A literary movement for the ending of a world · UK, global · 2009–present
A literary movement of writers and artists who reject the myth of progress and seek new stories for an age of ecological unraveling.
The founding act · a slim crowdfunded pamphlet
The Dark Mountain Project is a UK literary and artistic network founded in 2009 by former environmental journalist Paul Kingsnorth and writer Dougald Hine, built on the conviction that the ecological crisis cannot be met by reaffirming the civilizational myths of progress, human mastery over nature, and technological rescue.
Its founding act was a slim, crowdfunded pamphlet — Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto — launched at a small riverside gathering outside Oxford in 2009, calling for a new "Uncivilised" writing that abandons the reassurances of mainstream environmentalism and looks steadily at the possibility of collapse.
From that pamphlet grew a journal, a series of festivals, and a loose, ongoing web of contributors who treat civilization's ending not as a problem to be solved but as a story to be re-told.
— The Dark Mountain Manifesto, launched by the river, 2009
The recurring figures · what the movement returns to
Why it spread · the memetic forces
Permission to grieve and to stop pretending catastrophe can be averted was a profound relief to many. Its literary, non-activist stance attracted those alienated from both denial and green optimism. A resonant manifesto and anthology gave the mood a home and a name.
The myth of endless progress is finished — so tell the truth, in uncivilised writing.
Rather than deny or "solve" ecological collapse, the project holds that we need new, honest stories and art that reckon with unraveling: writing that no longer serves the civilisation whose ending it describes.
What binds it · what pulls it apart
A loose literary-artistic network gathered around a manifesto and anthologies — more a shared sensibility and gathering than an organization.
Two writers by a river
Their correspondence and a single meeting became a manifesto; the manifesto became a movement. Mediums the network works in — the manifesto · the anthology · the festival · the essay — and the archetypes it inhabits: Arcadia, and the Apocalypse / Millennium.
The reach · the signature · the fate
Named and gave voice to collapse-aware, post-progress culture — influencing climate discourse, ecological art and writing, and the broader turn toward grief and "dark" realism about the future.
A manifesto and anthologies coalescing a diffuse mood — ecological grief and post-progress honesty — into a literary movement.
Living, as a network and publisher — its collapse-aware sensibility increasingly mainstream as climate anxiety spreads.
Colophon · images & sources
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