In a 2010 essay entitled “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” the English émigré environmental writer Paul Kingsnorth recounts his journey into and out of the environmental movement. The essay appeared in the inaugural issue of Dark Mountain, the journal attached to the Dark Mountain group—inaugurated by Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine in 2009—a literary-philosophical project dedicated to uncivilization. What is uncivilization? Coauthors Kingsnorth and Dougald Stewart introduce their manifesto with a telling excerpt from Robinson Jeffers, in which the poet urges readers to “unhumanize our views a little.” Our Dark Mountaineers elaborate how “our whole way of living is already passing into history,” while urging their readers to “face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.” Whose way of life exactly? It presumably refers to the inhabitants of the Global North who represent the primary driver of the ecological crisis now ravaging the planet. While this sort of rough political economy is implicit in the remaining Dark Mountain principles, they notably eschew political solutions; they, for instance, “reject the faith that holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions.’”1

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