrasing, something like consider the possibility you may not be right.
Thanks, Martin. Always good to be reminded of Alastair's words! I share the sadness over what has gone on with George, above all because he's done a lot of good and been an important voice on the right side of many arguments over the years. I've actually found myself wondering about reaching out to Alastair about all of this, as it feels like he's the one person who might be able to talk to all involved in a way that could bring some deepening insight and healing. At the same time, I do believe there are moments when we all need to follow our convictions, even if they lead to a parting of the ways, and trust that there's more going on than any of us gets to see in the weave of a time like this.
In Alastair’s later works, I think Riders on the Storm (I to this house we’re born, into this storm we’re thrown) he talks about chatting over the garden fence. Feels like this is so important right now.
"If those trees are going to live and flourish, that requires us to show up, to stick around, to get back involved with the land and all the creatures that we share it with."
This echoes a realisation which came to me during one of my lockdown woodland walks a while back. The woods in this valley are new; 150 years ago these hillsides were mostly quarries, and it's incredible to see how much has grown in just the past few decades. But during that walk I was filled with the sense that we had pillaged the hillsides and then left them for "nature" to heal, and that this was a kind of abandonment. If we knew how to care for them - without trying to control their growth or impose any sense of how they "should" be - how much more could we support their flourishing?
For now, I do what I can, which mostly consists of walking, attending, and litterpicking. But I can't shake the feeling there is something more to be learned, or re-membered, here.
Thanks for this one. I have a bit impatient reading recent posts for you to get back to these themes. I very much like 'an approach that is centred on affecting the conditions of possibility... without seeking to control the situation or make it wholly predictable.' Conditioning the present so that something fruitful might arise.
I recommend The Ecotechnic Future and The Retro Future books by John Michael Greer. His premise is that our present global technological and capitalistic system is based on the abundant concentrated energy provided by natural gas and petroleum and there aren’t effective alternative energy sources(including nuclear) to continue to sustain in the long run our present energy intensive system let alone expand it. He argues that even the hardware of solar and wind technologies require coal, oil and natural gas to be made, nuclear included. Even the web of digital devices encasing us would decline. He gives a good picture of what life among the ruins would be like in a technological sense. A simplification with much more moderate use of technology dependent on produced energy and electricity.
Thanks, Jeff! Yes, JMG has been an invaluable guide in this territory for many of us.
Dougald! I’ve sent you an email, hopefully doesn’t get lost amongst spam, in response to this, I’ve got a small bunch of Philippine natives planted for you, Anna and Alfie as thanks to letting me join your at work in the ruins course earlier in the year. ❤️❤️❤️
And I put them in a spreadsheet ! 😂
Hi Dougald
Oh boy! As usual with your writing something resonates so powerfully within me with respect to my experience as a priest in a mainline church here in NZ but the same across the West. That the planting of trees goes into the database but their dying didn’t. I see this everywhere as the churches (the dear old CofE is especially captivated [sic] by this) trumpet ‘all the new things!’ but never comment on the massive dieback in ‘New Initiatives’.
I’ll get round to reading this more fully but the resonance with Iain McGilchrists contention that we are trapped in the Left Hemisphere of our brains, obsessed with the Novel and unreasonably optimistic - and of course the LH loves the hyper reductionism of spreadsheets. . . Well I cant help noticing it. Literally ‘Nothing to see here’. John 9:39-41
Thank you so much for recording the audio, I hope this will be a feature of your posts going forward!
Thanks, Gareth. I generally make an audio version for the essays in the main series here (Into the Deep and now How We Make Good Ruins), but don't always manage to for the pieces that come in between. But comments like this are an encouragement to do so more often.
One of the more important insights I've had in recent years is the realization that "thinking like a state" is also thinking like a business corporation ... or just thinking like a businessman or business woman in many cases. Now, of course, this is obvious, but the insight matured into the understanding that "business" and "the state" have been co-mingling and co-evolving for as long as capitalism and industrialism have been emerging.
Being intertwined from the outset (as told in books like The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh and The End of the Megamachine, by Fabian Scheidler), these two institutional forms have fused. Both think in spreadsheet terms. Both have their eyes on the bottom line. And this fact helps tremendously if what we're trying to do is understand why we can never seem to generate a means of applying politics (defined as decision-making in groups) that doesn't just replicate more of the same disasters and failures. It's cultural evolution I'm speaking of when I say the two institutional forms co-evolved. And cultural evolution is an essential key to understanding the political disaster which is "modernity".
Both the state and the business world (a Siamese twin?) behave like a papercliip maximizer (Google it), except what they maximize isn't paperclips but the concentration of economic and political power into hierarchies. And both depend entirely on what economists call "externalization" of costs, especailly "negative externalities". Negative externalities sounds complicated. But it just means harm and damage -- to people, to public health, to ecosystems, to the biosphere.... The Siamese Twin institutions of modernity -- business and the state -- cannot be reformed. They resist reform so intensively and effectively because to reform to the extent necessary would be to put an end to them. And they have a strong immune system.
What we who want the saplings to survive need to do is to look closely at how we can refuse to play the game in accordance with the "rules" of the Megamachine (Siamese Twin).
Why did the community not come to know these saplings were dying and reach out to the dairy farmer to offer collective, community help? Community aid. The saplings had entered the community by entering the soil there. And the community failed the trees and the farmer -- even if the farmer only really cared about the grant money and not so much about the saplings.
Sometimes -- very often! -- the care of saplings has to be done voluntarily. It's not a thing to just throw money at. It often requires communities organized in such a way to come to the aid of saplings on a volunteer basis, as an act of caring for a community -- of caring for life.
Care is not something the Megamachine has, or does. It's not in its design. Only humans living in an "living culture" -- or community -- can do that.
We're all saplings now.
Thanks, James. I do recommend reading Rhyd's original post about the saplings for some thoughtful reflections on what it would take for there to be a community capable of coming to the aid of the saplings. I'm a little wary of the ease with which we conjure a thing like "the community" into being with our words, from the safety of the screens that both of us are sitting at, compared to the work it would take for this to manifest out there on that hillside.
The recognition of the twin nature of the market and the state is an important step in making sense of the puzzle of modernity, isn't it? (If I were making a reading list, I'd add Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Illich's Shadow Work and the work of JK Gibson-Graham.)
If reform is out, then I'm not sure revolution is much help either. But then, who says that binary has it all covered? Making Good Ruins could include other moves: Hospicing, Composting, Hacking... The list can no doubt be extended.
Dougald,
I will read Rhyd's original post, at your suggestion. I was going to anyway.
I hope I didn't seem to come across as insensitive to the enormous challenges of re-establishing (or establishing) communities which function in the way I was speaking to. I have spent a gargantuan amount of time trying -- unsuccessfully, mostly -- to help facilitate the emergence of that sort of community where I live, at the neighborhood scale. So I'm fully aware of how challenging (if not impossible) it is in very many places.
"If reform is out, then I'm not sure revolution is much help either. But then, who says that binary has it all covered?"
Hmmm. Language has lots of functions, including "the expressive" one. So part of what I was saying about "reform" is to express exasperation about the fact that efforts to reform standard / conventional political machinery has failed in almost all important cases for my entire 57 years. So I've pretty much come to believe it just won't and can't happen ..., by which I mean that major transformation of political outcomes won't likely arise in this way.
I advocate for a revolutionary approach, but by "revolution" I am referring to something very different from what that word evokes in the minds of most folks. My guiding idea in using the term "revolution" is to keep pointing out that we need to (collectively) re-imagine what revolution is or can be -- and to do so in such a way to conceive of revolutionary praxes which are neither insurrectionary not violent. That's an imaginative task, and I think it needs to be fully collaborative and involve a great many voices in the dialogue.
Unfortunately, it seems very few people are interested in this shared imaginative task -- or so it often seems to me.
But let me explain just a little more. When I said "reform," I was meaning to indicate a style and approach to the political which emphasizes the use of the existing, mainstream, conventional institutions of politics. I meant to say that I don' t believe these can be of very much of service if one seeks revolutionary transformation. And as a serious amateur human ecologist and eco-cultural philosopher, I'm very nearly certain that only revolutionary transformation could divert this civlization off from its current trajectory toward utter ecocide and catastrophic social collapse. In other words, I think the only plausible response to the present world is a revolutionary response.
Having just read Rhyd's Solstice Letter, I can certainly see why you responded as you did, Dougald!
I share a perspective which Charles Eisenstein has shared many times in his writing and speaking. Some will insist that there was no Golden Age in the past, and I'm sure they are right. But I, like Eisenstein, strongly suspect that there is far less "community" in the modern world than there was in the past. That is, we today are less likely to come together with our neighbors to share in the tasks of caring for ourselves, one another ... and the more than human world (to use David Abram's word for it). And I think the consequence has been a generalized kind of relational trauma -- though too few of us recognize it as such, I think.
No one (no one alone), not Rhyd or you or me ... or anyone ... should carry more of the task of reviving "community". But such a reviving task should be recognized, I think, as necessary. And that's all I meant to convey in my remark about how too few of us are yet doing such collaborative work -- at least in very many places.
i, for one, am proud to call myself an innumerate romantic.
will the Zoom conversations be recorded and made available elsewhere, for those who can't attend in realtime? i would love to participate but 2pm EST is crunch time for at-home parenting.
"i, for one, am proud to call myself an innumerate romantic."
Heh, well, this takes me back to a friendly argument that Paul K and I had in the early days of Dark Mountain. I'm glad to number more than a few proudly innumerate romantics among my friends – yourself included! When it comes to an overall stance for those of us on this side of the fault line, though, I'm reluctant to cede that much ground to those who want to treat reality as if it can be managed by spreadsheet. The dialogues I had with Sajay Samuel and Christopher Brewster in early issues of Dark Mountain were explorations of this – and somewhere on YouTube, there's a talk I gave many years ago to Christopher's students at Aston Business School on 'The Measurable and the Unmeasurable', which was another piece of this jigsaw.
"will the Zoom conversations be recorded and made available elsewhere, for those who can't attend in realtime? i would love to participate but 2pm EST is crunch time for at-home parenting"
Hmm, I'm feeling you on that one! We don't release recordings of these kinds of sessions to people who aren't participants in the series, as it can be quite an intimate space where participants share things they wouldn't always want to put out on the internet. But I imagine that a lot of what I talk about during the sessions will bubble up into future writing on here.
makes sense! i'm definitely looking forward to future posts that deal with some of those strategies and tactics. i really enjoyed your recent conversation with Gordon, and the "not ceding too much ground" theme was in there as well. while i'm trying to take that advice to heart, i'm one of the many who are feeling fatalistic about conventional politics: there is no Left left, and the work of re-aligning opposing sides of the old culture war feels like a bigger job than i can stomach (at least until my kids are bit older).
(also, i'm hereby trademarking The Innumerate Romantics as the name of my apocalyptic folk band. [i will sell the rights to any worthy contenders in exchange for $10 and a well-made roast beef sandwich, provided they can first complete a series of riddles and quests.])
i'll pay you $8 and the roast beef sandwich is just okay, BUT the pickle on the side is homemade (and frankly impeccable, this is a great deal, trust me).
excellent. a crow will be along shortly with instructions regarding the requisite quests and riddles. DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH THE CROW.
haha, sucker. I woulda done it for UP TO $9.25 and thrown in an eighth of shrooms just to spread the good word. no take backsies
edit: i looked at the crow and he showed me two lies and a truth, all visions of my own death. this is the kind of existential horror I come to substack for. 4/5 star transaction, deduction for the first riddle being a train-based math problem.
I’ve heard several variations of this story of mass plantings dying now. Some where they weren’t watered, or were planted in the middle of summer, and another where the entirely wrong trees were planted. On top of the spreadsheet issue you mention, there’s also the disillusionment of those who give their time to help plant trees in these various green initiatives. Spending a day or more of your life trying to do something good for the planet only to find it end in waste likely has a counter effect where people may no longer want to get involved.
I listened to your talk with McGilChrist a while back and loved it. I think a lot about his work and how much it applies to so many of the problems we face. My partner works in software creating decentralized processes and is constantly dealing with left brain rationalists who want to measure individual productivity and force top down measures. Over and over again she will prove and show how they are missing root issues and cannot get better results by simply forcing people to work faster/harder etc. Time and time again the rationalists will come back to the table with the exact same solution as before (faster, more efficient, and measure productivity but only from one side.)
McGilChrist once described the left brain being in a hall of mirrors that will repeat the exact same thing over and over again.
A recent issue has been that one of the company founders where my partner works has been a single source problem for many, many issues. Rather than look honestly at this, the company wanted reports on each individual employee to see how effective they were. If you weren’t at a certain grade you could be fired. Take a wild guess who wasn’t included in the graded system? The entire C-Suite and all the VPs. There’s really no one honestly looking at the competence of the upper managers, the board nor the c-suite has a bottom up perspective, and there is no one measuring how much is lost when people are afraid to speak up and offer genuine solutions. No one is measuring how damaging it is to fear being fired for offering the right solution.
Sadly as James mentioned above I don’t see that these systems were ever meant to work for all, they were designed to extract and create wealth for a few while externalizing the negatives. Start-up culture has managed to exaggerate these issues to such a degree companies more often than not end up devouring themselves and become their own externalities when the venture capital group that owns them takes the remaining husk of a company and combines it with another husk of a similar company in their portfolio and sells the two as a new company(product.)
Sadly, we seem to be getting worse at the spreadsheet issue. The chaos of these structures tends to teach many people how to survive within these systems and often rewards blind ambition rather than acquiring hard skills or legitimately working to improve the systems themselves. I write all this because we seem to be entering the “green tech” phase of your/Rhyds mass planting death story. *Unless of course everything collapses. ::starts tap dancing while holding a copy of “At Work in the Ruins”::
According the analysts at J.P. Long awaited Peak Oil is now truly upon us in the next year and after that a continued shortfall in oil production compared to demand for the foreseeable future. Scroll down the page to see the relevant graph https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/commodities/energy-supercycle
Yes, I know they are spread sheet people but they may be on to something. They are recommending energy stocks as the increased price per barrel will more than make up for the smaller production. And so it goes- the needs of the investor class will be met!
I find myself moved to share a concern as we move into this phase of our explorations, based in Vanessa Andreotti's warning that we who grew up in the "First World"/modernity are too quick to design solutions and don't want to do the hard, slow work of disentangling ourselves from colonial perspectives. As someone who'd written a book three years ago describing what I thought was an alternative view of future possibilities, I winced, and I wonder still about the balancing of being able to envision different ways of being so that we can move towards them vs. our unconscious recreation of what we already know.
And as you, Dougald, well know, community is built by kindnesses -- that much I know for certain!
Thanks, Lisa! Vanessa's work is rarely far from my thoughts, so it's good to have it named in this context. I'd already been reflecting on the "beyond reform" space, as described in various papers by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, and how this relates to some of the other comments on this piece.
What I'm intending to sketch out in this series are some thoughts on (and examples of) what agency looks like in that space. Part of what makes it difficult to loosen the grip of modern/colonial assumptions is that they claim a monopoly on agency and instil an understanding of it which leaves those of us who have crossed the threshold beyond modernity's hopes of "reform" looking and often feeling as though we have no agency at all.
The word that rings out for me from your comment is "balancing". It reminds me of the Climate Sessions series that we hosted three years ago, when both Vanessa and Alastair McIntosh brought up the image of attempting to walk a narrow ridge.
So thanks for bringing Vanessa's work into the frame here. I'm glad to have readers who will keep us all accountable to warnings like the one you bring up here.
GTDF card that I turned up this week:
Assist with the birth of something new, without suffocating what is being born with with projections and idealizations.
It's really sad to read this about George and Chris - I hadn't picked up on that. I have found myself in disagreement with Monbiot for a while now, after previously having found his writing so inspiring and helpful. He is coming across as quite bitter, as well as fixated on technological solutions to problems, and neither of these are part of the future I am hopeful for. And thank you Dougald for introducing those of us who hadn't heard of Chris before to him in your book. I was really pleased I got to hear him speak at the recent Planet Local Summit in Bristol (along with Ian McGilchrist, who was such an interesting contrast in style to Bayo Akomolafe in their conversation on the stage together!).
I have a niggling worry that George is somehow compromised in all this. It's so puzzling that he would be so much on the side of technocrats, and the visions of some billionaires.
I've had a brief read of his essay now. I sense a fragile ego reacting to criticism of something he'd put his heart and soul into?