Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,52
a revelation of what is undoubtedly to come, and in some sense a welcoming of its arrival. It rejected all suggestions that we might negotiate a means of evading this collapse—through political consensus, through technological ingenuity, through pursuing a more sustainable form of consumerism—and that everything might somehow turn out fine. As a species, it argued, we are in collective denial about our way of life and its long-term prospects for survival; even when we face up to the magnitude of the crisis we face, we tell ourselves it is merely a crisis—a difficult but soluble situation, rather than an approaching cataclysm.
Kingsnorth and Hine had drawn a lot of negative attention for the unremitting pessimism of their vision of the future, but what struck me most on reading it was its undercurrent of stern utopianism. As is the way of much apocalyptic writing, from John of Patmos to Karl Marx, the manifesto was animated by the desire for the immolation of a corrupted world, and the hope of witnessing a new dawn rising above its ashes. Beyond the uncompromising insistence that the rising tide of climate change would wash the Earth clean of our civilization and all its works, the Dark Mountain Project argued for a displacement of humanity from its seat as the center and source of all meaning in the world, and for an enactment of this displacement in new forms of “uncivilized” art and literature and storytelling. And what it ultimately gestured toward was something strangely hopeful, at least on its own terms: a world beyond the collapse of technological civilization in which humans—those humans who survived such a cataclysm—would find themselves no longer above or beyond nature, but within it, in a place where such categories as “human” and “nature” were no longer useful distinctions. “The end of the world as we know it,” as they put it in the manifesto’s closing lines, “is not the end of the world full stop. Together we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”
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On the evening of my arrival in Alladale, I had very real trouble getting my tent into any kind of tent-like configuration. The opaque disk of the sun was disappearing behind the great shadowing slopes of the western highlands, and the remaining light was dwindling inexorably, and I was, I realized, in serious danger of having to get the thing up in the dark, with only a headlamp to light my way, when a young woman who’d had her own nearby tent up for a while now poked her head through its entrance flap and asked whether I needed a hand. I will not pretend that accepting her offer did not involve a certain measure of masculinity-related discomfort, but it seemed to me that the embarrassment of politely declining, only to then continue foundering in tent-purgatory, would be exponentially more severe than the comparatively benign embarrassment of accepting.
“I used to work in a camping store,” she said, “so I’m pretty used to putting tents up. They’re tricky bastards, some of them.”
I was immediately struck by the empathic skillfulness of this revelation, by the deft footing with which the woman had positioned herself not as a human being of normal competence, but as someone whose time as a camping store employee had endowed her with a special facility in tent construction—thereby skillfully maneuvering me out of my own position as an idiot who could not put up his own tent, and into the much less mortifying position of a person who, never having worked in a camping store, could be forgiven for not having been initiated into these esoteric practices. The profound emotional intelligence of this tactic was, in truth, even more impressive to me than the efficiency and speed with which she was putting up my tent in the dwindling light, which I knew was something any fool could do, myself excepted.
This woman’s name was Amelia Featherstone. (It is only now that I’m writing about her, incidentally, that her name’s amalgamation of emblematically opposed images—feather, stone—strikes me as somewhat heavy-handed in its paradoxical poeticism. This is hardly something Amelia herself could be blamed for, but neither is it something for which I can be held accountable.) As she put up my tent, and as I pretended to help her, she told me she was from Melbourne and that she worked for the government, in ecological conservation. This revelation prompted me to talk