The Gifts in the Ruins
Full details of next month's American tour
Two weeks tonight, I’ll set out on a tour that takes me across the northeast of the United States, into the Midwest and across the border to Toronto, to bring At Work in the Ruins into conversation with a wonderful range of co-conspirators, including Bayo Akomolafe, Catherine Keller, David Cayley, Lewis Hyde, M.R. O’Connor and more.
The full details of the tour are at the bottom of this post – but first, I take a step back to reflect on the book itself, as we approach the official publication date for the paperback edition.
On Wednesday lunchtime they arrived, a hundred copies of the paperback; by Saturday night, they were gone. The first ten went to those of you who have taken out an annual subscription to this Substack in recent weeks.1 The rest were bought up by audience members at the European Ecovillage Gathering, where I gave the closing keynote. After days in the detail of tour planning, it was good to be on stage again, telling stories, weaving connections, doing this work that is mine to do, catching sight of what lies ahead when I hit the road to meet new audiences.
Returning to this book, more than two years after writing it, I’m noticing things that I hadn’t recognised earlier. What I see now is that it’s a book which is strung between two manifestoes.
The first is the Dark Mountain manifesto, whose text framed much of my work over the past fifteen years, and especially the claim made in its closing lines:
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.
You could read At Work in the Ruins as a commentary on that line, because so much of what I’m doing in the book is to spell out why this distinction matters, how it shifts our understanding of what is at stake in the climate crisis, and where this has taken me.
The second manifesto is this passage which opens the book’s concluding chapter, ‘Where to Begin’, setting out the place to which the book had brought me:
Modernity is post-apocalyptic. It’s been that way from the start. It is born out of devastation: the destruction of the fabric of the living world and the destruction of the weave of culture.
Modernity is also antibiotics and anaesthetic dentistry and the mother who can almost take for granted that she will survive childbirth and the father, holding their firstborn, who can almost take it for granted that he will live to see this creature grow strong while he grows old. Because modernity is all these things, it is hard to see or to name its post-apocalyptic character. To do so is a kind of blasphemy.
The standard answer has been to disregard the devastation, to treat culture as anachronism and to treat the living world as a storehouse of resources for our exploitation. We are coming to the end of this way of treating the world.
The paths traced in this book belong to a search for other answers, for clues that we might survive this ending, that it might be worth surviving.
In between these two manifestoes, At Work in the Ruins is an account of what I came to see in the journey Dark Mountain led me into: those years in which “talking to people about climate change” became the thread that ran through my life and work. There are chapters that draw on the experience of collaborating with artists, storytellers and theatremakers, and chapters that seek to make sense of the eruption of climate activism in the years immediately before the pandemic, the moment of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For the Future. All of this is set within a longer history of the tendency within modern societies to ask science to do the work of politics – the desire to replace the frail and fallible exercise of judgement with processes of measurement and calculation – and how the environmental movement in its turn fell into this trap, as everything came to revolve around CO2.
These things came into focus for me during the Covid time, and the middle part of the book draws on the particular experience of living through those years as an Englishman in Sweden, with deep ties to two countries which took quite different approaches to the pandemic. I write about the apocalyptic nature of the pandemic, in the original sense of this term, apokalypsis meaning “unveiling”, the bringing into view of what was hidden: “The Covid-19 virus – and the reactions to it, both cultural and political – revealed and radicalised existing tendencies and tensions within our societies.” Against this background, and with the help of Ivan Illich and other scholars of the institutions of industrial society, I trace a story about the pandemic which does not fit the entrenched positions of the Covid culture war which raged on all sides as I was writing the book. Two years on, it can feel as though there has been a collective agreement to treat that era as a bad dream to be shaken off. But it seems to me that there is still a need to ask the questions which frame that section of the book: what actually happened in the Covid time, and what did it bring into view about the larger crises around and ahead of us?
In the later part of the book, I bring forward the thinkers and activists whose work has helped me find my bearings in the “search for other answers”. Many of them speak from parts of the world which have been on the receiving end of “modernisation” processes for generations, and to whom talk of the Anthropocene can sound – as Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena put it – like “the world of the powerful” discovering that its world too could end, after ending the worlds of so many others in the name of progress.
It’s not an accident that the opening chapters of At Work in the Ruins were written the week after I finished voicing the audiobook of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity. Bringing every word of her book through my body, reliving the experience of a friend whose life has been vastly different to my own, was an act that summoned this book into being – and it’s in the company of Vanessa’s work and that of others including Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash,
, Stephen Jenkinson, Martín Prechtel and Amitav Ghosh that I bring the book into land.Revisiting it now, and recognising in its ending another manifesto, I can see that those lines about “the search for other answers” frame not only what I began to do in this book, but also the work onto which it opens, the further stories that I’ve been gathering and participating in over these past two years. There are things I can see more clearly now as a consequence of the conversations this book took me into, and these will be part of the weave of another book whose time is coming.
In the meantime, on stage on Saturday, I felt my excitement rising towards the tour that lies ahead. There is work we can do together in the rooms where we meet, breathing the same air, riding the waves of laughter and seriousness and sometimes tears, a meeting of hearts and minds. I think of a phrase that’s been running alongside me, since I read it a week ago, the title of
’s excellent post: ‘This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour’. Let’s heed that call, holding both sides of it in view – and for those of you in the parts of the world to which I’m travelling, I hope to meet you somewhere along the way.North American Tour – September 2024
The plans for these events are now confirmed, with the exception of the Boston event with Lewis Hyde, where we are still finalising the time and venue. The details of the whole tour are on my website, while the links below will take you to the registration pages for individual events, where available:
9/16 · Toronto · with David Cayley · Centre for Social Innovation + The Stoa
9/17 · State College, PA · hosted by Sajay Samuel · Penn State University
9/18 · Washington, DC · hosted by · (venue TBC)
9/20 · Boston, MA · with Lewis Hyde (time+venue TBC)
9/22 · Burlington, VT · with , Sam Bliss · The Peasantry School + Food Not Bombs Burlington
9/24 · Haverford, PA · with Suparna Choudhury, Li Sumpter · Haverford College
Thanks to all of you who have helped to make this possible, and to everyone who is spreading the word and sharing the invitations to these events. We’ve set up a WhatsApp chat for anyone who wants to help with this, so join me there if you want to follow the updates and get involved.
DH
The offer stands until the end of September – take out an annual subscription to this Substack and I’ll send you a signed copy, wherever you are.
super stoked!