Uncivilisation

Much in contemporary thought is made up of myths masquerading as facts, and it is refreshing to see these myths identified as such … This slim pamphlet aims to demolish contemporary beliefs about progress, industrialism and the place of human beings on the planet.
John Gray, New Statesman

What I value [about Dark Mountain] is their clear eyed appreciation of the vulnerability of human life and the way we live it.
Rev. Giles Fraser, Thought for the Day, BBC Radio 4

Dark Mountain is a radical project, and a brilliant one, capable of opening your eyes in the encircling twilight.
Journal of Wild Culture

The Dark Mountain project tells us the things we don’t want to hear … it is a no-nonsense Zen-like response to the ‘age of ecocide’ that our civilisation is causing.
Huffington Post

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Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain Manifesto marked a break between what I was writing before and what I have written since. My previous two books had been deliberately accessible works of political journalism brought out by mainstream publishers. This was a radical artistic manifesto, co-written with someone I barely knew and self-published via online crowdfunding. Yet it may have had a bigger impact than anything else I’ve written.

Uncivilisation was a call for a type of writing that I wasn’t seeing much of in our literary and journalistic cultures: writing which acted as if we were living in the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. Writing that was open-eyed about humanity’s destruction of the Earth and the depleted future we are creating, but which did not respond to these things with polemic or hysteria, false hope or apocalyptic longing, but instead with a cool-headed attempt to engage with the myths we have created around our civilisation.

Uncivilisation was the founding manifesto of the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of radical writers and artists which I co-founded in 2009. I’m no longer involved in DM, but its work continues. You can find out more more about it here.

The Dark Mountain Project, 2009

You can buy Uncivilisation here, or read it for free online here.