HOMEWARD BOUND
THE CLIMATE SESSIONS
A four-part online series hosted by Dougald Hine with Martin Shaw, Vanessa Andreotti & Alastair McIntosh
SUNDAYS 15, 22, 29 November & 6 December
8.15pm CET ｜ 7.15PM GMT ｜ 2.15PM EST ｜ 11.15AM PST
This series has now begun. Please sign up to our mailing list for information about future online courses and events.
This autumn, we invite you to a series of live online sessions with some of the thinkers who have most influenced the work of this school. Over four Sundays, Dougald Hine will host a conversation that takes us into the deep territory of the climate crisis, the end of the world as we knew it and the survival of being.
How do we speak about the unspeakable?
The world is on fire – and over the past two years, the alarm has been rung with a new urgency by movements willing to talk about grief and beauty, fear and vulnerability, the dark night of the soul and the strange power that can come from the place beyond hope.
We need such ways of talking, if we’re to speak truth about a thing like climate change; the daylight language of facts and figures and strategies is vital, but not sufficient in itself. We need to walk on mythic ground, to journey into the underworld, into the deep structure of our ways of knowing the world.
To navigate in this territory calls for wisdom and experience of a kind that has been marginalised in the societies that most of us grew up in. So I’m grateful to be able to bring together three wise friends of this school, each of whom has made a powerful contribution to the deepening reflection around the climate crisis, two years into this new wave of action and awareness.
In the final week, we’ll be joined by a panel of researchers and activists to help us ground what we’ve learned and what we might take forward from this time together.
I look forward to sharing this journey with you.
— Dougald Hine
This series has now begun and we are no longer taking bookings. Please sign up to our mailing list for information about future online courses and events.
The Sunday Sessions
For four weeks, beginning on 15 November, we will meet each Sunday for a 90-minute webinar session. Over the first three sessions, we will hear from Martin Shaw, Vanessa Andreotti and Alastair McIntosh, taking their recent writings as a starting point. Then in the fourth session, we will be joined by a panel of researchers and activists.
A video of each session will be available to participants afterwards, allowing you to catch up on any sessions that you miss, or to watch again at a future date. These recordings will be available for three months after the end of the series.
Reading Groups
You are welcome to join us simply for the four Sunday sessions, but we hope that many of you will want to take part more actively in the conversations around this series, so there is a second part to this invitation. We will match you with a group of around a dozen fellow participants to form a reading group that meets ahead of the Sunday call.
All participants will receive an invitation to a reading group. Your group will be responsible for arranging how and when it meets, but we will provide reading recommendations and material to help seed your discussions. You will be able to feed back questions from these discussions into the following Sunday’s session.
Guest contributors
Martin Shaw is an acclaimed teacher of myth and one of Britain’s best-loved storytellers.
He founded the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University, whilst being the director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK. For twenty years Shaw has been a wilderness rites of passage guide, working with at-risk youth, the sick, returning veterans and many women and men seeking a deeper life.
His latest book, Wolferland, grew out of a 101-day ritual in which he went each day into a Dartmoor forest to call to the land and listen for a response. ‘This is,’ he writes, ‘a very ancient way of approaching an emergency.’
Vanessa Andreotti holds the Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at UBC and is part of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, a collective of researchers, artists, activists and Indigenous knowledge keepers from the Global North and South.
In a recent essay for openDemocracy, ‘Preparing for the end of the world as we know it‘, the collective brings Indigenous perspectives to Western conversations about ‘collapse’, asking how we can ‘grow up and show up differently to the challenging work that we need to do together as we collectively face the gradual collapse of the house of modernity, or, in other words, the end of the world as we know it’.
Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish writer, broadcaster, and activist on social, environmental and spiritual issues, raised on the Isle of Lewis.
A pioneer of modern land reform in Scotland, he helped bring the Isle of Eigg into community ownership. On the Isle of Harris he negotiated withdrawal of the world’s biggest cement company (Lafarge) from a devastating “superquarry” plan, then agreed to serve (unpaid) on that company’s Sustainability Stakeholders Panel for 10 years. Alastair guest lectures at military staff colleges, most notably the UK Defence Academy, on nonviolence.
The author of many powerful books, his latest is Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being.
Series host
Dougald Hine is one half of a school called HOME.
His writing includes Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (with Paul Kingsnorth), The Crossing of Two Lines (with Performing Pictures) and Notes From Underground (an essay series for Bella Caledonia).
He has been a founder of a series of organisations including the Dark Mountain Project, Spacemakers and School of Everything. He is currently presenting The Great Humbling podcast with Ed Gillespie.
Originally from the north-east of England, since 2012 he has been settled in central Sweden where he lives with his partner Anna Björkman, the other half of this school.
Header image: Julian Meehan
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