Spring greetings everyone! This month brings exciting news of the launch event for our forthcoming Dark Mountain Issue 29 – Bestiary, a book about animals. We also spotlight our archive offer for Dark Mountain: Issue 17 that explores ‘restoration and renewal’ in times of breakdown. Plus, you’ll find news from the network and all the latest from our Uncivilised Poetics series in the online edition.

Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 29 – Bestiary

We are excited to announce the forthcoming publication of our 29th issue, a book about animals.

The word ‘deer’, from the Old English dēor, originally referred to any animal that was free and undomesticated. The ‘wilderness’, or ‘wild deerness’, was where the wild ones lived. We would like to welcome you to the wild deerness.

The more-than-human – and the wild deerness in all its forms – has always been at the heart of Dark Mountain, but this is the first anthology we’ve devoted to the animal world. This book takes its inspiration from medieval bestiaries, but unlike those ancient compendiums doesn’t claim to be anything like representative. Nor does it reduce animals to moral cyphers. Instead, it presents a kaleidoscopic view, like the multiple images seen through an insect’s compound eye, fragmentary pictures that are chaotic and unordered – but which, perhaps, approximate the plurality of the world better than any abstract system can.

In these pages you will find a talking eel; a desert salamander who breathes through its skin; a mysterious time-travelling embroidered bird; a convocation of eagles; the earthy, bloody life of a forest jaguar in Brazil; feral dogs in the Galápagos; pigeons, as related to by a man experiencing homelessness; a letter to a crow; the brood-song of a bee colony; bears encountered in dreaming practices and bears that are dangerously close and real; wombats; woodmouse; spiders; jellyfish; and five dancing salmon.

We invite you to walk, crawl, slither, swim and fly through the wild deerness of these pages, and to give yourself the gift, in our darkening world, of imagining what it’s like to be anything other than human.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 will be published on 15th April.

Do come and join the contributors, editors and fellow readers for the online launch on Wednesday 22nd April at 8pm BST. Tickets are free, but you’ll need to book a place on Eventbrite.

Join us for the launch!

Spring Archive Offer

Dark Mountain: Issue 17 on restoration and renewal

After a decade of broken climatic records, after a year and a half of Extinction Rebellion protests, after the worst bushfires in Australian history and the die-off of the Great Barrier Reef, there were signs, as our spring 2020 edition was compiled, that ecological collapse was beginning to penetrate public consciousness.

In this collection we hold 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. But we also foreground 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 resilience of the human spirit in times of flood, war or sickness; testimonies from Iraqi marshes, Munich parks, and Canadian forests.

Restoration has its roots in humbleness, in the ability to attend to the reality of these times; to tend the much-abused garden of our world back towards health and wholeness, alert to the realisation that what we had dismissed as weeds were actually the first shoots of new growth.

As with all Dark Mountain books, especially back issues, there are limited copies available, so do grab yourself a copy!

Buy Dark Mountain: Issue 17

Online Edition

A month of Uncivilised Poetics

This month’s online edition centres on writing about poetry – the kind of poetry that makes sense in perilous times, ‘trying to honestly express what is.’ We begin with Rob Lewis’ No Nature Poems Please, an illuminating essay teasing apart the meaning of ‘nature poetry’, when the very term suggests that nature is separate from us. In How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic, Nancy Campbell handprints an artist book set in the Arctic, where the Greenlandic language is disappearing with the ice in the wake of climate change. ‘Hellbender’ poet Nickole Brown tells A Story in Three Floods from the mountains of North Carolina – a story of storms, salamanders, and of the origins of The Hellbender Gathering of Poets, launching this year.

Don’t miss the final post in our Uncivilised Poetics month, a conversation between Matthew Cooperman and Dark Mountain’s poetry editor, Michael McLane – coming next week!

News from the Network

Rewilding Fairytales course and Landspeaking with Charlotte Du Cann

Rewilding Fairytales: Folklore, Animism & Mythic Ecology, Starting 30th March

Curated by Joanna Gilar and guided by scholars and storytellers, this course on the Advaya platform explores the layered history of folk tales across cultures. Moving from Europe to the Caribbean to India, each session uncovers how these tales can be reclaimed as ecological, relational narratives, and help us find our place in the more-than-human world.

Dark Mountain’s Charlotte Du Cann will discussing myth and the technologies of transformation, as part of the ‘Becoming Wild’ module with writer Sophie Strand.

‘Landspeaking Workshop’, New Street Market’s Green Month in Woodbridge, Suffolk on 26th April

Calling our East Anglian readers! Landspeaking is an embodied practice that explores a deeper, more creative relationship with our local territories. Developed in Dark Mountain’s We Walk Through the Fires workshop series, this session will be an opportunity to engage, individually and as a group, with a wild place at a turning point in spring. We will learn how to tune into and physically and imaginatively connect with the land and its inhabitants – plants, birds, winds, stones – sharing our encounters and turning those insights into a creative practice.

Taking place throughout April, New Street Market’s Green Month features curated events designed to bridge the gap between environmental advocacy and local culture, including talks, music, feasts, and workshops. More information here.

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 21, 22, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

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Greetings all! With spring around the corner and the snowdrops emerging from the dark earth, we share a new archive offer for Dark Mountain: Issue 17 on the theme of ‘restoration and renewal’, plus news of The Plant Pamphlets, now available in our online shop as a PDF. You’ll also find news from the network and the latest posts from our Substack edition.

New Archive Offer

Dark Mountain: Issue 17 on restoration and renewal

This spring issue was published in 2020 just as the pandemic closed down so much of the known world, including its launch at our proposed gathering How We Walk Through the Fire.

After a decade of broken environmental and climatic records, after a year and a half of Extinction Rebellion protests and school strikes, after the worst bushfires in Australian history, after the ‘insect apocalypse’ and the endemic microplastics and the die-off of the Great Barrier Reef, there are signs that the full dismal horror of our environmental situation is beginning to penetrate the public consciousness.

In this collection we hold 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 we also explore 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 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

Restoration has its roots in humbleness, in the ability to attend to the reality of these times; to tend the much-abused garden of our world back towards health and wholeness, alert to the realisation that what we had dismissed as weeds were actually the first shoots of new growth.

As with all Dark Mountain books, especially back issues, there are limited copies available, so do grab yourself a copy while it’s hot!

Buy Dark Mountain: Issue 17

The Plant Pamphlets

A voyage around 12 flowers and a hands-on plant practice, now available as a PDF!

We’re very happy to report that The Plant Pamphlets is back in the Dark Mountain bookshop as a downloadable PDF. If you missed a print copy, you can now get your copy of this digital booklet filled with the scents, colours and flavours of some of Mark Watson’s beloved plant companions, from English oak to Mexican marigold.

What might a plant practice look like and what do plants have to say to us?

From 1999-2024, Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson taught and demonstrated the art of holding a dialogue with (mostly) wild plants. Part-manual, part-memoir, this small book is a distillation of his hands-on practice, ‘hanging out’ with twelve flowers and a tree over a year: from a conversation with burdock in a community garden, to lying alongside sea kale on the Suffolk shore, to foraging for mallow leaf fritters and flower teas.

Connecting with plants, whether a huge old oak, wild nettles, curly kale or a sunflower, helps us to be rooted and in touch with the time and place we’re in. It takes us out of the senseless, amnesic repetition of mechanical clock time and into the time of the planet, of seasons and weather. In that rooted Earth time, you stop running around, you get your bearings, you start to remember.

The plants keep us in time; they rise, they scatter seed, they fall. They are where they are. They are in the bigger Now. That’s what they connect us with. They bring us home.

– from ‘Foxglove’, The Plant Pamphlets

Check out Mark’s Plant People conversation with Eva Bakkeslett, republished in this month’s online edition (more info below), and The Plant Pamphlets trailer for a taste!

Buy The Plant Pamplets

Online Edition

Poems and Plant People in this month’s posts

This month’s online edition begins with Tough Times for Wandering Luddites, with writer and ‘deindustrial fiction’ editor Nathanael Bonnell hopping aboard a moving car in Portland without a cell phone: ‘it’s like seizing a thunderstorm by the mane’. In celebration of the first spring shoots of the green world and the PDF publication of The Plant Pamphlets, we republish Mark Watson’s Plant People conversation with the Norwegian artist, Eva Bakkeslett, about roots, fermentation and the dynamic partnership between food and human culture. And beginning our month of posts on uncivilised poetics, we share three poems from this winter’s archive issues which usher us into wild liminal territory: a swim towards deeper time, a more-than-human encounter, and an existential moment at a Thanksgiving dinner in Poetry on the Edge of Time.

News from the Network

The Breath We Share: a call for submissions from our friends at art.earth on embodied and creative practices for a living and dying world

This rich new book from art.earth Books is open to submissions from all those who explore the connection and perpetual unfolding between art, environment and embodiment in its multifaceted forms. Open to scholars, artists and researchers from diverse disciplines who wish to highlight the possibilities and impact of somatically-informed practices, research and artistic processes that speak with and to the other-than-human, in order to challenge and de-centre the dominant anthropocentric worldview and counteract our socio-ecological crisis.

Find out more here. Deadline for submissions is 15th March 2026.

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 19, 21-23, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

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New year greetings all! The Dark Mountain crew wish you a brilliant year ahead. In this month’s newsletter, we’re excited to share a new archive offer with you for Dark Mountain: Issue 13, plus we recap our soon-to-end offers on Issue 23 – Dark Kitchen and Issue 21 on ‘confluence’, and share recent posts from our online edition.

January Archive Offer

Dark Mountain: Issue 13 on ‘what it means to be human’

Time stops, or seems to for a moment: a woman falls from a tree and doesn’t remember falling, or she waits by a fire in a forgetting time, or she stands in a coal pit, in Australia or Germany, her body on the line.

One child is ushered in by the ancestors, another is refused entry by the future. Our paintings on a rock, meant to last for millennia, are swept away by the storm. Our words become covered in leaves, entwined with the lost tracks of animals. Letters turn into trees, pages burst into flames, language fragments and coheres in another shape.

The thirteenth Dark Mountain book focuses on what ‘being human’ might mean in an age of rapid ecological and social change. From the trepidations of bringing a human life into the world, to the responses which rise within us – humour, grief, despair, concern – when confronted daily with a society veering out of control.

Eric Robertson and Emma Giffard examine the familial and social burdens we inherit; Andrew Boyd‘s ‘gallows humour’ highlights the crucial role of laughter in serious times. Many of the works imagine what it might feel like to see ourselves more as biotic constituents living in emergent ecosystems, rather than as mere social conscripts tied to entrenched and tired ideologies. Kate Walters’ Horse Island Woman and Meinrad Craighead’s Woman with Ravens show the fluid relationship between the human and the non-human, while in Katie Holten’s swirling list of microbial flora found on and in our own bodies, we see the collective bloom of the myriad communities of organisms that we refer to with the single term human.

Walk Out Into the Rocks with Issue 13 cover artist Caroline Ross and discover how the issue’s artwork emerged from ‘hangman’s ochre from Oxfordshire; rosso ercolano, a red ochre from Italy, willow charcoal; some water and a bristle brush’ and take a peek between its ‘covers of painted limestone’ through Charlotte Du Cann’s Technê ‘on sparking the inner and outer fires at winter solstice’, a ‘thank you letter of sorts, for a practice and a vocabulary for inner and outer transformation’.

Buy Dark Mountain: Issue 13

Winter Bookshelf Offers

Issue 23: Dark Kitchen and Issue 21 on ‘confluence’ - offers end soon!

Check out our offers on two classic Dark Mountain hardbacks – last copies left!

Issue 23: Dark Kitchen (£13.99) is a feast of stories, poetry and artwork that explore food culture in a time of converging crises – from the devouring agricultural machine to the restorative fermenting jar. In this book, we look deep into the belly of the beast: into the slaughterhouse knocker box; in an elite dining room where endangered animals are on the menu. Among the clatter of our pans, we also remember the connections that nourish the living world: the Atlantic and Pacific salmon that feed the forests; the microbes that link the wild yeasts in Montana to the whiskered wheat of East Anglia to the sourdough loaves that feed a locked-down community in Australia. Join us around our convivial kitchen table! Get your copy here.

Dark Mountain: Issue 21 (£12.99) revolves around the theme of confluence in all its complexity: both life-affirming and death-bringing, creative and destructive. Increasingly, the times we live in feel like a confluence of catastrophes: climate, ecological, political, cultural and existential. In the white noise of this chaotic merging, do we try to hold fast in the roiling current that threatens to carry us away? Or do we look to the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus – panta rhea, ‘everything flows’ – as we try to navigate the unknown river? The contributions of the 60 writers and artists in this book join to make new patterns in this meeting of waters. Get your copy here.

Offers run until the end of January, don’t miss out!

Online Edition

Ancient bargains and avisual cartographies in our winter online edition

This month’s online edition opens with an extract from Issue 23 – Dark Kitchen (currently on offer). Head chef Charlotte Du Cann goes into the field to report on the mythic bargain between the wild and arable lands, and the consequences of our forgetting it in a sugar-coated modern world. In The Annals of the Shemsu-Hor, Brian George dwells in deep time, inviting us to remember our place in the cosmos amid civilisational collapse, asking: ‘What would happen if we saw each beginning as an end […] each end as a possible beginning?’

Meanwhile, looking to the future, filmmaker Josh Appignesi offers a haunting dispatch from his new documentary COLOSSAL WRECK, venturing into the ‘towering citadel-colony of glass and steel’ of COP28. Wrapping up our deep winter series of posts, activist Lara Plambeck asks ‘How can I find my more-than-human peatland relatives if I can’t see them? in Of Hidden Futures and Star-Shaped Worlds, tracing the avisual cartographies of peatland remains.

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 19, 21-23, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

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Winter greetings all! The Dark Mountain bookshop has two stellar issues on offer this month, plus we share recent posts from our online edition, and a bounty of radical Dark Kitchen pieces from our featured mountaineer, Max Jones. You’ll also find the latest news from the network and a recap of our new Issue 28 on ‘uncivilised art’.

Winter Bookshelf Offers

Issue 23: Dark Kitchen and Issue 21 on ‘confluence’

Hunker down this season with two colourful Dark Mountain hardbacks, perfect gifts to brighten up those darkening days!

Issue 23: Dark Kitchen (£13.99) is a feast of stories, poetry and artwork that explore food culture in a time of converging crises – from the devouring agricultural machine to the restorative fermenting jar. In this book, we look deep into the belly of the beast: into the slaughterhouse knocker box; at starvation on the Arctic sea ice; in an elite dining room where endangered animals are on the menu. Among the clatter of our pans, we also remember the connections that nourish the living world: the Atlantic and Pacific salmon that feed the forests; the microbes that link the wild yeasts in Montana to the whiskered wheat of East Anglia to the sourdough loaves that feed a locked-down community in Australia. With recipes, poetry and production techniques – do join us around our convivial kitchen table! Get your copy here.

Dark Mountain: Issue 21 (£12.99) revolves around the theme of confluence in all its complexity: both life-affirming and death-bringing, creative and destructive. Increasingly, the times we live in feel like a confluence of catastrophes: climate, ecological, political, cultural and existential. In the white noise of this chaotic merging, do we try to hold fast in the roiling current that threatens to carry us away? Or do we look to the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus – panta rhea, ‘everything flows’ – as we try to navigate the unknown river? From modern-day lycanthropy tales to the melting waters of the Antarctic Convergence; the contributions of the 60 writers and artists in this book join to make new patterns in this meeting of waters. Get your copy here.

As with all Dark Mountain books, there are limited copies available, so do head over to our online bookshop! Do also check out subscriptions to our books and our Substack, and receive either the latest Dark Mountain books or weekly subscriber-only posts from our contributors from all over the world.

Featured Mountaineer

Max Jones

Max Jones is a transhumance guide, writer, photographer and the founder of traditional food conservation project Up There the Last. Max lives with obscure makers of traditional food, documenting practices that are at risk of becoming forgotten, inspiring others with use of ancient techniques and offering reconnection to the land and sea through pre-industrial processes.

Check out some of Max’s pieces for Dark Mountain, including Salmo Salar, a shoreside paean in which Max records the tale of Ireland’s last smoker of purely wild Atlantic salmon, along with an intuitive recipe. In The Swell of the Mountain Tide, Max heads to the Italian Alps in a hundreds-year-old tradition of transhumance, a practice which ‘represents a fundamental pause and grounding of everyone within earshot’. Do also take a look at his radical piece, No Recipe, from Issue 23: Dark Kitchen (currently on offer!), which celebrates the underground craft of a young cheesemaker in the Italian pre-Alps and ‘one of the truest and most honest foods’.

For those looking to get hands-on with these methods, Max will be hosting The Transhumance in Biella, Italy, from 29th May-2nd June 2026, and his course Methods of the Mountain will be running in Piedmont, Italy, from the 18th-21st September 2026, teaching traditional techniques with guest teacher Trevor Warmedahl.

Online Edition

An Indian clay house, an ancestral forest, and the desert bones of ancient whales

Our winter online edition began with Issue 28 cover artist Kyle Scheurmann bearing witness to both the beauty and the relentless destruction of ancestral trees in a forest called Sassin in his meditation on art and activism, How To Love A Forest. Forager and anthropologist Yash Lad travelled to his native India to discover how restorative relationships can be forged with the land, people and plants to help all beings thrive in Living Without Stories, recounting his transformational time enrolled on a permaculture course. Closing this month’s roster of deep time stories is writer and marine ecologist Alexander McMaster, who ventures into sea and desert, visiting tombs in Egypt and his native Ireland, and the bones of ancient whales emerging from the Sahara sand, ‘a flash of ancestry burning through rock and sand’ in A Small Wave in the Sea.

Issue 28 Recap

Revisiting our new issue on ‘Uncivilised Art’

Our most recent issue on the theme of ‘uncivilised art’, intwined in the shape of a branching tree, has taken root in the hands of readers across the planet! Do take a look at some excerpts from its leafy pages, including a heart-breaking testimony from photographer Forest Woodward which attends to damaged places on the edges of empire in Edgelands. Hebridean shore-sketcher Cally Yeatman records her practice of stillness in times of frenetic speed for In Praise of Drawing, while Nina Elder finds herself falling into a dark crevasse on a small Cycladic island in Fugitive Dark. Philosopher Joshua Bergamin weaves together conversations with musician Marco Fusinato and the resonances between their families’ migrations in Repetition–(Loops)–Return, and Caroline Ross enters the future to meet fellow forager-artist Jordan Tierney on the shore of a river to discuss her visionary practice of creative salvage.

You can also watch a recording of the launch event here, where we gathered with contributors from across the planet – painters, makers, walkers, writers, musicians, sculptors and activists – to celebrate our most visual book yet.

Buy Issue 28

News from the Network

Island gleanings and gatherings

Dark Mountain crew Hannah Close is hosting an in-person gathering on the Hebridean island of Ulva next spring (28th May-1st June 2026). The gathering will be a chance to explore ‘islandness’ in a convivial setting that combines elements of a residency, workshop, and shoreside philosophical salon. Expect sailing on a hundred-year-old boat called Birthe Marie, Gaelic-guided geological walks, and archaeological and bushcraft workshops. Applications close Friday 30th January.

Known as ‘thin places’ because they straddle the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, islands can be crucibles for the spirit as well as practical and unsentimental places. Their natural limits offer valuable lessons in these times of extractivism, and as ‘canaries in the coalmine’, they uncover vital information about incipient cultural and climate change.

On 18th December at 6pm GMT, Hannah will be hosting a conversation on the Advaya platform with Dark Mountain contributor and environmental campaigner Alastair McIntosh on The Spirit of Islandness:

What is this elusive spirit that makes up islandness? Can it help wider society address the challenges that lie ahead? And why are we so drawn to islands, what forces lie at the root of their compelling dream-like attraction?

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 19, 21-23, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

Subscribe now

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Late autumn greetings all! This month we share a selection of ‘uncivilised art’ gems from our just published Issue 28, with a roundup of the book’s launch (now available to watch online). Also a reminder that this Friday (14th) is the deadline for submissions for the spring Issue 29 on bestiaries. Plus, some latest events from the Dark Mountain network.

Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 28

Celebrating the launch of our new collection on Uncivilised Art

Our special full-colour autumn issue on Uncivilised Art is out now! You can buy your copy from our online shop.

This October, we gathered online with contributors from across the planet – painters, makers, walkers, writers, musicians, sculptors and activists – for the launch of our twenty-eighth issue on ‘uncivilised art’, our most visual book yet which celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world.

Art is an ancient bargain struck when the Earth was young, a magical illumination that always reveals poetry, sometimes increase and sometimes tragedy (Simeon Ayres from Issue 28)

Holding an empty glass jar, producer Charlotte Du Cann opened the launch, illustrating how 60+ artworks and practices connected across time and place and were alchemised within the container of a book. Our show began and ended with jars: with Basia Irland collecting water from a desert tinaja and Monique Besten kin-fermenting with microbes at collaborative artist’s gathering, and closing the lid with Clare Thomas’s 100 Jar beach-combed plastic hoard.

This issue’s art editors – David Ellingsen, Mat Osmond and Caroline Ross – then introduced a lively ferment of readings and images. Artists shared their meditations on time and the cosmos, on art as a ‘sacred doorway’: with mountain rocks and slate, with a flood-wrecked photograph, a decorated ostrich egg from prehistoric Africa, a melting glacier in Svalbard in this era of climate crisis. We listened to conversations between a philosopher and a musician at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and between pigment and salvage artists on a Baltimore riverbank in a speculative future. We glimpsed into the book’s full-colour spectrum in a central art show, and into cover artist Kyle Scheurmann’s short film, A Beautiful Resistance. Do dip in below, and take a look at the Issue 28 editorial:

Final Call for Submissions

Only two days left to submit to Dark Mountain: Issue 29

Submissions close Friday 14th November.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 is inspired by bestiaries – medieval manuscripts that described the lives of animals both real and mythical, familiar and fantastical, observed and imagined. Unlike traditional bestiaries, though, which often instrumentalised beasts to reinforce moral messages – stags representing loyalty and beavers an admirable work ethic – we invite you to send us work in which animals simply are.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 will be published in April 2026. Read the full callout here and submit your work here. For further details, please read our submissions guidelines.

Online Edition

Online latest; Issue 28 spotlight

This month’s online edition is brimming with colourful stories and artworks from our just published Issue 28. Beginning this series of uncivilised art posts is photographer and writer Forest Woodward with a heart-breaking testimony to damaged places on the edges of empire in Edgelands. Hebrides-sketcher and shore-dweller Cally Yeatman records her practice of stillness in times of frenetic speed for In Praise of Drawing. Nina Elder finds herself falling into a dark crevasse on a small Cycladic island in Fugitive Dark, later to create an installation from squid ink collected by the islanders. Joshua Bergamin weaves together conversations with musician Marco Fusinato and the resonances between their families’ migrations in the Italian polyaspora in Repetition–(Loops)–Return, and for our final post in the series, Caroline Ross enters the future to meet fellow forager-artist Jordan Tierney on the shore of a river to discuss her visionary sculpture and practice of creative salvage.

News from the Network

Daring new film from inside COP, plus a radical gathering for ‘surviving the future’

COLOSSAL WRECK is a feature documentary by Josh Appignanesi journeying into the depths of the COP28 climate conference in Dubai. The film has just been released in the UK, ahead of COP29 which runs until 20th November, taking place in Belém, Brazil. Check out the Guardian’s review, and find a screening here.

Are these enormous get-togethers all about false promises that hinder change? Or are they the only hope we’ve got for world-saving unity? With his innocuous selfie-stick, filmmaker Josh Appignanesi moves unnoticed through Dubai’s seductive slickness to reveal the talks, meetings and backroom parties behind the strange mixture of global cry for help and political jostling that is a COP.

‘For those seeking insights and allies to help themselves and their localities through profound change’, author and Dark Mountain contributor Shaun Chamberlin’s course Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive is taking place from 5th January - 14th March 2026, ‘offering a 10-week opportunity to slow down, pull back, and explore responses as part of a small global community, among and alongside some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers.’ Teachers include Nate Hagens (The Great Simplification), Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical), Leah Manaema Avene (Co Culture), Tadzio Müller (KollapsCamp), Mark Boyle (The Way Home) and Isabelle Frémeaux (The ZAD).

Find out more and sign up here.

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 19. 21-23, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

Subscribe now

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Autumn greetings all! This month we’re excited to announce the publication of our twenty-eighth issue on Uncivilised Art, with an invitation to join us for the launch next week. Plus, you’ll find a final call for submissions for Issue 29 on bestiaries, a one-time archive book offer, our new featured mountaineer, and the latest posts from our Substack edition.

Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 28

Join us for a celebration of our new collection on Uncivilised Art

Our special full-colour autumn issue on Uncivilised Art is out now! You can buy your copy of this visual treasure trove from our online shop.

This spring a team of editors set out to create a collection of visual art that would act as a retrospective, a catalogue of the many genres our books have showcased since 2010: photography, illustration, graphic literature, calligraphy, painting, sculpture, land-based artworks, making, installation, ritual and performance. A collection of artwork that included written testimony, practice, conversation, memoir and poetry. We wanted it to be a celebration of the artists who hold out for a certain way of being in this collapsing world: true to the transformative power of creativity, to the love of the Earth, and the material of life itself… Read all about it in our editorial at the link below.

Do join us for the online launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 28 on Tuesday 21st October, starting at 7:30pm (BST) to hear from some of the book’s contributors and editors and take a peek into its colourful pages Tickets are free but you will need to book a place on Eventbrite. Hope to see you there!

Final Call for Submissions

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 on bestiaries

Submissions close Friday 14th November.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 is inspired by bestiaries – medieval manuscripts that described the lives of animals both real and mythical, familiar and fantastical, observed and imagined. Unlike traditional bestiaries, though, which often instrumentalised beasts to reinforce moral messages – stags representing loyalty and beavers an admirable work ethic – we invite you to send us work in which animals simply are.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 will be published in April 2026. Read the full callout here and submit your work here. For further details, please read our submissions guidelines.

Autumn Archive Offer

Issue 9, a humble Dark Mountain gem – last copies left!

This autumn’s archive book offer is our 2016 spring Issue 9 on the theme of ‘humbleness’, with a special price for paid subscribers. We have a handful of copies left - don’t miss them!

Humbleness comes from the Latin humus, meaning ‘earth’; so to be humble means to lay oneself low, but also to be grounded, to return to the solid and material. The artworks, poems, stories and essays in this volume explore different ways of re-communion with the Earth. Follow the book’s visual track with walking artist, Monique Besten as she collects paper boats while crossing the mountains to the Paris summit, with performance artist Robert Leaver as he digs himself into various holes in earth, snow, and rock, and storyteller-artists Kahn & Selesnick as they relate one of their fantastical Tales from a Drowning World.

You can order your copy of Dark Mountain: Issue 9 from our online shop.

Featured Mountaineer

Mat Osmond

Mat Osmond is a writer based in Cornwall. He is part of the Ecological Citizenship peer-learning community seeded by a student occupation at Falmouth University, where he works as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art. Mat has convened a number of eco-arts symposiums since 2014, most recently a two-year creative summit on ecological grief and death cultures, Art.Earth’s Borrowed Time.

Mat is one of the art editors for our new issue on Uncivilised Art, and contributed an essay, ‘Smashing the Mirror’, in which he looks back at pivotal art actions in response to the climate crisis: ‘Such work surely moves well below the radar of emergency declarations, being made of something more slippery and unpredictable’.

Take a look at Mat’s posts for Dark Mountain, including a searing piece on walking away from ‘the culture of uncare’, juxtaposing Ursula le Guin’s dilemma tale, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, with the West’s involvement with Gaza. Check out too the provocatively titled What Use is Art?, in which he considers the role of art as a ‘life-cherishing force’ and what it entails to hold ourselves accountable to a generation facing catastrophe.

Online Edition

Online edition latest; Issue 28 editorial and encounters with green and blue gods

This month, we set off with an editorial ‘tree map’ for our newly published autumn special issue on ‘uncivilised art’, plus animal tracker, writer, ancient history scholar and Dark Mountain storyteller Sylvia Linsteadt shares her painterly walkabout tale about a desert encounter with the winged god Osiris. We also share an excerpt from British writer and activist David Gee’s book on the imagined history of the Green Man in which he traces the leafy figure from historic church walls and peasant protests to emerging movements of resistance and change.

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books or the new home for our online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive series are available as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

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Equinox greetings all! As we enter the darker half of the year, we invite you to join us for the launch of our soon-to-be published Issue 28 on uncivilised art, plus we share our call for submissions for Issue 29 on bestiaries. You’ll also find a special archive book offer, the latest instalments from our Substack edition, and some exciting news from the network.

Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 28

Come and celebrate our new autumn collection on uncivilised art

Join us for a celebration of our special full-colour autumn issue on uncivilised art.

This spring a team of editors set out to create a collection of visual art that would be a celebration of the artists who hold out for a certain way of being in this collapsing world: true to the transformative power of creativity, to the love of the Earth, and the material of life itself.

What happens shift your attention from the shiny surfaces of an industrial culture, to a perception of the world co-created with all planetary kin who dwell in deep time? What happens when you follow the artists as they span dimensions, move through the land, disturbing and liberating our vision?

You find yourself in a book in the shape of a tree: leading from the forest canopy to the heartwood to the seeds of the future that lie on the leafy floor. You edge across branches that take you back in time to the illuminative script makers, or down into the underbelly of civilisation where women fall into holes, subvert road signs, throw paint, walk across mined and burning land. You descend into the roots, the core mycelial practices these artists hold in times of unravelling: collaborations with lichen, with microbes, with stalks of wheat, mountain slate, seaweed, horse and crow; in the studio which is a darkroom, and also a cliff, a river, a desk before a luminous window. You look up…

Do join us for the online launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 28 on Tuesday 21st October, starting at 7:30pm (BST) to hear from some of the contributors. Dark Mountain: Issue 28 will be published on 15th October. Tickets are free but you will need to book a place on Eventbrite. Hope to see you there!

Autumn Archive Offer

Issue 9, a humble Dark Mountain gem – on offer now!

This autumn’s archive book offer is our 2016 spring Issue 9 on the theme of ‘humbleness’, with a special price for paid subscribers.

Humbleness comes from the Latin humus, meaning ‘earth’; so to be humble means to lay oneself low, but also to be grounded, to return to the solid and material. The artworks, poems, stories and essays in this volume explore different ways of re-communion with the Earth – Em Strang avoiding the global news to bear witness to more immediate worlds, Adam Dinan and Tom Smith investigating microbial life – and established figures like Derrick Jensen can be found alongside new contributors: Nadia Lucia Peralta on the ecstatic loss of self at carnival time, Fern Leigh Albert recording life off-grid in Dartmoor with her camera, and Claire Liss considering the evolution of plant medicine.

Take a peek into its pages with walking artist, Monique Besten as she collects paper boats while crossing the mountains to the Paris summit. Meanwhile, performance artist Robert Leaver digs himself into various holes in earth, snow, and rock, and storyteller-artists Kahn & Selesnick relate one of their fantastical Tales from a Drowning World.

You can order your copy of Dark Mountain: Issue 9 from our online shop.

Call for Submissions

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 on bestiaries

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 is inspired by bestiaries – medieval manuscripts that described the lives of animals both real and mythical, familiar and fantastical, observed and imagined. Unlike traditional bestiaries, though, which often instrumentalised beasts to reinforce moral messages – stags representing loyalty and beavers an admirable work ethic – we invite you to send us work in which animals simply are.

Too many narratives present animals, and nature in general, as a resource for our species, whether as ‘ecosystem service providers’, convenient metaphors, or a waiting cast of helpers, teachers and healers. Even with the best of intentions, the implication behind all this is that animals exist for us, never just for themselves. We would love to see work in which humans act in supporting roles to non-humans – or even work that features no humans at all.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 will be published in April 2026. The deadline for submissions is Friday 14th November. For further details, please read our submissions guidelines. Read the full callout here and submit your work here.

Online Edition

Leafy resistance, dark verse, and the dynamics of memory in this month’s posts

For our first piece, ‘jungler’ and rainforest gardener Suprabha Seshan takes us into the leafy heart of the pipal tree in A Pipals’ Liberation of Bengaluru, observing the ‘daring acts of individual plants exploring cement, tar, brick and steel.’ In Dark Verse, we share three searing poems from our archive bearing witness to our ecological and moral collapse, including a poem by Rob Lewis that opened our first ever book. In Memory on Fire, Anna Sheftel looks at the Western culture of memory and the role nature tourism plays in obscuring the ecological devastation wreaked elsewhere. To finish is a ‘Machine Session’ from two Dark Mountain creative powerhouses, co-founder Paul Kingsnorth and artist and Issue 28 editor, Caroline Ross, discussing the role of art, beauty, haptic intelligence and cultivating the real in the struggle to remain fully human in the technological age.

News from the Network

Today sees the publication of Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth, one of Dark Mountain’s founders and author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (Faber & Faber), among others.

Against the Machine is an account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. A culmination of two decades of writing and thinking about technology, culture, spirituality and politics, it seeks to offer an insight into how the techno-industrial culture, from the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, has choked Western civilisation, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us all in its image. It is a powerful reminder of how a resistance to this advance requires: a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit.

Get your copy here.

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 27 (£18.99)

Our spring special issue is a full colour collection of writing and artwork on things bodily and broken, mended and mysterious, individual and collective, interrelated and entwined. Order from our website, or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 27 for only £12.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books or the new home for our online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive series are available as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

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Greetings everyone! This month, as the harvest season continues in the Northern Hemisphere and the days start to shorten, we share an exciting call for submissions for our next issue (#29) on bestiaries, plus two late summer bookshelf offers, dispatches from our Substack edition including several stellar pieces from Dark Mountain editors, and a new book from our featured mountaineer.

Call for Submissions

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 on bestiaries

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 is inspired by bestiaries – medieval manuscripts that described the lives of animals both real and mythical, familiar and fantastical, observed and imagined. Unlike traditional bestiaries, though, which often instrumentalised beasts to reinforce moral messages – stags representing loyalty and beavers an admirable work ethic – we invite you to send us work in which animals simply are.

Too many narratives present animals, and nature in general, as a resource for our species, whether as ‘ecosystem service providers’, convenient metaphors, or a waiting cast of helpers, teachers and healers. Even with the best of intentions, the implication behind all this is that animals exist for us, never just for themselves. We would love to see work in which humans act in supporting roles to non-humans – or even work that features no humans at all.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29 will be published in April 2026. The deadline for submissions is Friday 14th November. We are accepting non-fiction, fiction, poetry and artwork – for further details on what and how to submit, please read our submissions guidelines.

Submit your work for Dark Mountain: Issue 29 here. Read the full callout below:

Submit to Issue 29

Dark Mountain Bookshelf

Issue 25 and Issue 22 – ARK on offer now!

We’re running special offers on two of our classic hardback collections. First up is Issue 25 (£11.99), an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights. This book gathers voices from around the world – from Portugal to Palestine – to question the anthropocentric language of rights, couched in terms of ‘who owns what’. What happens when we flip such assumptions on their heads? Does the land belong to us, or do we belong to the land?

Next is our twenty-second issue ARK (£12.99), a work of creative salvage made in collaboration with the Wilderness Art Collective. Where most illustrative book collaborations (including our own fiction-based volume FABULA) come from artists illustrating writer’s work, for this book the relationship was reversed. Instead, writers selected images from the Collective’s ‘gallery’ and created texts in response to them: ranging from Theophilus Kwek’s luminous poem ‘Parable of Feet and Wings’ to Louise Crispin’s concertina sculpture ‘Flight Path’, to Micheál Mac Gearailt’s wild fable about banshees and forestry activism with William Bock’s performative artwork, ‘Exquisite Corpse’.

Come onboard and take a look into its salty hoard, starting with Eleanor Morgan’s lyrical essay (linked below) about tilting horizons on seeing the short film, To the Ends of the Earth by Hannah Scott, and, to introduce the book, an editorial.

Bookshelf Offers

Online Edition

Radical activism, roving wolves, and shifting seas in this month’s posts

Our summer online edition has featured several Dark Mountain editors, beginning with Mat Osmond (co-editor for our forthcoming Issue 28 on ‘Uncivilised Art’), reflecting on Omar El Akkad’s account of the Gaza genocide alongside Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Omelas’ tale, unmasking the West’s ‘culture of uncare’ in The Smile.

In Walking with Wolves, Adam Weymouth (co-editor of Issue 25 – currently on offer!) tells an extraordinary real-life story of a wolf called Slavc which he has tracked over a decade through the mountains of Europe. Anthea Lawson (co-editor for Issue 25) reviews the veteran campaigner Jonathon Porritt’s new book, Love, Anger, Betrayal, co-written with 26 young Just Stop Oil activists, where he also documents his own shift from moderate negotiator to climate elder.

Wrapping up this month from Issue 22 – ARK (also on offer!), we republished Eleanor Morgan’s lyrical essay ‘Seasick’, alongside an editorial, ‘Notes on The Finding of This Logbook’ as an introduction to the ARK.

Featured Mountaineer

Joanna Pocock

Our current featured mountaineer is Irish-Canadian writer and Dark Mountain contributing editor, Joanna Pocock. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and Guardian US. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender. Greyhound is her second book. Check out the description below and get your copy of this road-tripping memoir here, and do take a look at Joanna’s pieces for Dark Mountain’s online edition — an extract from Surrender about a transsexual rewilder, and This Is Where They Make Meat — a devastating piece about industrial beef production in the Texas panhandle.

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual against the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.

News from the Network

The British Pilgrimage Trust are hosting the 2025 Pilgrimage Gathering in London on the 2nd October. Writers, artists, and thought-leaders including Jeremy Deller, India Rakusen, Alice Loxton, Rupert Sheldrake and Seed Sistas will be there, exploring the spiritual, cultural, and ecological dimensions of pilgrimage. Experience panel discussions, a canal pilgrimage and live music with Broadside Hacks that connect us with the ancient practice of pilgrimage in a modern context.

The Raft network are hosting an Imagining Thrutopia residency at the Bidston Observatory in Liverpool between the 3rd-10th September. More details below:

This civilisation is dying, but people carrying the seeds of a new way of life will survive it. How can we navigate the vast possibilities that lie beyond the end of business as usual? As part of this week, artists Ruth Ben-Tovim, and Lucy Neal from the Town Anywhere team will facilitate a new version of the Town Anywhere community visioning process with a ‘Thrutopian’ lens, enabling us to time travel together to 2035 to 'rehearse the future’ .

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books or the new home for our online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive series are available as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 27 (£18.99)

Our spring special issue is a full colour collection of writing and artwork on things bodily and broken, mended and mysterious, individual and collective, interrelated and entwined. Order from our website, or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 27 for only £12.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

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Solstice greetings all! This month we share three exciting book offers, an excerpt from our current issue on ‘bodies’, the latest writing from our new Substack edition, a peek into The Plant Pamphlets in action, plus work from our current featured artist. You’ll also find details about how you can support Dark Mountain.

Summer Book Offers

Stock up your Dark Mountain bookshelf

Three classic Dark Mountain collections are now on offer in our store of uncivilised art and writing until the end of July. Do grab yourself a copy (or two), as they are likely to fly off our shelves fast!

First up is Issue 25 (£11.99), an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights. This book gathers voices from around the world – from Portugal to Palestine – to question the anthropocentric language of rights, couched in terms of ‘who owns what’ – but what happens when we flip such assumptions on their heads? Does the land belong to us, or do we belong to the land?

Next is our twenty-second issue ARK (£12.99) – a work of creative salvage made in collaboration with the Wilderness Art Collective. In its pages you’ll find an assemblage of stories gathered from the wreckage left by a flood that has already come; art and writing that reveal the beauty, resilience and strength found in being fully alive in a troubled time.

Finally, our only issue dedicated entirely to fiction, FABULA (£19.99), is now available to buy from our print archive, having previously been unlisted in our online shop. There are just a few copies of this voyage into uncivilised storytelling left, so if you’ve ever wanted to expand your Dark Mountain library, now is your chance! Check out Luke Winter’s dark folk story from its pages below.

Buy Dark Mountain Books

Dark Mountain: Issue 27

A page from our current issue on ‘bodies’

Our latest issue is a hardback anthology revolving around bodies, human and creaturely, plant and mineral, in an era of planetary breakdown. Below we share one of the many visceral poems from its pages, a piece from Felicia Zamora in which startling visions of what lies in our hands and beneath our feet come into view. This poem previously appeared in our online edition (now housed on Substack) alongside bodily work by poet Finn Haunch and artist Maria Renée.

Buy Dark Mountain: Issue 27

Ecogodliness

Scrolling the news, I pause at the underbelly of a lily pad. The veins. My god the 
veins. I put my phone down & think of all the lily pads I’ve encountered, never 
once thinking of the underside. All I turn over, choose not to turn over. All ahead 
of me left to turn & turn. Who looms large from above, unknowing (or unwilling) 
to turn me from back to belly, to inspect my Achilles, then soles of my feet? Check
my palms for residue? Pick at the etches in my wrists? Scan each follicle for what hides in the passage between hair & epidermis? What lingers in the overlooked. 
Linger with me. Tracing veins & belly buttons. Our thick fingers on our not-sosmallness. Berssenbrugge said, ‘When we enter into that closeness and unboundedness, it feels like disintegration, like everywhere.’ Gasp – I 
acknowledge the vastness tucked inside everywhere: from brain to galaxy, brain as galaxy. Gasp (mouth, too, a type of galaxy; language another). Energy collecting & expelling: propels the tumble & also the ghost in haunt of the tumble. Vastness in vastness. Think of a cell. Now the 100 trillion inside you. Gasp. I wonder about 
energy. What recycles. What churns. What burns away. I wonder who disintegrates 
me. Who I disintegrate. What turns from me, unable to stomach my filthy veins. 
O, my filthy veins. Filthy filth. How I long, anyway, to show you my crevasses. That closeness. Closeness: a brandished, bleeding love story. Don’t forget to peer so close 
you taste the supernova on my breath. What protrudes me. Am I lily pad? Am I frog? 
Or am I the water, forgotten, in hold of everything together, everything a float?

Online Edition

Catching up with the post

This month our online edition has highlighted several key pieces from our print archive, previously unpublished online, as well as timely new work, from revelatory essays to ‘post-cautionary’ tales. In Where Does the Night Start, Robert Sherman takes us into the heartland of the recent legal debates over our right to sleep under the stars in England. Anthropologist Carla Stang journeys into the forest of the Mehinaku people in Rampant Rainbows and the Blackened Sun to learn about an attentive state of being the tribe call awitsiri – a salve to the frenetic modern mind. In The Meniscus Moment, Scottish writer Margaret Elphinstone reaches deep into a mythic and parallel past, when the frontiers of the Roman Empire began to collapse as its centre imploded.

Wrapping up this month’s posts, Nick Hunt retells a dark tale (also available as audio) from the edge of Welsh lake in To the Bone, about a mythical creature dragged to shore by ‘civilising’ human hands, seeking to break what they cannot understand.

If you have just arrived to our Substack edition, do check out our Long Read section, featuring core pieces from Dark Mountain’s co-founders. In Remember the Future, Dougald Hine examines the collapse of cultures, looking to the future by looking to the past, and in Dark Ecology, Paul Kingsnorth shares a damning account of the ‘progress trap’ of civilisation, juxtaposing it with a praise song for a down-to-earth hand tool.

Midsummer Plant Practice

The Plant Pamphlets in action

For those in the northern hemisphere, this zenith of the flowering year reveals a treasure trove for plant lovers as the hedgerows and wild terrains burst into colour — red campion, St John’s wort, foxglove, yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, wild rose and more. Our newsletter editor Hannah Close has been foraging her Hebridean island home with a copy of The Plant Pamphlets in tow, getting hands-on with pineapple weed, which has proven to be a favourite as a tea with a dash of honey! Part-manual, part-memoir, this small book is a distillation of Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson’s (1962-2024), practice of ‘hanging out’ with twelve flowers and a tree over a year: from a conversation with burdock in a community garden, to lying alongside sea kale on the Suffolk shore, to foraging for mallow leaf fritters and flower teas.

Start your Plant Practice

Featured Artist

Caroline Ross

This month our featured artist is Dark Mountain luminary, . Caroline was born and lives in Dorset, England. She is a writer and natural materials artist and her first book Found and Ground was published in 2023. She writes each week at Uncivil Savant on Substack, and her second book, Drawn From the Wild, was published earlier this month.

For a dip into Caroline’s work, check out Three Blades, which reflects on the transformative power of the tactile through a knife-making practice set across deep time. See also her piece from our ‘Becoming Human’ series, Question for the Woods, where she enters the liminal world of the forest and forges a wild camp by a fallen oak. Her essay ‘Keepers of the Spring’ features in our Substack edition, which you can find below (originally published in Issue 22 – ARK, currently on offer!)

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books or the new home for our online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive series are available as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 27 (£18.99)

Our spring special issue is a full colour collection of writing and artwork on things bodily and broken, mended and mysterious, individual and collective, interrelated and entwined. Order from our website, or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 27 for only £12.99.

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Hello everyone and welcome to our new monthly newsletter! This month, we share news of our move to Substack, plus dispatches from our current issue on ‘bodies’, including a lively launch event with contributors from around the world, and several stellar pieces from its pages which feature in our online edition. You’ll also find the latest news from the network, and more details about how you can support Dark Mountain.

Welcome to our new Substack!

An invitation to explore Dark Mountain’s collections of writing and art

Welcome to our new Substack edition, a glimpse into the creative work of the Dark Mountain Project.

For a while now we have wished to share the treasures of our ‘stacks’ with a wider audience. Since the project began in 2009 we have published hundreds of pieces in our anthologies – essays, fiction, poetry, artwork, practices, testimony – but many of the books are now out of print. So our plan is to shift the weekly online edition to this platform, interspersing new pieces with some classic Dark Mountain stories. This specially curated Substack will act as a guideline, a leaner showcase of the writing and art kept on our shelves. A Dark Mountain ‘reader’, if you like, for old and new readers.

For this inaugural ‘front page’ we share essays by Dark Mountain’s co-founders and in our Long Read section, laying the tracks for two of the project’s main themes: a creative resistance to the machine and the myth of progress. We will also be featuring some of our key poets and artists each month: here with three searing Firebird poems by Em Strang from our recent issue and artist Caroline Ross’ elemental practice of tending a spring.

For our paying subscribers, there will also a chance to buy back issues that have not previously been on sale. These are all limited editions, so if your Dark Mountain bookshelf is missing one or two volumes, do check them out.

This month we’re starting with Dark Mountain: Issue 18 – FABULA, a collection dedicated to uncivilised fiction. You can read or listen to a story by Luke Winter from this anthology here.

How you can join us

Like all Substacks, there are two kinds of subscriptions for this site, free and paid. Paid subscribers will receive our weekly online edition and the newsletter, plus extra benefits, such as the chance to buy our archive editions. Free subscribers will receive our monthly newsletter and any public posts, with the option to upgrade at any time. If you are already on our mailing list you will receive this newsletter automatically. Meanwhile our main Dark Mountain website will continue to host our store of earlier online posts, a full background story, as well as the Dark Mountain shop and book subscriptions.

Thank you for reading everyone and for your support – and hope to see you again here soon!

Subscribe to the Dark Mountain Substack

Dark Mountain: Issue 27

More from the pages of our new spring issue

Earlier this month, we gathered – across oceans and time zones – to launch our latest issue: a hardback collection shaped around bodies human and creaturely, plant and mineral; an anthology of the corporeal in times of crisis, collapse and change.

Some of the pieces are visceral – peeling back the anatomies of Italian Renaissance Venuses, burying a road-killed mole in a nettle-fibre shroud, or plunging into the uncanny world of blood platelet donation – and, inevitably, death casts a shadow on this book. But its pages hum with life as well, from the palo verde beetle emerging from the Sonoran Desert, from crows, jellyfish, mountain goats, mare’s tail, granite and trees, to the leafy guardian deity of the Amazon.

The event brought together writers and artists from all over the world to read from its pages. Introduced by four of the book’s editors, we tuned into our bodies to listen to tales from the mountains and shorelines, and a future where humans shapeshifted into birds; Peter Brooks took us into the hellish reality of UK chicken sheds, Adam Wilson into the generous world of his ‘gift flock’; Cate Chapman spoke about her own body in a state of collapse, and poet Em Strang the fate of coyotes in a New Mexico wildfire. At its heart, we showcased some of the glorious and disturbing artwork in this issue.

Take a peek into Dark Mountain: Issue 27 in our online edition section below, and catch up on the recording here:

Buy Issue 27 Here

Online Edition

Glimpses into Dark Mountain: Issue 27

This month we showcased pieces from our latest issue which explores the theme of bodies in all their forms, starting with Amy Kennedy’s chilling account of the body's invasion by fossil fuels at a children's birthday party where everything is made of plastic. Caroline Williams explores living with a chronic condition, once understood as a 'wandering womb', through a pilgrimage to a standing stone in Cornwall, and Finn Haunch and Felicia Zamora follow with poetry in ‘The Vastness Tucked in Everywhere’; a lily pad reveals the expanse of the universe, and a Yorkshire moor the Greek tragic tale of Antigone and her unburied brother.

Meanwhile in ‘Iron Martyr’, paramedic Darren Perlongo describes his stark encounter with a dead body on a railroad embankment, while Dana Iova-Koga dances in a rural Japanese kitchen and city basement theatre as part of a performance collective exploring the body's capacity to connect with the Earth. In ‘The Planet Burns and Still I Drive’, Lucy Hallam steers us to our regular online edition, contending with the cognitive dissonance created by the car, a contributor to climate breakdown that is also one of her few sites of safety and freedom.

Browse our Online Edition

News from the Network

Earthy books and teachings from Caroline Ross

Long-time Dark Mountain contributor and guest editor for our forthcoming issue on ‘uncivilised art’, Caroline Ross (), has an exciting new book coming out on 12th June called Drawn from the Wild. It's a practical guide to making your own foraged art materials, with hands-on projects and foreword by Stewart Lee. Along with artist Rima Staines, Caroline is also hosting an in-person course, This Painted Earth, which runs 7th - 11th July in Devon, UK. It's a convivial five-day course of drawing and painting from the world around us, from our hearts, and from the imaginal worlds, all done with handmade natural materials. Read Caroline’s piece ‘Keepers of the Spring’ here.

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books or the new home for our online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive series are available as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 27 (£18.99)

Our spring special issue is a full colour collection of writing and artwork on things bodily and broken, mended and mysterious, individual and collective, interrelated and entwined. Order from our website, or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 27 for only £12.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

The Dark Mountain online edition is edited by Charlotte Du Cann and , our monthly newsletter by . If you would like to contribute please do get in touch at info@dark-mountain.net and send us either a pitch, or a News from the Network item (100 words max with image). Our submissions guidelines can be found here.

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