Dark Ocean is a collection of essays, stories, artwork and poetry, praise song and meditation, based on a Dark Mountain residency aboard a boat called Merlin in the Outer Hebrides in 2023. The highly visual edition travels from the seabed to the horizon, from birth to death, in search of beauty, memory and the transformative power of the sea.
Our paper vessel sails out from the Atlantic, carried by currents across power lines and ghost nets, through storms and oil spills, plankton and giant squid, into the far Pacific, swimming by the foggy Californian shore, following in the wake of a Greenland shark, the song of a humpback whale, a floating coconut shell in the rising Indian Ocean, the nightmare of migrants in the Mediterranean, a dreaming of Doggerland under the North Sea, of a vanished ocean in the desert in Utah.
Browse extracts here
Our twenty-fifth book is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.
Land is the ground beneath our feet, but it is so much more than that. Those who act in its defence are fighting for many things: for the right to access food and water; for the existence of other beings, of rivers, mountains, lakes and trees; for the right to build a home, or to live without one; for the right to walk without fences and to sleep beneath the stars; for connection and imagination; to resist invasion.
This book gathers voices from around the world – from Cameroon to Mexico, from Portugal to Palestine, from Singapore to the leafy lanes of the Oxfordshire stockbroker-belt. The language of rights can be anthropocentric, couched in terms of ‘who owns what’ – but what happens when we flip such assumptions on their heads? Does the land belong to us, or do we belong to the land? What happens when we expand our perception beyond the human?
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