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In these hard-hitting and deeply personal essays, Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes.
After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.
Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle. Throughout, he poses a question that resonates for many on the left today: If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?
Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cheap hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.
List of contents
Preface
Part One
1.
Learning to Live in the DarkReading Arendt in the Anthropocene. A personal essay.
2.
Carbon IroniesThe moral miscalculations of William T. Vollmann's climate fatalism.
3.
'Living in Truth'Havel, McKibben, the Green New Deal, and the revolution we need now.
4.
The Hardest ThingArendt, Frantz Fanon, Olufémi Táíwò-and what global solidarity looks like now.
Interlude:
5.
Walden at MidnightThree walks with the radical Thoreau.
Part Two
6.
The Social BeastOn the anti-totalitarian spirituality of Simone Weil.
7.
Great SinnersDostoevsky, my father, and me.
8.
The RebelCamus and the revolt against nihilism, then and now.
9.
How To Blow Up a Climate FantasyA specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.
10.
Risk And RevolutionA specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.
11.
The Desperate of the EarthGaza, Fanon, anti-colonialism, and the value of humanism in a war(m)ing world
Postlude:
11.
Beyond Blasphemies and Prayers Conversations with Jane Hirshfield, poet of the present moment
About the author
Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A correspondent for
The Nation and frequent contributor to
The Baffler, he is the author previously of
What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other (2015), about the pivotal early years of the U.S. climate justice movement. He is a former editor at
The Atlantic and
The Boston Globe, where he edited the "Sunday Ideas" section, and has written for those and many other publications, including
Slate,
The New York Times Book Review,
Los Angeles Review of Books,
The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital. He lives near Boston.
