dark mountain

The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it.

The Project grew out of a feeling that contemporary art and literature were failing to respond honestly or adequately to the scale of our entwined ecological, economic and social crises. We believe that writing and art have a crucial role to play in coming to terms with this reality, and in questioning its foundations.

director at large: Dougald Hine

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ny times april 2014:

“I just wish there was a way to be more honest about that,” he went on, “because actually what McKibben’s doing, and what all these movements are doing, is selling people a false premise. They’re saying, ‘If we take these actions, we will be able to achieve this goal.’ And if you can’t, and you know that, then you’re lying to people. And those people . . . they’re going to feel despair.”

The author and activist Naomi Klein, who has known Kingsnorth for many years, says Dark Mountain has given people a forum in which to be honest about their sense of dread and loss. “Faced with ecological collapse, which is not a foregone result, but obviously a possible one, there has to be a space in which we can grieve,” Klein told me. “And then we can actually change.”

Kingsnorth would agree with the need for grief but not with the idea that it must lead to change — at least not the kind of change that mainstream environmental groups pursue. “What do you do,” he asked, “when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty, and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad?

For Kingsnorth, the notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent — a distortion of the proper relationship between humans and the natural world and evidence that in the throes of crisis, many environmentalists have abandoned the principle that “nature has some intrinsic, inherent value beyond the instrumental.” If we lose sight of that ideal in the name of saving civilization, he argues, if we allow ourselves to erect wind farms on every mountain and solar arrays in every desert, we will be accepting a Faustian bargain.

The core of the demonstrators’ complaints was not that the new highways would worsen air pollution, cause car accidents or fracture communities; it was that some things, like wilderness and beauty, were — despite, or perhaps because of, their “uselessness” — more important than getting to work on time. The motivation was raw, intuitive and, in its Wordsworthian love of the Arcadian, very, very English. In an essay titled “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” Kingsnorth wrote that after Twyford Down, he “vowed, self-importantly, that this would be my life’s work: Saving nature from people. Preventing the destruction of beauty and brilliance, speaking up for the small and the overlooked and the things that could not speak for themselves.”

“Here’s millions of people who don’t like this way of measuring the world, don’t like this way of living, don’t like this way of seeing the world.” He made reporting trips to four continents, tracing the movement’s roots and common themes.

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@johnthackara

“paradigm changes can’t be predicted, ushered into existence, or recognised when you’re in their midst” dark-mountain.net/blog/autonomou… @darkmtn

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2017 – dougald on dark mountain in 3 min:

[https://www.facebook.com/DarkMountainProject/videos/1366535790112442/]

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via p2p foundation share on fb.. april 2023 article by paul kingsnorth (co founder of dk mtn) – The Universal – Four Questions Concerning The Internet, part one – [https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-universal]: