About
Beyond Contact is a letter about being human.
It is about the living world and the people who defend it. About what the screen has quietly taken from us, and what can still be found by anyone willing to look up.
Each letter comes when it is ready, under a sky of its own.
Why uncontacted
This site lives at uncontacted.org.
It is named for the uncontacted peoples who still live in the forests of the Amazon and a few other places on Earth, largely beyond sustained contact with the societies around them.
Their existence is an extraordinary reminder that there are still other ways of being human. Ways of living in which the forest is not somewhere we visit, or something separate from us, but home.
They are also a reminder of something easily forgotten: there is no human world without the living world.
Beyond Contact is not about uncontacted peoples, nor does it speak for them. But they are among its deepest inspirations.
Read about them →Who writes
David Johnston
David started Beyond Contact and writes most of the letters.
He has spent much of his life outdoors, and a good part of it a long way from anywhere. His work has taken him into forests and wild places around the world, including the Peruvian Amazon, where he has spent many years working to protect forests bordering the territories of uncontacted peoples.
He now lives in a house near the sea.
Other voices
There is room here for other voices.
If you have a story that belongs here, from the wild, from old ways of knowing, from an encounter that changed something in you, or simply from looking for something deeper in an age of machines, tell us a little about it.
Something hiccuped. Mind trying again?
Thank you.
We will write back.
