Maya Silver and the Dark Humanities

Maya Silver, second year Environmental Humanities graduate student, published an essay The Dark Humanities: Cosmic Comfort in the Anthropocene on the Dark Mountain Project. In it, she proposes that the dark humanities encompass a both an environmentalist’s study of space and also illuminates these dark times of climate collapse.

She writes: “But what about humanity’s reckoning with our larger environment, our ultimate home? Introducing the Dark Humanities — an intellectual domain for dark times. The term I’ve proposed also evokes the mystery epitomized by dark matter. We know so little about space and its cryptic vastness stupefies us, humbles us, and can even soothe us.”

Read more of Maya’s work at mayasilverwrites.com

Dark Mountain Project is itself a network of writers, artists and thinkers who reflect the reality of ecological collapse and political unravelling. “The Project grew out of a feeling that contemporary literature and art were failing to respond honestly or adequately to the scale of our entwined ecological, economic and social crises. We believe that writing and art have a crucial role to play in coming to terms with this reality, and in questioning the foundations of the world in which we find ourselves.”