Introducing Dark Mountain: Issue 29

The word ‘deer’, from the Old English dēor, originally referred to any animal that was free and undomesticated. The ‘wilderness’, or ‘wild deerness’, was where the wild ones lived. We would like to welcome you to the wild deerness. The non-human, the more-than-human – and the wild deerness in all its forms – has always been at the heart of Dark Mountain. And yet it’s taken 29 issues to make animals the theme of a whole book. Why is this? Why have we avoided what feels like such an obvious subject? The manifesto that launched the project back in 2009 called for work that attempted to ‘step outside the human bubble’. This simple request, however, is deceptively difficult – if not impossible. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’. Philosophers from Pythagoras to John Stuart Mill have argued over the degrees of sentience experienced by non-human animals. What unites all of these arguments is the fact that they are limited by language. This…