Description
“Dougald Hine’s brilliant book demands we stare into the abyss and rethink our securest certainties about what is actually going on in the climate crisis. It’s lucidly unsettling and yet in the end empowering. There is something we can do, and it starts with where we look, how we see and what we choose to change.”
— BRIAN ENO
“A must-read for all those activists feeling lost, desperate and perhaps subject to ‘press-on-itis’. Let’s find our curiosity together, hold each other as we navigate the turbulence and face our lack of roadmap. Reading this book was like having a long and honest supper with an old friend. I finished it feeling nourished, heart opened, humanity seen.”
— GAIL BRADBROOK
The first full-length book from Dougald Hine, co-founder of a school called HOME and the Dark Mountain Project. At Work in the Ruins grew out of a strange moment in the second year of the pandemic when Dougald heard himself saying, “Maybe it’s time to stop talking about climate change?” Trying to make sense of how this could possibly be the case, he began writing.
The book became a reckoning with the strange years we have been living through, the long history of asking too much of science, and the different things we can be talking about when we talk about “taking climate change seriously”. It’s also about how we find our bearings and what kind of tasks are worth giving our lives to, given all we know or have good grounds to fear about the trouble the world is in.
Further praise for At Work in the Ruins
“One of the most perceptive and thought-provoking books yet written about the multiple intersecting crises that are now upending our once-familiar world.”
— AMITAV GHOSH
“A book of rare originality and depth – profound, far-reaching, mind-altering stuff.”
— HELEN JUKES
“Let Dougald Hine’s masterful storytelling mark you; let his song of loss and longing, his call to fugitivity, dispossess you of your steady gait and poise. Perhaps then we, collectively infected, might together witness the incomprehensible.”
— BAYO AKOMOLAFE