How to Give Up

Video from the roundtable with Bayo & friends – plus a live event later today

Here comes the recording of the AMOR MUNDI event a couple of weeks ago where I gave a talk and joined a roundtable with Bayo Akomolafe, Ciclón Olivares and Maya Kóvskaya. At the bottom, you’ll also find an invitation to an online event taking place later today.

With Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and Bayo Akomolafe, Paris, December 2018.

It started as an accusation, thrown at us in sorrow or in anger, over the year or so after Paul and I published the Dark Mountain manifesto. ‘You guys, you’ve given up,’ someone would say. ‘And worse, you’re encouraging others to do the same!’

Now and then, I come across something I wrote at that time and I can see why it got up people’s noses. Not the manifesto itself, so much, but the debate articles that spun off from it. ‘The environmental movement needs to stop pretending!’ shouts the headline on one that ran in the Guardian. The work we had begun was guided by deeply felt intuitions, I was still learning how to word them, and such a process sits awkwardly with the combative language demanded by public debate.

Yet even at the time I had a sense that something was missing: that ‘giving up’ is not always necessarily a moral failure, in the way our critics seemed to assume. Nor does it have to be the final move. Rather, it can be a necessary step, part of how we come to see the world differently and find other moves that were hidden from view.

There’s a chapter towards the end of At Work in the Ruins called ‘How to Give Up’. It’s actually the point in the book where I start to write about the kinds of work that seem worth doing and the people whose example gives me hope, the steps that might come on the far side of giving up. ‘To give up is always to give up on something,’ I write, ‘though at the time it may well feel like everything.’

When I was asked to give a talk to the AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab, my thought was to focus on that chapter – but as I sat down to prepare for the session, I began to see that this theme runs through the book as a whole. Or perhaps it’s that there is another book to be written called How to Give Up. It would tell the story of how what started as an accusation from critics became a question that was mine to carry, a line of enquiry that led me to places I would not have imagined.

For now, I’ve traced that story in this talk, which starts about nine minutes into the video and runs for fifty minutes or so. It’s followed by an hour-long roundtable with Bayo Akomolafe, Ciclón Olivares and Maya Kóvskaya, moderated by Athong Makury.

I was delighted to find out that Bayo and his family have just moved to Hamburg for half a year, and we are going to meet up for an afternoon on the homebound leg of next month’s tour. Perhaps there will be the occasion to sit down and record a more free-flowing conversation between the two of us. Meanwhile, I’m grateful to Maya and colleagues for bringing us together in this online container.

Future Trends Forum – online event today

Misunderstandings happen, don’t they? I had a quick call earlier in the week with Bryan Alexander to check the sound and video set-up for my appearance on his weekly Future Trends Forum webinar. He seems a lovely man and possesses a formidable beard. But somehow I had missed the heading under which our session has been framed – so it caught me by surprise just now to discover that I’m due to speak on the question, ‘What Should Colleges and Universities Do About Climate Change?’

My first reaction is to say, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy!’

But I make myself the first coffee of the morning and sit with all of this a little longer. I remember that there can be a power in showing up empty handed. It occurs to me that maybe that’s the most honest way any of us can show up in front of questions like these. So let’s see, perhaps we can take this somewhere worth going, without leaving those who turn up expecting answers too disappointed.

If you’d like to join me and Bryan, this is an open event, taking place at 8pm CET (that’s 7pm GMT or 2pm EST), and you can get onboard by using this link.

February tour

Finally, a heads-up that tickets are now on sale for all the events on next month’s tour – including the Newcastle gig that hadn’t gone live when I sent out the original announcement. Tickets for the London events on 22nd February are selling fast, so if you’re hoping to come then I recommend booking as soon as you can.

Full details and booking links are on the Events page on my site.