At Work in the Ruins - lire.boitam.eu

Langue : English

Publié 18 décembre 2023 par Chelsea Green Publishing.

ISBN :: 978-1-64502-185-8

(1 critique)

Dougald Hine, world-renowned environmental thinker, has spent most of his life talking to people about climate change. And then one afternoon in the second year of the pandemic, he found he had nothing left to say. Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological destruction want to stop talking about climate change now? At Work in the Ruins explores that question.

‘Climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer,’ Dougald says. Questions like, how did we end up in this mess? Is it just a piece of bad luck with atmospheric chemistry – or is it the result of a way of approaching the world that would always have brought us to such a pass? How we answer such questions also has consequences.

Through our over-reliance on the single lens of science, Dougald writes that we are blinded to the nature of the crises around and ahead …

Dougald Hine, world-renowned environmental thinker, has spent most of his life talking to people about climate change. And then one afternoon in the second year of the pandemic, he found he had nothing left to say. Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological destruction want to stop talking about climate change now? At Work in the Ruins explores that question.

‘Climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer,’ Dougald says. Questions like, how did we end up in this mess? Is it just a piece of bad luck with atmospheric chemistry – or is it the result of a way of approaching the world that would always have brought us to such a pass? How we answer such questions also has consequences.

Through our over-reliance on the single lens of science, Dougald writes that we are blinded to the nature of the crises around and ahead of us, leading to ‘solutions’ that can only make things worse. At Work in the Ruins is his reckoning with the strange years we have been living through and our long history of asking too much of science. He offers guidance by standing firmly forward and facing the depth of the trouble we are in, to ultimately, helps us find the work that is worth doing, even in the ruins.

3 éditions

loppear a publié une critique de At Work in the Ruins par Dougald Hine

conflicting, still left me thinking

3 étoiles

A challenge, a surrender. Climate change advocate becomes disenchanted with the "believe the science" dogmatic and othering polarization, wants to withdraw into a more contested, other-ways-of-knowing, art's-more-than-a-message-deliverer, science-is-also-what-got-us-here. BUT global covid response was his limit: we should be more accepting of death, too much of the book is his fears of the authoritarian-science alignment of vaccine mandates and none of the book considers the anti-science factions his discomforts are in dialog against. Another path is ahead, and he's humble in not having answers to what that is or where it goes, instead like Hospicing Modernity asks us to sit with the discomfort. Indeed.