Kaczynski was the notorious “unabomber”, and this long essay is also known as the “unabomber manifesto”.

His crimes were unjustifiable, but that’s no reason for ignoring his writing. This essay is, in my opinion, the most incisive critique of industrial civilisation ever written. As John Zerzan says, “The 232 sections of Industrial Society and its Future represent a lucid, calm, carefully reasoned argument.

I believe that an open-minded reader comes to concur, rather irresistibly, with its central thesis: namely, that the more technology-oriented society becomes, the less freedom and personal fulfillment its constituents will have … Unsuprisingly, the dominant culture – including the left – has ignored this deeply incisive contribution.

I’ve been taking advantage of the winter months to make some headway with these less appetising aspects of the project, since the few hours of daylight and the inclement weather conditions have severely reduced the scope for outdoor work.

Of all the various administrative tasks, the two that have been taking up most time are securing planning permission and drawing up the schedule of visits for the volunteers. I first wrote to the local planning office in August for some preliminary advice, and was shocked by their reply.

It seemed we would need planning permission for the change of use of the barn (as it will be used for accommodation), for the septic tank and drainage system, the yurts, the shower and toilet facilities, and for the wooden “meeting space” beside the river (which one of the volunteers, Adam, has baptised “cafe utopia” — what a great name!). In other words, we would need permission for virtually everything!

It took me several months to prepare all the documents for the full application for planning permission, but eventually I got it all together and posted off a big parcel to the planning office. Needless to say, they replied to say that it wasn’t enough, and asked for more information. I’ve also got to talk to the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) regarding a discharge consent for the drainage system, as we want to discharge waste water, via the reed-bed, to the river.

The other administrative task that’s been causing me a few headaches is drawing up the schedule of visits for volunteers to the utopia experiment. I drew up a big table, with ten rows (one for each slots at TUE) and lots of columns (one for each week). I then went through all the applications that I had received so far (a total of 83) and looked at the dates that people said they would be available.

I then put names into the relevant slots, trying all the time to ensure that there would always be a good balance (equal numbers of men and women, a good mix of ages and skills) and overlap (so there’s never a week in which everyone leaves at the same time). This was very hard, and took a lot of time and thought, but with a lot of help I finally produced a workable schedule for the first six months of TUE.

I then started sending out emails to the people I had booked in for the first couple of months. I sent out twenty-two emails, and so far have only got replies to eight of them. Of those eight replies, three people accepted the dates I suggested for their visit, three said they could not come on the dates I suggested and asked for different dates, one person is still checking to see if they can come on the dates I suggested, and one said he could no longer take part in the experiment.

It quickly dawned on me that the way I was approaching the matter of scheduling visits by volunteers was not very efficient. For a lot of volunteers, it’s been a while since they sent in their applications and they are no longer available on the dates they originally suggested. Some did not even suggest particular dates at all. So I’ve had a re-think, and a chat with Agric, another volunteer, and we’ve decided to set up an online database for people to say when they are available to come to TUE. I will check the availability database every few days and, if there is space at the relevant dates, I will contact those who have submitted their data to suggest an arrival and departure date. I’m hoping that this will help make the scheduling easier, but whether it really does or not remains to be seen.

Thankfully, dealing with all the administrative tasks hasn’t completely deprived me of all opportunity for the physical stuff outdoors — a kind of work which I approach with more relish than ever after all the red tape, no matter how cold it is, a kind of work that William Morris aptly called “easy-hard work”. I’ve been putting up fences with my friends Mike and Rick to cordon off a new area for the two sows, one of whom I suspect may be pregnant again.

As we bang in the fence posts, and stretch the wire, I exult in the joy of physical effort. This is just so much more FUN than filling in forms and drawing up schedules! This is what the utopia experiment is really about.

The utopia experiment is an attempt to simulate and imagine what life might be like if, as some scientists predict, global civilisation collapses during the twenty-first century. Lasting eighteen months, from April 2007 to September 2008, volunteers of all ages and walks of life will pretend that they are living in the future — around the year 2040 — by which time a combination of climate change, the end of cheap oil, and other threats to the contemporary world order have led to the demise of industrial civilisation and a return to pre-industrial lifestyles. This scenario has already been explored in a number of novels, but the volunteers will attempt to go further than these literary excursions by acting out the dilemmas they pose in real life.

The utopia experiment can therefore be seen as a kind of “experimental futurology”; just as experimental archaeologists try to learn, for example, about different types of flint tools through the hands-on approach of actually making them, so the volunteers will try to learn about life in a post-apocalyptic world by pretending that they are already living in one.

The four months I’ve been here have been very exciting – and very busy. With the help of a few volunteers who lived on site for varying amounts of time, I’ve put up two yurts and a cooking/eating area we call “cafe utopia”. We also dug our first vegetable patch, sowed our winter crop, put up fences, looked after pigs (and killed a few to eat), and a hundred other things. It’s been a huge learning curve.

At the end of October, we had some of the heaviest rainfall and strongest winds in this part of the world in over 40 years. At one point, the chimneys blew off both the yurts – but that was the worst of the damage, and it was easily fixed. I was very pleased that the yurts survived such extreme weather. If they can survive that, they should be robust enough to survive throughout the experiment.

It’s still early days, and the experiment proper will not begin until April next year, but the preparations so far have already helped me think more carefully about what life might be like in the aftermath of a global collapse. Such an event would lead to the deaths of billions of people, but not the end of the human race. Some people would survive the end of the industrial age by reverting to a preindustrial lifestyle.

The enormity of such a scenario makes it hard to imagine. Some science fiction writers have sketched out visions of a post-industrial world characterised by small rural communities. But futurology is a notoriously difficult enterprise, especially when guided only by the unaided imagination. If we want to know what life might be like in the aftermath of a global collapse, it is necessary to do more than just read science fiction. It is also necessary to act it out, to conduct a simulation. This is the purpose of the utopia experiment.

There are some aspects of life after a global collapse that are quite easy to predict. The survivors would, for example, have to re-learn many old crafts that were widespread before the industrial revolution, such as weaving and smelting. They would also have to learn to defend themselves against attacks by hostile strangers. But there are other aspects of post-apocalyptic living that it is much harder to guess at, and which the utopia experiment will explore.

For example, would the survivors try to rebuild civilisation just as it was before the crash (as happens in that awful film, The Postman)? Or would they pause for a moment to reflect on what went wrong with that particular historical experiment, and attempt to build a different kind of society? In the latter case, which bits of the old collapsed civilisation would they try to preserve, and which would they relegate to the dustbin of history? Which bits of modern technology would they keep, and which would they abandon? Which cultural artifacts — which books, music, works of art — would they preserve for posterity, and which would they consider not worth preserving?

Different groups would no doubt behave in different ways. But some, at least, might act like oases of culture and learning amidst the ruins of the old civilisation. In this respect, they might be secular equivalents of the European monasteries which preserved the great books of classical antiquity throughout the Dark Ages, and so enabled future generations to enjoy these ancient treasures.

By simulating life in a post-apocalyptic community, we might be able to test an intriguing hypothesis — that, far from being a disaster, life after the collapse of modern civilisation might not be so bad as some people fear. Might it be, in fact, a second chance for humanity, an opportunity to escape from the awful state we’ve got ourselves into? Might global collapse turn out to be the most promising route to utopia?