At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All Other Emergencies

Written by Dougald Hine

Narrated by Dougald Hine

Social thinker Dougald Hine explores the role science plays in shaping public policy, our attachment to modernity, and the consequences for society and the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea Green
• Release date: Feb 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666633672

Dougald Hine

Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he cofounded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. He has collaborated with scientists, artists and activists, serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern (Sweden’s national theatre) and as an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. At Work in the Ruins concludes the work that began with Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009), co-written with Paul Kingsnorth, and is his second title with Chelsea Green, following the anthology Walking on Lava (2017).

Reviews for At Work in the Ruins

[Charlie freud · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are few thinkers today who can speak with nuance and humility; without desperately falling or grabbing at a storyline to rush out of the senseless modernity we have come to accept as the only possible reality.
There are few who can weave the ideas of others, like themself, who can challenge assumed definitions, hegemonic patterning, extreme left and right polarities, even the designation of left and right itself.
Dougald Hine and his companions- Illich, Machado de Oliviera, Yunkaporta, Norgaard, Esteva, Ghosh, Smaje, Akamolafe, Jenkinson and so many many more - open our neurones to experiment in ways that are decidedly uncomfortable, unpleasant, unclear, unsettling.

As a fellow human traveller on the journey of life, I'd beg you to persist with all this 'un', to consider one of your roles in the uncertainty in which we swim, as observer and experimenter. Maybe someday, somewhere, we shall meet, working and playing in our unique and collective ways, knowing in our hearts that the old growth mother trees are ever so gradually being born.