The Alpine Review – Issue 3

The Alpine Review Issue 3 (the Permanence Issue) is available now on loremnotipsum.com. Now is the only time we will ever live in, and the only time we can do anything about. But as with every generation, most of the things that concern us in this moment will be lost to the remorseless sweep of time. When the lone and level sands stretch far away, and the Anthropocene draws to a close, our dreams of reconfiguring our bodies through gene editing, or colonizing Mars rather than fixing things at home, will seem, well, Ozymandian. When that desertful of dust finally settles, what will be left?

It’s not apocalyptic thinking and it’s not doomsaying to explore the implications of this moment—a moment in which all the moments that have ever been and might ever be are at stake—a moment, in short, like any other. As Barry Lopez urges in our feature interview, it’s a time not for fight or flight, but for a third alternative: to gather. In this issue, we are excavating the past and harvesting the present to trace the dim outline of the future. From alchemy and witchcraft to the post-human dream of science, just over the mountain range. We travel from the spiffed-up streets of Moscow, where the echoes of revolution continue, however strangely, to reverberate, to the salty shores of Orkney, where stone-age carvings still ring with teenage drama, and park along the far-flung roads of northern Alaska, teetering between the noise of the human world and the mysterious silent wild. Finally, we meet people who want to spin out still further, to Mars, and ask what this means for the home they dream of leaving behind, where we still haven’t quite solved the problem of toilets.

The Alpine Review is a bi-annual, comprehensive magazine that tracks changes in thought, systems and creations around the world. It is a compendium of ideas for a world in transition. The Alpine Review assembles emerging signals, connections and patterns and tie them together with the people, places and things that draw the attention of our team. It’s about perspective. Climbing the mountain for the inarticulable gratification of surveying the landscape and getting an overview. It seems overwhelming at the bottom, but when you’re standing at its peak, the path makes sense and the journey worthwhile. It’s about massive disruptions; like tectonic shifts, they are most apparent at the edges where the plates collide: changing landscapes and making mountains. Finally, with mountains come cliffs, caves and caverns, hidden valleys and unexpected crevices to explore and discover.

Special inserts

Cold War Artifacts, The Process of Life with Alan Watts, Aerials.

The peope behind this issue

• Editors: Louis-Jacques Darveau, Patrick Pittman
• Managing editor: Anna Duckworth
• Senior editors: Eli Burnstein, John Di Palma
• Art director: Elise Eskanazi
• Designer: Chris Lange
• Editor-at-large: Patrick Tanguay

Guests: Kyle Fraser / Elmo Keep / Robert Rowland Smith / Alan Watts / Kingston Trinder with Erik Kessels and Thomas Sauvin / Barry Lopez / Tanya Davis / Martine Rothblatt / Ruby J. Murray / Gillian Terzis / Noam Chomsky / Mathew Ingram / Lewis Lapham / Marie-Eve Bélanger / Tomas Hachard / Ian Fitzpatrick with Col. Casey Haskins, Andy Weissman, Brian Clark, Erik Pelletier, Andreana Drencheva, Stephanie Chase, Rebecca Plante, John Willshire, and Peter Hanlon / Chris Frey / Josephine Rowe / Marcus Westbury / Aerials with Chris Fussell, Mark Raheja, Helge Tenno, Ilona Gaynor, Jay Owens, Jay Goldman, Jon Husband, Boris Anthony, Neil Perkin / Robert Skoro / Ann Friedman / Boris Anthony and Hugh McGuire / James Niehues / Ben Huff / Nick DeWolf

Details: The Alpine Review – Issue 3

304 pages