This is a beautiful conversation about endings, among other things.

Dougald is / was a long term climate campaigner - working alongside scientists, often picking up the story where their work ends. He joins Ben to talk about his new book, the beautifully titled ‘At Work In The Ruins’.

Picking a path through the various crises of our times, the book is equal part invitation and provocation; it is not a source book of solutions to the climate emergency and beyond. Quite the opposite.

It’s an invitation to think and feel and respond into our changing world with a humility, curiosity and hope. It’s an invitation to work to end all that no longer serves us - in modernity and the lives we currently lead. And in all these endings we might find that something new and far more beautiful is born.

Enjoy.

Links

• The Work in the Ruins (May 2023)
• At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies – Dougald’s book
• Dougald’s website
• Dark Mountain manifesto
• Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
• A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena & Mario Blaser
• Vandana Shiva
• Gustavo Esteva
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist
• Ani.Mystic: Encounters with a Living Cosmos, by Gordon White
• Cynefin Framework
• A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth, by Chris Smaje
• Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
• Tyson Yunkaporta
• Bayo Akomolafe
• Red Hand Files
• Robin Williams’ speech in Good Will Hunting
• A School Called Home
• Dougald’s writing on Substack

Welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

The series of conversations with academics advisors, entrepreneurs and activists, people all championing those ideas on the margins, the periphery.

Why is this important?

Well, as the systems on which we've depended for the last 50, 60 stroke thousand years, crumble and creek people increasingly looking for new stories, new ideas, new myths, if you like, that might guide and inform how they live and work.

So in these conversations, we take time to speak to those people who are championing the ideas on the margins, championing the ideas on the periphery, those ideas which are gonna shape the mainstream tomorrow.

Uh, and our hope is that you are a little bit inspired, a little bit curious enough to take some of these ideas and bring them back to the day-to-day of your work and your life.

Just a quick little note before we get into the conversation with Dougald.

Uh, it seems Dougald and I were not alone in this conversation.

We were joined by some gremlins, gremlins, hiding somewhere in the depths of my computer.

Anyway, these gremlins have made for a slightly sort of less than perfect recording towards the end.

A few of my last questions are, are lost in the ether somewhat, uh, but I hope this doesn't get in the way of, uh, your experience too much.

I hope it doesn't get in the way, uh, of Dougald's story too much, and I hope it doesn't get too much in the way of your appreciation of where his amazing book At Work.

In the Ruins.

So meantime, enjoy.

uh, Dougald thank you for joining me on peripheral Thinking.

it's a pleasure.

Good to be with you, Ben.

Um, so your book, uh, I guess in the nicest ways has sort of been haunting me, uh, over the last, uh, the last weeks.

And I, I think, uh, haunting me in a sense that clearly there's a, there's an idea, a topic in it, which feels very re resonant, but also in the, in the kind of social media, dismotivated, disintermediated world we live in, clearly the, some of the writers, the echo chamber I'm in the book is in too.

So, uh, you know, whether it's, uh, Caroline Ross, and, uh, for people who've not listened to that, they should, uh, I follow her Substack, I'd actually, uh, I think she, she was on your book tour was she with you?

Or certainly part of the book tour with

Yeah, we went, we went, we went on a mission together to, to go and visit Ian McGilchrist, who's an old friend

Right.

Okay.

So yeah, so Ian McGilchrist, I've watched the conversation you had with him.

He also, uh, someone I, I follow and Dan Burgess who was on this uh, podcast of, of little while back.

I know you also spoke to him.

So yeah, so, so by all of these kind of wrote roots and means the book is coming to me.

And then actually there was another one, ed Gillespie, and I think written about, uh, upcoming program you have around the book last week.

And I saw that and I thought, no, now, now it's enough.

I must reach out to Dougald and we should have a conversation.

So I really appreciate you taking the time.

Great.

Thanks Ben.

Well, it's nice to know that it is kind of weaving into different conversations cuz that's definitely the kind of book that it is.

I've, I've said a few times, you know, it's a book that's the fruit of many conversations and a fruit should have seeds in it.

So hopefully it's seeding a lot of conversations as

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well that is, that's great.

Well, I love the, the, the kind of, the, the picture, the picture of that.

I mean, maybe, so Kelly, we hit some, but maybe just start, I mean, how, so give us a kind of headline.

What is the book about?

Is that, if that is a, a sort of useful place to begin?

And I guess maybe in a way, how you came to write it, why you came to write it now?

Well, when I was working on the first draft, it had the working title, why I Am No Longer Talking to People about climate Change, which for multiple reasons was not the title under which to send it out into the world apart from anything else.

It outgrew that.

But it did begin with a moment where as someone who spent a lot of my life since my late twenties, really standing up in front of rooms full of people or sitting down, having heart to heart conversations, talking to people about climate change, the trouble we are in, not the science of it.

It's never been my job to be the person who explains the facts and figures.

I kind of come in after that to help people make sense of what does this mean?

How does it call our existing stories and trajectories into question?

But at a certain point, sort of midway through the covid years, I began to find my own role in doing that was being called into question.

And I needed to trouble that and unsettle that a bit.

And I heard myself say to my friend, Felix Marquardt, I think it's time to stop talking about climate change.

And as soon as I heard those words come outta my mouth, I realized that I was gonna have to explain myself.

And uh, and Felix said, yeah, you really need to write something about that.

And I started writing what I thought was kind of an essay that was saying farewell to a chapter of my work.

And instead it became the book that I had been threatening to write for years and never actually delivered that it, it does cover this arc that goes back to around 2007, 8, 9, when Paul Kingsnorth and I met and were writing this thing called the Dark Mountain Manifesto that was sort of born out of our own disquiet with the shape of the activism we'd been part of, the ways in which the world was talking about climate change, even in the circles where it was being talked about.

But also the sense that, uh, big as it is and scary as it is, climate change is not the sum total of the trouble that we are in.

And that actually talking, falling into talking as if it is, can be part of reproducing the patterns that got us here.

So that's really the starting point of the book is.

How does somebody who has spent a lot of time being someone who, in one context or another, talks to people about climate change, find themselves questioning that and looking for other places from which to start the conversation about the trouble that the world is in and, and also what might be worth doing given what we know and what we have good grounds to fear about that trouble.

And you sort of talked a bit about who the book is for and who the book is not for.

Yeah.

Well, I'm not setting out to convince anybody.

I'm not that kind of writer.

I, um, you know, the way I write comes out of my own need to puzzle things through and make sense of things, and the hunch that often when we do that, honestly and from the heart, however personal, it starts out as being, it will turn out to be speaking to hunger and needs that other people have.

So there's no kind of, you know, when you start working with a publisher, you're meant to kind of come up with a profile of your audience, your reader, for this book.

And, you know, I'm, I'm, I, I have a great publisher, Chelsea Green.

I really love working with them.

But for myself as a writer, I don't start out with an idea of like, who the target market is for what I'm writing.

All I can do is try and tell the bit of the truth that I can see from the angle at which I'm looking at the world and trust that if I, if I cleave to that, if I, you know, make myself stay with the bits of it that are difficult and uncomfortable, and don't try and tidy them up too much, then something in that will turn out to be helpful for others.

But it's definitely not a book which is setting out to convince people who are totally sold on, you know, Steven Pink or Han Rosling's story of, you know, where we are and where we are headed, that they're wrong, right?

You have to kind of come to your own moment of doubt, your own crisis of faith in the stories that our society likes to tell itself.

But anyone who, from whatever angle has arrived at that kind of crisis of faith, maybe will find this book keeps them company.

In just staying with the trouble of that.

One of the things that I have loved since the book started to find its way out into the world is I have had people write to me who start their messages by saying I don't even think that climate change is a thing, or at least not that humans are causing it, but I've been reading your book and I've found a load of stuff in here that really speaks to me.

And that's very hopeful for me because I think we get stuck on lines that are drawn up, that we are told.

It's very simple as us and as them.

And I think that if we're gonna unlock the, the stuckness, that is part of the trouble we are in, then, uh, creating strange encounters, strange moments of recognition between people who don't see themselves as being on the same side is probably one of the kinds of work that is called for.

And maybe one of the kinds that the sort of storytelling and the sort of writing that I do might contribute to.

Thank you.

That's it is, and that's, uh, it's a really kind of useful reminder for me too.

Cause I, I think, I guess I also find, cause at the beginning of the book, you, you, you start obviously by kind of just whilst you say I'm not here to kind of persuade just some context, you know, there are these crises.

These crises are many.

They come in, they come in in in many forms.

And I guess one of the things I kind of feel like I fall into is, And maybe this reflects a little bit, you know, where I'd live, right?

So I live in Brighton on the south coast of the UK, which by many by, if you kind of judge a city by the label on the tin, right?

Is uh, sort of understood as a progressive place and all of those sorts of things.

But, and maybe it's the enclave that I live in.

In a sense, I kind of feel like that I'm really sort of surrounded by kind of people who are, there's a lot of sort of head in the sand is how it sort of feels to me.

And also a lot about my kind of life really, you know, the kind of world that live in where the kids go to school, the community that I'm part of feels kind of, it, it sort of, in some respects, it kind of feels like we are really not sort of acknowledging the range of crises that we are kind of facing and that we are.

Uh, you know, we, we've, you know, we're very able to kind of, at the moment be keeping those things just out of sight, out of mind.

And, uh, it kind of feel, you know, I guess I, I kind of fall into the trap of, you know, I do need to persuade people of the kind of weight of the crisis.

But what you are saying there is a, is a helpful reminder that maybe not actually

whenever you write or speak about these things, people will at some point tend to turn to you and go, well, okay, so what are you saying we should do?

And my first answer to that is, I don't think there is a thing that we should do.

I think there are many things to be done.

And we are not gonna know until a long way further down the line.

Frankly, we're probably not gonna know until after you and I are gone, which of those things turned out to be the ones that make all the difference?

So I hesitate to, um, say, you know, stop trying to persuade people because I, I might be wrong.

But I think there are other things worth doing as well.

And I mean, I came to Brighton when I took the book on the road in February, and I had a lovely evening at the friends meeting house with Chris Thorpe Tracy the artist, formerly known as Chris TT, uh, who is, who's a, a very, a very wonderful man.

And we had about 40 people in the room, and we had two hours of just this great rolling conversation that started from the things that I'd been writing about in the book and the, the conversations that that had been taking me into.

But of course, you know, I, I know and in a different way, like, I live in Sweden, which feels quite sheltered in a lot of ways.

You know, when I go back to the UK, the UK even when I get to Brighton feels a lot more battered and bruised and unraveling these days compared to when I left 11 years ago.

So there are, there are degrees of this, but yeah, we all, you know, e even if we are for one reason or another, able to give this stuff, the kind of things I'm writing about in the book, more attention than most people have time to give it, we're still living with a foot in both worlds.

We're still living with a foot in an ordinary everyday reality where it still looks a lot of the time as if things work, as if things can continue in something that vaguely resembles the way that they're going along now.

And I mean, I remember the first time I met Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, whose book Hospicing Modernity is really important as a touchstone for my book.

I mean, I literally started writing At Work in the Ruins the month when I had voiced the audio book of Vanessa's book.

So I brought every word of that book through my body over, you know, about three weeks every afternoon on my own in a tiny studio under the stairs and the, the barn at the bottom of our garden.

But the first time that I heard Vanessa speak about this idea that what's at stake might be hospicing modernity, not, not trying to save it, not trying to bring it down, not rushing into what's coming afterwards, but trying to give it a good ending to limit the damage that's done in its ending, but also to allow it to teach us the lessons that it might only be able to see clearly in that kind of twilight phase, she said where she comes from in Brazil, there's a saying, they say when there's a flood coming, when the water's up to your ankles, it's not time to start swimming.

When the water reaches your knees, nah, still no point in swimming.

When the water gets up to your ass, it's time to start swimming.

And the first thing I got from that was, Okay, sometimes things need to get bad enough for something that was impossible to become possible, and that that's part of the nature of the journey that we are on here collectively.

Now, the next place I went with that was to go, well, wait a minute.

Looking at the societies where things need to change the most in the years ahead, which are the ones that have benefited the most from modernity and also been sheltered the most from its casts, where is the water deepest in our societies?

Because a lot of the time, even now, it's probably not climate change, like that's around our ankles or for certain communities up to their knees.

But the people where the waters are highest around climate change right now are not the ones whose societies need to change the fastest.

But if we look at, you know, Britain or North America, Sweden, like any of these, the countries that have been the winners of modernity, that have where, where it's been possible to see ourselves as the ones living closest to the future, and if we take an honest look at our societies, then what we see is the waters are pretty deep when it comes to loneliness, comes to the isolation of old people when it comes to mental health problems amongst young people, when it comes to all sorts of forms of addiction, including our addictions to networked technologies.

There is on the one hand real, you know, hunger and precarity within our communities, not very far from where most of us live.

And on the other hand, among those who are still relatively sheltered from that, there is a hunger for meaning.

And all of those things are getting pretty deep.

Like getting deep enough that they might start to be the places from which things that used to seem impossible become possible.

And so that's sort of, that's one of the invitations I make in the book is just to, to look around for where things are bad enough that people are saying to each other, can't go on like this because they might be the places where it becomes possible to try things out.

To be rehearsing for the kind of ways of making life work that are gonna be necessary as we head further into the trouble that's around and ahead of us, including the part of that trouble that's born out of climate change.

So there's a, a sort of general, um, kind of theme in the book.

I, I kind of take it as a theme because it, it kind of mirrored, we were talking bef before the podcast.

Uh, I've given a talk last year, uh, and.

Uh, I kind of realized actually a lot of what I've been thinking about over the last years, actually the last years, is this idea of endings.

And that probably reflects it a bit my age for sure.

You know, like, so kind of 50 year old man now, uh, the kind of the, the wheel kind of turns, maybe this partly around that.

But I think I was feeling it, I was kind of aware of it most, um, kind of most keenly initially in relation to my work and what work I was doing and what felt like important work.

And this kind of idea of kind of endings was something which was really sort of bubbling up and, and growing in me.

And it sort of, uh, there was a talk that I gave last year, which was on this idea of endings, although I was still kind of framing it in this, in, in a sort of concept really of creative destruction and the importance of ending things and ending things well, and practicing ending things, as an invitation to create a new, uh, and I, I kind of feel that very much, uh, the, the kind of arc of that in, in your book too.

Well, you know, I, I talk a lot in the book about this thing called modernity and you know, if people want to understand what I, what I mean by that, uh, at its simplest, it's this period in human history that starts somewhere quite local and specific.

It starts, I mean, it grows out of ideas that were already around in Europe in the Middle Ages, but it really, you know, gets legs about 400 years ago in France and Britain, and spreads out from small groups of thinkers and scholars to become pervasive.

And it's this idea, as I see it, of it it that we live in a time where what is most important and best about us, our defining character is our proximity to the future.

You know, that's what it means to define ourselves as being modern.

And for 50 years or so now that has been kind of in turmoil and you see it now on the one hand, um, sort of intellectually and theoretically coming from France in their seventies with the beginnings of this thing called post-modernism.

On, on the other hand, if you look at what was going on in London at the same time, you have, you know, Malcolm McLaren on the Kings Road inventing retro fashion, this kind of recycling of the past in a new way.

And at the same time, coming up with that slogan that was made famous when, uh, when the pistols came along in the late seventies, no future.

This sense that the future had failed, that the future had somehow broken down.

That began to become part of the background of Western societies about 50 years ago, and has been trickling out and taking different forms since.

So if, if that's a diagnosis that we are sort of living at the end of this story of modernity that, you know, that picked up momentum 300, 400 years ago, had a couple of centuries when it was really dominant.

And from that spread out to touch so much of the life of so many people in all parts of the world and remake the world, but which from the places where it began has been losing confidence in itself and kind of reaching the end of its cycle for half a century or so.

Now, part of the characteristics of that story, that way of it being in the world, part of what makes it distinctive and strange because of its sort of relationship to the future, it's identification with proximity to the future, is that it's tended to be very bad at endings.

It's tended to see ending as failure rather than as a natural part of the rhythm of what it's like to be creatures of the kind we are in the world like the one we're in.

And some of the reasons for that are very good reasons.

You look at some of the achievements of modernity at its best in terms of, you know, the transformation of infant mortality and maternal mortality, things that it would be very hard for any of us to, to say were not real and good and important achievements.

Um, but there are shadow sides to it as well.

Modernity has also been very good at outsourcing its costs, outsourcing, you know, all of the death and destruction that it's brought to those on the far end of its supply chains that we've inherited from the colonial era of high modernity.

You know, all of that has been kept carefully out of view, just in the same way as you know, very few of us have actually been with someone as they die.

And this difficulty with endings, you know, part of what I'm saying in the book is that it makes us poorly equipped to handle something that isn't a problem that can be fixed and made to go away.

And everything gets to continue roughly as it was before, but something that is actually calling into question and bringing to an end our way of life as we've known it, which is, you know, what climate change means as far as I can see, even in the best scenarios.

So, one of the things that we need to do is find ways to invite back in from the edges, from the bits that get written out of the story, talked about as if they're, you know, old-fashioned or anachronistic or simply going along below the radar, but not being treated as serious and important.

Skills for ending things well, for giving as much care and attention to the end of something, as we might give to the beginning of it.

You know, the entrepreneur is a very valorized, you know, heroized figure within late modern culture.

Where are the equivalents for, you know, the skill that is given to giving a good ending to something, whose time has come?

Whether it's an organization, a project, you know.

These are the kind of questions that I think we get called into when we start to take seriously the trouble we're in, including climate change, not as something that can be fixed and made to go away, but as something that is gonna change it all, change the whole landscape within which we are having to make life work.

I was sort of reflecting on sort of my own sort of relationship to endings and uh, I remember it was in conversation with a teacher who I work with a sort of meditation Buddhist teacher.

This was some years ago, and it was coming to the end of the year.

And remember we were having some sort of conversation around intentions for the coming year or coming period, whatever.

And I remember saying to him that I had, uh, my intention was something to do with letting go.

So it was kind of feeling like that that was, that was important.

And him kind of, uh, him posing the, the kind of reflection back that in order, if that is your intention, you need to know first what you are holding onto.

Um, you know, that is actually the work there is what, what are actually you holding onto rather than the intention being letting go, make the focus on what you're holding onto.

Of course there's lots of sort of structure and.

Uh, the way our kind of economy works, which, like you say, kind of outsources a lot of the sort of thing about that, but also in a very kind of personal sense, I think ending things feels risky.

Risky.

And ending things feels scary.

This act of letting go is, is, requires us stepping into the unknown and we are very, very uncomfortable with the idea of the unknown.

We're very, very uncomfortable with that kind of, you know, it feels, it feels scary, it feels risky, and I kinda wonder if whether that's part of what is happening.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think we've built societies, which in many ways aim for security, aim for certainty or at least aim.

Aim for predictability, the ability to project outcomes and futures, and the rest of it aim to insulate us against, um, risk and uncertainty.

And what that looks like in practice is that you go a long way into life if you're born into a relatively privileged setting in a modern western country before ever finding yourself having to rely on the kindness of strangers.

I always think about this because when I was 18, 19, I said, often spent a year traveling around Europe, making a living as a street musician, traveling mostly by hitchhiking.

And, you know, I don't say this to, I encourage anyone to lightly go out and throw themselves into those situations because there are risks involved.

And as I always have to say, you know, the, the only bad experience I ever had hitchhiking was when I was halfway through writing what would've been an article about all the amazing things I'd learned from hitchhiking.

And I took that as a message that, you know, I shouldn't just be encouraging people to go off and take these risks themselves.

That's a decision people should make of their own accord.

But nonetheless, what that meant was that by the time I arrived at university, while I was, you know, less equipped than lots of the people who'd gone to expensive schools and come from, you know, better connected backgrounds than mine, who I met when I arrived at Oxford, one thing that I had, which few of them had, was the experience of again and again, having put myself in a situation where the only thing that got me where I was going or that, you know, ended up putting a roof over my head that night was people who I didn't know and who didn't know me, um, responding in some way to, you know, whether it's me with a sign at the side of the road or me singing a song on the street and making eye contact with them and then putting some money into the hat.

And I think that in the reasonable attempt to build lives that are secured against risk and uncertainty, we end up insulating ourselves against what the world is actually like.

You know, partly because of that famous Helen Keller quote about, there is no, uh, I can't remember how it goes.

It's like there is no security.

It's, it's all, it's all a myth.

And partly because there is a certain magic that comes in as a result of us having to.

Make life work together, having to rely on things other than, you know, I know that I'm gonna get to where I'm going because I've paid and I have a ticket, and I can show that ticket.

Other than, you know, things happening because we're told to or paid to do them.

And so I've spent a lot of my life trying to create context in which people come together and find ways of making life work, find ways of creating things for reasons other than because we've been paid to be here, or because we've been told by some agency that has authority over us that we have to be here.

Because I think that's how humans have always got through hard times and made life work.

And they think that if things are gonna be less bad than it often looks like they're going to be in the times to come.

As a result of the kind of trouble that we're talking about here, then it's partly gonna be because we recover that capacity to come together for, for other reasons than other logics, than the logic of the market or the logic of the state.

So the book starts in Covid or sort of, I guess written in Covid, and there's a, there's a Covid lens and, uh, the kind of the, it's the, the reason I should also kind of make clear, you know, you, it's such a kind of thoughtful wandering, your, your book is such a thoughtful wandering through the sort of polarities of that and the emotion of that, which I really, really appreciate.

So I kind of, I say that both, uh, as, as thank you to you, but also as a.

A kind of reminder and reassurance to, to the reader that you know, that that's the root through this cuz it's such a kind of emotionally charged, emotionally charged thing.

Might be worth sort talking about that a little bit.

And I guess also in cause, cause that also kind of points a root into, uh, science, which you talk, talk a lot about, which feels to me like a link to what we were just talking about this, this need for the, uh, an illusion of security, an illusion of predictability.

And of course our, our kind of need and wanting for that meets, you know, the role that silent science has come to play in our, in our culture.

But maybe just sort of start a little bit about your, the, the covid beginnings of, of the, of the writing.

Right.

Yeah.

And I mean, thank you for framing that so gently, Ben, because it is, it is true that, you know what all of us have experienced in one way or another, and some of us experienced particularly acutely during the covid time, is something that can be so traumatic that it's difficult to have nuanced conversations about it.

You know, another of the things that I found really heartening when the book was starting to go out into the world was I had a message from, um, an artist friend who said, I, I've realized this book is kind of an act of peacemaking, she said.

Because I can read this book and share it with my friend who.

I had really difficult conversations with, and we got to a really difficult place because we had such different experiences of, and interpretations of what was going on during the Covid time.

And there is something here that we can meet around and both recognize.

And part of that is because I'm describing it very personally from the strange experience of being an Englishman who's very settled in Sweden.

You know, my other half is Swedish.

We have a son together who is, you know, he's seven now.

So he was born here.

He's growing up thinking of himself as primarily Swedish.

Uh, he only speaks English when there's no one who speaks Swedish round.

So I rarely get to hear him speak English.

But I, in that early, early covid phase, you know, kind of February, March, 2020, it was so weird to be sitting here in Sweden and having one set of conversations with my Swedish friends and another set of conversations with friends back home or across the pond where, you know, I was getting messages from people I, I know and love and trust, who were saying, look, if the Swedish government doesn't change course really quickly, then you know, within weeks you're gonna be in a disaster zone.

Because, you know, Sweden was kind of the one western country that wasn't following the path of lockdown.

Now there's a lot of nuance that is needed in the descriptions of that.

There are a lot of culturally specific reasons why it was possible for Sweden to take the path it took.

So I don't particularly dig it when I see kind of right wing, libertarian folks picking up their version of what Sweden did and waving it around as if it's what everyone ought to have done obviously, it's just not that simple.

But nonetheless, to live through that experience, partly it gave me this very strong sense of like powerlessness because there was nothing I could do about what the Swedish government was choosing to do.

It made me realize that even if I am culturally split between, you know, the two countries that I've called home in the course of my life, I'm nonetheless exposed at a bodily level to the decisions of the Swedish government in a different way to the, the, the British government.

Um, and then over the months that followed, I got to see the subtle differences, but actually kind of deep and powerful ones in the experience of my friends and family back home in inverted commerce in the uk and what was going on from my family here and in the world outside my doorstep here.

And so, without taking any strong positions on the kind of polemical arguments that go on in this sort of c culture war over covid, I can certainly say that I'm, I'm grateful to have lived through that time in a country where life was able to go on more as normal, and where there wasn't any kind of attempt to mobilize or organize people or get people doing things on a basis of fear, that just wasn't how the Swedish government and the Swedish public health authorities responded to things.

And so that's given me, you know, without having any cause to particularly question the mainline science on a lot of things around covid, it's given me a, a sort of nuanced position in which I can respect people who find themselves on different sides of the very heated arguments going on in in other countries.

And even the ways that it gets mapped politically, you know, seem less obvious if you're starting from Sweden.

Because here in the spring of 2020, the only party in Parliament that was saying that we ought to be having more authoritarian measures and having lockdown was the far right Sweden Democrats.

So just for a bunch of reasons, Sweden was a kind of curious place from which to watch all of that, not just watch live, all of that playing out.

So then something that began to strike me was the power of this language, of The Science.

You know, because the Swedish government and authorities as much as the Danish or British or other governments were, were talking about following The Science in the spring of 2020 and yet making different decisions on the basis of it.

And anyway, that language of following The Science had a sort of strange echo of the placards that I'd seen a year or two earlier on Fridays for the Future demonstrations and XR events and so on, where it said, you know, unite behind The Science.

And so part of where I go in the book is to try and tell a story of what goes missing when we talk as if The Science is this singular thing, as if it's something that can, can lead us and we just fall in behind it.

And this is done partly coming out of the conversations I've had over the years with climate scientists and out of respect for their work that I don't think we do the actual work of science many favors when we talk as if there is this monolithic thing called The Science that can do all of the work of knowing the world and telling us what we ought to do.

I, I think in order for the work of science to, to go on and be done well, we need to allow it a humbler position then that asks of it.

We need to not use it as a kind of cover behind which to do the, the other kinds of work, the work of judgment, the work of politics.

We need to recognize that science can and should inform our conversations, our judgments now decisions, but it doesn't actually make them for us.

And so part of what I'm doing is, is tracing this story of how actually throughout the history of modernity, again and again, there's been this impulse, this desire to ask more of science than it is capable of doing.

And sometimes those who do the work of science have played into this and sometimes they've gone, hang on a minute.

But it is a pattern that recurs partly because of that yearning for security, that yearning for certainty that we were touching on a few minutes ago.

And it gets us to a place where we can't see, even, some of the decisions, some of the judgments that we need to make.

I say early on in the book, and this is something that I've gone around saying for years, climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer.

Now, starting with the question, how did we find ourselves in this trouble?

Are we here as a result of a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry?

Or are we here as a consequence of a way of approaching the world, a way of seeing and treating everyone and everything that would always have brought us to this pass?

Even if it turned out that the International Panel on climate change had done its sums wrong and we could actually release all of that co2, like if we are here because of a way of approaching the world, a way of seeing and treating everything, then climate change is a symptom of something which has other symptoms and will go on having other symptoms.

And therefore to, to attempt to address it only at the level of the symptom, only at the level of, you know, carbon reduction and, you know, the greening of the economy and so on is to, is to miss what the stakes here actually are.

And part of what I'm saying about science then in the book is that when we talk as if.

The Science brings us all of the knowledge that we need and tells us what we need to do, and firstly, that's not true.

And you get properly into conversation with scientists and that becomes clear, but secondly, uh, that disguises these underlying questions, these upstream questions like Are we here because of bad luck with the chemistry or because of a way of approaching the world?

We can't see those questions or ask them clearly.

And then what happens is if those questions aren't asked, then in the name of science, a particular set of answers to those questions, which serves the interests of power, which serves the interests of the existing order and those who have most vested in it gets to shape what Taking climate change seriously means.

Part of why I say early on in the book that I've found myself questioning whether it makes sense to talk about climate change anymore is because it's as if we're, you know, we're walking down a path and we come to a fork in the road.

And at the fork in the road there's a signpost, and it's quite clear.

You can see that these are very different directions, but on both arrows of the signpost and both arms of it, it says taking climate change seriously.

And if that's what's written on both arrows of the post, we can't even see what the decision that we need to make is, you know, what's at stake, what the paths that we have to choose between as we begin to take seriously the trouble we're in are.

And so that's part of why, you know, I'm, I'm writing very much wanting to, wanting to invite, uh, those who work with science and those who aren't scientists into dialogue, into conversation about where we go, what, what's worth doing?

If the sort of Bill Gates answer to the, you know, what does climate change, what does taking climate change seriously mean?

is not the way we ought to be going know if, if this is not about a set of technical geo-engineering solutions and the rest of it, if this is actually about having to let go of the trajectory we thought we were on, rather than be able to fix that so that we get to continue on that trajectory, uh, how do we make space for those conversations?

And one of my conclusions is that we may actually need to start from quite other places than starting from having a conversation about climate change, because the power imbalance between those who speak for both those two different directions we could be going on from that fork in the road is such, and the way that we talk about science right now that became kind of supercharged in the pandemic makes it harder to even get into the, the conversation about there being things that science cannot do for us when it comes to knowing what the nature of the trouble we're in is and what the nature of the choices that lies that lays before us is.

The idea of this, the kind of fork in the road and both the forks sort of, you know, claiming, saying, intending in their own way.

Maybe the, the kind of the, the sa the same thing.

You kind of sort of see.

Also whilst the whole covid, you know, living in the world of kind of polarities, living in the world of opposites, living in the world of, I'm right, you are wrong, whichever side I'm kind of on, you can sort of see then how the fork in the road could easily become those two.

And if I kind of reflect on sort of conversations I might have with people, sort of, you know, in who I might just happen to meet through kind of where I live, you know, the, the idea, I can reflect on actual conversations I've had about the, the kind of the nature of those folks in the road, and we can sort of talk about that a little bit more in, in, in a second maybe.

But this idea that that one is definitely right and the other is definitely wrong.

It just kind of feels like, you know, without sort of care, we just accidentally fall straight into that camp too with the, the right and the wrong.

So I guess is that the, that's the invitation about trying to find a different start place, um, part, you know, part, part of the nature of that debate.

Let's find a different start place to open up a different dialogue.

Yeah.

I mean I'm, I guess maybe one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is try out some different ways of labeling those arms of the signpost that might make it clearer, while at the same time not being naive or misleading about what kind of choice we are at.

Because it's not as if our societies are standing hesitating between, you know, what I call in the book, the big path and the small path.

It's quite clear where the power is.

It's quite clear where the momentum is.

It's quite clear what direction things are kind of thundering on towards for now.

So then it's more a question of those of us who do not wish to contribute to that big path.

Which, you know, I, I guess like to define it a little bit more clearly, there's a, a quote that I use from a pair of anthropologists, Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, where they're talking about the anthropocene, which is this term that's used to describe the sort of the new geological epoch brought about by human industrial activity.

And they say, you know, these conversations about the anthropocene that go on in cities like, you know, Berlin or Brighton or Stockholm or New York, the way they sound from elsewhere, and they're writing from, you know, a lot of the people in the book that they're writing this in are, uh, are speaking from Latin America, uh, the way it sounds from elsewhere is that the world of the powerful has discovered belatedly, that its world two could end after having gone around the world ending so many other people's worlds and calling it progress.

And so from that moment, that dawning recognition that our world too could end, on the one hand, that can be, uh, humbling.

It can be a point at which it becomes possible to get alongside people who've been on the receiving end of destructive processes of modernization for generations and who've been trying to tell us about the bits that have been written out of the cozy, you know, optimistic stories that those who are the beneficiaries of modernity have tried to tell about where we are, where we've come from, where we're going.

So that's one fork is, you know, it can be the moment where we can finally open our ears and hear that.

On the other hand, the same recognition, the same sense of vulnerability, can justify a fresh version of the project, of trying to save the world, fix the world, manage the world, turn it into a kind of global object of management and control, uh, in the name of saving the planet.

So it can kind of give a new legitimation, a new moral legitimacy to projects that are being conceived in and directed from the same cities that were running Empires stretching across the world a hundred years earlier, that are conducting themselves in very similar ways.

I mean, Vandana Shiva, the great Indian activist, said this to me.

She said, you know, I, I met one of the people who's at the heart of the whole kind of Nhat Zero project.

And he was like, yeah, we've got all of the plumbing in place now for Net Zero.

All we need is the land to plug into it.

And she's like, no, no, you don't get to come back within living memory of the end of Empire in India and take our land all over again, but this time so that you can go on with your lifestyles in Europe and North America.

That's not how this is gonna go.

And so, I'm trying to say in the book that there are lines to be drawn, but they might not be drawn in the ways that we're most often told.

We might need to think twice before deciding how we recognize who we find ourselves in some form of allegiance with, and who we find ourselves having to say no to.

And I, I talk in the book about, you know, what it, how much I learned from Gustavo Esteva, a great Mexican activist who died last year, and you know, he was the person who kind of came out with that, the original version of the slogan One no, many yeses, which kind of describes this, this thing of, you know, needing to be able to say no, but also needing to have a plurality of fronts along which action is taking place rather than having a grand plan that we want to come together and develop and get everyone to sign up to, uh, for how it's gonna work.

It's like that's not what's called for.

That's part of how we got into this, into this trouble.

And so just to, uh, kind of characterize it some more for the, the company.

So this, this idea of the, the kind of the big versus the the small, the big or the small in a, in a sense.

So the, the kind of big, also being the kind of, you know, that as you talk about that essentially the, the kind of extrapolation, the continuation of the idea that I'll kind of manage everything to an okayness, which also turns into, um, kind of technology being the solution kind of bigger ever kind of evermore sort of a, I guess I was about to evermore centralized control, but I kind of feel like how quickly the language around these things starts to become kind of alienating or not alienating or meaning certain things or not meaning certain things.

But in, in a sense this idea of the kind of the big being one of, uh, a kind of technological driven solution, which comes from the kind of places which already have the power in a sense.

That, that being the kind of chara, another character characterization of, of the big that you talk

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that, that, that rings true.

I mean, one way of saying it is that the big path is what makes sense.

If you think that the world is like a machine, or if you think that the world is to use the image that I use in the later part of the book that came to me from Paul Kingsnorth, you think the world is like a fish tank.

You know, a fish tank requires human management.

You have to be monitoring and adding all sorts of different chemicals in order to keep the, the fish alive.

It's a different order of thing to a river or a stream, or a lake or a planet.

And you know, It's been pointed out to me since the book came out that there are degrees of this, that actually, if we look at a country like the UK, lots of even the natural and wild ecosystems are sufficiently, entangled with industrial processes that we kind of do need to manage the, the rivers and waterways a bit more like a fish tank.

And I can, I can buy that, but I think that we have to see that as a product of a way of operating in the world.

And we have to say like if the end game, if the, the place, if the destination of all of this is a situation in which the planet has become no longer a living thing, but a thing that only stays alive as a result of human ai, assisted technological monitoring and management, that's not called winning.

That's called hell.

Like, that's, that's, I don't believe that that is actually, you know, I think that's a hubristic project.

But it's definitely implicit.

It arises from the way of looking at the world that, you know, that shapes this thing that I'm calling the big path.

We could look at it from another angle.

I mean, we already mentioned Ian McGilchrist and, you know, I, I went up to the Isle of Sky and spent a couple of days with him, and we recorded this conversation where part of what we were talking about was this sense that some of the, some of the responses to climate change and the trouble we're in seemed very much to reflect what he describes coming from the, the neuroscience side of things as this left brain approach to the world, this way of seeing the world which can only see the world as a sort of dead mechanism, as an atomized thing, rather than as something that is life and flow and starts out as whole, starts out as emerging from connection rather than starting out from building blocks.

And so where we're, where we're at then is along lots of different fronts from lots of different directions I hear these invitations coming.

To find ways of inhabiting the world as something which is a life, find ways of inhabiting the world as something which is not fundamentally a system or a machine.

Yes, it can be described sometimes useful as if.

It's a system, but it's not a system in the way that, you know, the London Underground is a system or a factory is a system.

When we describe a forest as a system, we are using a metaphor rather than giving a technical description.

But when we see the world as a system, we end up trying to remake it as a system.

And we are now, you know, a long way down the line of that so that the world really has been turned into a system.

There are plenty of forests that have been managed as systems for a long time.

But what we need is to find a way through the far side of that.

A way not, it's not about withdrawing and letting the world be this wild thing that we are disconnected from.

Our disconnection from the world is part of the problem.

But getting involved in a humbler way, which doesn't require us to treat the world as a thing which needs to be known in the way that we imagine God knowing the world, is this kind of idea of agency that we've sort of inherited from the secularization of Christianity where agency is fundamentally about like firstly needing omniscient, needing a kind of total knowledge, a total map of the world in order to act, and then the action is a kind of once and for all.

It's a from above mode of action.

And part of, again, the invitation I'm making in the book, which I feel resonates with things that are coming from lots of different directions and different people's work.

You know, you can, you can get here from sort of, um, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, or from Vanessa's Hospicing Modernity, or from Ian McGilchrist, the Master and His Emissary, or from, you know, Gabor Maté's work, or from Gordon White's amazing book Animystic, you know, from different directions, mobilizing different forms of knowing and acting, I think the invitation we're all kind of making is to come back from that fantasy of knowing the world as it might be known by a creator who created it as a machine to inhabiting the world as a thing where we can act within it without having to have that form of kind of placeless universal knowledge.

That we can know enough to make the next move starting from, starting from where we find ourselves just now.

I heard Dave Snowden, the um, guy who came up with the Cynefin framework talking about like finding the, finding the next good thing to do, and that that's part of how you inhabit something, which is too complex to be described as if it's a thing that we can know in the way that modernity wanted to know and remake the world.

So those are the kinds of, those are the kinds of invitations.

Those are the kinds of agency that I think we're, we are headed into if we're trying to find our way onto this branching thing that I call the small path.

And so then, I mean all, all those kind, all the writers and uh, people you mentioned there kind of people who kind of been very sort of influential in my own thinking, super inspiring stuff around, uh, Gabor Maté and Iain McGilchrist, and there's so much kind of real rich kind of, um, so many rich ideas and all of that.

When, when you're talking about the sort of small, one of the things which was sort of coming up in contrast to the, the kind of big, the controlled, the extrapolation of all of those things, you know, is this kind of invitation to not knowing, and the kind of vulnerability that's required into that.

The kind of the, the kind of in a sense comes back to the conversation we were having, you know, early on about the, the kind of, the fear of letting go.

So the kind of fear of not knowing, the fear of, kind of wondering that, and in a sense is, is that what you're starting to kind of point to in, in this, in, in the small branch?

Yeah.

And I think, you know, even in the way that I am, the way that I'm writing the book and the conversations that I'm kind of taking it out into, part of what I'm trying to do, I guess, is to model another way of knowing and speaking and writing and inhabiting and entering into dialogue and finding agency within the world that doesn't require us to make these kinds of pronouncements where we talk as if we can know the world in, um, this kind of confident from above way that, uh, that modernity has encouraged us to do it.

I I, I talk for example in the book about the, the work that Chris Smaje has been doing.

His book, A Small Farm Future is kind of alongside Hospicing Modernity as the kind of the books which made it possible for me to write this book.

And part of what I appreciate about Chris's work is that he comes from a background as a, you know, quantitative social scientist, he can really dig into the numbers and give you quite technical analysis when it comes to the different arguments over what, what we know, what we can do when it comes to how we're gonna feed, um, ourselves in the, the times around and ahead of us.

But he also has, he's much more honest about the limits of that than the ways in which people.

Sort of need to express themselves.

If they think that the way that you speak about any of this is that you write a book, the implicit message of which is, if only everyone would listen to me, then we could fix this.

And I think, you know, books like that are written in good faith.

They're written because that's how we've been taught to approach the world.

They're written because the authors imagine that the alternative to writing a book that addresses the world in that way is to give up.

And I have a chapter later on in my book, which is called How to Give Up.

And it came from the fact that when Paul and I wrote The Dark Mountain Manifesto, we were accused, and accused is the right word, but often by friends of, you know, having given up.

And people would say, you've given up and worse, you're encouraging other people to give up.

And I found myself having to carry this language of giving up around with me and go What does this mean?

What more is there in giving up than the way it's being used when it's thrown around as this simple moral accusation of a moral failure?

And eventually, years down the line, one of the places that took me was to getting to know various people who were involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and 12 Step Fellowships, and coming into dialogue with them about the transformative power of giving up.

You know, because obviously at one level, like AA and other 12 step fellowships are about giving up on a substance that you've been addicted to.

But what's interesting is if you look at how their approach, how the culture of those fellowships work, the assertion that they start with is that, well, the move that they start with is a move of surrender.

We admitted we were powerless over our addictions.

That's pretty much the first step in any 12 step fellowship.

And this paradox, this strange thing that there can be a power in, there can be a form of transformation that only becomes possible once we give up on our illusion of power, our idea of what power would look like and enter into another relationship with reality.

You know that cuz the next step is to do with, in the oldest versions of it, it's expressed in terms of God and or God, however we understand him.

Um, but, you know, one way or another, this kind of putting ourselves in relation to something, a higher power, something larger than ourselves, which, you know, Vanessa and others from the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective will often talk about this in terms of, uh, the metabolism.

A recognition of the world is a metabolic thing that we are only a, a tiny part of, that we are living within and contributing to the life of, in one way or another.

That's another way of coming into relation with a sense of a higher power.

It doesn't need to be framed in the kind of theological ways that come to hand if you're coming out of the cultures that many of us were born into.

But one way or another, those kind of moves that people in 12 step have found very helpful and very powerful for giving up on addictions that have dominated and wrecked their lives, I think contain medicine for the times that we're in and for finding the sort of the tricks to move the unexpected move, the move that makes all of the difference.

But that only becomes possible once we stop pretending that we have the power that we were taught that we had, that we thought that we had that or that power looks like the kind of thing we were taught that it, it was.

So that's gonna look like giving up, that's gonna feel like despair if you are completely enculturated to, you know, a kind of left brain, top down mode of the sense of what agency looks like, how we are meant to change things.

You know, right at the end of the book, I find myself going back to a conversation that I had with, with Vanessa for Dark Mountain when we were sort of marking the 10th anniversary of Dark Mountain.

And I thought, well, you know, the original manifesto grew out of this really important to me conversation that I'd been having over a period of a couple of years with Paul Kingsnorth.

I was like, So who?

Who's equally important to me 10 years on in the conversations I've been having?

And this was, you know, when Vanessa was still working on the Hospicing Modernity book, but we'd been talking to each other for a couple of years.

And so we had this dialogue with each other that we published in that 10th anniversary Dark Mountain Issue.

There was something that I was brought back to as I was writing my book that came from that, where she said, you know, as I go around talking to people about this hosting idea, about the idea of hospicing modernity, giving it a good ending, and also assisting with the birth of something new, as yet unknown possibly, but not necessarily wiser, and trying not to smother that new thing with our projections, which I think is such a, such a great formulation of the other side of the work that is called for alongside the hospice in work.

But she said again and again, she would find with audiences that that was where people got stuck, that they'd go, I just can't believe in it.

I just can't imagine that we can do it, that we can really bring about something new beyond this ending.

It just feels like the end of everything.

And she said she began to realize that part of what was going on there was that people were imagining that all of the agency had to lie with us humans.

And she's like, maybe that's not how the new thing comes about.

Maybe we are only part of the story of how something else emerges from the ruins of the dreams and promises of, of modernity.

And I take that further in the book.

I say it's like, it's not just that we locate the agency exclusively with us as a species, so that it tends to be, you know, in the rooms where people are brought together to talk about climate change, that agency tends to be located with a very specific subset of humans.

The ones who are identified within the logics of modernity, as the people who live closest to the future.

And in the latter part of the book, what I'm doing is listening to and bringing forward the voices of a lot of different people I've learned from, from, from India, from Mexico, from Palestine, from Brazil, who are speaking from the experience of communities and movements and schools of thought that are not identified as, the world's most modern people, the people who live closest to the future.

They might be peasant movements, they might be, you know, people who've worked at grassroots in the burials in Mexico City or whatever.

And just trying to bring, interview the clues that if there are things that turn out to make all the difference so that things turn out less badly than we often secretly in the middle of the night or publicly.

If you're me and you go around talking about this stuff, express as our fears about how it's all likely to go, if something's gonna make all of the difference, then not only, as Vanessa says, might that agency not all be coming from humans, but the part of it that's coming from humans might not be coming from those of us who have, you know, been able to pride ourselves on being most modern, most developed, living closest to the future.

We might actually be the helpless ones.

The ones who in the best case scenario, have to learn a lot quickly from people who, according to the logics of our TED Talks, were the ones we should be going around the world helping.

And that might be part of what the story of the 21st century ends up looking like in hindsight.

And I think you get that glimmering interview on a good day in the kind of dialogues that are going on, between, on the one hand, people who are trying to speak for the possibility of a small path in a western context like Chris Smaje, and on the other hand, you know, folks like Tyson Yunkaporta, Vanessa, oh, there are lots of other indigenous thinkers that we could be talking about here, Bayo Akomolafe and so on, and lots of other people who I'm not even aware of, but whose work is rippling through these networks and who may turn out in hindsight to have been the ones who really brought the nourishment and the openings of possibilities for that new as yet unknown possibly, but not necessarily wiser world that we can be contributing to the, the emergence of out of the ruins of the world as we knew it.

It is a sort of reminder and maybe kind of point also just for what I'm trying to do in a sense with the podcast cuz this idea of sort of peripheral thinking, that there are these sort of, you know, the, the voices, the ideas, the thoughts, the story, which I think is Vanessa's as well.

The idea of kind of reclaiming parts of ourselves.

I think there was, there was something around that.

Uh, and it kind of feels a little bit that maybe part of what, um, Tyson Yunkaporta's doing and the other kind of thinkers and writers is, is helping kind of point to those parts of ourselves in the broadest sense.

Yeah.

Exile capacities is the way that I've often heard Vanessa speak about it.

And I think that's a really potent thing.

And you know, we have to be careful about not simply repeating historical mistakes of romanticization in the way that we are learning from and engaging with and giving, um, platform to indigenous voices in all of this.

Because, you know, one of the things at a certain point in the conversation has to be, we have to be thrown back on our own cultures.

And, you know, even among the wreckage and among their, you know, the toxic legacies of them, there is also, we have our own resources that we need to be going back to rather than just going and borrowing from, from other peoples.

So if you want to think about I, those exile capacities, the things we don't even know about ourselves, things we don't even know we're capable of, because of the ways that we've tended to organize the world and our lives have tended to be organized in modernity.

You know, you can go back to what I was saying before about those experiences busking and hitchhiking when I was a teenager, that, you know, because most of us, if we've had relatively sheltered lives in modern western societies, have never had to throw ourselves on the mercy of the kindness of strangers, we don't know what humans are capable of, and we don't know the magic that emerges when we have to make ourselves vulnerable to each other because we've been so well insured.

We've been so well sheltered.

And actually there, uh, another example that comes to mind for me is you look at someone like Nick Cave and what he's been doing over the last few years with the Red Hand Files, which I found a huge amount of, of nourishment in and, and resonance with.

You know, I feel like that's one of those places where you get the clue.

When people start to really show up.

You know, not with the parts of themselves that you bring to work or to school or to a kind of polite dinner party, but with the most ruined and raw parts of ourselves.

And when someone as a, as a celebrity shows up as differently as Nick Cave has done in recent years, inviting others into a different kind of relationship in the way that you see in those letters, like again, to me, that's a kind of pocket within which we get clues as to how we invite those exile capacities back.

How we bring the parts of ourselves that haven't been welcomed to modernity's party or to modernity's boardroom or to modernity's schoolroom.

And I think we need to, you know, whenever we see that, not fetishize it, like not make it all about some guru or some, you know, exotic cultural, um, group or whatever, but go, you know, where are the things that, where are the lessons from it, where are the bits that we can share and try out and bring into the places where we find ourselves and the work we're being given a chance to do by the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Whether it's our, you know, the privileged aspects of our circumstances, whether it's the trouble that's on our doorsteps.

Both of those present us with different kinds of opportunity to try and make room for, um, exile capacities for, for things that weren't on the map of how we'd been told the world worked.

I I like that a lot cuz this just so much of course, in how we are living, which is just all about the, the kind of the, the polished version, the, the kind of polished picture, which of course is sort of exacerbated and accelerated by, by social media.

But like you say, also, whether it's in conversations at work, whether it's the work that we do, whether it's in conversations at a dinner party or whatever it might be, that there are, there are some topics which are okay to talk about, and then there's a whole kind of murky underbelly, which is somehow not accept, not acceptable, not accessible, not shared often.

And what you are talking to there around what Nick Cave is doing is, is a really, is a really useful reminder to that.

I feel like, uh, one of the dangers we have in the world as it is just now is that we have this abundance of information.

You know, I was having this conversation with someone not that long ago who's no, probably a decade older than me.

So in his mid fifties.

He's like, when I was at university there was this mature student in our course and we were also curious about this guy who had actually already been out in the world.

And we were like, we wanna know what it's like.

No one grows up like that.

Today.

We grow up with this super abundance of information, of being told and shown what the world is like, or you know, lots of the information might not actually be trustworthy, but it's all there at our fingertips.

Anything we don't know we can Google.

And by seven years old, my son's already like well aware of and afloat in that sea of information.

And we're now building all of this AI stuff that is kind of premised on a world that is made of information.

And so my question is, what does information not know about?

What can information not tell us?

And so I'm really curious about the, the moment where something shifts, the moment where the flat surface of the world, that is all that information ever provides us with, we find an opening in it.

And we find that opening goes deeper and deeper and deeper.

And it might be the moment where the temperature sort of changes in a room because of the turn that the conversation has taken.

I'm thinking now of like, um, Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting and you know, that scene where he's like, All this clever stuff.

You're telling me I can get it in the library.

The only thing I can't find there is if you tell me what it's like to be you.

Something like that, you know, this thing I'm talking about.

Uh, but one way or another, I think, you know, for our children and young people in our communities, if we are not going to descend into the kind of the hell, which I think that the big path Le leads to, then we need to recover the capacities.

For, you know, gently and without falling into the traps and the, the toxic patterns of how it can go, making these invitations to depth, creating spaces where it's possible to, you know, to turn off the axis of that kind of flat informational plane of, uh, reality as described to us by our machines, and into all of the stuff which, you know, every religion and spiritual tradition that I've had dealings with has things to say about this, knows things about this.

You know, the bit that goes missing from that way of describing the world, the bit without which there is no value in the part of the world that can be described in that flat surface informational way.

And so more and more, like if I ask myself what I'm gonna be talking about, what I'm gonna be writing about, having, you know, used this book to, to put down, both in the sense of putting down in writing, but also in the sense of like laying down a burden that I've been carrying, the role of speaking about climate change that's been central to my work for 15 years or so, where am I going next?

It has to be in this direction and it's, you know, I say near the end of the book, surrender, yeah.

But don't surrender to the certainty, the kind of dark certainty about how the story ends, which I sometimes hear coming into some of the ways that people talk about the depth of the trouble we're in with climate change.

Don't surrender to the certainty, surrender to the mystery.

Ivan Elich work has been so important for me used to say, you know, what hope means.

Hope means remaining open to surprise rather than being certain that you know how the story ends.

And that's, that's kind of, that's where I see the, the work that's mine to do next among the ruins and what we're doing.

You know, we have this little school here.

It's based out of our, our home in this small town in central Sweden, but also, you know, exists in different ways online and in gatherings that we convene in different places as Anna and I are on the road at times.

And, you know, I think that the, the work of A School Called Home, the work of regrowing a living culture, as we often talk about it, for me increasingly looks like learning the skill of making these pockets to which we can show up differently, where we can, uh, relearn, learn to invite back in our exile capacities, learn to make that turn to depth, turn to gentleness in the language that Anthony McCann taught me to think about it years ago.

Um, and I, however bad things are, however much trouble there is around and ahead of us, however much trouble there is already now cause we're in hard times for lots of people around us, there is work that we can do.

There is an invitation to come alive in the face of all of this that feels like it exists on the far side of that kind of giving up that we were talking about a few minutes ago.

Like, you give up, give up your illusions, you give up the idea that any of us are gonna have a plan, which, if only everyone would listen to us, would make it all.

Okay.

It never was okay.

It's never gonna be okay.

And that's all right.

But there is work to do.

And there like, and everyone's answer to what that work is, it's gonna look slightly different depending on your gifts, your circumstances, your privilege, your struggles, the, the place and time in which you find yourselves.

I love that phrase, the recreating the living organism.

Like, it's just, it's, it's so kind of evocative.

It feels like such a kind positive invitation.

Cuz in a way, I guess where my sort of kinda feeling around the the kind of book and what we've spoken about here.

This, you know, one, the kind of helpful kind of, reminder, this is not the the work need not be about kind of persuading people or this or that.

There's something kind of, you know, it kind of feels to me like my kind of felt sort of understanding is that we are at a transition that lots of the ideas which have always been kind of fixed and known and sort of secure, just don't kind of feel like they are, but the word not being about needing to persuade people of that.

But actually the, then the invitation that comes actually to sort of step into the kind of mystery as you talk about.

To step into that hopeful idea that, you know, maybe we don't know, well, we don't know actually what the news stories are gonna be.

the new solutions are gonna be whatever they, and that's also not the work.

But actually just to start heading down that road, um, with the, kinda with the qualities and characters, which you're pointing to and alluding to.

We talk about being drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

So being sort of being gardeners.

The nice thing about being a gardener is it's not like managing and controlling something.

Anyone who's ever done any gardening knows that you have your part to play.

You can contribute to the possibility of flourishing.

You can, as we've been doing since we moved on to this patch of land here three years ago, you can kind of conduct a war against lawn and turn it into something more alive and more fruitful.

But you also have to recognize the point at which you step back and, um, you can't make a tree grow faster than it's gonna grow, all you can do is provide it with good conditions.

And there's a strong analogy I think, between that and what the, you know, the work of creating the kind of spaces that we've been talking about, um, what that looks like as well.

So that's, that's, to me, that's how it looks from here.

But it's gonna look differently from, you know, where people who are listening to this are sitting, people are gonna be able to see things that are hidden from view, from, from my perspective.

And that's good cuz we, we all need to be, as I, I say to people when they're taking part in courses with us at the school, I say, don't trust me, trust yourself.

That is, you know, listen to the bits that I'm carrying, what I can teach.

You know, if you're called to it, then step inside it and carry it around and try looking at the world through these lenses for a while.

But like, don't, don't hand over your judgment to me.

It's still in the end.

It's your, it's your judgment and you wonder around the world and you might learn from what me and Anna are doing.

You might learn from, you know, what Ben's doing with curating this podcast.

You might learn from lots of the other people who we've named in this conversation.

But that will compost down into something that's alive for you that is not simply, and never should be a kind of copy and paste or a kind of transfer of some commodity or some pure total truth from any, anyone else to you that's, that's not how it works.

That's not, it's not what the work of culture looks like.

We don't get off that lightly.

We have to do the work of regrowing a living culture.

We don't get to, you know, buy it off a shelf.

And I guess the, in the spirit of that, um, your book also kinda ends with a kind series of questions, which I guess is, you know, like I said is, is in the spirit of that this is not about solutions or answers or this versus that in that sort of sense that these kind four questions that you, you, end with or, or invitations might be a better way of better way of putting it.

Is that right?

That's it.

It's kind of a back of an envelope map of I the kinds of work that makes sense, that might make sense in a time of endings.

And I'm like, alright, so you can be salvaging the good stuff that we have a chance of taking with us from the world as we've known it, from the thing that is ending.

You know, we touched on it a little bit.

There are achievements of this, this thing, this time, this entity called modernity that we would not gladly leave behind.

So you can be doing work of salvage, you can be doing work of mourning because the will be the will turn out to be things that were good about the ways that we arranged life around here lately that we don't get to take with us.

But part of the work of mourning and know anyone who's been, anyone who's been through grief knows this from their experience.

Part of the work of mourning involves telling the stories, honoring what's been lost by telling its story.

And part of what you are doing when you tell those stories is that you are carrying seeds.

Those stories may turn out to be seeds for possibilities in worlds to come that we can't imagine yet.

So then the third kind of task that I name is a work of discernment.

Using the strange angle of the light that comes at twilight, that comes in the moment of ending, to notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were about the ways that we've been living around here lately.

You know, to call those stories into question, to call the monopoly of the particular institutional forms through which learning or health or whatever social goods have been offered to us in recent times.

To distinguish between those institutional forms and the deep underlying things that we are longing for and working for in learning or health or whatever it is.

So that's a work of discernment.

So that's the third kind of task, noticing the things we are being given the chance to walk away from.

And then the final one is looking for the dropped threads, the bits from earlier in the story.

Because, you know, if, if we are talking about the end of the world, as we have known it, that world had a beginning, it came into being and other things were ending or being ended, sometimes very destructively in that time.

And yet those things leave their traces.

They persist at the edges on the periphery or the places that have been marked on our maps as the periphery, but might feel like the center to those who are living there.

And in again, in a time of endings, we've given the chance to notice that, to come into dialogue, to, to lift up the things that have been marginalized or marked as old-fashioned or obsolete, or just have been surviving below the radar or at the edges.

And to allow them to be part of what makes all the difference as we find a way forward into whatever is coming next.

So those are the four kinds of tasks, the, the work of salvage, the work of mourning, the work of discernment, and the work of picking up those drop threats and weaving them back in.

And when you say at the beginning of the book, and actually when we start at the beginning of the conversation, you know, publisher says, work out who the book's for.

And you are sort of not doing that, but I think one of the things you do say in the book is that, you know, part of who you're writing for are people who are trying to make sense of endings, uh, make sense of kind of what is ending.

And I think I've kind of feel that very, very strongly both in what the book and what I have kind of got from the book and what I've also got from this conversation.

So hugely appreciative of the book, of hugely appreciative of you taking the time, um, to, to talk with me today.

Where, so where, where would we point people to in terms of your work generally?

Obviously the book and I'll include links to all of that, but, uh, other places we might point people to?

Well, anyone who's listening to this, um, In the next week or two we're, we have a series that we're gonna be running online through Zoom with the school called The Work in the Ruins, which is really picking up on all of the conversations and the messages that I've had from readers over the last two or three months since the book came out and making an invitation to, to come together for five sessions, you know, there'll be a chance to put questions to me, but also to meet other readers and get into conversation, explore the themes in the book together.

Figure out like what else might be part of this evolving back of an envelope map of.

The path's worth taking and the work worth doing in times like these.

And so I'm really hopeful that we'll be able to make some connections and birth some new, some new collaborations out of that series that we'll be running through May.

We've also got, um, a, a longer program that we're gonna be launching soon that we'll be starting this autumn that is kind of going into this territory of this, the turn towards depth and how we develop practices around that.

So that's all through A School Called Home and the website is aschoolcalledhome.org.

I'm also on Substack.

dougald.substack.com, which is where I'm publishing new writing and, um, videos and, uh, material.

So, you know, just join the conversation, use the book as a way to start conversations with others and I hope that it will be something that proves fruitful and helps people, you know, find their bearings and find their way to others.

Whose thinking has been helpful to me and to practical examples of, you know, people who are finding the kinds of work that's worth, worth doing.

Now, I know there is much more to work in this, but you are also exceptionally good at names, A School Called Home, a Work in the Ruins, dark Mountain.

These are incredibly evocative invitations into the work, so, uh, I, yeah, I appreciate that too.

Thank you.

Well, they've all been given to me in one way or another by friends and collaborators over the years, so I share the credit for each of those names.

But it's, uh, I think a name is always an invitation.

It's always a, a beginning of a conversation, so it matters.

The, the names we choose for, things are like little spells that we put out there into the world, aren't they?

yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Googled, Thank you, so much.

Thank you, Ben.

Really a pleasure to speak.

Thank you again for listening.

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