My environment versus THE environment. Sucked into the maw of the Dark Mountain Project.

My environment is good. Early crocuses, hellebores, and snowdrops are all abloom. (I included the picture at the bottom just to show the color of my dining room walls.)

For the last few years I've really wanted to understand a little bit of the science of global weirding, energy sources, and all that kind of thing. So I've been reading lots of books and articles. I still don't feel like I really understand anything yet, or that I can support any decisions about anything yet -- like the Keystone oil pipeline.

Last week I read this article -- "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist" -- in a magazine, new to me, called Orion. I read all 200+ comments too, and they were almost as interesting as the article itself. For now, I'm totally smitten with what the author Paul Kingsnorth says, and maybe I'll also be smitten with his project called Dark Mountain. I've just started reading about it; it's a lot to take in. Here's a summary:

From this interview with Paul Kingsnorth:
Dark Mountain is not about ‘giving up’ or wallowing in doom or anything like that. Some people think it is, but they’re the ones who haven’t been paying attention. Dark Mountain is a process. First you give up on the unrealistic ambitions of both the mainstream growth narrative and the mainstream green narrative – creating a “sustainable” consumer democracy for nine billion people, stopping climate change, making capitalism nice and all the rest of the utopian stuff. You give up on that and then you can move on. You embrace what we might call radical honesty, and you look at what is possible and what’s not, and you see your true place in the world and in history…We call this the “hope beyond hope.” First you get real. Then you give up. Then you are re-inspired.’