More and more progressive thinkers are coming to understand that the only realistic path to a sustainable world is the collapse of the existing economic world order. The Dark Mountain Project understands the problems we as working class individuals and families all face and seeks to speak to the great dilemma of our time. We can't consume our way out of overconsumption. The future for our children will be far different from our lives this past century. The new world order, the end of an economic order powered by the consumption of resources stored away by geologic forces over millions of years, may look dark and bleak but The Dark Mountain Project seeks to teach a new ethic for these new times, a new way to see, a new way to live through the ongoing changes that surround us.
Dark Mountain: The Project
These are precarious and unprecedented times. Our economies crumble, while beyond the chaos of markets, the ecological foundations of our way of living near collapse. Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century intact.
We don’t believe that anyone – not politicians, not economists, not environmentalists, not writers – is really facing up to the scale of this. As a society, we are all still hooked on a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. Somehow, technology or political agreements or ethical shopping or mass protest are meant to save our civilisation from self-destruction.
Well, we don’t buy it. This project starts with our sense that civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world. But it is driven by our belief that this age of collapse – which is already beginning – could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.
Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories: on the myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of ‘progress’, of the conquest of ‘nature’, of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.
It is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain Project intends to conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world. We call this Uncivilisation.
Our aim is to bring together writers and artists, thinkers and doers, to assault the established citadels of literature and thought, and to begin to redraw the maps by which we navigate the places and times in which we find ourselves.
- from The Dark Mountain Project website.
