Welcome to the Dark Mountain Project: a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption. We have set out to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to reflect clearly and honestly on our place in the world.
The Dark Mountain Project started with a manifesto, written by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, which sparked conversations around the world. Now we are drawing together those conversations in the first issue of Dark Mountain – a book-length collection of stories, essays, poetry and interviews from writers negotiating the edge of the world as we know it, finding paths into the unknown world ahead.
Contributors to Dark Mountain #1 include John Michael Greer, Jay Griffiths, Alastair McIntosh, Derrick Jensen, Ran Prieur, Melanie Challenger, Mario Petrucci and many more. You can pre-order a copy, hot from the presses this coming May, on our IndieGoGo page.
The conversation also continues face to face, with UNCIVILISATION: The Dark Mountain Festival. Join us in Llangollen, Wales, 28-30th May 2010 for a weekend of talking, singing, making and playing. Guests will include George Monbiot, Tom Hodgkinson, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly and Chris T-T – as well as many of the contributors to the journal.
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Rearmament
These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.Robinson Jeffers, 1935
