The Monthly Salon: January
Plus some events coming up, in Ireland, England and America
Hello everyone. It’s conversation time again. Before we start though, there are three events coming up that I want to tell you about. These will be the only public events I will be doing until the autumn, when my book on the Machine is finally due out. More on that another day.
Before then, I will be:
In Galway City, Ireland, very soon - Saturday 15th February - for a day-long event with Martin Shaw, Paul VanderKlay and others. There will panel discussions, conversation, music and poetry. We’ll be circling around the topic of Christianity, culture and civilisation. A few tickets remain.
In London, England, on Monday 17th March, giving a talk at the Temenos Academy about the Orthodox Christian understanding of nature, and our place within it. You can find out more, and buy advance tickets, here.
In Wyoming, USA, from 27th to 29th June, for the ‘Doomer Optimism campout.’ at the Wagon Box Inn. This will be a weekend of discussions about the Machine, nature, human nature, technology, land, culture and all sorts of related issues, interspersed with music, conversation, dips in the river, fishing, walks, chats at the bar and all sorts of other Western-type things. I’m encouraging my American readers to come along; I think you’ll like it. You can read more about the Wagon Box here. It’s a great place.
With that done, we can move on to your thoughts, ideas and questions. It’s 2025, and I’m wondering how my readers are feeling about it. There are obviously political shifts going on, especially in the US. But there are technological shifts in the air too - AI is advancing fast and unpredictably, for starters. The climate itself is literally shifting, along with our ways of seeing the world. Things are changing, but also accelerating. How are you feeling about it? Who has a new year’s resolution they want to share? Over to you, to talk about that - or something else entirely.
OK, so I am a Trump supporter who is taking a terrible journey down into schadenfreude. it’s not nice of me, but I can’t resist.
Do you hate me? Do you feel sorry for me? Can you concede he’s doing the right things? Are any readers of this Substack with me?
U.S. commenter here. I came to your work, Paul, through your environmental writings, and stayed for your discourses on the Machine. So I will try to keep my comments to current events as they relate to those two topics.
The Trump administration is going to set us - and in this case, by "us" I mean the world - farther behind in addressing the sixth great extinction (species loss) and the climate crisis. To be clear, I believe the Machine has already driven us collectively past the tipping point where humanity could "fix" or "solve" these things. But I still hoped for a slowing down of damage, for harm reduction. I hoped humanity might come to live more simply and locally, by goresight and choice rather than being forced to by elements of societal collapse (from pollinators being out of phase with blooms to widespread market and trade disruptions, etc... everything is connected).
Business-as-usual IS the Machine, and that was certainly true of prior administrations. AND the Trump administration is accelerating the Machine, with its faith in markets and technology (Zuckerberg, Musk et al) and even less ecological literacy than the mainstream (in which it's already pretty low).
I don't consider myself a conservative Christian, but I do understand - and share! - at some level the desire to return to traditional values. The ideology for which Trump is the front man is not the path to that return.
Enough for now.
- Robin in the central Appalachians