Here comes the invitation to the third in this season of “overheard conversations”, when I’ll be joined by
to talk about why “the Earth is not a person sleeping”, how one side of the science of climate change went missing, even as the urgency of the climate crisis rose on the global agenda – and what happens if we take the role of “land change” seriously. If you want to join us live at 8pm Swedish time on Sunday, then take out a paid subscription to Writing Home or to Rob’s Substack, .I’ve been reading an extraordinary book by the theologian Andrew Shanks called Hegel versus “Inter-Faith Dialogue”: A General Theory of True Xenophilia. With a title like that, I thought, you’re either dealing with someone with a wicked sense of humour, or no sense of humour whatsoever.
(Speaking of humour, I just listened to a talk by the actor Paul Bazely about playing Gandhi at the National Theatre. As part of his preparation, he watched a five-hour documentary from the 1970s that includes all the existing film footage of Gandhi, much of it silent, and noticed that in pretty much every piece of footage, Gandhi seems to be laughing.)
Shanks writes with a glint in his eye. To his way of seeing things, God is a gambler and every human religion – “insofar as it is driven by a genuine love of truth-as-openness” – is one of God’s gambles, “testing out different intensities of self-revelation, different levels of risk, to see how they work in practice.” This would apply even to “militant irreligious atheism”, where “God experiments with the very deepest concealment”.
Depending on your tolerance for God-talk and your enthusiasm for wrangling with European philosophy, your mileage with Shanks’s book may vary – but it’s been sparking many thoughts for me, not least about how human creativity also has this quality of a gamble.
In any creative undertaking, there comes a moment when you have to stake what you’ve got on a hunch – a sense that something matters deeply enough, you can’t not act on it – though in that moment, you can have no proof that what you are doing will make sense to anyone else in the world.
That’s how I remember the beginnings of Dark Mountain: this manifesto we’d woven together, made up of threads that Paul and I had been carrying when we met and lines of thought that took shape in our conversations, thrown out into the world with a hunch that there might be others who recognised some of what we were seeing, but no way of knowing how anyone would take it.
One gamble calls forth another. That’s part of the story Shanks is telling about how faith works – and it’s how it felt when strangers began to trust us with their heartfelt words.
In the responses that came in during those first months, as we asked for words and images towards a first Dark Mountain book, there was one poem in particular that struck us so deeply, we put it at the front of that book, ahead of the list of contents. It came from a man named
and it goes like this:I went looking for the wild one, the howler, the vatic tramp.
The one for whom the wounded hills are body burns, whose
blood is stained with the old love-wine of poet and earth,
warrior poet, slinging battle flak out at the static
shattering polite conversations everywhere.
I looked in the anthologies, listening for echoes,
traced for signs in the quarterlies, magazines, best of’s.
I learned it’s been a good year for poetry. Grants and awards
keep coming in. Contests and prizes are proliferating,
The wise grey consensus counsels a return to the classics.
Meanwhile, poor scientist holds extinction
in a palm full of numbers
with nothing but data
to howl with.
That poem stayed with me down the years, I read it aloud to audiences on many occasions – and when I drew together the threads of my journey with Dark Mountain to write At Work in the Ruins, I found myself quoting its closing lines. Late in the editing process, my publisher pointed out that we needed permission for any poetry quotations, so I wrote to Rob for the first time in twelve years, and he replied at once to say he was glad for it to be used. Then he added something that intrigued me:
It’s interesting those lines feature a scientist. I’ve been studying the science and science-history of climate change, and am feeling much less sympathetic to the scientist these days. Mainstream science has essentially denatured the climate.
By one of those strange patterns which I’ve learned to keep half an eye on, the same day I wrote to him, Rob had published the first in a series of essays setting out this story he had been tracing. It’s a story about how one side of the science of climate change went missing over the past three decades, even as the urgency of the climate crisis rose on the global agenda:
The living, water-mediated processes of land change were too complex and variable to be put in the global computer models, while CO2, well mixed in the atmosphere, was relatively easy to model.
Any questioning of the frames of mainstream climate science is at risk of getting caught in the crossfire, used to justify a counsel of complacency on behalf of all those interests that want to pretend we can go on with business-as-usual, or dismissed as an unhelpful muddying of the waters. What I appreciate about Rob is how clear he is about the depth of the trouble we are in, while at the same time spelling out how the dominant framing of this trouble shapes responses which are likely to make things worse.
So on Sunday night, I’ve invited him to join me as the third guest in this season of “overheard conversations”, when we’ll be drawing out the story of “land change”, its role within the history of climate science, how it came to be eclipsed by a focus on the atmospheric side of climate change, and what this means for our understanding of the trouble in which we find ourselves, but also for the kinds of agency that are called for in response to that trouble.
As usual, if you have a paid subscription to Writing Home – or to Rob’s Substack,
– then you’re welcome to join live for the conversation, which will include time for questions. The details are below the paywall on this post. If you really want to join us, but you’re not in a position to pay just now, then drop me an email and I’ll send you the Zoom link.Friends across the Atlantic should note that this and future sessions will be an hour earlier according to your clocks, as we have finally shifted to daylight saving time over here.
And if you want to learn more about Rob’s work ahead of the session, then I can recommend exploring his Substack,
.DH