Five years ago I decided to leave my job in an environmental consultancy in London and go back to university to do a PhD. Back then I was working on different kinds of projects evaluating the UK’s capacity to adapt to climate change and examining strategies for transitioning towards sustainable forms of production. But on the whole the work didn’t feel that meaningful because it didn’t address the basic problematic which sits at the heart of the sustainability challenge.

The rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ doesn’t make much of a difference, ecologically speaking, to the policies that are rolled out under this banner in order to turn around the negative environmental impacts of industrialisation, overconsumption, pollution and habitat loss. And the fundamental reason for this is that sustainability is framed as an act of balancing human needs against environmental protection – a calculation in which the needs (and wants) of humans very nearly always win out.

So I began to wonder how sustainability could be perceived to be about something else: about the kind of relationship we humans have with ‘nature’. Why does our culture treat nature as ‘resources’ and ‘raw materials’ and not as a source of meaning and well being? This was the motivation for my PhD project and the beginning of a long inquiry into how alternative views of the environment and the wider world enable ways of living that are less destructive than high-consumption modern lifestyles.

The research didn’t turn out quite like I expected it to. I had to deal with unforeseen theoretical and methodological obstacles along the way, and my case study – a UK network called the Dark Mountain Project – posed fundamental questions about my own way of seeing things. Studying worldviews proved to be anything but straightforward. But after four years of hard work I have completed the thesis and completely changed the way I think about sustainability.

The work has been underway so long that it feels a bit strange to be at the point of letting it go. But I guess it is ready to take on its own life (if only as a pdf on an obscure website in a remote corner of the internet). To send it on its way, I want to set out a few pointers for potential readers about how it can be read, which parts to hone in on and which to avoid depending on what you’re looking for.

The thesis as a whole can be read as an attempt at theorising and studying how sustainability is enacted based on different assumptions about what the world is like. A simple way of saying this is that if you see the world as made up of individuals who pursue their own interests within a world of natural resources which are treated as raw materials for human production and consumption, you are likely to treat nature as a commodity. Sustainability then has a very narrow meaning pertaining to protection of natural resources from human exploitation.

On the other hand, if you learn to experience the natural world as something which is intrinsic to human agency and well-being it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to partake in systems of meaning which cast nature as a mere material object. Seeing ‘nature’ as the matrix within which human activities unfold means that it doesn’t make much sense to think of the environment as separate from human communities. It is learning to understand this difference which is the core interest of the study.

The text is divided into three parts which are wrapped in auto-ethnographic reflections from the research journey. The first part, Chapter 2, sets out the basis on which the study theorises changes in worldviews. This conceptualises grassroots innovations as spaces of transformation in the ideas and visions that underpin specific notions of sustainability. Critiquing and expanding the conceptual framework of transitions theory, this chapter argues that the sustainability challenge is essentially onto-epistemological – about the fundamental assumptions which shape how we see reality. Drawing on insights form Radical Human Ecology, eco-linguistics and embodied cognition a framework is articulated for studying how worldviews affect the way sustainability is imagined and enacted.

Chapter 3 then develops a methodology for researching onto-epistemological change. Building on understandings from actor-network theory and narrative inquiry an approach of ‘following the narrative’ is devised for doing in-depth qualitative work with research participants. Taking inspiration from Bent Flyvbjerg’s writings on case study research, the methodology constructs the study with participants in the Dark Mountain Project as a ‘virtual reality’ which enables the reader to follow the quotes and references in the empirical chapters back to their source. This chapter also explains how I have interpreted and patterned the data I have worked with.

Chapters 4 to 6 are written as an ethnography of the Dark Mountain Project which explores how participants engage with the fundamental assumptions that underpin the meta-narrative of progress and the worldview of Western civilisation. Many inquires in the Dark Mountain Project have started from the question “what do you do when you stop pretending that social-ecological crises are problems that can be fixed?” What makes sense once we accept that the earth is going to change irrevocably during the next century? The three chapters delve into different aspects of dealing with such questions, e.g.: how to accept and cope with loss, how to avoid reproducing the logic of progress, what to do in the face of profound existential uncertainties and how to begin re-imagining and embodying a different sense of reality.

The three empirical chapters on the Dark Mountain Project can be read in their own right and stand as an auto-ethnographic exploration of learning how to see the world in different terms. This narrative is based on my own experience and, while I have brought the voices of different participants into the text, it is entirely my own construal. For readers who are interested in the Dark Mountain Project, or in how creative practice can help reshape how the world is experienced and storied, this will probably be the most interesting part.

For anyone who is interested in transitions theory, grassroots innovations or radical human ecology the theoretical part is taking each of these literatures in new directions. In my view, the most significant contribution of the theory is showing how it is possible to conceptualise transitions as a transformation in social life and avoid theorising on the basis of a disengaged mode of thinking which reproduces what I take to be epistemological and ontological fallacies. I draw on Edgar Morin, Gregory Bateson and David Bohm in particular to show how this is possible.

The methodology will be of interest to researchers who are interested in participatory and online research. My aim has been to create a credible narrative based on openness, emergence and clear ethical standards by introducing a high level of transparency into the research. I used virtual platforms extensively in the course of the research and made much of my material available online throughout my fieldwork. In the empirical chapters I weave links to this material into the text to enable the reader to understand my interpretations and complete their own reading of my narrative.

The whole thesis, and chapters 4 to 6 in particular, can be read as a virtual reality and the text is hyperlinked throughout both to enable the reader to jump to different places in the text and to visit those data points which are available online. All indices, chapter and section numbers, bibliographic references and footnotes are ‘clickable’ and will take the reader to the relevant page. Likewise references to Dark Mountain literature, individual blog posts, my own interviews and online writings are hyperlinked and will open on a page in a web browser. Each section is bookmarked so that if the thesis is opened in a pdf viewer the contents will be navigable in the sidebar.

This work can be seen as an experiment in creating a personal vocabulary that can hold the questions, activities and meanings I examine. In this way I’m using quite a few terms that I had to get to grips with myself in the course of the research. Some of these will surely fade but I hope to have built enough connections with other literatures that some will travel further. I am not claiming that these are new ideas or approaches, I have simply had to go about the research in this way because I found the available vocabularies lacking.

While the thesis reflects the questions I have grappled with in the last years – and attempts to provide straight answers – it is impossible to collapse four years of inquiry into a linear text like a PhD thesis. And the nature of a thesis is such that it has to be written from a position of knowing. But most of the time it took to research and write this text I spent not knowing the answers and sometimes unknowing my preconceived ideas. The published interviews which I developed with research participants in the course of the research provide an indication of the development of the inquiry as whole. I consider these ‘interview-conversations’ as important as the thesis itself because it was through these mutual inquires I learned what I know now.

I guess all that is left to say is that if you do read parts of this work, find inspiration or connections in there, I’d love to hear from you. While I have now closed the last chapter on this project I’m pursuing many of the ideas in there in other contexts and I’d be excited to hear what you think.

You’ll find the thesis here.