Dark Mountain: Issue 17

The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, thinkers and artists responding to an age of social and environmental crises. Started in 2009 with a manifesto called Uncivilisation by writers Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, it is an invitation for people to share words and images that make sense of a time of disruption and uncertainty.

At the heart of this project are the bi-annual journals, illustrated hardback collections, where many voices come together to explore the questions which Dark Mountain frames.

This seventeeth issue brings together essays. stories, poetry, and artwork that are creating new culture of restoration and renewal. Just after it went to press, the pandemic swept across the world shaking the global economy and revealing what happens when ‘business as usual’ stops and people begin to question the way we have all been living.

The Spring 2020 collection holds open a space for stories that speak to the reality of being human in these strange times, for art and writing that helps us mourn for all that is being lost, to listen to the quiet voices of particular places. But it also explores new aspects of our global predicament, foregrounding fresh ideas, images and insights that might provide us with the hope that arises once the grieving has been honoured.

In these pages, you will hear of how rivers can be helped to run again and hearts helped to heal; landscapes rewilded and broken bowls mended. You can witness the regenerative power in an abused piece of ex-industrial ground and the resilience of the human spirit in times of flood, war or sickness; testimonies from Iraqi marshes, Munich parks, Canadian forests and Japanese dormitories; and tales of rebellious communities, revivifying storms and rejuvenated pigs. You can follow the peregrinations of ancient peoples as they sought refuge and revelation, and to take an astronomical perspective on our small world’s happenings.

The many ways we might answer the book’s core questions: How can we live? What can be saved? What beauty and life might yet grow from the fallen trunk of this civilisation?i

Dark Mountain: Issue 17 is a hardback book, 243 pages long, printed on FSC-certified paper

Cover: 'Violet Storm' by Kate Williamson