Learning to Live in the Dark

Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A correspondent for The Nation and frequent contributor to The Baffler, he is the author previously of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other (2015), about the pivotal early years of the U.S. climate justice movement. He is a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, where he edited the "Sunday Ideas" section, and has written for those and many other publications, including Slate, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital. He lives near Boston.

"At the end of the day, it’s ironic that Wen would name his latest offering Learning to Live in the Dark, when there is so much light in this book. It showcases backcasting—'the practice of a strategic planning approach that starts by defining a desirable future and then works backward to determine the present-day actions needed to achieve that future.' Whether he meant to or not, Wen has manifested the praxis of backcasting by delivering us to his past writings and making them more germane than many of the present-day approaches to social and climate justice. He is assessing what it will take to retain the one thing that even an epoch of climate catastrophe must not change or take away from us if we are to survive it. As he posits towards the end of his book, 'The question, maybe the only question left at this hour, is whether we will hold on to our humanity in our desperation.' —Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright for The Progressive“In Learning to Live in the Dark, Wen Stephenson confronts our ongoing planetary crisis in all its horrifying bleakness. But even as he looks into the abyss Stephenson is able to find rays of light within the darkness. This is a book for anyone searching for meaning and hope in an age of crisis.” —Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis“Wen Stephenson has long been not only one of the ablest thinkers about the climate crisis, but one of the most determined do-ers—an unyielding activist in the fights he describes so well. That makes this an important account on many scores, one that will nourish and sustain you!” —Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Third Act; author of Here Comes the Sun“It’s ironic and paradoxical that Stephenson would name his latest offering Learning to Live in the Dark when there is so much light in this book that elucidates contradictions through an illumination of bold and requisite veracity. These essays deliver on what it will take to retain collective humanity in an epoch of climate catastrophe that demands the politics of solidarity and complexity rather than comfort and deference.” —Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, climate and racial justice advocate; author of Good Friday: The Death of the US Climate Movement and Pathways For Its Resurrection (forthcoming)“To search beneath the surface, reflect deeply on what one has found, and write with a fierce honesty about it; that is the path of the finest journalists. You will find that in Wen Stephenson's essays. His journey is an inspiration.” —James Gustave “Gus” Speth, Distinguished Fellow, The Democracy Collaborative; author of They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis“Stephenson’s approach to the human crisis speaks volumes to me. He knows it is a matter of heart as well as mind. His writer-heroes overlap with my own because they are morally clear and unafraid. Stephenson too is unafraid.” —Todd Gitlin (1943-2022), Columbia University, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

• PrefacePart One1. Learning to Live in the DarkReading Arendt in the Anthropocene. A personal essay.2. Carbon IroniesThe moral miscalculations of William T. Vollmann’s climate fatalism.3. ‘Living in Truth’Havel, McKibben, the Green New Deal, and the revolution we need now.4. The Hardest ThingArendt, Frantz Fanon, Olufémi Táíwò—and what global solidarity looks like now.Interlude:5. Walden at MidnightThree walks with the radical Thoreau.Part Two6. The Social BeastOn the anti-totalitarian spirituality of Simone Weil.7. Great SinnersDostoevsky, my father, and me.8. The RebelCamus and the revolt against nihilism, then and now.9. How To Blow Up a Climate FantasyA specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.10. Risk And RevolutionA specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.11. The Desperate of the EarthGaza, Fanon, anti-colonialism, and the value of humanism in a war(m)ing worldPostlude:11. Beyond Blasphemies and Prayers Conversations with Jane Hirshfield, poet of the present moment