My latest blog for the Huffington Post UK is now online, and I use this to look at the Dark Mountain project’s use of creative writing and political and environmental thought:
Creativity was used in a constructive manner, to provoke thought, and wasn’t so much a trivial add-on: it was core to the experience, supporting the non-fiction it accompanied. It was only upon reading this book that I realised what the project is really about: ideas, expression, discussion, a chance to blow away old ways of thinking. It is not so much about offering new answers, but possessing an intellectual fecundity in which new answers might develop. What’s more, it places a strong emphasis on the arts, something not all that common in both the environmental movement and the wider political sphere.
It’s fascinating to see fiction combining with politics in such unusual ways; more importantly, it’s wonderful to see fiction helping develop or refine such ideas, which otherwise might not have come up.
