How I Got On This Trail

...and who you think I should be in conversation with

Khayelitsha (Image: Freddie A)

The first time I heard Vandana Shiva speak, it was to an audience of thousands on a hot March day in Khayelitsha, a township on the Cape Flats.

I was twenty-three and I’d come to Cape Town… why? Because of the memory of days spent here with a friend’s family, a couple of years earlier, on my first trip outside of Europe. Because I had graduated the summer before and saved up some money from selling books door-to-door. Because I could live here cheaply and write the book I’d told everyone I was going to write. You know how that last bit worked out.

But I met a woman who was working with an NGO, helping to organise this event, and I’d volunteered to help out. For twenty years, I kept the orange T-shirt they gave us, until it fell apart. The poster, increasingly torn, went up on the walls of rooms and offices. Somewhere I still have the report I wrote from the notes I took that day.

The event was the World Court of Women Against War, For Peace, part of a series of symbolic hearings, people’s tribunals, unofficial public enquiries that have taken place around the world since 1992. Members of the ANC Women’s League had travelled on buses through the night from all over South Africa to fill the recently built sports hall. The women giving testimony had come from all over the world.

I heard stories that day that were entirely new to me, or that hit home in ways they had never done before. Stories from Palestine, Bosnia, Sudan, Soweto, New Caledonia. Afterwards, I didn’t know what to do with all that reality, but it was a few weeks later that I decided to train as a journalist.

All of the speakers were women, except one: Archbishop Desmond Tutu made an unannounced appearance, and as he came into view at the side of the stage, the whole hall erupted in song, thousands of voices rising and falling, over and over, and it was minutes before he could even begin to speak.

But the person who made the strongest impression on me that day was an Indian activist who told a story into which so many of the other stories we heard that day could fit. A story of how the world had come to be as it is, how hunger and poverty are created, who feeds the world today and who could feed it tomorrow. It was a story that didn’t fit the maps I had been given in my life up to that point, the timelines of progress and development. In the years that followed I would read and learn from people who were carrying other parts of that story – Alastair McIntosh, Ivan Illich, Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash, Vanessa Andreotti, Chris Smaje – but looking back, I realise that it was that day in Cape Town, when Vandana Shiva spoke, that I first found myself on its trail.

So when my publisher told me that Vandana would be coming to Sweden next month, and that they want to film a conversation between the two of us, my feeling was, first of all, excitement – and then a sense of the deep appropriateness that the first person I will be in conversation with about At Work in the Ruins is the person who first put me on that trail all those years ago.

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There are books that are written to please those who agree with the author, or to win over those who disagree, or to tell everyone exactly what needs to be done. I’m no good at any of those kinds of writing. What I hope to do is use words to open up a space, somewhere off to the side of the arguments that we mostly fall into when we talk about any of the things I’m writing about: climate change and how we respond to it, the pandemic and how we make sense of it, belief in science and how it gets us into trouble. At Work in the Ruins will have succeeded if it starts conversations, or feeds into conversations that are already underway – so as I get ready to take this book out into the world, it feels natural that this should happen by way of coming into dialogue.

With that in mind, I’d like your help. I am planning two kinds of tour in the first half of 2022 – a physical book tour that will take me to the UK between 7 and 23 February (with stops in Brussels and Paris en route) – and an online tour of podcasts, panels, YouTube channels or wherever else there are worthwhile conversations to be had. And my hunch is that some of you who are reading this will know better than I do where to find those conversations – so this is an invitation to get in touch with your invitations, suggestions or wild ideas. Who else should I be in conversation with? Where are the places and platforms that it would make sense to be bringing this book?

If you have ideas, you can get in touch by replying to this mail, or post a comment on Substack, or join the Facebook thread where we’re discussing plans for the trip to the UK. Or write to your favourite podcaster and suggest that they invite me on.

If you want a link to learn more about the book and to share with people you think may be interested, then use this page on my website. And here’s a very kind quote which arrived this morning from Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, which may give you a sense of how the book is landing with readers who my publisher sent advance copies to:

I’ve long felt Dougald Hine as an elder to our environmental movements. In this timely book he is asking us to pause and consider where we are now and how we got here – to think about the deeper causes of the polycrisis. I consider this book a “must read” for all those activists feeling lost, desperate and perhaps subject to “press-on-itis”. Let’s find our curiosity together, hold each other as we navigate the turbulence and face our lack of roadmap. For me, reading this book was like having a long and honest supper with an old friend around a warming fire. I finished it with a relieving sigh, feeling nourished, heart opened, humanity seen. Let our longings guide our actions.

I’m not sure I feel old enough or wise enough to qualify as an elder, but it means a lot to know that people are finding what I’ve written helpful.

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It’s -10C outside this lunchtime, here in Östervåla, and revisiting those memories of Cape Town only makes it feel colder. I spent the first part of the morning in the broom cupboard recording studio in the Red House, the unheated barn at the bottom of our garden, where I’m recording the audiobook. My feet have just about thawed out again.

Alongside all the excitement of bringing the book I’ve already written into the world, I’m also working on the essay series that is part of this Substack – and I’d hoped to have the next instalment to you by now, picking up on the doubts I voiced at the end of All Heaven Breaks Loose. I spent a couple of days working on it this week, and it has taken me into deeper territory than anticipated – from a father’s experience of birth, to an abandoned book project on ‘the cultural logic of progress’, to an extraordinary account by an anthropologist who survived a bear attack. The result will be worth the wait when it comes, but in the meantime I have another piece to share with you early next week, written in response to an invitation to reflect on the possibilities (and limits) of conviviality in online spaces.

Thank you for reading – and for all the encouraging responses I get to these mails. It’s always good to hear from you.

DH