At Work in the Runes

On Gordon White's podcast – and two live online happenings today

Let’s start with the announcements this morning, because somehow everything converged on this last Friday in April.

• At 12.30 CEST, I’ll be giving a talk at Re-Imagining Education, an online conference run in partnership with the Ecoversities Network with a huge range of speakers from around the world. Registration is on a pay-what-you-can basis and you can register here.

• At 23.05 CEST, I’ll be joining Waylon Lewis live on his Walk the Talk Show on Instagram. No idea where this will go, but if you want to see whether I can string sentences together this late on a Friday night, tune in!

Much as I’m looking forward to both of those, today’s most exciting news is that my conversation with Gordon White for his Rune Soup podcast just dropped.

Who knows where else this book will take me, there may be conversations that will reach larger audiences – someone pointed out that Russell Brand’s cat appears to have been reading the book – but when my publisher asked which podcasts I’d like to go on, Rune Soup was at the top of the list, because I’ve found so much nourishment in the weave of conversations that Gordon has recorded over the years.

If you’re new to Rune Soup, then here are a few of my favourite episodes from recent years: Place, Myth & Story with Martin Shaw, Indigenous Thinking with Tyson Yunkaporta, Mythic Time with Kathryn Fink and The Regenerative Life with Carol Sandford. One way or another, Gordon is likely to take you out of your comfort zone, but no one is doing a better job of weaving together the outsider thinkers who are carrying clues as to how we make sense of the times we’re in and what’s worth doing from here.

Clearly that’s also a big part of what I’m setting out to do, with the book and with our school, so in this conversation I had a sense of joining up the work we’ve both been doing. Apart from anything else, I was really glad to have introduced Gordon to Vanessa’s Hospicing Modernity, and I look forward to hearing the two of them in conversation before long.

The day before we recorded, I was talking to a mutual friend, Jay Springett, who had just finished Vanessa’s book. “You realise you’re the only person in the world who has read every word of that book aloud?” he told me. “And you realise that was a ritual?”

Hard to disagree – and it sharpened the sense I already had that the three weeks I spent recording the audiobook of Hospicing Modernity were part of what summoned At Work in the Ruins into being, after thirty years in which I was forever writing/not-writing a book.

I tell that story early in the Rune Soup conversation. But what I didn’t mention is the book-end that came at the other end of the writing process. I wrote and revised the first draft in eight weeks through the late winter of 2022. The afternoon I put the final full stop on the manuscript, two things dropped into my inbox with uncanny timing. The first was an email from Alastair McIntosh, who I hadn’t heard from in over a year, and whose influence stands at the back of all my work. The second was Gordon’s episode with James Bridle, talking about his book, Ways of Being. James had been in one of the Homeward Bound groups that I taught in the autumn of 2021, and Gordon’s own book, Ani.Mystic, had been among the reading that accompanied me through the writing of that first draft. I went for a walk with their voices in my ears, listening to them talk about the choice between treating the world as a made thing, the mechanical worldview that Gordon calls naturalist–materialism, or approaching it as an ongoing process of making, a living cosmos. And this felt like a direct parallel to the line I seek to draw in the closing third of At Work in the Ruins, between two contrasting ways of inhabiting the world, leading to contrasting responses to the trouble in which we find ourselves, including the part of that trouble that rides under the name of climate change.

As I listened, I remember feeling that my book had cousins, that it was coming into the world alongside the work of others – James, Gordon, Vanessa, Chris Smaje – who were the right people to tell different parts of this overlapping story. A few times, I actually described the book as midway between Ani.Mystic and Ways of Being, and then I realised that (1) this was setting the bar of expectations pretty high, and (2) it was quite possible that no reader would ever see why this description had made sense to me. As I’ve said before, you can write yourself so deep inside a book that it takes months to find your way back out to a place where you can describe what you’ve written in a way that will make sense to anyone but you.

There were other, stranger sequences of events that accompanied the writing of At Work in the Ruins, and maybe I’ll tell you about them another day. But for now, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Gordon as much as I did.

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One other thing to mention – apart from the reminder that we still have places available for The Work in the Ruins, the online series I’m teaching which starts next week – is that I just finished reading an advance copy of Chris Smaje’s new book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System & Against Manufactured Foods, which is now available for pre-order.

It’s rare that a single book deserves a book dedicated to critiquing it, but when it comes to George Monbiot’s Regenesis, such a substantial response was called for – for all the reasons that Ed and I discussed in the most recent episode of The Great Humbling – and Chris is exactly the person to provide it. On the one hand, he does an excellent job of highlighting the gaps in the evidence which Monbiot marshals to make his ‘empirical’ case against farming and for high-tech factory food. On the other hand, drawing on a wide range of sources, he brings into view the underlying assumptions that are hidden behind the loud insistence that ‘you can’t argue with arithmetic’ and reveals that there are other, more plausible ways to approach the future which these assumptions obscure.

So if you or anyone you know was left enthused – or just confused – by Regenesis, then Saying NO is an essential read, and I heartily recommend pre-ordering it from wherever you get your books.

DH