Dark Mountain Issue 17: Spring 2020

At the dawn of the 2020s we sense a change of chapter. 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 devastated over 170,000 km2 of land and killed an estimated billion animals, 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.Since this book went to press, a pandemic has swept across the world, shaking the global economy and clearing skies of pollution and cities and highways of traffic. The absence of ‘business as usual’ has revealed what happens when the merry-go-round of industrial progress stops and people encounter the existential territory Dark Mountain has been charting since our first issue came out in 2009.In this new collection we continue to hold open 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.That might answer the book’s core How can we live? What can be saved? What beauty and life might yet grow from the fallen trunk of this civilisation?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 regenerative power in an abused piece of ex-industrial ground and 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. You can follow the peregrinations of ancient peoples as they sought refuge and revelation, and to take an astronomical perspective on our small world’s happenings.Restoration has its roots in humbleness, in the ability to attend to the reality of these times; so that we might see opportunity within the grim crises that are unfolding; to find useful work to be done in service of life and truth; 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.