The Hope Beyond Hope
An invitation to this week's Sunday Session with Jay Springett
Let’s start today with an announcement – a couple of times a year, we open the virtual doors and welcome newcomers and old friends alike to an online series with a school called HOME. Yesterday, the invitation went out to our spring series for 2024, Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture. We’ll have two groups, one that meets on Thursday evenings (Swedish time) and the other on Friday mornings, starting on 23 & 24 May and the series will run for five weeks.
The way these series work is that I bring stories and teach from what’s most alive in the conversations I’ve been part of over recent months. There’s time for a deeper dive, with reflections and questions from within the group, and after each session there’s an afterparty where we all get the chance to get to know each other a little better. If people are drawn to the series by what they have read and heard of my words, for many it’s the case that what matters is as much the connections made with others who are drawn to this work.
You’ll hear more from me about this over the coming weeks – but meanwhile, registration is open and you’ll find all the details on the school website.
I’ve known
since the days when I lived in London. We crossed paths back then in the swirl of people and projects with which I was connected in the early years of Dark Mountain.A few years after I moved to Sweden, he got in touch and suggested a conversation. He’d been involved from early on in a movement called Solarpunk that had spilled out of online discussion lists and into multiple shapes as a genre of sci-fi, design and architecture. He was wondering what lessons Dark Mountain might have for the evolution of this kind of collective project.
I’m sure there are those who would think of Dark Mountain and Solarpunk as polar opposites, night and day. I mean, the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry refers to “an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism”, and I run into people who think of Dark Mountain as the precise opposite of that definition.
Yet it’s not just because Jay and I have been talking more-or-less-regularly for years now that I doubt this way of framing things. There’s certainly a difference of emphasis – and there’s a side of Solarpunk that does slide into green-tech utopias and leafier versions of high-tech urbanism – but what both movements have in common is an attempt to reach for the “hope beyond hope” that we wrote about in the closing lines of the Dark Mountain manifesto.
In the previous instalment in this season of “overheard conversations”,
and I ended up talking about how “doom” and “techno-optimism” can be two sides of the same coin, two products of the same lens through which we are generally invited to look at the trouble that the world is in. To step aside from that way of seeing, it takes a work of the imagination. And both Solarpunk and Dark Mountain are imaginative projects, grounded in the sense that – to quote our manifesto again – “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.”The other day, Don Blair sent me this podcast he’d made with a friend, wondering “Can Solarpunk survive the unraveling of high technology?” I’d found myself thinking along similar lines when I read this post from
, where he contrasts the position of those who are seeking a way for “global modern civilisation” to make the transition from fossil fuels to a promised (but nowhere near realised) abundance of renewable energy with the attempt to build “a different kind of civilisation, a solar civilisation”. What’s striking in Chris’s description is that “solar” is not only (or even mainly) about solar panels, but about photosynthesis.So these are some of the threads that I want to carry into this Sunday’s conversation with Jay: what do we find in the overlap between Dark Mountain and Solarpunk, which parts of our shared history might illuminate that, and how might this help connect up the conversations that we’ve had so far in this season?
How to join us for the call
It’s the usual deal: if you have a paid subscription to Writing Home – or to Jay’s longrunning blog, thejaymo.net – then you’re welcome to join us live on Zoom for the conversation, which will include time for questions. The details are below the paywall on this post. The recording of the first forty minutes will be available to everyone, while paid subscribers will also get the recording of the Q&A session.
And if you really want to join, but you’re not in a position to pay just now, then drop me an email and I’ll send you the Zoom link.
DH