The importance of being earnest

Since then, the poetic post-eco movement shepherded by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine has achieved a phenomenal amount, shared itself far and wide, running a series of fascinating events and discussions around Britain, published a beautiful hardback collaborative book and brought fierce momentum to their proposed reshaping of the context for environmental creativity and thought.

On Sunday I bussed into the tourist mountain town of Llangollen, north Wales, to perform at Dark Mountain's first Uncivilisation Festival.

Llangollen Pavilion hosts the International Eisteddfod and as a venue felt earthily appropriate, with the weekend-long Uncivilisation event having the flavour of a kind of Eisteddfod for the Afterwards.

Within minutes of arriving, before even soundchecking, I was deep into several intense conversations about the changing nature of the environmental movement and language, with people I'd not met before.

The immense keenness with which people wanted to continue discussions that had started in workshops and performances across the weekend was very impressive - with a potent energy still visible late on Sunday afternoon, despite the exhaustion.

The bad news was, I missed all the fireworks.

The night before, George Monbiot had taken to the stage in ebullient form and attempted to slap down large swathes of the idea.

Never lacking in audacity, Monbiot must obviously have felt directly threatened enough by his ongoing discussion with Kingsnorth in the pages of the Guardian - where the younger Dark Mountain writer is gaining a clear upper hand - to take a strident, almost vicious attacking approach, instead of opening further potentially rich avenues of real dialogue.

I think the core idea of Dark Mountain is that we are already living through a fundamental and - crucially - unstoppable change in (or end of) our "civilisation" because of the environmental and social damage done. Put simply, we cannot fix it. Instead, we need to alter our ways of thinking to prepare for, or at least acknowledge the reality of, whatever comes next.

Further, rather than being a hardcore campaigning ideology, Dark Mountain is predominantly a wellspring of creative culture - so they're talking about how we write, compose and think artistically, as well as how we "run our business" in our creative industry. In this way it edges towards accepting genuine spiritual contribution.

This is partly why I like the movement so much and find such common ground there, as the poetic is less drastically overlooked in the discussion process than elsewhere.

Where Monbiot has previously given real credence in print to the underlying inconvenient truths in Dark Mountain, this time by all accounts he kicked around his own exaggerated and parodied versions of what they are trying to say.

I hate this kind of fake argument. The two things that speedily screw up a debate are: "What you're trying to say is ... and this is why you're wrong," when the explanation itself is a bunk parody of the other person's viewpoint, and "you don't have the right to make this point because..." which is excluding to the point of insanity. Both are just fucking stupid, though we're all tempted to use them occasionally.

I only heard about the wrestling match after the fact, and of course from one side only - from the somewhat shellshocked people who'd been respectful of Monbiot's integrity and powerful background knowledge, yet felt his fire badly misdirected.

However, I'm more sceptical of motive, even unconscious. It is too easy, operating as an activist for change but existing day-to-day within the dominant corporatised system, to suppress beneath one's surface the mixed feelings about the continual need to perpetuate status or validity. Even the loudest shouters have to do their accounts every once in a while.

Monbiot remains one of the biggest fishes in the medium-sized pond of the "real" environmental movement (as opposed to the now dominant voice of self-interested corporate and government greenwash) and he comes with a lot of baggage even before he opens his mouth.

Just like rock stars in my world, his brand walks into the room before his brain does. I think it is increasingly hard to maintain a clarity of purpose against what I have come to believe is genuinely inevitable defeat. Not in an apocalyptic "the end of the world is nigh" sense - although it is - but in a sense of knowing which argument to have at which time.

In fact any group of people coming up with positive road maps forward right now need to be listened to and have their actual processes discussed, not just clumsily discarded.

Perhaps all I want - or need - to say is this. Dear George, for evil to prevail, all the good have to do is be dicks.

I was obviously still in the rhythm of the indie rock tour, despite the different surroundings, because later on I got badly drunk and was a bit of a dick myself. It's easy to go there, when there's so much to say and hear. But at least when I was onstage (the important bit) I held it together and did my job.

More than that, I wasn't bringing anyone down and even when I lost the plot, it was in a spirit of positive love and curiosity. Anyway, it's been a lot of touring and that's another story.

Perhaps George Monbiot can grow a pair and challenge the internalised insecurity to take onboard a genuinely new thought.