What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
Dougald Hine
Dougald Hine is author and co-founder of Dark Mountain, a cultural movement of people who have "stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself" and a School Called HOME, a "a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture" (personal website, Substack, wikipedia).
His latest book is "At Work in the Ruins", which we discuss at length in the conversation. At the beginning Dougald describes himself as "using words, and sometimes silences, to shift the space of possibility", which I think underplays his role as curator and community builder.
One way of understanding Dougald's response to these powerful times is that he sees them as showing that our world, the world of modernity, is ending.
Rather than moving into denial or a desperate fixing, Dougald is making 'good ruins' for whatever might be next, through creating pockets of living culture. He is trying to contribute to the possibility of presently-unimaginable futures, which starts with clearing away the stuff that has colonised the currently-imagined future.
I have read the book and heartily recommend it. To buy the book, and find the latest on Dougald's tour in Feb 2023, follow this link.
Links
'Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism' by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (aka Vanessa Andreotti).
More on Dougald's partner, Anna Björkman, here.
A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje
Timings
0:50 - Q1. What are you doing now? And how did you get there?
7:53 - BONUS QUESTION: Tell us something of the genesis of Dark Mountain?
12:00 - BONUS QUESTION: Tell us something about the start of a School Called Home?
18:11 - BONUS QUESTION: Give us a pen portrait of the book, At Work in the Ruins.
32: 54 - BONUS QUESTION: What are the strongest good faith arguments against what you are saying?
37:00 - Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?
42:20 - Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?
46:42 - Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?
49:55 - Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?
52:30 - Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?
52:46 - Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?
More here
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Website hub: here.
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Thank you for listening! -- David
Welcome to what we do in these powerful times. I'm your host, Steve bent. And I've been working in the field of sustainability and climate change for some 20 years, it feels like the need for change is growing faster than the impact we're delivering. So I'm wondering what I can do next is useful. Speaking with others, they have that same challenge, which is why I'm doing this interview series in 30 minute bites, I asked some brilliant people what they're doing now and why, or to inspire and enable the audience, which may just turn out to be me through stories grounded in experience. I'm delighted to say today's guest is dougald Hine. He is the author of our work in the ruins, and co founder of dark mountain and a school called home, both of which I'm sure we'll talk about, but hello to dougald. Hello. whispering dougald. Right at this moment. So first off, what are you doing now? And how did you get here?
Dougald Hine:So I was trying to think what the what the answer is, I think the answer is using words, and sometimes silences, to shift the space of possibility. And that's quite an esoteric sounding answer, but it's what links all of the stuff that I ended up doing, which includes writing, it includes standing up in front of rooms full of people and speaking, it includes bringing together conversations of different kind, which is a lot of the work that Anna and I do with school called home. And at the heart of it is just this, this sense that there's always a space of possibility, you know, think about how with different groups of friends, different conversations happen, or different things happen as a result of hanging around in different circles, different combinations of people in a room. That's like the most everyday thing that everyone has kind of experienced that there is this thing that we could call the space of possibility. And so I feel like one way or another what I've been trying to do on small and larger scales over the years, is work out how you can contribute to what shaped that space has, what things are likely to happen within a space, what things become less likely to happen and how you can how you can move that which is a way of trying to, to change things without trying to take control or manage things or tell people what to do. But just by shifting the atmosphere, shifting the mood, and therefore the things that are likely to happen, and therefore some of the things that do happen,
David Bent-Hazelwood:and contributing some words and concepts and making sense for people of what you feel is going on. So that's what yeah,
Dougald Hine:sorry. Yeah, and the words are, guess the reason why I describe it like that is because my friend, Vanessa Machado Talavera, the beginning of her book hospice in modernity, says there are two ways you can be using language, you can use words, to word the world. And you can use words to world, the world. And to word the world is to try and create this sort of descriptive layer on top of the world to tell people how things are and define reality. Whereas using words to world The world is recognising the whatever you're saying whatever story you're telling whatever language you're using, is not somehow above and on top of reality, but it's tangled up in the middle of it. And so you're not trying to give the true definitive version of something, you're trying to make a contribution because the way in which your words work in the world will have consequences and will affect the people who they encounter. And for me, that's, that's the kind of writing that I'm, I'm interested in and find myself doing.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Sure. And we'll come back to our work in the rooms I'm sure in a few moments. But first I want to cover off how did you get here? So how did you get to the point where you're using words and sometimes sciences to shift the space of possibility?
Dougald Hine:So I guess I had like, at least four layers of early training or initiation in this first one was I grew up with a dad who's a minister in the church, and therefore seeing him standing up in front of a roomful of people doing things with language every Sunday morning. Apart from anything else, it meant that I never even thought about the idea that it might be strange or scary to stand up in front of a roomful of people and use words. Then I studied literature at university and got to spend time with the work of extraordinary writers from different periods. And then I got a job during my summer vacations selling educational books door to door and was suddenly in this utterly other world. Have a language from this kind of rather old fashioned American sales company that was kind of rooted in this early 20th century. Stuff that actually involves paying a lot of attention to what you're doing with language, and what you're doing in terms of the words you're using inside your own head and the stories you're telling yourself, what possibilities you are opening or closing off in the words that you use in an encounter with somebody. And I wasn't that interested in using that stuff to sell books door to door, but I was interested in what lay behind it. And then I worked as a radio journalist. And radio is a particular form. Because, you know, when you're writing for a newspaper, the reader can flick their eyes back and reread the sentence, if there was something that turns out to be important earlier in the sentence. Can't do that when you're listening to radio. So learning to write for radio has a particular discipline, again, in another way in terms of using language. So I guess like before I knew who I was, or what was worth doing with my life, somehow, I had already acquired this set of very different experiences of ways in which words can be used. And for a little while, I thought I was having a career as a radio journalist, and then very quickly realised I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in newsrooms and having sort of trashed that career in my mid 20s, had to begin a process of figuring out what was actually worth doing with whatever time it turns out that I have. And that set me on the path to all of the things that I have ended up doing in terms of creating the dark mountain project with Paul Kingsnorth, which was this kind of intervention within both environmental activism and thinking, and also the arts and literature, in relation to the trouble the world is in in the ways we talk about it. Things like space makers, which was, you know, bringing unused or underused spaces into ways that we could reimagine them and fill them with life, which was kind of one of the things that I spent a lot of my time in the years when I lived in London, working on. And then lately, Anna and I are running this this school together, which we always say is like a school that starts from the conversations that happen around our kitchen table, a gathering place and a learning community for people who are drawn to the work of regrowing and living culture. So those are the things that I'm using words for now.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Wonderful. And I think there's worth unpacking a bit about dark mountain. That was one of the ways we just introduced you. And it's sort of semi famous, famous or notorious, I'm not quite sure what the right word for it. But tell us a little bit about the genesis of dark mountain. Where did it come from? Why why did you want to do it? What was its purpose for you.
Dougald Hine:So about 15 years ago, I had been through a phase of getting pretty freaked out about climate change, getting involved in various kinds of activism, walking away from the beginnings of this career at the BBC. And there was some things that were troubling me some things I wasn't satisfied within myself. And then the the experiences I was having in the movements that I was part of at that time. I ran into this guy, Paul Kingsnorth, who was a few years older than me, he was pretty well known as an environmental journalist and campaigner, had been the editor of the ecologist magazine. And we discovered that we had some similar disillusionments, let's say, with what we've been part of, we both worked as journalists and become disillusioned with the possibilities of what you could do from within that trade. We both been environmental activists. But we had this sense that the environmental movement was in danger of becoming a church where the priests had lost their faith, but didn't think that the people who turned up on a Sunday were ready to hear the bad news. There was this gap between the kind of the encouraging stories that were being told in public and the things that the same people would say to you if you call them quietly over a whiskey at the end of the night, and we thought that that gap was dangerous and that we needed a space in which it was possible to speak honestly from despair or uncertainty or disillusionment or doubt or wherever you were at. Instead of feeling like you had to give this kind of rallying cry and encourage each other or else that was letting the side down. And somehow I think we also knew, or were both writers. And we were also a bit disillusioned really as writers with the stuff that was being celebrated and the literary pages of the newspapers, we thought, people were gonna look back in a generations time and go, How could they write this stuff when the world was on fire? But out of that cave, also this sense that art and culture might have a more important role or a deeper and different role to play. When it comes to the mess the world is in how we respond to it, not least how we make spaces where we can bring our darkness is without that simply leading to people giving up doing nothing and feeling isolated and lonely. The art and culture has some clues for how we live with the things that feel unbearable, the times of really, really not knowing what to do, and somehow turned back into something generative a space out of which an imagined possibilities come.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And so when the dark mountain manifesto came out, I was working at that time in Forum for the Future, sustainable voting charity, which is sort of founding myth in a way was to do with positive messages, we'll get this done. And so that gap between what was being said in private, and what was being the cheerleading was something which we experienced within the organisation. And so there was quite a, I think there was quite a reaction to dark mountain when it came out, one of which is that privately going, well, this is bracing, but honest and authentic. But also, I think, for our founders, they were quite against it and would say, and we should never take this point of view. And I remember arguing with this a little bit later arguing with some of the folk in the climate world who had this hashtag of climate optimism, that of course, we can do this, of course, we can do this. And when we go and vote, we don't we don't we need to go through and experience the fear and despair, in order to come out the other side, with more profound truths, more profound ways of working, rather than being afraid to even go into that space. So it very much took took me a lot longer to get to that point, did with you don't want to, but I absolutely recognise all of that. And, and then there's a school called home came after dark mountain. Talk to us about the genesis of that and how it came about.
Dougald Hine:Well, so Anna and I have been together for 12 years now. And we kind of found each other around this shared sense of the virtues of hospitality and conviviality. Not just as things that we liked, but as things whose significance was not marked clearly on the maps of the world into which most of us were born the world of modernity, that actually, in some strange way, what happens when people gather around tables, what happens when people come together, to do things for reasons other than because they've been paid to or told to, is very central to the story of how human beings have ever made life work and ever found meaning. And very marginal to the the kind of world, or the parts of the world that are meant to be taken seriously, the parts of life that are meant to be taken seriously, in the world of modern industrial societies, developed countries, the world of the humans who supposedly live closest to the future. And that if this stuff that Paul and I've been talking about with dark mountain, you know, if we're anywhere half right, with the read on the unravelling that is underway, then, if things were to turn out less badly than it often feels, is likely to be the case that might have to do with some of these human capacities that have not been taken seriously not being treated as stuff that matters and ought to be central to live in recent times, but most other human cultures in other times and places seem to have given much greater emphasis to. And so the school really is just an extension of what we found ourselves doing automatically, which is that our household would have people passing through it, who would include, you know, visiting artists and thinkers and writers and activists and also people I was meeting in her work, people I was meeting who were, you know, fellow migrants to Sweden, who I was sat in class with learning to speak Swedish and learning how to be good immigrants together, we just invite everybody back to our house. And these conversations would happen around the kitchen table. And we knew that sooner or later, we would have to create something that was a sort of vehicle to be able to expand that invitation a bit, and pass on the things that we felt like we had learned so far from our experience of doing this, and also just spread this rumour that maybe these things might have a surprising role to play in how things turn out in the kind of bigger More serious grown up stuff that we might be talking about if we get invited to meetings at places like Forum for the Future,
David Bent-Hazelwood:or Davos, which is going on as we speak. I think typically, when we, when, in a mainstream conversation about addressing the challenges of climate change, it quite quickly turns to technology or consumption, or we need to build more nuclear power stations, we need more renewable energy. And the sort of hypothesis or thesis that you've laid out there is more. It's in the little spaces in the private spaces, it's in the conviviality between people that cultures are built, the society is built out of that comes whatever can come next. And maybe that is more bigger nuclear power stations, but maybe it's something else entirely. But But unless you have that conviviality you don't you risk having a thin version of society, struggling forward from here,
Dougald Hine:if you forgotten what makes life worth living, then your attempts to create the conditions of possibility for lives worth living in the future is going to be hamstrung by that. And so when we say, the work of regrowing and living culture, clearly implicit in that is a, a critique of whatever it is the passes for a culture around here, just now, say that, you know, whatever the elements of what we've inherited from modernity, that we would not willingly give up. And clearly they are there, there has nonetheless been some great forgetting, of a lot of what makes life work, not least what makes life work in hard times. And a story about the past and the story about other cultures, which is actually, you know, implicitly both ignorant and patronising and kind of racist, which says that everyone was living in these terrible conditions everywhere apart from around here during the last handful of generations. And we need to bet everything, we need to bet the planet, on managing to somehow make sustainable the way of life, the Western middle classes, and this promise that this is somehow going to be extended to everyone else. And if you just don't buy that, then the conversation that starts from climate change, or whatever way you come into this policy crisis, whatever we're calling it this year, then it becomes something rather different than just what array of technologies and economic hacks do we need in order to have a chance of sustaining this unsustainable way of living? And that's where you might end up closer to the things that we often find ourselves talking about, around the table.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yes. And I think that neatly takes us to the book, which is due out any moment as we talk at work in the ruins. So in the book, you talk about why you wrote it. And also the moment where you realised you needed to find a new set of words, because what you previously been speaking about wasn't working for you anymore. So why don't you start there? And then give us a sort of pen portrait of what's in the book?
Dougald Hine:Yeah, I mean, for a while I was threatening to call the book, why I'm no longer talking to people about climate change. And thankfully, everybody talked me out of that. But it did start honestly, with me hearing these words come out of my mouth, maybe it's time to stop talking about climate change. At the end of a week, where like many weeks in my life, in recent years, I'd had a number of calls and interviews and conversations in which I was talking with people about climate change. And I just had this sense that the gap between what I was wanting to talk about and what seemed to be taken for granted as obvious by the people I was talking to, had somehow got wider. And the possibility of inviting people across that gap had gotten narrower. And I didn't, you know, it was really a gut feeling when I heard myself say that, and thought, I'm going to have to write something to explain apart from anything else. If it's truly the case that after 15 years in which a lot of my work is involved talking to people about climate change, that's going to be less the case, I need to explain myself, but actually, I sort of needed to write the book in order to answer the question for myself of how that could possibly be the case, even if it's just for me. And the answer that I got to is, well, whenever we talk about climate change, that conversation is going to start inside this frame of science because climate change is a concept that is framed for us by science and the evidence and the knowledge of the price. surfaces that we're talking about when we talk about climate change come to us through the work of the natural sciences. And particularly for those of us whose work takes place indoors in front of screens and where the seasons fade into the background. We need to be told about this by scientists because we're not going to notice in the way that somebody who's a farmer or a reindeer herder in the north of Sweden, like one of the people I speak to, in the book, notice through their own experience without needing it mediated for them by famous scientists. But it's also the case or at least, this is what I have gone around saying, and that's been often received quite warmly, including by the climate scientists I've worked with, that climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer. The example that I gave in the book is, how did we find ourselves in this trouble? Is it the result of a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry that it turns out seven generations down the line that all of the co2 that was being released by these fossil fuels on which we built our industrial societies was messing up the climate system, and it's just kind of unforeseeable, bad luck? Or did we find ourselves here because of a way of approaching the world a way of seeing and treating everyone and everything that would always have brought us to such a pass? Even if it turned out that we could get away with all these co2 emissions? Like even if the IPCC would turn around tomorrow and go, guys, terribly embarrassing? Turns out, we got our sums wrong, which they're not going to do. But it's worth asking as a thought experiment. And what I say in the book is, you know, on the one hand, it's, it's pretty clear from the way I'm speaking, which of those two answers I stand for. But more than that, I don't think you can say anything about climate change without having answered that question one way or the other. But as long as the question is taking place, inside this box of science, the question doesn't get framed clearly, because science can't really see or answer that question. It can help us in the conversations by which we might arrive at our answers to that question, but it's not the kind of question that science is for. And so then, two things began to trouble Me by about second half of 2021. One was that because of the kind of politicisation of science in the context of the pandemic, and this very understandable language of believe the science following the science, etc, the idea that you have a conversation that starts inside the space of science and moves out of that, to these other questions, was becoming less obvious, less, you know, it was raising more defensiveness. And secondly, meanwhile, there'd been this turn, you talk about Davos, a few years earlier, 2018 2019, you had Greta turn by going to Davos and calling out the world's elite, which she has been doing again this week, and all power to her. But by 2020, what you had was the most powerful people within that world, you know, the Bill Gates's, of this world, coming out with their books about how we were going to fix climate change, despite the fact that they'd only really been paying attention to it for about six months. But they had their list of all of the breakthroughs. I at the time invented technologies by which we were magically going to get to continue these trajectories of progress and growth and development. And it just felt like those people and their worldview is going to be well served by the conversation staying inside this box of science. Because as long as it does that, you end up defaulting to that first answer that this has been a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry. So it serves them well. And it serves the people who increasingly own the climate conversation. For us not to be asking these questions that I call the upstream questions. So that's kind of where the book starts from, I guess.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And you put a lot of emphasis on this in the book, and you hinted at it just now, and I just wanna make it. Make sure I understand, make sure it's clear. You're, you're absolutely not rejecting the science, what you're saying is, the science gives us important insights, but they're not enough by themselves for us to understand what we can do next, and should do next.
Dougald Hine:Absolutely. You know, this is a book that's come out of conversations with friendships with climate scientists. And, you know, a real sense that there is a recurring pattern which has gone on throughout the history of modern societies of asking too much of science, trying to get science to do all the work of knowing the world and telling us what we ought to do. The work of science is not well served by that and Actually, within the history of environmentalism, there was a turn that happened in the 90s in mainstream environmentalism, that replicated this pattern of asking science to do all of the work. You know, instead of making political arguments, instead of engaging in the kind of critique of worldviews that the environmentalism of the 1970s had done, often very powerfully, there was a sort of retreat behind the evidence and behind the claim that is so often there in modern societies, that scientific evidence is what we take seriously. And therefore people were saying, Well, if we want to be grownups, if we want to be taken seriously, then rather than trying to get into all of these hard to make arguments, we just need to present the evidence. And then people will have to do something about this. But part of what I encountered by the time I grew up and wandered into the aftermath of this was the disillusionment, the half articulated disillusionment, especially among the scientists of people who had genuinely believed that the IPCC process was going to lead to meaningful political action, as the evidence mounted up, and then gradually seeing that the translation mechanism wasn't working. And so that's, that's where the book is coming from. It's absolutely not an attack on science. It's it's an act of friendship towards science.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yes. And I think I mean, I, I'd say, certainly in the first part of my career, I was guilty of, if we give people the facts, of course, there's only one set of facts. But if we give people the facts on, say, climate change, then of course, they will act on those facts in the same way that I would, because we're all rational. And we all have the same basic values, don't we, and we all want the same things really don't we, and the sort of the sense of global we, and that we have this, because we're all humans and our shared humanity, we all know for our would act the same under this with the same information. And it turns out, that isn't remotely the way in which society works. And, but, and to the frustration of scientists, the folks who have been in the IPCC have deeply, as you say, frustrated that their insights are not used to create change. So on the one hand, science has this great power. But I think as you say, somewhere in the book, only if it aligns with what those who are in power are willing to do anyway, if it doesn't, then all kinds of things happen, including the merchants of doubt that have been our oil companies over the last 30 years or so. So that's the questions you're asking, that's science is a useful contribution, but we need to go upstream to ask the questions that we need to ask, and to gently to create the spaces of possibility which might generate what happens next. So then, where did you get to? There's an enormous amount in the book, and I'm not going to try to serve all of the richness of it. But just where does that lead you then as your conclusions? Is it not that it's a to do list, but what is it that comes out of asking the question in a different way?
Dougald Hine:Well, I say that some watch the worried looks on people's faces. The first step is to give up. And that was, you know, I've sort of realised after having written it that I there's a chapter near the end, which is called How to give up, I could have called the whole book, How to give up. Because when Paul and I wrote the dark mountain manifesto, that was one of the the accusations that was thrown at us with a lot of force was you guys, you've given up and worse, you're encouraging other people to give up. And it was always said as this this was simple, as it was obviously always automatically the case that giving up was the kind of moral failure. And it never seemed that simple to me. And so in a weird way, having that thrown at me, it became something I was carrying, it became one of my questions to carry was, okay, if if there's something more complex and more complex story to be told about giving up, then what is it? One of the places I get too in the book with that is giving up is always giving up on something, even if at the time it feels like everything. And often you have to have made that kind of leap in the dark. of giving up on the story, you thought that you believed in giving up on saying things that used to make sense to you, but privately, you've realised that they no longer making sense, in order to come in to the in between space. Like, it's only it's only when you've removed position, that you are able to see the things you couldn't see from the position you were in before. But you don't get any guarantee you don't get any promise that will make it okay to make that leap of faith. So in a sense, that's what I'm asking people to do in the second half of the book is to had to give up on a lot of the a lot of the promises and a lot of the stories. But to do it without embracing some kind of dark certainty about knowing how the story ends, a lot of what I'm doing in the second half of the book is trying to tell stories, and give examples that might help us shift our sense of agency. Because it began to come home to me that well, Vanessa Machado doll of era, who's also who also writes as Vanessa Andreotti, I interviewed her for the 10th anniversary edition of the dark mountain journal. And she said something to me near the end that really kind of kept coming back to me, she said, when I talked to audiences about this idea of hospice Singh, modernity, not trying to save it or sustain it, and not trying to overthrow it or burn it down, but trying to give it a good ending, and let it hand on the gifts it has to give, in its last period of its life, said, I see people reach this point where they get stuck, because they can't imagine the thing that I'm saying when I say that we also need to be midwifing, something new, unknown? And possibly, but not necessarily, why is it they can't imagine that there might be another chapter, because they want all of the work of that to be done by humans. Like they can't imagine participating in something where the rest of the world is, our actors within the process by which another chapter of life that might include us unfolds. And what I realised is it's worse than that. Because in the rooms where the conversations about climate change mostly happen, it's not just that the agency is limited to the humans, it's limited to a very particular subset of humans, who are the ones who get invited to those rooms. And the idea of the people who might know what to do next, might actually be among the 2 billion peasant farmers in the world today, rather than among the 200,000 people that say, who in a year spend time in conferences and policy meetings about climate change, is just utterly off the maps nearly all the time in those rooms?
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah. And so there's, there's giving up. And then from that new liminal space, there's acting, at acting from a new place, really, and a new understanding. And as you were saying, they're about with the more than human world as well into what we might create together. I want to ask one more question before I move on into the the rest of the normal flow of powerful times, which is about about the book and way where you feel like it's, it can't enter everything, of course. So what what for you are the strongest good faith arguments against what you're saying? And how do you respond to them?
Dougald Hine:I mean, I think the most obvious one is, like I'm saying it's time to stop talking about climate change. And then I'm writing a book where I talk a lot about climate change. But also, this thing about giving up the the challenge there is, it does require a leap of faith, like I cannot prove to anybody who is still operating inside the assumption that the world is a thing that needs to be saved. And it needs to be saved by people like them working within institutions and organisations like the ones they work with it. And I cannot prove to them that that is not the case. Because it's only going through your own crisis. And stepping to another position that might give you a vantage point from which you can notice what was missing from there. That's why the book is much more a book of storytelling, it's much more a book of kind of personal encounters, than it is attempting to frame an argument and make a case like a lawyer trying to win over a courtroom. Because I hope that somewhere within there, there might be some people might find some little bridges across the gap, that speak to them at moments where that's what they need. And it really was, what I had begun to encounter was people who had lost their faith in the promises made by the institutions that they were working within, you know, the promise to save the world to fix climate change to build a sustainable future. But they haven't really questioned the theology of those institutions. They still saw the world as a thing that needed saving and fixing and so on by people like them within those institutions. So someone can come along in good faith and go, you know, well, there's a lot of nice stories here. But you've not met had a couple of bottoms argument, because it's not the kind of thing which can be settled. In that way it is going to take a leap of faith, it's going to take a personal experience a dark night of the soul. And I suppose part of why I needed to write this was because in the 2018 2019 surge of climate movements in XR and Fridays for the future and so on, there was a lot of this prophetic language, you know, Roger Hallam talking about the dark night of the soul. Greta talking about? No, I want you to act like your house is on fire. These are, these are images consonant with the language of mediaeval saints or Old Testament prophets. And so it's shaken a lot of people those kinds of encounters, but often the people who were articulating that were themselves, speaking powerfully from the first shock of having hit this, that I guess, because of where Paul and I were at back in 2007 2008, with dark mountain, it felt like I'd been sitting in a similar place for a long time and might be able to offer some paths out the far the far end of that, but it's it's not going to make an argument that is going to persuade somebody who is not ready for it. Yeah, because I don't think you can do that with this kind of material.
David Bent-Hazelwood:No, and I mean, part of the foundational part of the foundations of the book is that, in a way, there's no version of modernity, there's no version of the status quo, we can't improve modernity to the point where we will have a safe climate, and 9 billion people able to choose how they live their lives, their own version of the good life, like that's not available with a version of modernity. And that's where we need to hospice modernity, in order for whatever might do that, and not just 9 billion people, but also a thriving nature around it. And it's incredibly difficult to prove that kind of thing. But we have lots I mean, ironically, we do have a lot of science, which is pointing in that direction. But it is a very contestable conclusion. Yeah. So you have, so you're about to start your book tour. So that's what the immediate future is about. But what is the future you're trying to create? And why?
Dougald Hine:Well, I guess I'm trying to contribute to the possibility of what again, Vanessa Machado Talavera would call presently unimaginable futures. So I've been invited to a lot of processes in which the idea is you get together a group of well intentioned people who tend to be mostly pretty privileged because of the people who end up in those rooms, to collectively imagine a sustainable future and then backcast, from saw. And I'm not saying that there's no worth in those kinds of processes, but I became increasingly troubled by it. And then Vanessa gave me this language that after a while started to help me unpack that trouble. And what it is, is there are worlds worth working for in the time to come. At least I will, I will, I will assert that. And no one has convinced me that that is not the case. But the futures that are worth working for a presently unimaginable in the sense that we as we are now can't imagine them. And so what's needed is not for us to try harder at the imagining, like just sort of straining, like we've got this sort of constipation of the imagination. What's needed is for us to become other than who we are, in order for those futures to become imaginable. And wherever NASA goes in hospice in modernity is there's a lot in there that can help us just sit with the present, like one of my grounds for suspicion about imagining the future is I feel like it can be a refuge for those of us who, if we're honest, given where we sit within the world situation, given that we have been the winners and beneficiaries of modernity, it's painful for us to imagine the present to imagine all of the things that make possible our lives all that lies on the other end of the supply chains. And part of that pain is because just because you can imagine it doesn't make it easy to see what to do about it requires you to enter a sort of state of helplessness for a while, in order to seriously Imagine that. And so Vanessa gives a lot of tools, a lot of images there. And I guess I've been I've worked quite a bit with her collective the gesturing towards decolonial futures collective because I feel like there's there's a lot of material there that can help. Another version of this that I found while I was working on the book, I came across this philosopher Federico compania, who has an extraordinary book called prophetic culture. And one of the things he talks about there is he says, sometimes you realise sometimes it dawns on you that you are living at the end of a world. Well, then this has happened before in other times and places Yes, there are particularly The terrifying aspects to the ending of a world that we have been born into, but not the first time around. So what do you do if you find that you're living at the end of a world? Firstly, the way you notice it is because the future doesn't work anymore. There's no future left in the narrative of that world. And it sounds fake when people try and make that narrative work. So then what you do, what modes of action would be wise says, Well, you can stop trying to make sense according to the logic of that world, according to its narratives. And you can start trying to create good ruins, trying to leave things behind that might turn out to be helpful to those who come after. And so the future I'm trying to create, or the way in which I'm trying to contribute to possibilities for the future is, firstly, by inviting people to this puzzle of how do we work for the possibility of presently unimaginable futures? And then secondly, how do we go about making good ruins leaving things behind? That may turn out to be helpful?
David Bent-Hazelwood:Excellent, thank you. And what you're saying there reminds me of an earlier interview in the series with Professor Richard Sanford, who's a professor on the get the title role, and despite knowing really well, is professor of sustainable in sustainable heritage. And he's trying to bring together the futures community and the heritage community to put in a very similar way, right. And he mentioned, certainly, there's a Californian philosopher, he talks about who says, Well, the point about transformation is you can't imagine what's after the transformation. Right? If it was, if you can imagine exactly what it is, then it probably isn't transformation. So. And I often think about if you were to wind the clock back to 1450, or something, and to get a bunch of the then elite in a room and say, What do you think's gonna happen in the future, be a bunch of monks in Europe or something. And I mean, it, of course, there'd be the great chain of being and God would be central to that society, because it would be, they will be able to imagine something else. So that's the kind of very much here that about the present the unimaginable futures. So that if that's the general direction, and the contribution, what are your priorities for the next few years?
Dougald Hine:Well, I mean, my immediate priority is taking this book out into the world, but trying to do it in a way that is generative and starting conversations, and creating improbable encounters, let's say, because I've had the luck to get invited into all sorts of different worlds and different circles over the years. And so now I'm really trying to use the book as a tool to bring people who might not otherwise have ended up in a room together, together in a room and get quickly past the small talk. I guess that's one of the things that I've used words for over time is to try and invite people into spaces of deep conversation quickly. And how to do that by working with pre existing threads of trust among some of the people who find themselves in that room, and creating conditions of possibility that mean that more trust is built. And there is a desire to go on meeting in those combinations. And so that's really like in the weeks and months ahead of me, what I'm what I'm trying to do not least with a view to how fast different aspects of unravelling are playing out, not necessarily directly in connection with climate change. You know, one of the other books that I reference in at work in the ruins is Chris majors book, a small farm future, which is a really, really great, important book. And he had a point in that where he turns to politics on the journey to a small farm future, he has this idea that he calls the super seizure state, which is based on this phenomenon of super seizure that happens in beehives, when you have the end of the air of one queen. And what he's what he's saying when he transfers this to the human political is, you get these conditions in which the nominal power of the centre is weakening, its ability to exert that power in practice or fulfil its promises is diminishing. And therefore, the further you get within the geographical sphere, or whatever it is, that is nominally under the power of that centre, the more you find people are having to improvise ways to fill the gaps that are being left by the state. And I think you might see where I'm going with this when I say that, I think even more so certainly in the UK than in Sweden, where I spend most of my time that doesn't feel like a conversation about the future so much as a conversation about the present, but nonetheless, something that is going to accelerate in as possible scenarios for what happens over a 510 20 year time horizon for the UK. So I'm quite seriously trying to use this book to bring together people from inside and outside within the UK and at a European level and elsewhere, in conversations that might just seed connections that might turn out to be helpful in having benign rather than toxic versions of what those emergent supersedure states might look like at local and regional level, in the kinds of future that we might well be headed into, or just already in and haven't fully noticed it yet. Yeah.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And when you say that, it makes me think how in the very first part of our COVID, and locked down, there was a sort of burst of mutual aid of different kinds. And so and so if we are heading into evermore powerful times where we can't rely on big institutions to be able to serve our needs, for whatever reason, that will be turning to creating local mutual aid of some kind. And, but and the more practice we are at that, the more we can learn from other people in doing that, and so on, but the stronger that's going to be, and there's lots of different things to do. That's a whole other podcast all by itself. So if so moving, the priorities are here in there about creating good ruins, it's about creating spaces of possibility. There's something about asking those upstream questions and helping people to be able to answer them or at least act on them rather than be destabilised and, and stuck by them. If someone was inspired to follow your priorities, what should they do next?
Dougald Hine:Well, there's a there's a line that I often quote from Yvonne Elledge, who's a thinker whose work has been very important to me, where apparently, towards the end of his life, he used to say the limit of possible political possibility today is the number of people who can sit around a table and share a meal together. Sounds really pessimistic the first time you hear it, but actually, you know, people need to eat roughly two or three times a day. There's no rule that says everyone needs to be sitting at the same table every time. We don't always have to sit around the table, et cetera, like you can get from that to a model of how things can grow and spread close to the ground. And so my suggestion to anyone who's kind of finding that they, they're they're kind of tuned into and drawn towards the priorities that I'm describing is, firstly, just to find ways of practising that, because that's part of how you practice shaping, shifting the space of possibility is by making invitations bringing people together on a human scale, the things that it gets harder to do once you get beyond the scale of like eight people around a table together. And we just need more experience of and practice in that. And all of the projects that I've created, whether it was dark mountain, the schools, pacemakers, School of everything that I was involved in back in the day in London, all of those grew out of small groups of people coming together repeatedly over a period of time in conversation, and paying attention to where the life is, like noticing when something quickens in the way that you're speaking to each other in the look in the eyes that the person sat across the table from you. And following that, even if it wasn't why you thought you were coming together in that constellation. So that will be sort of my advice is it find the others and practice, practice coming together with an attitude of hope in the way that elects us to talk about it, he would say, you know, hope means remaining open to the possibility of being surprised, having a seat set at the table for the stranger who might turn up at your door. Those are the kinds of things that we need to work into the fabric of our lives. And I remember Anthony McCann saying to me a long time ago. If you're going to go into a conversation about changing the world, start by noticing that we are always already changing the world because we're always already affecting those who we encounter, become more aware of the effect that you're having on others become able to choose the ways in which you tune that the things that you might want to do differently because of the effect they have on others. And work from that which again, is that scale of you know, the the handful of people gathered around the table to thinking about how you can create things that can spread far and wide.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Thank you. If your younger self was starting their career now What advice would you give them?
Dougald Hine:Don't worry too much about making mistakes. Don't worry too much about what other people think of you, or about things needing to make sense. There are going to be patches of your life that make no sense at the time. And that turned out in hindsight to have been indispensable. For such a large part of my young life, I had no story that I could tell that would convince anyone that I was on any kind of track that was worth pursuing. And then turns out that that was sort of the fallow ground in which seeds were growing, that allowed me to do things later. But there was no plan of that. So don't feel that you need to have a plan or need to be able to justify yourself and learn to follow your inner compass, I learned to notice those moments where how the things where you feel yourself coming alive, move towards those and the things where you feel yourself quietly, dying, move away from those quickly, and learn to steer in that way, which doesn't require you to be able to explain to yourself or anyone else. Why, like those explanations, that analysis can come later, you can learn to trust the vital compass first.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Wonderful, thank you. And then last two questions, who would you nominate for this interview? Because you admire their approach.
Dougald Hine:I would if you haven't spoken to her already, I would love to hear you talk to Elizabeth Slade, who's the Chief Officer of the Unitarians in the UK, who is a dear friend of mine, and someone I spend a lot of time thinking together with, and oh, as a a woman who's significantly younger than people who previously held the office that she holds as leader of an interesting, unusual church within the map of UK religious groups trying to find their way in post religious society. I find it constantly fascinating to hear the stuff that she's experiencing and thinking about, so I'd love to hear her answer these questions.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Wonderful. Well, I will ask you, weirdly, I was married to a Unitarian chapel in Oxford. And then the Reverend involved was like, you don't believe in God? Don't worry about it. It's fine. Sounds like the Unitarian. And then just finally, is there anything else important? You feel you have to say?
Dougald Hine:Ah, I feel like I've had a lot of words already with you here. Yeah, no, I just want to say thank you. Actually, David, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Well, it's my pleasure. And I've enjoyed it too. And there'll be lots of shownotes for this, including where you can go and buy the book, which is excellent. I had a chance to read it just now in the pre publication version, and I do highly recommend it. And I just want to salute one of the things you said right at the start about using words and silence to shift the space of possibility. I think, hopefully, that has been something people have experienced today with your words, and fortunately, not too much silence. And given that we're on the corner of the radio, and I think that creating spaces for possibility. It's interesting. My the mantra I write every workday for myself is accepting today's realities. Growing tomorrow's possibilities. I think that's the spirit that I take. We're saying and so thank you very much. Thank you.
