Dark Mountain: Issue 22 - ARK

Full-colour autumn 2022 edition is an ARK carrying a cargo of testimonies, stories and artwork gleaned after the flood

What do you keep when the storm comes in, and the tide goes out?

Our twenty-second issue is an ARK you might not expect: a store of testimonials from the custodians of a planet in peril, a seed bank to buffer us against an uncertain future, or a queue of iconic animals rescued from extinction.

Instead its pages carry a cargo of another sort: an assemblage of stories gathered from the wreckage left by a flood that has already come; art and writing that reveal the beauty, resilience and strength found in being fully alive in a troubled time. Our seeds are collected from felled trees and activist front lines, our disappearing creatures discovered in dreams; our artworks made with ochre from a polluted shore, with peat from endangered bogs, with insect wings, limpet shells, unloved spruce needles, microoganisms, tilting ocean horizons. A hold that treasures tales about what might happen next.

This ARK has been made in collaboration with the Wilderness Art Collective – a work of creative salvage, with a cover and content pages (designed brilliantly by Graeme Walker) forged from abandoned archives and old typewriter keys. Most of all, it is a testament to the imagination of writers and artists, gleaners in a world that has lost its way, to show how we can build and regenerate an Earth-centred culture from what has been bequeathed us on a vanished tide.