Looks like they're stopping the publication of the bi-annual book after the final edition due out soon: https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-30/ Pity, I got some of the earlier ones and found them to be thought-provoking, eye-catching, often beautiful, sometimes overly liberal and the kind of 'poetic' approach that makes me roll my eyes, but hitting the mark more often than not. Nothing else quite like it nowadays... Presume they'll keep an online presence going at least. Below is an exerpt, I think.

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https://darkmountainproject.substack.com/p/boom-and-bust

Boom and Bust
From Dark Mountain: Issue 30
The Dark Mountain Project

The latest in our series from our new special autumn collection – Dark Mountain's final biannual print anthology – is an essay from author and activist Anthea Lawson, exploring how patterns of urgency and collapse play out both in societal systems and in human bodies. Accompanied by an image from artist Robert O. Leaver's 'Hole Earth': an experience of labour, gestation, surrender and rebirth.

‘Hole Earth’ by Robert O. Leaver

DESPITE BEING ABLE-BODIED AND MORE THAN HALFWAY through life, I am learning how to stand and sit once again, with a teacher of the Alexander Technique. At least, that’s what it feels like. By the end of a lesson, after many gentle and minute adjustments, and with repeated reminders to release muscles all over my body that I have been habitually bracing for decades, I find myself in a standing posture that feels as blissful from the inside as a very young child’s instinctive poise looks beautiful from the outside: that exquisite positioning of heavy head upon delicate neck, both softly wobbling yet sufficiently supported. I came in search of help for persistent lower back pain which neither prescription painkillers nor physiotherapy had solved. I have stayed with it not only because the pain is in retreat (indeed, the NHS acknowledges that the Alexander Technique can help with back pain), but because the metaphysical revelations are startling.

I’d heard about it from musician friends, who find it helpful to unwind the asymmetric positions they must hold. Frederick Matthias Alexander, born in Tasmania in 1869, was an actor who lost his voice. As the legend goes, he used mirrors to observe himself, began to see the extent of the tension caused by his nervous system reacting to the idea of performing, and regained his voice through discovering he could inhibit the habitual responses that create tension. In 1904 he brought his findings to London, continuing teaching until his death in 1955.

Today’s teachers can trace their lineage directly back to Alexander’s teaching, and the terminology that he developed remains in use. The instinctive alignment between head, neck and back that, with the teacher’s gentle guidance, I have assumed by the end of a lesson, Alexander called ‘primary control’. We cannot deliberately strive to reach it, nor can we overcompensate the other way (for me, this would be to fall into a slump – though someone who habitually slumps might overcompensate by bracing themselves). We can only cease doing the problematic thing, which requires inhibiting our habitual reaction to external stimuli. So the lesson is actually nothing to do with standing and sitting; those activities are just an opportunity to observe that rushing reaction to get there, to respond, to achieve the goal, never mind how. Alexander called this nervous system reactivity ‘end-gaining’. It’s how you walk or get up out of a chair when you’re in a rush and not thinking. For me, end-gaining is, quite literally, sticking my neck out; the chief culprit in years of migraines. I worked out years ago that they develop from a neck-out, back-of-the-skull-crunched-down physical stance. Now I’m learning how they also come from the grasping, unmindful, disembodied, must-get-to-the-next-thing orientation towards the world that generates that stance.

But we could also say that end-gaining is profit at the expense of wellbeing. It’s endless economic growth at the expense of the biosphere. It’s power at the expense of life. It’s using artificial intelligence to avoid thinking. It’s any hollow victory, any revolution that puts ends over means, and any overreach that we stretch for because we fear what might happen, what we might feel, if we just… stopped.

At an anti-far right march in London that I attended with half a million others in March 2026, four people shouldered above the crowd the two poles of a litter bearing a three-foot-high, bawling, orange, papier-mâché Donald Trump baby, in a soiled nappy and holding a munition emblazoned with children’s toy lettering: My First Bomb. This grotesque image seemed remarkably psychologically astute. I had been reading Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider’s contribution to the literature that seeks to understand patriarchy’s persistence. Like other feminists who draw on psychoanalytic thinking, they argue that patriarchy requires psychological explanations that go deeper than the material advantages that male domination confers. In their account, it is fear of feeling the pain and vulnerability of loss of relationship, often in early life, that keeps some men on the culturally-sanctioned track of domination; patriarchy replicating itself through trauma. Faced with any changes that threaten this unsteady fortress of defences against feeling the despair of their own pain – which would feel like ‘collapse’ – they resort to violence, destruction, and the kind of anti-life ideas that make actual large-scale societal collapse more likely.

This is how we reach the point where a few of the world’s most powerful men would rather accelerate the destruction of civilisation than face their own inner vulnerability (or, in the outer world, indictment). They give themselves away when they inveigh against compassion – actually one of our most powerful human capacities – as weak and wrong. Propagated discursively by men on the internet, like the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad who thinks compassion for the stranger is ‘suicidal empathy’ (he also came up with the ‘woke mind-virus’ phrase adopted so enthusiastically by Elon Musk), this topsy-turvy idea is made real through the brutal calculus of detention centres and aid cuts.

A few of the world’s most powerful men would rather accelerate the destruction of civilisation than face their own inner vulnerability

Of course, to claim there is something wrong with compassion is a far more explicit articulation of what racialised capitalism has already been doing for centuries: putting profit, extraction of labour, land and resources and the death of nature over the care of life. Also, of course, patriarchy is only one of the dominance hierarchies that currently structure most human societies, intersecting with white supremacy, class and others. But what I most want to note is that, as ever, language reveals what is going on in the depths. Perhaps the very idea of functioning, compassionate human societies that can live in interdependent harmony with the rest of nature does feel like suicide for powerful authoritarian men and those who have swallowed their stories: it’s the death of the individual, questing, controlling self who can have whatever and whomever he wants.

I was intrigued to see the end-gaining pattern in the Alexander Technique’s teachings, because for several years I had been tracking a related pattern in the dominant culture. My friend Sophy Banks – systems thinker, engineer, psychotherapist, holder of grief ceremonies – had taught me to notice an urgency/collapse polarity that seems to manifest at every scale, making it hard to imagine a consistent way to live in which our energy (or the planet) can regenerate. We’re either being urgent, or we’re collapsing in exhaustion. We flip from one extreme to the other. At the scale of the individual, under the perverse incentive structure of capitalism, we run, run – until we collapse into burnout. At a societal scale, the economy must grow, grow – or it collapses into recession; business as usual or bust. And, under that model, bust is exactly what will happen – but to the biosphere. Climate breakdown and ecological collapse are the planetary level consequences of urgently growing the economy until it destroys everything that makes life possible.

Even when we’re trying to save the world from this outcome we can fall into the same patterns, because modernity’s urgency/collapse pattern is in all of us. Individually, we push ourselves beyond our limits – partly motivated, perhaps, by a subconscious Calvinist script of proving ourselves saved, not damned. Groups getting together to make change are also pushed into urgency, not just by the situations they want to alleviate but by their founders’ habits and way of being, especially if they’re action-oriented people, as founders often are. People who, like them, are go-go-go will feel that they belong, but those who want to bring in cycles of rest and discussion will not – or there may be conflict and the group falls apart.

Such boom-and-bust patterns are not only observable among the ‘activists’ I spend time with. ‘Green growth’ ideas tell us that we can substitute renewables for fossil fuels and continue consuming, growing the economy and exploiting workers. Yet, even if that did reduce carbon emissions, we are crossing other Earth-system boundaries for soil, water and air and will meet collapse anyway. Then there is the interplanetary-scale of tech billionaires’ fantasies of life on Mars, artificial general intelligence, uploading their consciousnesses to the cloud for digital afterlives, or the billions of future humans envisaged by the effective- altruists and ‘long-termists’. They pursue abstract futures for abstract lives at the expense of current suffering and at the risk of accelerated climate and ecological breakdown, both of which could be vastly mitigated by the resources they have accumulated.

I see scarcity driving this urgency/collapse pattern, though I may be influenced by my own scarcity feelings here. Sophy Banks sees a more general sense of fear, which she thinks may be underpinned by feelings of worthlessness, powerlessness, separation, unsafety and scarcity. Creating the conditions where we are not driven by fear, she observes, requires that their opposites are all present: feeling valued, empowered, connected, safe and resourced. She notes that people coming from different perspectives or traditions often name one of these feelings as central to the problem. For example, ‘separation’ is a familiar frame for Indigenous and decolonial critiques; Vanessa Andreotti’s Hospicing Modernity distils the problem down to how colonial modernity’s ontology separates us from the web of life. Lack of safety, meanwhile, is central to people working with trauma or attachment; Gilligan and Snider’s discussion of patriarchy’s psychic roots draws fruitfully on their reading of Bowlby’s theory of infant attachment.

I’ve also been learning from Sophy to see that there are ‘return paths’ out of that split polarity of collapse-despair versus urgency-burnout, though we may have to walk them back into existence ourselves. At each level of scale, we are re-joining aspects of life that have been artificially sundered by the ruling patriarchal culture of splitting and extraction. Within ourselves we can put action and rest back into relationship by remembering that we are not our thoughts or feelings, and noticing when we’re being pushed into action by stories from the outside world (Consume! Achieve! Save!) or stories from inside ourselves (Be good! Don’t feel! Gain approval! Be liked!). We can learn where our internalised voices saying ‘no rest’ are coming from and choose whether to listen to them; spend time noticing and being with non-human kin; seek collective support in feeling our grief.

At each level of scale, we are re-joining aspects of life that have been artificially sundered by the ruling patriarchal culture of splitting and extraction

In the groups where we gather, we can put action and connection back into relationship too, by making enough space – alongside being busy with our tasks – for communication, celebration, reflection or repair, if things have gone awry. In our aims for our communities, we can recognise that there are so many more options than those two extremes of business as usual versus apocalypse. There is an infinite number of potential stories – including those in which we knock on each other’s doors, ask what we can do together, and build local resilience to help us cope with the faltering climate and failing societal systems – so long as we accept that the task is not to restore to just a few of us those boons of modernity that we blindly enjoyed for a while before we realised the truth about climate and ecological breakdown. The task is to put life – and the relationships that support it and make it worth living – at the centre of whatever we do, even amid already-occurring breakdown. When we do this, we put ‘economy’ back into relationship with care.

At each of these scales, we are paying attention to the means and not just the ends: prefiguration, as scholars of social movements sometimes call it; ‘emergent strategy’, in adrienne maree brown’s resonant term. And not just the means, but the ‘means-whereby’. This was Alexander’s phrase for paying mindful attention to how we respond each time we are called to move. Do we leap up, unthinkingly, according to our old pattern? Or do we inhibit that response – for a fraction of a beat – just long enough to choose how we are going to do it?

Back in my Alexander Technique teacher’s room, I continue to grapple with my own relationship between means and ends. As I am guided to stand up from a chair, I am invited to focus only on my knees pointing forwards, my back tending backwards, my head drawing upwards, as if suspended on an invisible string. Not thinking about standing up. Consciousness extending beyond myself, so as not to freeze in my own self-conscious glare. I find myself standing upright, softly and pain-free, in the mid-point between slump and over-reach. Aldous Huxley, who studied with Alexander in the 1930s, was so taken with the metaphysical and political implications of the method’s experiential offering of harmonious and deliberate mind-body alignment that in 1940, he published a book called Ends and Means to argue, in his own terms, for the means-whereby. It became a mainstay of the mid-century pacifist movement.

When we live our lives in end-gaining mode, we can be trying to avoid our own feelings, griefs, uncomfortable stories and histories. That much I can feel in my bones every time I practice the Alexander Technique and experience temporary freedom from the pressure of that flight. On a couple of occasions I have found myself in tears: a sudden release of emotion that had been held behind the dam of all that physical tension. Such embodied insight has made me suspect, also, that in habitual end-gaining we may ultimately be on the run from our mortality. The ‘collapse’ end of the collapse/urgency polarity stands as a metaphor for burnout, despair, slump or inaction, but what are we really talking about when we talk about ‘collapse’? It is death. Here we are, trying to escape annihilation, but in our typically Western and modern way: by continually, urgently, running and growing.

Death-denial is intrinsically human, an inevitable aspect of our reflexive consciousness and of living with the shattering knowledge that we are mortal. Culture can mitigate against death-denial with myths that keep us in touch with the eternal return to the earth, but Western modernity’s linear, extractive culture has turned us away from the cycles of life, death and compost and, for those who can still recognise her, from the death aspect of the old great Mother. Christianity has the return, but not to the earth. I found myself almost unbearably moved reading the conclusion to Sophie Strand’s essay collection The Flowering Wand when she has Dionysus and Orpheus help the dying Jesus to lie down in the blue-black soil, with a libation of wine and the scent of lavender and woodsmoke.

This culture’s aversion to vulnerability and the life-giving – in its compost sense – inevitability of death is projected outwards into ecological breakdown, creating, ironically, the conditions for mass death. At the extremes of the culture are the tech-patriarchs and fascists, attempting to avoid death and their own feelings. In end-gaining so far, with so little concern for the means along the way, they miss out on the actual business of life, the path that treads a line between despair and overreach: the intergenerational chain of work, care and love, from one woman’s body to the next generation which her body births and the community raises, hour by hour, day by day, amid the attention that is needed to create a society where the needs of the flourishing of all life are put at the centre of everything, even when conditions are hard and hope is thin. We can call this, too, the means-whereby. We can also call this, simply, living.

Notes

Gilligan, C. and Snider, N. Why Does Patriarchy Persist? Polity Press, 2018
Wong, J.C. ‘Loathe thy neighbour: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy’, Guardian, 8 April 2025

Anthea Lawson is the author of How Not To Save The World and The Entangled Activist. She wrote about childbirth for Issue 13, about the relationship between despair and activism for Issue 16, interviewed the philosopher Minna Salami for Issue 21, and co-edited Issues 16, 21 and 25. anthealawson.substack.com. (Issues 13, 16, 21, 25)

IMAGE

Robert O. Leaver
Hole Earth

Wearing a vintage pinstripe suit that once belonged to my father, I began digging holes and getting inside them. HOLE EARTH taps into themes of exploration, vulnerability and perseverance. The process is simple; I select a spot, I dig, I get down inside. The hole is round and deep enough to contain me in the foetal position, just beneath the surface. While inside the hole I try my best to listen, to myself, and to the earth around me. When the time is right I rise again, fill the hole and move on. Each hole provides an experience of labour, gestation, surrender and rebirth. I have dug holes in the wilderness, in major cities, small towns, and in a snowstorm by the ocean. Sometimes I have an audience of strangers, or friends, or family. At times I am completely alone.

Robert O. Leaver is an artist, musician and writer based in the Catskill Mountains and New York City. His music goes by the name Birdthrower. (Issues 7-9, 16)