In this episode, I spoke with Dougald Hine. He was a former environmental journalist and activist, probably best known as the co-founder of Dark Mountain along with Paul Kingsnorth. He know also writes “Writing Home” on substack, and founded A School Called Home with Anna Björkman.
He’s got a great new book coming out on 9 February, 2023, called At Work In The Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, and All the Other Emergencies.
This conversation was great, and Dougald Hine has become one of my favorite people in the whole world. Making this episode was a wonderful experience, even more so because of the relentless technological snags we encountered while recording. While the audio version came out very good, his video that his feed slows and stalls multiple times, especially at the beginning. His video finally syncs up towards the end when he switched to recording on a phone rather than his computer. Unfortunately, at that point my video became wonky.
As I said, the audio came out perfectly (and even better than previous episodes).
This was a really, really fun conversation. It was especially great to talk about the four points he makes at the end of the book regarding what kind of work we can do. Those points are:
salvage the good from the ruins
mourn the good that cannot be salvaged
discern what was actually good, rather than what we only thought was good.
look for the dropped threads from the beginning of this catastrophic story, to see the other stories we can tell instead.
Both the video and audio versions will be released to the public on 27 January.
The Re/al/ign,3: With Dougald Hine