
Dark Thoughts

Time to Look Down (artwork from first Uncivilisation Festival 2010
How do we make sense of the world, as we start to disentangle ourselves from the stories we grew up taking for reality itself?
In this section, you’ll find Dark Mountain contributors thinking about the largest questions and asking what it means to live in times like these.


Fire Season
Amory Abbott
6th September, 2023
First of a trio of pieces on wildfires: artist Amory Abbott reports from smoke-shrouded Vancouver, with an introduction to his co-edited creative journal 'Fire Season'

Preparing the Ground
Jonny Randall
9th August, 2023
Final post in this Dark Kitchen online sister series running alongside our latest book, Jonny Randall draws connections between bodily and planetary health, exploring restorative practices not only for our individual bodies but the soil we all depend on.

Enchanted Visions
Nick Hunt
6th July, 2023
To mark the publication of Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt explores how alternate histories can help imagine different futures

A Compass for Survival
Mat Osmond
28th June, 2023
In this penetrating essay, artist and lecturer Mat Osmond, looks at how the disruption of activism challenges a fossil-fuelled ecocidal civilisaton and asks: what is the true role of education when generations are being betrayed by the sleepwalking culture that fosters them?

I Want a Better Catastrophe
Andrew Boyd
15th February, 2023
Today activist and writer Andrew Boyd introduces his new book, 'I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor', which is published this month.

The Paths That Are Still Open
Dougald Hine
1st February, 2023
Today Dark Mountain co-founder Dougald Hine introduces his new book, 'At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies, which he begins to tour in the UK this month.

A Half Mountain
James Roberts
20th December, 2022
In the wake of COP27, James Roberts drives a scenic route down the Elan Valley in Wales into a poisoned landscape that holds the untold stories of a people who once toiled there.

What Use is Art?
Mat Osmond
27th July, 2022
In the light of recent climate protests, Mat Osmond considers what it entails to hold ourselves accountable to a generation facing catastrophe.

Anywhere But Here
Anthea Lawson
29th September, 2021
'How do we change a system we are implicated in'? This week's post explores how we might engage with the complexity of the task, in an extract from Anthea Lawson's 'The Entangled Activist'.
