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--- resilients:dougald_hine_interview [2013-02-08 07:23] – nik
+++ resilients:dougald_hine_interview [2013-02-08 07:23] – nik
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 **Interviewer**: How do you describe yourself?
-**Dougald**: My usual short answer is that I start organisations as a way to avoid finishing books: I'm a writer, but I'm easily distracted. I'm interested in how new things come about, how change happens, how new things enter social reality. The process by which something goes from being something no one quite has a way of saying to something that everyone is talking about. Or the process by which things go from being a conversation, an idea that comes out of nowhere when a group of people are jamming together around the table, to something that captures people's imagination, something that affects people in really down-to-earth, concrete ways.
+**Dougald**: My usual short answer is that I start organisations as a way to avoid finishing books: I'm a writer, but I'm easily distracted. I'm interested in how new things come about, how change happens, how new things enter social reality. The process by which something goes from being something no one quite has a way of saying to something that everyone is talking about. Or the process by which things go from being a conversation, an idea that comes out of nowhere when a group of people are jamming together around the table, to something that captures people's imagination, something that affects people in really down-to-earth, concrete ways. Because I'm interested in that stuff, I've ended up spending quite a lot of my time in the last few years being part of groups of people who create new projects, who create new organisations. There was a web start-up called School of Everything which was inspired by ideas from Ivan Ilich from the early '70s about learning webs, about using networks to route around institutions and allow us to organise our own learning. There's an agency in London called Spacemakers, which is a kind of civic ideas agency, bringing people together to reinvent and re-imagine spaces and places, and doing practical projects on the ground with local people that come out of that process. There's something called the Dark Mountain project which started as a manifesto that I wrote with a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who used to be the editor of The Ecologist magazine. That came out of our frustration with the narrowing of environmentalism down to carbon counting and looking for technical and political fixes, and us saying, unless we ask the cultural questions about how we got into this mess, we're sunk. It's only by asking those questions that we have a chance of keeping going at the point, when we realise that carbon counting and the technical fixes are not going to get us out of the mess we're in, that a lot of this is actually stuff that is just, it's going to happen. We're not going to make our current way of living sustainable. That was never either a realistic or actually a desirable goal to begin with. And from that manifesto, that's ended up being a series of books, it's ended up being a festival that happens once a year in the UK. Before I ended up in Sweden, there was already a group that had started up there which organised their own Dark Mountain Festival there, so it's kind of a cultural movement. So somehow as a way of distracting myself from these books that I actually want to be getting on with writing, I've ended up spending up most of my productive time over the last few years instead being one of the instigators of these various apparently quite different projects and organisations.
-Because I'm interested in that stuff, I've ended up spending quite a lot of my time in the last few years being part of groups of people who create new projects, who create new organisations. There was a web start-up called School of Everything which was inspired by ideas from Ivan Ilich from the early '70s about learning webs, about using networks to route around institutions and allow us to organise our own learning. There's an agency in London called Spacemakers, which is a kind of civic ideas agency, bringing people together to reinvent and re-imagine spaces and places, and doing practical projects on the ground with local people that come out of that process. There's something called the Dark Mountain project which started as a manifesto that I wrote with a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who used to be the editor of The Ecologist magazine. That came out of our frustration with the narrowing of environmentalism down to carbon counting and looking for technical and political fixes, and us saying, unless we ask the cultural questions about how we got into this mess, we're sunk. It's only by asking those questions that we have a chance of keeping going at the point, when we realise that carbon counting and the technical fixes are not going to get us out of the mess we're in, that a lot of this is actually stuff that is just, it's going to happen. We're not going to make our current way of living sustainable. That was never either a realistic or actually a desirable goal to begin with. And from that manifesto, that's ended up being a series of books, it's ended up being a festival that happens once a year in the UK. Before I ended up in Sweden, there was already a group that had started up there which organised their own Dark Mountain Festival there, so it's kind of a cultural movement. So somehow as a way of distracting myself from these books that I actually want to be getting on with writing, I've ended up spending up most of my productive time over the last few years instead being one of the instigators of these various apparently quite different projects and organisations.
 **Interviewer**: What connects all of these different projects, in your view?