Page 95 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

At the same time, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports the warming-driven

death spiral of Arctic sea ice hit a staggering new May low. May 2016 saw Arctic sea ice

extent drop “about 600,000 square kilometers below any previous year in the 38-year

satellite record”. — from an article by Joe Fromm in the online forum Climate Progress.

Closer to where I live, after a warm winter, it was cold for weeks this spring and there

were no cherry blossoms. Now a surfeit of swallowtail butterflies has appeared, sucking

nectar out of my garden’s wild phlox; hawks nest a couple of blocks away and send

keening cries from silver maple trees onto passersby below. Cars speed past. A strong

wind blows out of the west. In the park a mother hovers over her 13-month-old son who

wanders among the dogs. He’ll only eat off the floor with his mouth, she says. He drinks

from the dog bowl and pants, and she’s fine with it for now but worries about what will

happen to him when he gets older. When he grows into this world of ours, whatever this

world will be.

Two years ago I stumbled across this quote, which appears near the end of the

Uncivilization Manifesto, a text co-authored by Paul Kingsnorth, the English writer and

activist. The manifesto, available online (http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/), led

to the founding of the Dark Mountain Project. Through Dark Mountain, Kingsnorth and

fellow travellers seek to create a new literature for this unsettled present lived on the

edge of a climate precipice and in the midst of mass species extinctions. The manifesto

states: “The shifting of emphasis from man to not-man: this is the aim of Uncivilized

writing. ...This is not a rejection of our humanity – it is an affirmation of the wonder of

what it means to be truly human.”