Learning to Live in the Dark

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.