Book Launch!: At Work in the Ruins of Modernity with Dougald Hine

Monday 13 February

6pm – 8pm

NewBridge Books

“The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.”

At conferences in shiny venues in London or Stockholm or San Francisco, climate change is presented as an opportunity for technological progress, economic growth and a “fourth industrial revolution”. Yet for decades now, the promises of modernity have been failing in the everyday experience of more and more of us in what are supposed to be the world’s most affluent societies, even before the impacts of the climate crisis come home in earnest.

In his new book, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies, Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project) asks what happens when we take this experience seriously. When we stop treating the climate crisis as a problem to be solved or managed and encounter it as part of a larger story of the ending of the world as we knew it. How do we find the paths that lead into the unknown world that lies ahead, the kinds of hope worth having and the tasks that are worth giving our lives to?

In his first visit to NewBridge since he gave the opening talk of the Deep Adaptation season in 2018, Dougald will be in conversation with Dr Martyn Hudson of Northumbria University.

Copies of At Work in the Ruins will be available on the night and the event will be followed by a book signing.

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, author of The Great Derangement

“I’ve long felt Dougald Hine an elder to our environmental movements… For me, reading this book was like having a long and honest supper with an old friend around a warming fire. I finished it with a relieving sigh, feeling nourished, heart opened, humanity seen.” – Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of XR

“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, founder of The Emergence Network