Learning to Live in the Dark

<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>