My worst case scenario is ....a kind of hyper-developed society at just below the level at which ecological limits are reached. In other words, you can keep this over-civilized anthill society going indefinitely. Everyone's in a race. ..... There's a kind of division developing in the green movement over this. The greens have failed to prevent over-development pushing ecosystems beyond their limits, and all of the traditional methods that we all tried for years don't work on anything like the scale they need to. And faced with this .... a couple of camps [are] developing. ..... One of them you could say Dark Mountain is part of, which people who see the system hitting the buffers and who think we have to negotiate our way through that, culturally and practically. The other camp is the old-fashioned cornucopians, who are coming back strongly at the moment. Steward Brand seems to be their current spiritual leader! They can also see that the old green solutions have failed, but they argue that the world populations want to live in cities and wants advanced technology and this isn't going to change, so we need to work with it. They're all about this hi-tech, centralised future with GM foods and nuclear power and hyper-capitalism and synthetic biology, and high density cities, all very controlled and rational, lots of wild nature growing outside the boundaries, you know .... we're all Gods
Paul Kingsnorth | Dark Mountain - Issue 3 | p142-143