Welcome to the Dark Mountain Project – a cultural movement for an age of global disruption.
We are a growing global network of writers, thinkers, artists, craftspeople and workers with practical skills who have stopped believing in the stories our civilisation tells itself. We believe we are entering an age of material decline, ecological collapse and social and political uncertainty, and that our cultural responses should reflect this, rather than denying it.
We are citizens of the most destructive civilisation in human history. That civilisation is in the process of destroying much of life on Earth in order to feed its ever-advancing appetites. As it does so, it appears to be destroying itself. All around us are signs that our whole way of life is passing into history.
In times like these, an honest cultural response is needed. It is through stories that we weave reality. The progress of civilisation itself is a story; as is the centrality of homo sapiens to life on Earth, as is the inevitability of human life getting better, of technology and science digging us out of the hole we are in. These old, creaking stories are now killing us. We need new ones.
The Dark Mountain Project exists to write them. We aim 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. We call this process Uncivilisation.
The Project started in 2009 with a manifesto, and a set of principles for writers. Since then, we have published two hardback anthologies of Uncivilised writing and art, held two festivals, and been involved in a number of other events and projects. In 2012 we will publish a third book and run a number of new public events. We have other plans too, which will unfold on this website as they happen.
If you like what you see here, please help shape our direction of travel: contribute to our books, get involved with, or help start, Dark Mountain events, join the online network, spread the word, get in touch. We are always looking for new people to meet, talk to and work with. The journey up the Dark Mountain stands or falls on what we all bring to the expedition.
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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
