Learning to Live in the Dark

Auteur

Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A contributing writer for The Nation since 2013, and a frequent contributor to The Baffler and Los Angeles Review of Books, he is the author of What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice. He has written for many publications, among them The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and The Boston Globe. A former editor at The Atlantic, he has also served as the editor of the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section and the senior producer of NPR's On Point. In 2010, he walked away from his mainstream media career and began to write and engage on issues of climate justice. As a grassroots activist and organizer in New England, he has supported and engaged in numerous campaigns of nonviolent direct action and resistance to the fossil-fuel industry and its backers.

Texte du rabat

**In this series of personal and political essays, veteran writer and activist Wen Stephenson explores what it means to yearn for a better world and refuse to look away from the darkest depths of climate despair.

**As the climate crisis worsens all around the globe, so does the perennial battle of hope and despair. For writer and activist Wen Stephenson, that battle is political, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.

In Learning to Live in the Dark, he traces his evolution: first facing the climate-and-political abyss through a close reading of Hannah Arendt in the first year of the Trump era; responding to fatalistic climate doomists such as Roy Scranton and William T. Vollmann; his renewed political engagement via the Green New Deal and his ongoing commitment to nonviolent direct action in solidarity with the global poor; and a personal reckoning in the depths of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Engaging with thinkers from Thoreau and Dostoevsky to Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon—as well as contemporary writers such as Bill McKibben, Andreas Malm, China Miéville, and Olúfémi Táíwò—the book ends with a question that has become increasingly resonant for millions of people today: If nothing short of revolution, in some form, can salvage the possibility of a better world, ecologically and socially, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on offer, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the face of our catastrophes?

In the face of soothing but toothless "solutions" to the multiple crises facing us, Learning to Live in the Dark offers hope of a sturdier kind: a sharp-edged tool for use in our own liberation.

Contenu

Part One
1. Learning to Live in the Dark
Reading Arendt in the Anthropocene. A personal essay.
2. Carbon Ironies
The 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 Thing
Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Olufémi Táíwò—and what global solidarity looks like now.

Interlude:
5. Walden at Midnight
Three walks with the radical Thoreau.

Part Two
6. The Social Beast
On the anti-totalitarian spirituality of Simone Weil.
7. Great Sinners
Dostoevsky, my father, and me.
8. The Rebel
Camus and the revolt against nihilism, then and now.
9. How To Blow Up a Climate Fantasy
A specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.
10. Risk And Revolution
A specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.
11. The Desperate of the Earth
Gaza, 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