Learning to Live in the Dark

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.

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, Vaclav 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 Mieville, 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, Stephensonposes 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?

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