INTRODUCTION
Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis.
It is a great joy to introduce Dougald Hine. I first came across Dougald two years ago as a speaker for the ecovillage Gathering in Denmark. Whether listening to Dougald live or online, his powerful storytelling holds great warmth, a balm for the souls awakened to these times of endings. Dougald Hine is a social thinker, a writer, and a speaker.
After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME, a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. He has collaborated with scientists, artists, and activists, serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Swedish’s national theater, and as an associate on the Center for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins, finding our place in the times of science, climate change, pandemics, and all other emergencies. He also co-hosts the Great Humbling podcast and publishes a substack called Writing Home.
I hope you enjoy our conversation and are inspired to dive deeper into the wise mind of Dougald Hine.
INTERVIEW
Eva: Today we are joined by Dougald Hine. Dougald, thank you so much for making the time to talk with me today.
Dougald: It’s a pleasure. It’s good to be here.
Eva: I’m hoping to start by asking you to share a bit of your personal journey and how it has led you to your work with the Dark Mountain Project, with the various books and projects that you’re involved in, and if you feel like adding how these experiences have shaped your approach to resilience.
Dougald: Well, my journey is that I grew up in the north of England in the 1980s and 90s. I went into working as a radio journalist in my 20s, but already before that I’d been very much alive to and shaken by the news that was coming in about climate change and about the rest of the ecological crises tangling with our ways of living. I think I had from when I was fairly young a sense both that the ways of living that were being taken for granted in the world I was growing up in were not going to last, nor was it a desirable thing that they should last, that there were things that were importantly lacking or destructive behind the surface of, in many ways, in global terms, in an ordinary sense, quite a privileged experience that I was having of the world. Relatively quickly after I started working at the BBC, I realised that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working in radio newsrooms and in the mainstream journalistic world that I was in, but I didn’t really know what alternatives there were, how you could shape a life. I had been around various kinds of activism, some of which had inspired me deeply, but I had also learned relatively early on that I’m not the most useful person on the front line in high tension conflicts of the kind that that can take you into. I also had a sense that we needed to get below the surface and the energy of a lot of the ways that we were doing activism and a lot of the ways we were framing the trouble we were in and what it called for. I was still following these lines, still trying to figure out how to use the skills in telling stories that journalism runs on in service of something else, in service of making room for other possibilities and shifting the boundaries of possibility. When I crossed paths with Paul Kingsnorth, who had been editor at The Ecologist magazine, among other things, and as we started comparing notes, it seemed as though we were asking some of the same questions about the need for a reckoning with the depth of the trouble that went beyond the urgent mutual encouragement that was one of the modes of cheering each other on, you know, we can do it, we’ll go to this year’s COP meeting and this time they’ll listen to us, that kind of spirit. We wanted to make room for something else, which might start with a kind of admission of not knowing, an admission of not believing in some of the stories you’d been meant to be propagating if you were involved in environmentalism 15 or 20 years ago, saying, you know, this is all, this trouble is deeper than we are acknowledging in the way we’re talking about it, deeper both in the sense that things are worse, but also in the sense that the roots go down a lot further than the language we’re mostly using is bringing into view. And that was the origins of what became first The Dark Mountain Manifesto and then a project with a journal and festivals and an international network of writers and thinkers and artists and musicians and all sorts of folks collaborating and just making room for a different kind of conversation. And for a good number of years, I guess from sort of 2009 when we published that manifesto to 2019, I was partly responsible for the running of Dark Mountain itself and also increasingly getting drawn into all sorts of different contexts as a consequence of what we were writing and publishing and curating with Dark Mountain. I mean, to fill in the biographical details, during that time I moved to Sweden, came to a festival in Sweden where I was speaking and met Anna, my now life partner, and moved here to live together and we started a family and in 2019, after 10 years, I stepped down from my role as co-director of Dark Mountain and by then Anna and I had already begun to open up this ongoing work that we call A School Called Home and that takes multiple forms, including online, international gatherings and series that I teach and that lead into an ongoing community called The Long Table but also where I’m sitting speaking to you from in this old shoe shop in this town of 1500 people north of Uppsala in Sweden, we have a gathering space which we use just to do things with our local community and also to bring people from our international network and our local network together for different kinds of conversations and events and all of that is woven around this language of the work of regrowing a living culture in a sense that that names part of what’s called for today and just to touch on this word resilience, I remember back in 2012 being invited to take part in a project that was called the Guild of Resilients, so resilient with a t like it’s a noun, a kind of person and the idea was that they were asking me to be a journeyer so something like a journeyman in the old guild system, wandering around Europe for a summer collecting stories about resilience and I said well I’ve looked at the definitions of resilience and a lot of them are relatively technical and scientific and I’m going to assume that if you wanted somebody to collect stories about that you would have asked someone who has more of a background in that, so I’m going to interpret this in terms of cultural resilience. The question that I carried into the places I went that summer was what is cultural resilience, what makes for cultural resilience, what makes the difference between going on and giving up in hard times and what is the role of culture within that and I guess that inquiry is part of how Anna and I ended up with this frame of creating a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture, recognising that there is something brittle, something lacking in resilience in the dominant culture, the dominant ways of inhabiting the world that we’ve inherited from recent generations of what we sometimes talk about in terms of modernity and so given that it seems reasonable to assume that there are hard times around and ahead, what part of the work that that implies involves learning again how to be human together in place and over distance in ways that maybe bring us into a humbler relationship with the whole history of the ways in which humans have been human together, one that doesn’t present where we’re starting from as the summit of some grand arc of progress but actually recognises that for complex reasons we got out of practice, lost some of the habits that have been a matter of life and death in most times and places where humans have been human together and that we are going to need again if we’re going to hold together and make life work under uncertain circumstances in the times to come.
Eva: Thank you so much. I’m very curious what some of the major learnings from this time of asking this question were. What did you come back, what was your report like?
Dougald: Well, I remember that one of the first things that happened was my old friend Vinay Gupta. When I lived in London, I created a thing with Vinay and a few others called the Institute for Collapsonomics and Vinay got wind of this project that I was doing and he said, okay, Dougal, you have to go to Finland and ask people about Sisu and I went and spent a morning walking around the streets of Helsinki with a sign that said Sisu, interviewing people and asking people to tell me about this word. It’s one of those culturally important, untranslatable words that names a quality which is part of the self-narrative of Finnish culture that has something to do with resilience. Among the answers that people gave me, they said, Sisu is what meant that we won the Winter War against the Russians or Sisu, it means you carry on even through the grave or Sisu, it means you climb the tree with your ass first. It was fascinating because as we got into this conversation about this strange word, people were able to make jokes about the almost foolish stubbornness that they saw as an element of their cultural character and also objects of pride, bits of important history woven into it. There is nowhere in the world where I could walk around the streets with a sign that has the word resilience on it and get into those kinds of conversations with people because resilience is what the sociologist called a plastic word, a word that starts off within a specialist technical scientific vocabulary and then gets brought out into a larger conversation wearing a white coat, wearing the authority of that technoscientific background but with a set of resonances. None of that is to say that it can’t be a useful word that’s appropriate to certain settings. But if we’re wanting to work culturally, it’s worth noticing the difference between language that is specific and grounded and woven into stories and that can be reworked. I know another thing that someone told me that morning about Sisu, they said, it’s a word that’s as powerful as a swear word but not negative. And I thought, wow, I don’t even know if modern English has words like that. So finding words like that, finding ways of talking about where we are and what’s called for that speak to the heart and the gut and the history and the sense of humor as well as the head and the analysis, that’s one of the things that I came back from that trip with a clearer sense of.
Eva: Very nice. I’m wanting to jump into that communication topic a little bit already. In the Resilience Project, there was a noticeable gap between ecovillages recognizing their unpreparedness as the project was exploring this plus 2.5 degree global warming scenario and the bright optimism that many community members still seem to share for the future. And you’ve already mentioned this a little bit in your introduction but you have a quote that says, I remain convinced that the world is deep in trouble, deeper than we know how to talk about. And I’m wanting to tap into the second part a bit. Why don’t we know how to talk about this? What do you believe the disparity that we observed in the ecovillage project reveals about human nature or human culture and our approach to climate resistance as we’re referring to it?
Dougald: I think that the question that I was asking in the context in which I wrote those lines that you quoted is about whether the whole frame of talking about climate change might be less helpful than we think it is as a way into facing up to getting to grips with the depth of the trouble. And I was thinking that as well when you talk about the 2.5 degrees and the sort of bright optimism and the gap, in order to find ways of talking about the depth of the trouble, we have to go places that the language of 2.5 degrees or even the language of climate change won’t take us. We have to go places of loss and longing. We have to let in questions that that language doesn’t bring to the table. The one that I often come back to is how did we find ourselves here in the first place? Is it a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry that it turns out seven generations down the line that the fossil fuels on which we built modern industrial societies were having all of these knock-on effects for the climate system? Or is it a consequence of a way of approaching the world, a way of seeing and treating everything and everyone, which would always have brought us to such a pass, even if the atmospheric chemistry and the chemistry of those fuels had been different? And I think that second possibility takes us into the deep. It brings into the picture things that go missing if we’re talking as if it’s a matter of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry. And that also has to involve a reckoning with the multiple kinds of loss and destruction that have been written into the story of modernity. The colonial devastation of so many cultures and ways of inhabiting the world that is the other side of the coin of the destruction of landscapes and ecosystems. The way that those two things go together and are produced together and feed in and out of each other. And the ways in which even in the societies that are taken as a whole, the winners of those games of modernity and coloniality, the places where most of the benefits accrued, all kinds of damage was also going on here, whether it’s in industrialised landscapes and communities, and then the post-industrial wreckage left when those industries are globalised and moved elsewhere, or whether it’s in the cultural hollowing out that is the other side of the material privilege of those who are the winners within those societies. The loss of some really basic skills of being human and inhabiting the world that happens when we become so reliant on the power of money and the power of the state to organise things that we almost forget that for most of our history humans had to get together and do things in ways and for reasons that don’t fall into that twin logic of, you know, the power of money, I’m doing this because someone told me to. The power of the state, I’m doing this because someone who has power over me told me to. So yeah, someone paid me to or someone told me to are those two twin logics. And they dominate, they take up so much of the space in rich societies and developed societies that we almost grow up without learning or noticing that there’s still a lot that doesn’t fit into either of those categories that our ways of living depend on, so much of the care that goes into our ways of living, so much of the relationships to land, even within mainstream farming, you know, you meet farmers and these are people who are very often part of an intergenerational relationship with land and creatures that may have been distorted and bent out of all shape and made destructive by aspects of modern industrial farming, but that still only goes around because people are willing to live lives that are far less materially prosperous than those who are eating their food on the whole, because of a sense of being bound into something that matters, you know, that goes a long way through the world of agriculture even today in ways that are hard to compute for people who are working on financial markets or sitting in think tanks. So all of these things and all of the grief that goes with the destruction and the distortion needs to be brought to the table, brought into our conversation about the trouble that we’re in, if we’re going to get past that shiny optimism and not just lose ourselves in despair either, you know, often we produce optimism of that kind because we fear that the alternative is a despair that would be the end of everything. One of the things I realized after a few years with Dark Mountain was that part of the work that we were doing with that project was holding a space in which there wasn’t a rush to action or to answers, in which people could admit things that they might feel ashamed to say in other settings and not feel judged and not feel alone. And by doing that, I was watching people go on a journey to the far side of despair where we’re changed by allowing that into the room. But in order for any of that to happen, we also have to break this kind of spreadsheet logic that underwrites the idea of progress. You know, progress is used as a signpost to point to lots of good things, including achievements that we would not gladly lose. But nonetheless, as an idea, in order for it to make sense, progress means movement towards. So you have to be able to measure, are we getting closer or further away? So you have to be able to depict history as if it is the kind of thing that can be measured on a single dimension. And in order to do that, although we don’t often admit it, you have to be implying that history is like a cost benefit analysis, that the losses of history can be balanced out against its gains to produce a single number that is going up or down from year to year that tells us whether we’re on track of progress or whether we’re getting off track. And the problem with that is that, yes, history is made up of gains as well as losses, but the losses are like bereavements. They’re like grief. They need to be grieved, not treated as if they’re numbers that can be cancelled out against the positive numbers within what’s been going on. And if we don’t admit that, if that’s outside of what’s conceivable within the logics on which our culture, our society is running, then that ungrieved loss is like an untended wound that will be going septic and going toxic and boiling over. And sure, we’re seeing plenty of that in one way or another in our societies these days. But recognising how deep the source of that is in the ways of thinking, the ways of telling the story that tend to dominate in the spaces of those who think of themselves as the good guys, the ones who are on the progressive side of the argument, on the right side of history, and so on. That’s part of why I say that the trouble we’re in is deeper than gets admitted in the ways that it’s normally presented in lots of good, well-intentioned, progressive, activist and environmentalist settings. And if we can make room for that grieving, for that space in which we move towards the far side of despair, then I think that we can also catch sight of stranger kinds of hope that can give us things to steer by for the next step along the way in the journey into the strange world that we’re headed for, not least because of what climate change is bringing us.
Eva: Absolutely. I think you’ve also touched on another nerve of society, which is our incapacity to grieve, and this exclusion of death in the cycle of progress. This is, for me, a very profound thing that has been shunned over the past centuries. You talk about this journey to progress and all of the important things that have been lost in this second scenario of the relationship we have created, when I say we, I mean the general society with our planet, this monetization, this individualism and commoditizing life. You also talk about a lot of the things that we’ve forgotten as a society, and then without knowing exactly what you mean here, I’m wondering if this may allude to some of the optimism that we see from the ecovillages, because a lot of the ecovillages within the network really work with these concepts, they work with grief, they work with healing the relationship between the natural world. I’m wondering if maybe a few of these pieces that have already been recovered, allude to some of the optimism.
Dougald: Yeah, I think you’re probably putting your finger on something there. I think that it’s worth us distinguishing between different things that can ride under the name of optimism, where particularly within mainstream society, there is a great deal of optimism that is wishful thinking, or a kind of forced optimism often in environmentalist circles where you have to convince yourself to believe in something that in your heart you’re not convinced you believe in, because otherwise that would be giving up and giving up is the worst thing that could happen. I’ve been looking for where are the people and the settings that seem to be living on the far side of despair, living in a relationship of awareness of the depth of the trouble that is not simply being stuck in the doom scrolling on Facebook of the endless salami slices of the apocalypse that the Guardian will serve up in its newsfeed. It’s not just that it has diminished returns, at a certain point that’s actively unhelpful. We don’t need more information about the factual layer of the trouble. That becomes a way of avoiding where we are and what we could do. I definitely notice that the recurring pattern of the people who impress me by their being in a place of a grounded hope, that is not in denial about the depth of the trouble we’re in, is that these are people who are getting back involved with place, with living creatures, landscapes, with the life of human community and culture.
In one way or another, through doing that, it’s not that you show up and present the evidence of what you’ve done and what you’re doing in your little corner as the proof that the big story about the trouble we’re in is wrong. It’s not that. It’s that you’re like the climber who is on a rock face and each hold only comes into view as it comes into reach. It’s what rock climbers have described to me. They said you can be looking further up the rock face and you can’t see how it’s going to be climbable and a hold will present itself. It’s not just that it was objectively out of view because of where you were before. It’s that it was subjectively out of view because your hand wasn’t going to reach it yet and you couldn’t see it until it came there. I think that’s a lot like the way that we navigate these times, which is not to say that there isn’t use in stepping back and looking at the rock face, which is what the factual layer can give us. But then you have to get on the rock face. You have to be there. You have to have a direction that you’re moving in and be there with your vulnerability as an embodied creature. We’re not talking about climbing a rock face here. We’re talking about the things that feed us in body and in soul. Those practices, getting back involved with those, awakens memory in the bones apart from anything else. The things that you’re doing are things that your ancestors would recognize. You might be doing them a bit differently. You might be in a halfway place of relearning how to do something but still being reliant on things that you know are products of an industrial supply chain and the rest of it. But nonetheless, the activities in which we come alive and in which we have this sense of finding the next hold, I think, tend to be activities which, unlike many of the things that take up our time in the societies most of us are living in just now, would be more or less recognizable to our ancestors 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 years ago. There’s a clue there as well. There is a kind of hope, which I think you’re right in saying, is likely to be kindled in many of the communities and spaces that are part of the ecovillages network, amongst other places, that looks like that, that feels like that.
Eva: I love how active that task is as well, because everyone’s ancestors are different and unique, and it’s not, you need to pick up this skill or this habit, it’s do the research, and as you say, get on the wall. I also, as you were talking through this metaphor, thought back to earlier, you were talking about how in our society we try to measure things, and to make progress it has to be measurable, and this is actually one of the aspects of the Resilience Project, we were tasked to measure resilience, and for me, hearing this metaphor, this task is almost strange, because I have observed in my own life how flexible resilience is, in my definition of it, and you might not see the handhold, because in that previous moment, you might not have had the capacity to hold it, but as we are faced with these new situations, we grow and adapt, whether or not we are ready to.
Dougald: The thing about measurement is, it’s not bad, it’s not wrong, it’s just that it doesn’t reveal to us a truer reality than the reality of experience, rather it’s a tool which can sometimes be made useful to us in the reality of experience, which is the reality we actually inhabit, but there’s been a tendency in modern societies to get that back to front, and to think that the things that are revealed by techniques of measuring and counting are a truer reality than the deceptive reality of experience, and that’s where we go astray, so measure by all means, but put that in service to a larger reality, rather than treating it as the objective, authentic revelation of what’s really real, hidden behind the misleading surface of the world that we inhabit and embody ourselves in and experience.
Eva: Absolutely, I am also the communications leader for GEN, and through this, I work a lot with questions around cultural transformation, and how do we communicate in such a way that really entices people to shift their mindsets, to turn away from this individual society, and embrace, as you say, activities that their ancestors would recognise, and I’m curious if you have found any answers to my questions along your journey.
Dougald: I find increasingly that I’m less interested in starting a conversation from talking about climate change, I’m more interested in starting it from talking about beauty, and meaning, and skill, because I think that the same trajectories that have given us climate change have also brought us to societies which, despite their achievements, are strangely lacking in beauty and meaning and skill, compared to almost any human community that we can find evidence of historically, and I find that just telling stories that brings that into view is in itself a way of waking something up in encounter that’s happening when we’re using language, and so I mean, I had a conversation not long ago with the artist Caroline Ross, where we talked about this, and we called the recording of that, Taking Beauty Seriously, and those are the kinds of places now that I feel more and more called to go, and then I think it’s about embodying that, because if we don’t embody it, then it doesn’t matter what we’re saying, and if we do, doesn’t matter that much what we’re saying, because we are, you know, as the creatures that we are, we do have a kind of navigational tool, what the Brazilian psychoanalyst Sully Rolnick calls the vital compass, this kind of gut level ability to steer towards the things that we feel ourselves coming alive in the presence of, and away from the things that we feel ourselves slowly dying in the presence of. Now, there is work needed to awaken and connect to that capacity to navigate in that kind of way, because we’re also operating, you know, part of the lack of beauty is that we’re operating in anaesthetic cultures, which means both cultures lacking in beauty and anaesthetized, numbed cultures, cultures which, in order to even go on existing within these settings, because of the cultural brokenness, we have normalized habits of numbing, whether it’s the drugs, or whether it’s the Netflix subscription, you know, one way or another to get through the day, to get through the week. Totally understandably, for many people around us, there are habits of numbing the very parts of us that might be sensitive to those twitches on the vital compass. But nonetheless, when something happens that is full of life, the twitch is still there, we still feel it. I remember Martin Shaw, the storyteller, talking about this. Martin will say, you know, people talk to me about kids today, having these splintered attention spans, because everyone’s on TikTok and so on. And he’s like, no, no, I can get a group of kids and like a lot of his life and work, Martin’s been working with kids who are on the boundary of ending up being sent to prison. If I can get those kids around a fire, their attention will be held for an hour and a half, as I tell a story that’s 5000 years old. And I’ve seen that happen with my own eyes. I know that’s true. So often we locate the problem in the wrong place, because we’re so lacking in examples of what fully alive would look like. But we know it, like in our bones, even when we don’t have the kind of cultural transmission that we might wish we had been born into. We know it when we see it, some part of us does, and is drawn to it. And so really, below the surface of communication, and there are other things we could talk about, about the different languages that are useful for bringing a project to life. But at some deep level, the question is, what is carried on your words? What is the music beneath the words? Because if that’s not right, if there is an energy of fear and panic and anxiety running beneath our words, then the invitations we make, however rationally, people might rationally go, yes, everything this person is saying makes sense. And there’s a certain fraction of society that is actually guided by that, but it’s a small fraction. Most of us are more in touch with this gut level intelligence than that. And therefore, even if it makes sense, we will steer away from it, if that’s the energy that’s running on it. And that’s why we need, you know, other practices and skills. And just looking for the things that are the oasis of beauty and meaning and skill within the desert of a crumbling modernity, and then we’ll find the words that are needed.
Eva: Through your words, I think you’ve also given me an answer on how to create this cultural shift. And for me, it would come down to the individual for taking the initiative to change the context to build a fire and tell a story that’s centuries old, and change the context for the capacity to listen.
Dougald: There’s a quote that I love from the great Marxist thinker and storyteller and novelist and artist, art critic, John Berger, where he is near the end of his life, he’s in his late 80s. This is probably 10 years ago or something. He says, you know, we’re living in a new dark age. And he says, in an illuminated age, there are these big paths into the future, that you can kind of come together and sort of march like a May Day parade into the future. And that’s what solidarity looks like. That’s what working for change looks like. So in a dark age, there’s no motorway to march off down. What you have are these little paths that are made by people on their own, people finding each other, people walking in small groups. And that’s the kind of path that’s open to us in these times. And I love that passage, you know, especially because it’s someone coming from that history and that political and intellectual tradition and recognizing that this is the nature of what’s called for now. And so the sort of cultural work, you know, it probably involves finding each other, like finding one or two people that does nonetheless, even that finding each other relies on small moments of courage, from an individual making a move, trying out an invitation that feels vulnerable. And then it’s practicing, and often practicing things that are small and hard to, hard to name in ways that sound impressive, in the contexts that we’re coming from. A lot of the work that we do with The Long Table, which is the community of people who’ve come through one or more of the online series that I teach, involves just getting together regularly in the same groups, with some very simple tools for meeting and sharing time together. And with an ongoing reflection, in which we notice what we’re learning from that. And quite early on, the Australian artist Kelly Lee Hickey said to us on one of those calls, she said, I’ve realized that when we meet regularly on Zoom, at the same moment in the week or the month, time becomes the space in which we meet. And then another image came to us, which is the image of, you know how the hare doesn’t make a burrow like a rabbit does. So it doesn’t go under the ground and make its place that it dwells. It lives on top of the ground, and it will have a patch in the grass that it keeps coming back to. And that patch has the imprint of the shape of its body, waiting to receive it as it returns there the next time to sleep. And something similar happens through practices of repeated gathering. Whether it’s, you know, fire keeping in your local area, or whether it’s getting together with the same group of people at the same moment every Tuesday afternoon on Zoom. We make something in a gentle, undramatic way, through those repeated practices of gathering, that becomes a shape that’s waiting for us, a vessel that can hold us. And, you know, sometimes on a Tuesday afternoon in our heartbeat call, all that might happen is that everyone shares something from what’s going on in their garden just now. There’s no need to perform, something big and emotional and dramatic doesn’t have to happen in order for people to go away satisfied from the call. And I think that’s we have to be really attuned to is the addiction to drama, the addiction to the performance of depth, the performance of authenticity. And instead, what we’ve noticed is, you know, sometimes someone comes along, and something big needs to be said. It might be something that’s happened personally for them, that gets spoken into the space. Sometimes it’s a kind of chain reaction of things that are shared by different people, that takes us to a space of depth and rawness and vulnerability. But because that doesn’t need to happen, when it does happen, it’s not dramatized, it’s not performed, it’s not feeding anyone’s dependency or addiction. And that to me, although it’s a very small thing, I feel like we are practicing and learning some of the things that have been essential to how human communities have made life work in other times and places. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, who wrote Hospicing Modernity, she’s also known as Vanessa Andreotti, she’s part of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. I remember Vanessa saying to me one time after some experience that she and a colleague of hers who was a Canadian First Nations man had had, and they’d been talking to each other, and they’d ended up saying to each other, working inside these institutions of modernity, it’s as if this culture is just everyone sitting in kindergarten all their lives singing the ABC song over and over. They’re like, that’s how primitive and how crude the ways of living of the dominant culture look from the perspective of mature cultures that have lived through the endings of their worlds and are still here and still figuring out how to be part of ongoingness. And so, you know, when I describe something like that Tuesday afternoon gathering that we have as part of the Long Table, I always say these days during the series where new groups are arriving and getting involved with the Long Table, I say, look, we’re in remedial class, me too. We weren’t born into a culture where we were taught these things by the age of eight in the way that we would have been in many times and places. We’re having to teach each other them in, you know, the middle years of life. And that’s okay. We need to cut ourselves a bit of slack about that and be able to laugh at our own foolishness rather than have to be either the heroes or the villains of the story of what’s happening in the world. And then, yeah, get practicing, because practice is a over a lifetime and it applies to that terrible sound that the eight-year-old in the next room is making in their first year of trying to learn to play a violin. Practice is a word that has room for a whole trajectory, including our lack of skill and our starting from places of uninitiated beginnings.
Eva: You speak so beautifully. I’m very happy that you’re here sharing your wisdom with us today. For me, it sounds like you’ve shared a lot of practices that build resilience in you. And I’m wondering if you have more to say on that. How do practices like the long table personally result in your ability to continue walking in this world?
Dougald: I think the simplest answer is the feeling that I have when I arrive onto one of those calls or into a room with a group of those people where the heart says yes, the guts and the bones say good. This feels like a good place to be. And that can happen even in the context of a Zoom room where most of the people there are people I’ve never met in the flesh. That’s a mystery. And yet it’s true. It happens. I know it. And that’s something that feeds me. And in the process, having convened and sharing in the hosting of that, I get to see and contribute to others being fed. And if we all found in one way or another, both ways of noticing what really feeds us as distinct from the things that are like binging on a McDonald’s meal or whatever your equivalent is, and also ways in which we can feed others. And especially in that last bit, I think, especially for those of us who are heirs of privilege in one way or another, there’s a terrible risk involved in allowing it to be possible that we might actually have something to contribute. Because secretly below the surface, below the bluster, the story about what humans are like, and the way we show up in the world as creatures that modernity has been carrying is a very dark one. I know that people sometimes will go on and sometimes with good reason about, you know, the dark picture of what humanity is like that Christianity or monotheistic religions have and so on. Now, I as somebody who has been fed by those traditions, among others, would say, yeah, I understand why some people’s experience and why a lot of the historical way that those traditions have shown up would contribute to that. But they’ve got nothing on the underlying story of Hobbes and modern free market economics, and even of whole currents within environmentalism of what the human being as a creature is like. We need a story that has room for us being a presence within the world that is not simply or automatically a destructive presence. And we’ve been cut off from the experiences that would allow us that story. So we that’s part of why I bring and try and pass around these smaller stories of instances of humans showing up in ways that look more like that. And I mean, a book that comes to mind that is full of gifts for that would be Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And she has that moment in it where she talks about asking her undergraduate students to make a list of examples of humans having a destructive impact on the living world. And they can fill three pages without pausing for breath. And then she asks them to come up with examples of humans having a beneficial impact. And they sit there with their pens hovering over their paper frozen. And she says, it’s not because those examples aren’t out there. But it is often because we have lived lives where we’re so cut off from any involvement with what feeds us and with what we might be feeding, that we don’t have much experience of that. And again, this is one of the reasons why I think you might be detecting a grounded hope within the ecovillages networks that gives some counterweight to that, because it is a context in which it’s normal to have experience of being involved in a living, ongoing, contributing way with other species, other creatures, other beings and landscapes. And we need to share that experience and invite more people into it one way or another.
Eva: Absolutely. This theme has come up for me a lot in my life over the past few days, is we are looking to settle in a very wild piece of land, and really speak to this fear of having a negative impact. And one of the stories from Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass also is a reassurance for me when they talk about a study on sweetgrass, and how the patches of sweetgrass that went unharvested, were the ones that died, and the ones that had the attention of humans, were the ones that thrived. And this calms my soul. What if we’re meant to be here?
Dougald: Yeah. I think that there’s a secret fear that we’re a mistake, that is underpinning a lot of actually a lot of the mainstream culture and also has inflected a lot of the environmentalism that’s been born out of that culture. What if we’re meant to be here? And what if, even now, even with all of the loss that’s written into the story and all of the hardship that’s written into the story, there’s still time for us to show up and remember that?
Eva: Oh, I am needing to wrap up this interview as much as I don’t want to. I have a few last questions, one of which is, if you could inspire one major shift in culture through your work, what would it be?
Dougald: It would be people meeting each other in the places where we find ourselves, it might be a place where we’re staying put or a place we’re passing through, in ways that are not defined by identity. They’re not defined by what kind of person I am, who I am like, who’s like me, who’s other. And that we start practicing some simple things that can be passed along, things that are so simple, they can spread by word of mouth. That make it a little easier to start doing that in the places where we find ourselves. And you know, those practices probably don’t involve mentioning climate change, or lots of the other things that, you know, clearly animate the work that I’m doing and a part of how I ended up here. But actually recovering this capacity for being human together involves not starting from having this whole big story that we need to invite everyone together and screen a film about to inform people and then form a group about, you know, the stories worth inhabiting aren’t made that way. The stories worth inhabiting are made together through getting alongside each other, and taking one step at a time, doing things that our ancestors would recognize, without it all having to be theorized or analyzed or mapped out. And those of us who have something to contribute by theorizing and analyzing and mapping out, we can get together in the corner and have those conversations. And we can hopefully be helpful to others. But the world isn’t changed by everyone getting pulled into those conversations, or everyone who likes having those conversations living together in the same village. Like each village probably only needs a small number of those people. And then we need ways of connecting up the villages so that we can get together in the guilds of our different sets of skills with people who live elsewhere, but share these kinds of preoccupations or practices. And that’s part of why, so long as it’s around, I find myself using the internet to convene the kinds of conversations and groups that we do as that side of the work of our school.
Eva: Absolutely. My last question was on passing on advice to listeners that might still be in this sense of overwhelm or panic in the state of the world. But I’m wondering if you haven’t already given it in the passing on the little things, like what if we were meant to be here?
Dougald: Yeah, well, let’s just linger a moment longer with that question, because it’s real. I’ve been in those times of spiraling in the fear and the panic. And, you know, that can be a season that we need to pass through now and then to strip off a layer of protective skin and experience the rawness of the depth of the trouble. And then there’s something there about the need to be kind to ourselves and to each other, the need to not sit completely alone with those kinds of feelings, but to find the settings in which it’s possible to get together, to have that person you can talk to about those things. And then really important to the question of overwhelm is renouncing the sense of agency that we’ve inherited from modernity. There is a sense of agency in which in order to do something, we all need to get together and work out what the answer is. In order to do something, we need to somehow be like people sometimes might have imagined a monotheistic God to be, you know, all knowing and all powerful. So step one, we need to survey the world and know it from above with the satellite’s eye view, put it all in a spreadsheet, et cetera. Step two, we need to act from that above rather than from where we actually are, which is within unable to see the edges and the full shape of the patterns that we’re part of. And so then the what to do question, which can be where the overwhelm comes from as well, isn’t a question that needs to be answered for once and for all. It’s a question that we answer for here and for now, starting with those we find ourselves with, starting with the particular histories and gifts and the particular twitches on the vital compass that you or I have. And out of that, we find a place within a story, the full shape of which we never get to see and don’t need to see in order to be able to be acting and playing a part within it.
Eva: There is so much more to say and at this time, not more designated space for it. I am very happy that I will have the chance to maybe speak with you again at the ecovillage Gathering this summer. I’m looking forward to being back there. And I thank you so much for telling your story.
Dougald: Thank you, Eva.
OUTRODUCTION
Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis.
While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.
GEN Staff
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