I am as prone to nostalgia as both Thomases, and visions of past Golden Ages hold a visceral appeal for me. I can dream of those pre-industrial hawthorn lanes for hours, dream until I can physically smell them. But they’re gone, like so much else is going, and we are going to have to live with it. Nostalgia is one of life’s pleasures, but it can only, in the end, take you down a dead end.
Perhaps the answer is summed up by a third Thomas, Dylan, whose famous injunction to ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ calls angrily for a last stand even when the battle is clearly lost. That’s part of it, I think: a determination to fight for what is good and right, to fight against the encroachments of the Machine even though you know that the Machine does not die, only ever slumbers; takes blows but always rises again, because the Machine is us and part of us loves it even as it takes our world apart.
What does this mean in practice? It means, I think, respecting the past – its tools and technologies, our connection to it, the fact that it continues to live in us – without collapsing into nostalgia for it. It means understanding that nothing is coming back, that the future will be very different from then and now, but that the future will be very different from how we recently understood it to be also. Not only will we not be getting the jetpacks and moon bases I was hoping for as a child; we will not be getting the pensions and secure jobs I was told to work towards as a student. The future looks more like feeling in the dark as our certainties collapse. But it also looks like holding on to whatever we can of the world beyond the human.
Anything could happen in the next hundred years. The two extremes? Well, we could devastate the Earth and collapse into chaos and runaway climate change. Or we could create a global ‘sustainable’ society based on large-scale renewable tech, mass rollout of GM crops, nanotechnology and geoengineering – a controlled world of controlled people living in a closely monitored scientific monoculture. Brave New World with windfarms and smartphones. Which would be better? Who would deliberately aim for either? Why do both look frighteningly possible?
Faced with these poles, the middle way looks like a stumble towards the guns armed only with penknives and tin trays. But that’s where we are. What it means, I think, is that our task – mine, anyway, because I wouldn’t want to speak for anyone else – is to save as much of the wild world as can be saved, even if that means buying half an acre of English woodland and starting a coppice cycle to get the butterflies and the birds back. And it is to practise and to teach ways of being and doing that worked once, work now and will work tomorrow, when the cars look as lumbering as airships and the roads have gone from dirt to asphalt and back again.
Something Edward Thomas would still recognise today is Papaver rhoeas – the common poppy. Famously, these flowers sprang up all over the battlefields of Flanders where Thomas died. They did so because the common poppy seed can lie dormant in the soil for up to eighty years – it can be paved over, built on or oversown, and it will wait patiently until the plough or the guns tear up the soil again and breathe life into it. The common poppy flowers when everything is turned upside down.
Be a poppy then, in the face of the Machine? It seems a good task to set myself. To watch and learn and save and sow seeds and wait for them to flower, knowing that they may not do so in my lifetime. In an age of loss, our task is surely to keep safe what we can when the Machine passes by, hungry and howling for blood. To be still and stoical and protective, to pass on truths and skills that will always be truths and skills, and never forget to remember what we are losing, every day that we live.
Poems quoted are Edward Thomas’s ‘Lob’, ‘First Known When Lost’ and ‘March’, and R. S. Thomas’s ‘One Life’.
dark-mountain.net, 2011
Learning What to Make of It
When we win, it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
The most exciting thing in my life at the moment is a five-gallon bucket full of human excrement.
I should explain.
I recently tore the flush toilet out of our family home and replaced it with a compost toilet that I built myself. It is of the most basic variety: we crap into a big bucket and cover the crap with sawdust. When the bucket is full I empty the contents onto a compost heap, where it rots down over the course of a year. At the end of that year, we should have a safe and nutritious compost to use on our fruit trees and bushes, on the fuel coppices of aspen and birch we’ll be planting this winter, and on the small native forest that we are planning to grow here for as long as we are healthy.
It’s a major job, something like this, and undertaking it has made me realise how much effort needs to be put into the most simple things, and that in turn has made me realise why the society I live in has become addicted to paying for complicated things instead, and how this has laid a great big elephant trap for us that we may struggle ever to get out of.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first thing I did was to build a rectangular box out of planks and nails, and the remains of two kitchen cupboard doors, which we didn’t need any more. There followed a lot of sanding and planing and painting and varnishing and swearing when things were the wrong length and hinges didn’t fit where they should have done. This took a few weeks, on and off, but at the end of it I had quite a handsome varnished wooden structure with two shiny-blue hinged covers and a toilet seat on top. A five-gallon brewing bucket fitted underneath.
Then I had to build a compost heap: two, in fact, so that we could keep an annual cycle of compost from the toilet going. I bought some old pallets from the timber yard up the road and carted them home in my van. That was a couple of days’ work. After I had finished, I stood back and admired them for about half an hour. I am a writer. I have never been a practical man, or have never believed I am, and I’m still at the stage where successfully completing a practical task fills me with astonishment.
Still, that was the easy bit. Ever tried taking out a flush toilet? It’s a messy job. In the end, a friend came round and devoted an afternoon to helping me to do it. He is a casually practical man, so the job went well. In the aftermath, big chunks of porcelain lay on the grass outside and all that remained in the bathroom was a blocked-up outflow pipe and a gash in the lino. In went the compost loo; in went a bucket of sawdust; in went a wall hanging to cover the gaping holes, and voilà: a closed-loop system.
The flush toilet, to me, is a worthy metaphor for the civilisation I live in. It is convenient, it is easy, it is hygienic and it is wonderfully warm and dry. It is the most luxurious pooing experience known to man. You can do your business and never have to think about what happens next: never have to think about what happens to the faeces and urine you have just produced, just as you probably never thought about the origins of the food that created it in the first place. You can act, if you like, as if you have never produced it at all; as if you were far too civilised to have to engage in such base and primitive behaviour. You can sit in the warmth, reading an amusing light-hearted book, then you can simply press a button, and you will never have to deal with your own shit.
What happens to a society that won’t deal with its own shit? It ends up deep in it.
A compost toilet is harder work. First you have to build the toilet and the compost heaps, and then you have to source a regular supply of sawdust or pine needles, which will keep the smells and flies away and give the compost enough bulk on the heap. Most importantly, you have to empty the bucket when it gets full, which is every few days most of the time. This is the part of the job that really seems to disgust those of my friends and family who can’t understand why I have disposed of a perfectly good toilet and replaced it with something medieval.
But it’s also the part of the job that I enjoy the most. I’ve notic
ed myself getting almost excited as the bucket approaches being full. Emptying the thing onto the compost heap, covering it with grass, inspecting the progress of the heap so far, cleaning and replacing the bucket, putting a new layer of sawdust in the bottom: would you believe me if I told you this was a satisfying process? Anticipating being able to use the results on my own trees is almost thrilling.
If a flush toilet is a metaphor for a civilisation that wants to wash its hands of its own wastes as long as they accumulate somewhere else, then a compost toilet is both a small restitution, and a declaration: I will not turn my back on the consequences of my actions. I will not hand them over to someone else to deal with. I will not crap into clean drinking water and flush it down a pipe to be cleaned with industrial chemicals at some sewage plant I have never visited. I will fertilise my own ground with my own manure, and in doing so I will control an important part of my life in this world, and that control will give me more understanding over it. I will claw something of myself back. Even in the rain, even in winter, I will deal with my own shit.
*
In 2014, I emigrated. My wife and I moved with our two young children from urban England, where we had always lived, to rural Ireland. We bought ourselves a small bungalow with two and a half acres of land up a quiet lane. It was the culmination of a personal project we’ve been engaged in for more than half a decade: to find a way to escape from the urban consumer machine we were both brought up in.
We wanted to live more simply; or perhaps just more starkly, because life here is rarely simple. Our kids were just getting to school age, and the idea of sending them to school to systematically crush their spontaneity and have them taught computer coding so that they could compete in the ‘global race’ made us miserable. We wanted to grow our own food and compost our own shit and educate our own children and make our own jam and take responsibility for our own actions.
This can all sound very cloying. Western middle-class people going ‘back to the land’ is a modern cliché, and when we think we are hearing that story we tend to react in a particular way, positive or negative depending on our political or cultural persuasions. Perhaps I am a cliché, but I’m not especially interested in other people’s expectations. I was brought here by many things, but one of them is a voice that has been whispering in my ear for years, and growing louder for the last few.
This voice tells me that I am one of the luckiest people on Earth. It tells me I am a middle-class man from a country grown fat on centuries of plunder, that I have a university degree, that I go to restaurants and have a laptop computer and an internet connection, and I can publish articles like this in magazines. In other words, I am somewhere up near the top of the pyramid of human material fortune. And that in turn means I am up near the top of the pyramid of human cupidity and destruction that is driving the natural world to the edge.
One of the driving forces in my life is a deep love of nature. If you ask me to explain precisely what I mean by that, or why it has such a grip on me, I won’t be able to. But I could tell you about profound experiences I’ve had in forests and mountains, about the joy that rises in my heart when I see a hawk circle or hear the roar of an untamed river, and the misery that sinks into it if I’m trapped in a city or on a motorway. I could tell you about the occasional brief glimpses I get into the reality that I am a passing moment in an ancient, beautiful, terrifying whorl of life on a vast unknowable planet; that I am not an observer of it, but a part of its wide flow; that there is no such thing as outside.
This kind of thing is nearly impossible to put down on paper, as you can see. Once upon a time, many millennia ago, I suspect it would have been the default worldview, but today, it is a hard one to live with. The culture that I was born into is systematically dismantling the web of life itself, and as it does so it is dismantling my sense of meaning and many of the things that I love. My status as a middle-class consumer in a Western industrialised country means that I am part of this problem, whether I want to face up to that or not.
This is what that voice whispered to me, as once it whispered to Rilke: you must change your life. I came here because I can’t justify my complicity any more. I feel a personal duty to live as simply and with as little impact on the rest of nature as I possibly can. I’ve no interest in extending this duty to anybody else, or in preaching about it or politicising it, or in pretending that I am in any way pure or unsullied or even halfway competent yet at undertaking it. It is just a personal calling.
But perhaps it explains my joy at that full toilet bucket. I feel I am at last starting to do my bit, to make restitution, to walk the walk after so many years of talking the talk. I can’t write or talk about natural beauty, or natural anything, unless I’m trying to do as little damage to it as possible; and at this time in history, that means taking myself away from the heart of the beast. It means stripping back. It means inconveniencing myself. It means paying attention.
*
Soon after I got here I began reading a new collection of letters between the poet-activists Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder,* both of them influences on my own writing, both role models in some ways. They jumped ship and bought themselves acres of land many decades ago, and they stuck it out. And here they were, discussing the nature of modernity, the problem of technology, the life of the spirit and how to use a chainsaw, in handwritten letters over a period of forty years. It was the right book at the right time.
In July 1973, Berry wrote to Snyder with some important news. He had bought forty acres of land in his native Kentucky, to add to the twelve acres he already owned. This made him the owner and manager of a fifty-two-acre farm: a steward of the land as his Kentucky ancestors had been. ‘All this adds up to a profound event,’ writes Berry. ‘We’ll be years, I think, learning what to make of it.’
My two and a half acres seem profound enough to a boy from the suburbs who has never even owned a garden. At the time of writing, we’ve been here seven months. It took about three months for it to stop feeling like a holiday, though the children settled in more quickly than their parents did, building dens in the bushes and making a home in a fairy tree at the edge of the field. Children adapt to anything if they haven’t been told what normal is. And just in the last few weeks, I’ve felt myself beginning to settle too; to sink into the place a little.
I’ve noticed the different birds that appear around the house in the different seasons: the bullfinches in April, the swallows in June, the starlings in October, the robins and wrens at Christmas. I’ve noticed myself not wanting so much, and not wanting to leave. Even buying a few items of food every week seems an indulgence. Making things from stuff we find lying about feels like an act of resistance or escape: compost heaps from old bits of wood, firewood from fallen trees, cordial from blackberries, water butts from old barrels. We use less water; we produce less rubbish. Sometimes I feel small spaces open up in my life where anxiety used to be. Only sometimes, and briefly. Still, it feels like something is being reawakened.
In 2009, I was one of the founders of an initiative called the Dark Mountain Project. It began life as a self-published manifesto written by me and another writer, and it grew out of a need to find new ways of relating to the struggle over the future of nature in a human-centred world. Having spent years as an environmentalist working to ‘save the world’, I no longer believed that any such thing was possible. I thought that climate change was going to tip us over the brink much sooner than we thought, and that most people alive today, if given the choice between the kind of comfortable lifestyle I spend too much time agonising about, and the sacrifices needed to prevent the ecocide we are unleashing across the globe, would choose the former.
I thought then, and still think, that the momentum of the global civilisation we have built is unstoppable, and that its conclusion will be either its own collapse, the destruction of most life on Earth or the refashioning of Earth entirely in the image and interests of modern human beings. Either way, the oil tanker is not
turning around now, despite the heroic efforts of many. ‘The best intentions in the world’, wrote Snyder to Berry, ‘will not stop the inertia of a heavy civilisation that is rolling on its way.’ That was in 1977. I was five.
Wondering where that left me was the starting point for the Dark Mountain Project, which has since evolved into a network of writers, artists, thinkers and doers across the world. Dark Mountain began as an attempt to found, or discover, a new form of literature: one more engaged with, and honest about, the age of ecocide we find ourselves in. It is still that, but it is something else too: something it was never intended to be but that, in retrospect, it had to be. It is a way to work through the grief caused by the end of much of what we hold dear.
Living through the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, and knowing that our species is the cause of it, can be similar in some ways to living through the death of a loved one, or the collapse of something important and precious in your life. Before you can move on, before you can accept what has happened and come to terms with it, you need to be able to grieve, in the company of others. You need to be able to acknowledge the reality of the loss, and the pain it causes. You need to stop pretending that the loss isn’t real, or that it will all go back to how it was. Grieving is the starting point for being able to move on and through, and to begin to rebuild yourself again.
In retrospect, this Dark Mountain of ours has offered a way to engage in a kind of planetary grieving process. It has allowed people to come together to talk about the despair they feel at the state of the world and their inability to change what they would like to change. But this is a starting point, not an ending. Accepting the loss and moving through it, dropping old assumptions and thinking afresh, allows you to think again about the big question: how can I still be useful?
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Page 8
