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

In this series of personal and political essays, veteran writer and activist Wen Stephenson explores what it means to yearn for a better world while refusing to look away from the darkest depths of climate despair.

As the climate crisis worsens all around the globe, so does the perennial battle of hope and despair. For writer and activist Wen Stephenson, that battle is political, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. In Learning to Live in the Dark, he traces his evolution: first facing the climate-and-political abyss through a close reading of Hannah Arendt in the first year of the Trump era; responding to fatalistic climate doomists such as Roy Scranton and William T. Vollmann; his renewed political engagement via the Green New Deal and his ongoing commitment to nonviolent direct action in solidarity with the global poor; and a personal reckoning in the depths of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Engaging with thinkers from Thoreau and Dostoevsky to Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon--as well as contemporary writers such as Bill McKibben, Andreas Malm, China Mi ville, and Ol f mi T w --the book ends with a question that has become increasingly resonant for millions of people today: If nothing short of revolution, in some form, can salvage the possibility of a better world, ecologically and socially, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on offer, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the face of our catastrophes? In the face of soothing but toothless "solutions" to the multiple crises facing us, Learning to Live in the Dark offers hope of a sturdier kind: a sharp-edged tool for use in our own liberation.

In this series of personal, political, and literary essays, Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve and solidarity in the face of the advancing climate crisis and widening political abyss.

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.

Born of his own struggle, Learning to Live in the Dark is Stephenson's argument for resolve in the face of an intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss. In essays that reach back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Va lav Havel, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon--and back to Thoreau and Dostoevsky in the 19th century--Stephenson finds a constant among these iconic figures--a resolute embrace of universal human solidarity in dark times.

Engaging with contemporary writers along the way--including William T. Vollmann, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Andreas Malm, China Mi ville, and Jane Hirshfield--Stephenson charts a personal and political journey from the horrors of Trump's first presidency; through a renewed political engagement via the Green New Deal and his ongoing commitment to escalated nonviolent direct action; to a moral reckoning in the depths of the COVID pandemic and on up to the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza. Throughout, Stephenson 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?

Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cost-free hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.