We’re doomed

The Guardian – April 26, 2018
Interview – ‘We’re doomed’: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
By Patrick Barkham

The 86-year-old social scientist says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it

The Guardian – Interivew – We’re Doomed

Dark Mountain editor Tom Smith and author and geographer Alastair Bonnett:
TS: Which is surely a factor in the relevance of the ideas surrounding Dark Mountain over the past decade. Though, it must be said, there is something of a paradox here, isn’t there? We live in a culture simultaneously more saturated than ever before with knowledge about environmental calamity, perhaps reeling more from its reality, yet just as people appear to tire of being modern, things are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The net grows tighter. You spoke of ‘strategies of evasion’ earlier, which could play a role. How widely embedded are these, do you think?

AB: A lot of people feel they have no control over their world; they hear all these messages about environmental catastrophe, and it’s overwhelming and very disempowering. They can do all sorts of things in response: they can pretend nature isn’t real; they can kill themselves; they can drink a lot… But one response, that the Australian environmental writer Wendy Shaw and I have identified and been writing about, is that people bunker down into a form of grief-laden consumerism. You could call it ‘shopping therapy’, I suppose, but it’s more serious than that. We have argued that it is a form of grief, and that it is a traumatic condition in which people are trying to literally buy their way out of the remorse and the sense of powerlessness that environmental loss and crisis creates.

Dark Mountain – Landscapes of Loss

The Situationists, or Situationist International, were a group of radical thinkers, writers and artists who played a prominent role in laying the groundwork for the May 1968 uprisings in France. Their analysis of 20th-century capitalism was most famously developed in the work of Guy Debord.
Wikipedia – Situationist International