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  • Beyond Nature Writing: The Dark Mountain Project and The Land: An Occasional Magazine About Land Rights
  • Nicole Pohl

We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Nature writing has long been a revered yet ideologically disputed literary genre and mode. Oscillating between accusations of (bourgeois) escapism and environmental anarchism, nature writing has always been tapping into political debates and agendas. My review seeks to introduce two journal publications that contribute in a wider sense to nature and ecological writing and express their utopian visions in manifestos that deserve attention.

Nature writing (and its literary predecessor, the pastoral) has served as a proxy for topical social and political debates about ecological responsibility, sustainability, and civilization, but more so, about humanness, evolution, and human society. Calling upon mythological resonances such as the Golden Age, Eden, Arcadia, and Albion, a certain strand of the genre carries a profoundly utopian dimension. This prelapsarian utopianism is juxtaposed by the dystopian vision of the destruction of our natural environment underpinned and in many ways motivated by the modern alienation from a “natural life.” Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and George Monbiot’s recent book Feral (2013) have ignited debates about the “true nature” of nature. Their call to “rewilding,” or letting nature be in charge, raised specters of, on the one hand, so-called ecoterrorism and, on the other, unfettered pandemics of avian flu and the black death. Richard Maybey’s The Unofficial Countryside and Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley’s more recent book Edgelands: Journey’s into England’s True Wilderness contribute to the debate in different ways. They reclaim the industrial wasteland and the nonplaces where town and country meet as wilder and more natural than cultured native ecosystems. [End Page 255]

Edward Abbey’s strand of nature writing reflects the politicization of nature writing and ecological writing that looks at environmental issues in the context of culture and civilization, but more so, in the context of land rights and social agendas. As such this is not a novel pursuit, but Abbey is of course particularly known for his very radical environmental politics and the possible inspiration it provided for radical environmental groups.

The focus on land rights as a social and environmental issue is also pursued in the British journal The Land: An Occasional Magazine About Land Rights. The journal’s motto is to campaign “peacefully for access to the land, its resources and the decision-making processes affecting them, for everyone, irrespective of race, creed, age or gender.” Publishing since 2006, The Land has contributed to the Landrights Campaign of Britain and offered articles on self-sufficiency, education, social justice, “rewilding,” farming, DIY planning, upskilling, and environmental policies. Interesting for Utopian Studies is its manifesto (http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/manifesto). Its essential utopian preoccupation harks back to the writings of More and the utopian socialists; landownership is seen as a means to open up the political, social, environmental, and economic terrain to more socially just and sustainable possibilities. The Land rejects anthropocentric environmentalism in favor of social ecology. It successfully marries the visionary with the pragmatic: “We are much more than dreamers, now. We must be diggers too.”

The Dark Mountain Project pursues related issues through art and literature. It consists of a “network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it.”1 The project publishes biannually a hardback collection of “Uncivilised” writing and art. Each beautifully designed book brings together writing of many kinds—including essays, conversations, poetry, and fiction—along with the work of artists inspired by the project, all of it responding in one way or another to Dark Mountain’s call for work that challenges the root assumptions of our culture. Its manifesto, Uncivilisation (http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/), reflects on the purpose of nature and ecological writing as “Uncivilised writing” and offers an interesting contribution to the recent Guardian debate...

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