Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe

<p><strong>In these hard-hitting and deeply personal essays, </strong><strong><em>Nation</em></strong><strong> writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes.<br /><br /></strong>After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.<br /><br />Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle. Throughout, he poses a question that resonates for many on the left today: If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?<br /><br /><em>Learning to Live in the Dark</em> answers not with fatalism or any cheap hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.</p>

Book details

• Publication date: 24 June 2025
• Page count: 180
• Dimensions: Height 190 mm; Width 133 mm
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9798888904343