Extending the Glide
By Jem Bendell, Dougald Hine, Dark Mountain Project
Looking back over the last few years, I didn’t really know what to do about this realisation that we can’t fix climate change, that so much of the impact for our civilisation is already locked in. I didn’t know how to work on that. And I realised that one of the reasons was the lack of a framework to get your head around all this.
Dark Mountain Issue 12 Sanctum: Twelve Pieces
By Dougald Hine, Dark Mountain Project
If your copy of our twelfth book has already landed, then you’ll know that we’ve shaken up the form of Dark Mountain in a whole lot of ways. Not least, where a typical issue would contain forty or more pieces ranging from short poems to longer essays or stories, this time around we have built the book around twelve longer texts – and having introduced the other elements of this issue, it seems like time to tell you a little more about these.
At the Mouth of the Cave
By Dougald Hine, Steve Wheeler, Dark Mountain Project
What, if anything, is sacred? ‘Nothing should be sacred!’ comes the impatient answer from the enthusiasts for gene-splicing and geoengineering, the singularitarians eager to upload their consciousness into a disembodied digital eternity. To call anything sacred is to set it off-limits to improvement by the application of human ingenuity – to stand in the way of progress.
2016: You Want it Darker
By Dougald Hine, Dark Mountain Project
The regular mechanisms of political narration are breaking down. The pollsters lose confidence in their methods, the pundits struggle to offer authoritative explanations for events that they laughed off as wild improbabilities only months before.
Commoning in the City
By Dougald Hine, STIR
As Ivan Illich and Anthony McCann have argued, historically, the commons was not simply a pool of resources to be managed, but an alternative to seeing the world as made of resources.
Words which matter to people
By Dougald Hine, The Resilients Project
I wish to argue only this: that the end of all our questioning will not be a set of universal abstractions that transcend the messiness and peculiarity of the local cultural concepts with which we find ourselves. That abstract technical concepts, however usefully they serve within their own context, will always lack the power of living language. And that, if we wish the qualities that we may associate with resilience to take root in the places where we live, we would do well to look for concepts and stories which embody those qualities, and words which matter to people.
The Dark Shapes Ahead
By Dougald Hine, The Resilients Project
If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.
Uncivilisation 2011 – Looking for hope in the dark
By Dougald Hine, Transition Network
Ever since Paul Kingsnorth and I published Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, two years ago this month, I've found myself struggling to explain exactly what Dark Mountain is about. There was never a slogan or an action plan - by contrast, the Transition movement does a brilliant job of distilling important messages into simple suggestions that people can put into practice. And yet I have come to see the difficulty of summing up Dark Mountain as part of what it has to offer: an invitation to slow down, to step out of the rush of answers and actions for a while, and dwell with the puzzle of living in these strange times.