At Work In The Ruins
Also catalogued elsewhere
A book about how we find our bearings and what kind of tasks are worth giving our lives to, given all we know or have good grounds to fear about the trouble the world is in.
Ruth to add notes
PL Kindle Hightlights
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. (Location 210)
The end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world. (Location 214)
the work is no longer to concern ourselves with making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, but to leave good ruins, clues and starting points for those who come after, that they may use in building a world that is – as Vanessa would say – ‘presently unimaginable’. (Location 258)
Something is coming over the horizon: a humbling from which none of us will be spared, that will not be managed or controlled, but will leave us changed. (Location 267)
You can smell the smoke of burning forests from half a continent away; fish are cooked alive in the heat of Canadian rivers – how much more biblical do you want this to get? (Location 345)
We may no longer see climate change as the problem, but as an especially alarming symptom of an underlying condition. (Location 372)
For those most sheltered from the shadow side of modernity, the facts of climate change can be the place where its shiny promises first crack; we recognise our vulnerability and it starts to dawn on us that the ship might just be going down. (Location 379)
The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world worth living for’ nonetheless remains. (Location 415)
The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. (Location 420)
American essayist and archdruid John Michael Greer, between a problem and a predicament. A problem has a solution: you can fix it and it goes away, leaving the situation much as it was beforehand. A predicament has no solution; it is something you have to live with. You can do a better or worse job of living with it, but you cannot make it go away. (Location 556)
Modernity has two faces, suggests the Argentinian decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo, as inseparable as the faces of a coin. He calls them ‘the shine’ and ‘the shadow’. (Location 601)
The conquest of the Americas involved the extinction of 80 to 90 percent of the Indigenous population, a multigenerational genocide in which the impact of introduced diseases was compounded by military, economic and biological warfare. (Location 606)
As the Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson told Naomi Klein, ‘It’s been the end of the world for somebody all along.’ (Location 622)
The need to be worthy is not just a moral aspiration, a desire for a sense of dignity or self-justification, but a practical necessity for any culture that wants to stick around. (Location 634)
Either we make our lives a part of a cycle of gift, a reciprocal relationship with other living things, or we become an engine of depletion, bringing about a desolation from which we will not escape. (Location 636)
The fossil economy breaks the possibility of such a cycle. How many million years of dying in the forests and seas of the ancient world go into one generation of living the way we have been doing around here lately? (Location 639)
Kathryn Yusoff in her book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None: ‘The movement of energy between enslaved bodies in plantations, plants, long-dead fossilized plants, and industrialized labor is a geochemical equation of extraction in the conversion of surplus.’ (Location 645)
gather and share the embers of other ways of being, blowing them gently into flame together, knowing how much unfinished history we bring to such encounters. (Location 663)
Cushioned on millions of years of fossil energy, veiled by the impersonal logic of commodity exchange and the Emerald City magic of the shop window display, the level of detachment from consequences which has been normal, even necessary, for participation in our death-fuelled societies of consumption was until quite recently the preserve of mad emperors. Our ancestors could not afford this carelessness – and nor, it turns out, can we. (Location 678)
There is no question of going ‘back to the land’ because we never left; we just stretched the chains that link us to it so far that we lost sense of what lies at the other end. (Location 697)
We are dealing with something that implies a transformation we have hardly begun to acknowledge. (Location 739)
The role of myth and mystery, story, symbol and ritual gave way to a ‘reasonable’ Christianity, religion straightened out into a set of laws. The result was a structure of belief peculiarly vulnerable to the double shock that the natural sciences were about to deliver. (Location 821)
The ultimate goal of neoliberalism, according to Davies, was the ‘disenchantment of politics by economics’. (Location 848)
In this, it echoed the promise that deism once held in the sphere of religion. (Location 850)
if the language of emergency normally means less democracy and this is not what we want to bring about, then let’s talk about what ‘emergency democracy’ could mean. (Location 1004)
map made up of the ‘three R’s’: Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration. Each could be distilled into a question: ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’, ‘what do we need to let go of, in order not to make matters worse?’, and ‘what can we bring back, to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?’ (Location 1079)
The gap between what they can say in the pub and what they can say in a peer-reviewed paper is not a problem that could be solved by greater courage. It’s deeper than that, a predicament that reflects the nature of science and the role that it is asked to play within modernity. It takes us back to the difference between measurement and judgement, and the impossibility of one of these doing all the work. (Location 1163)
What’s missing here is a sense that the truth might exceed the facts: that to tell the truth about climate change requires us to speak not only to the part of the story which the work of climate science reveals, but also to the questions which lie beyond the frame of science. (Location 1169)
‘I think Bendell could still make the case for Deep Adaptation, and perhaps more effectively, based on the broad consensus science.’ (Location 1182)
‘In some sense, not wanting to know was connected to not knowing how to know.’ (Location 1227)
Note: denial
The real problem is that we don’t have a living-space in which to fully know what we know, in which to confront the knowledge and respond to it emotionally without immediately becoming entrenched in a position of fear, denial and hopelessness. (Location 1234)
The starting point of knowledge, surely, is the experience of knowing. With all the work that goes into them, the words or numbers on a page are derivative of this experience; (Location 1252)
The search for ‘empirical evidence’ has at its root the old Greek word empeiria, meaning ‘experience’. (Location 1257)
the high status given to scientific knowledge, according to the story modern Western society likes to tell itself, is an ideological facade. (Location 1289)
figures in white coats are useful so long as they feed the ideological structure of industrial society – so long as their labs contribute to the GDP – but when their findings start to call the aims (or even the viability) of societies like these into question, their voices carry little more authority in the summit rooms than those of the protesters at the gates. (Location 1290)
I am convinced that the bind in which climate science finds itself can only be broken by relieving it of the responsibility to carry all the weight of knowing this thing we call climate change, inviting it to take a humbler role within the work that lies ahead. (Location 1312)
to be a friend to science involves making room to talk about its limits and its blind spots. To ask science to carry the whole weight of knowing a thing like climate change is to ask too much. The work of science can and should inform the decisions we make, but to put science in the position of leading, while the rest of us fall in behind and follow, is to go beyond what can be asked of it. (Location 1370)
science doesn’t tell us what to do, it gives us information on the basis of which judgements have to be made. To make a judgement is to take responsibility for its consequences, and it is this responsibility that can be hidden from view behind the talk of ‘following the science’. (Location 1440)
Think again of its peculiar ways of seeing: the glass that makes available for scrutiny the distant or the invisibly small, the way the subject of scrutiny remains on the far side of the glass. This perspective can create an illusion of invulnerability; it implies a detachment that is not part of what it is like to live as the creatures we are in the world in which we find ourselves. (Location 1445)
the pandemic had ushered in a new regime, a closing of the borders of the mind. (Location 1503)
‘Our job is to complicate matters.’ Not to be difficult for the sake of it but to do justice to the strangeness and the messiness of life in a world like this, and to create the kind of space in which stories come alive. (Location 1545)
Is it really the case that people don’t have enough information about climate change? Or is it that we struggle to make sense of what this information means, to fit it into the frames we use to make sense of our lives? (Location 1556)
In its attention to whatever is missing or taken for granted, art can lead us upstream. (Location 1559)
With all its well-meant calls to optimism and its othering of fear, this Worldview A ends up approaching the clinical condition of dissociation, identified by psychologists: a pathological detachment from physical and emotional experience. (Location 1650)
All this Anthropocene talk sounds a lot like the discovery by ‘the world of the powerful’ of ‘the plausibility of its own destruction’. (Location 1683)
‘Ecomodernism says we have a moral obligation to extend gifts of technology and modernity to those who have to date been left behind.’ (Location 1748)
it’s not that there’s no truth in the story told by Pinker or Rosling, it’s that too much has been left out in order to make this story work. Not least, the judgements hidden behind the data visualisations. (Location 1761)
the work that lies ahead looks less like sustaining modern lifestyles at all costs and more like salvaging what we can from these ways of living, while learning from the many other ways that humans have made life work in the long history of our species. (Location 1768)
There are no sure bets for the times ahead of us; all we have are long shots. (Location 1771)
when those who hold power are stuck, when they have no good moves left to make, it can fall to the weaker party to find the hidden move, the power from below that might just make it possible to rewrite the rules. (Location 1822)
Note: degrowth
‘France is unable to decrease its emissions,’ Macron told her, ‘because of its economic growth.’ (Location 1876)
Once you take into account the resources used in factories elsewhere to produce the goods and services we consume, the growth of our economies is more stuff-dependent than ever. (Location 1887)
‘It is not politically acceptable to question economic growth,’ they write, ‘therefore green growth must be true, since the alternative is disaster.’ (Location 1892)
Note: degrowth
sustainability is over: the challenge now is not to sustain the way of living of the European countries but to negotiate its surrender. (Location 1905)
The need for growth starts as a social construct, yet this construct is the tablecloth on which our current societies have been arranged. The question, I thought, was how fast this cloth could be pulled out, and how many of the plates and glasses would get broken in the process. (Location 1921)
Note: degrowth
the winners of modernity, those of us whose lifestyles generate the most emissions, tend to be the ones most cut off from any possibility of reactivating older institutions. (Location 1939)
to admit you are out of solutions is to reach the end of the world. (Location 1975)
the work of medicine is to heal but death is not an illness, only a natural part of life. (Location 2090)
He observed that the advantages of modern systems tend to be cancelled out as we become increasingly dependent on them. (Location 2122)
beyond a certain point, he argued, schooling makes our societies more ignorant, hospitals make us sick and prisons create criminality. (Location 2125)
out of the thirty years’ increase in US life expectancy between 1900 and 1991, only five were due to the impact of medical care; the other twenty-five were attributable to public health measures, changes in lifestyle and the social environment. (Location 2133)
‘Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins,’ Ghosh tells us, ‘born at the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience.’ (Location 2163)
Statistical methods belong to the category of scientific tools that allow us to act as if the world can be held at arm’s length, observing the landscape of experience with a satellite’s perspective. (Location 2203)
Life is not a statistical experience; it is inherently anecdotal. (Location 2235)
once care of the sick and dying has become the monopoly of highly trained professionals and expensive-to-run systems, no society can afford to retain the capacity to handle an unusual surge in numbers. (Location 2283)
because it’s hard for us to look clearly at this systemic vulnerability, the measures taken against the pandemic were justified by inflating our perception of the dangerousness of the disease itself – and this creates a lingering sense of unreality and untruth around what is happening, feeding the madness of true believers and conspiracy theorists alike. (Location 2313)
This is a foundational step toward the establishment of a governance system to effectively manage human interactions with the Earth System. (Location 2357)
When we start out describing the living world as if it were a technological and economic system, this ends in the attempt to make the world into such a system: (Location 2372)
the logic of ‘the Machine’. (Location 2378)
I tend to talk about it as the logic of ‘modernity’ (Location 2380)
we could start by thinking of modernity as the era in the history of the West when the future took on a special importance: (Location 2385)
The fish-tank mindset is only an extension of a logic that goes deep into the history of modernity, an approach to the world as a mechanism to be optimised for particular human ends. (Location 2463)
‘A universal social straitjacket will be the inevitable outcome of ecological restraints on total energy use imposed by industrial-minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at some hypothetical maximum.’ (Location 2473)
‘the path of engaged surrender’: ‘These were the people that accepted that they could not control all the variables or the outcome, and yet understood that by staying present to the process, they had a choice in how to experience it.’ (Location 2528)
The idea that these stages mark a linear process grieving people pass through was later disavowed by Kübler-Ross herself (Location 2534)
it would be a mistake to imagine that our societies stand before this choice – the path they will take is clear enough, for now. What is at stake is our willingness, those of us who cannot bring ourselves to contribute to paving this path, to turn aside. (Location 2571)
To turn aside from the big path is to turn aside from the projects of modernity, and modernity does not belong to one side of that familiar axis of political choice, it is the frame on which the whole axis was strung from the start. (Location 2595)
as Anthony Barnett points out, the most important words in the slogans ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ were back and again. (Location 2612)
the desire to reboot the future starts with an acknowledgement that something has gone badly wrong, but it treats the failure of the future as a mistake or a temporary loss of faith. (Location 2614)
This version of the left is every bit as keen on the fish-tank world; it differs only on the question of how the ownership of the tank ought to be structured. Its vision is also just as reliant on yet-to-be-invented technologies. (Location 2619)
Nicholas Beuret’s forensic analysis of the Green New Deal motion passed the same year by the Labour party conference: ‘to meet its electric car targets global production of cobalt would need to double, the entire global production of neodymium, three quarters of the world’s lithium production and half of the world’s copper production would all be required.’5 Remember, this is just to supply the UK. (Location 2625)
What’s called for is not to reboot the project of modernity but to see what can be salvaged from it, and what deserves to be left behind. (Location 2633)
It began with the seating arrangements of the Assemblée nationale in Paris in the early phases of the French Revolution, where those who favoured the king took their seats to the right of the chair while the revolutionaries sat to the left. (Location 2656)
such conceits are everywhere within the logic of modernity: models are proclaimed in the capitals of Europe, then treated as universal laws that were there all along, waiting to be discovered, and can therefore be read back into history or out across other cultures. (Location 2659)
the imaginative frame of industrial society, a frame which seeks to maximise production and which looks on the world as a collection of raw materials to be transformed by the application of human effort and ingenuity, all subsidised by great flows of fossil energy and by great imbalances in the cost of labour between different parts of the world that are the ongoing legacy of European colonialism. (Location 2669)
The first of these maps suggests that both right and left have had their versions of ‘progress’, one focused on market freedom and the other on social rights; in both cases, the direction of progress has been away from the local and towards the global, and this has been pursued in the name of ‘modernisation’. (Location 2677)
In place of the attractors of ‘the Global’ and ‘the Local’, Latour proposes that the direction of travel that remains available is the one proposed in the book’s title. (Location 2686)
Note: degrowth - Down To Earth
Bayo Akomolafe: ‘We are coming down to earth; we will not arrive intact.’ (Location 2688)
Note: quote
tending to their decay in such a way as to contribute to the possibility of life going (Location 2692)
We are not entitled to a happy ending, or even to know more of the story than the small part any of us gets to play. (Location 2698)
we don’t have to see eye-to-eye with others, or even get close enough to look each other in the eye, in order to contribute to the patchwork that makes up a countermovement to the projects of power. (Location 2724)
At each of the turns in his journey, he had been willing to renounce the security of existing structures, structures he had come to find intolerable, even though he had no answer as to what else could be done. Willing to go and wait in the wilderness, with patience, to see what new things might come into view as a result of that letting go. (Location 2750)
To give up is always to give up on something, though at the time it may well feel like everything. (Location 2756)
‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead into the unknown world that lies ahead.’ (Location 2765)
no suggestion I make is likely to satisfy those looking for a plan for a highway. (Location 2768)
if we find a way through this trouble, it will be because the agency through which food systems adapt lies closer to the people who grow our food. (Location 2782)
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira was born, as she tells it, with Indigenous blood in her veins and on her hands: (Location 2788)
‘the house the European man built on the backs of Indigenous peoples would eventually fall, and that we’d better take cover when it happened.’ (Location 2792)
To hospice modernity is neither to kill it nor to try to save it, but to seek the conditions that would allow it a good death, one in which it gets to teach its final lessons and hand on the goods it has been carrying. (Location 2804)
‘we do not invest in the future of modernity, while staying with modernity’s troubles, facing our responsibilities, and gradually developing discernment to reorient our desires away from modernity’s violence and unsustainability – without resorting to heroism or escapism.’ (Location 2810)
it may look like being part of new experiments, closer to the ground, without burdening them with grand visions of the future; it may look like putting yourself on the line to interrupt the systems of our collective addiction, systems that tend to be invisible until they stop working. (Location 2815)
the worlds worth working for in the time to come are ‘presently unimaginable’. (Location 2818)
who may think that your veiled or explicit arrogance, self-image, and sense of self-importance are, plainly speaking, ridiculous.’ (Location 2823)
be taught by the precarity, brokenness, and imperfection of our collective existence.’8 (Location 2826)
Coming to see the world differently involves coming to see ourselves differently. (Location 2830)
If I had to guess where the waters are deepest, here in the countries that need to change the most in the years ahead to head off the worst of the climate crisis, then I’d say it’s loneliness and lack of meaning, mental health amongst young people, addiction, including addiction to networked technologies, economic precarity and, for an increasing number of those around us, the ability to feed ourselves and heat our homes. If the question is where impossible change might come from, then these are places we should be giving attention. (Location 2843)
The industrial chain uses more than 75 percent of the world’s agricultural resources but feeds only 30 per cent of the world’s people; (Location 2855)
70 percent of the food humanity eats comes from the peasant web and seven out of ten of the world’s people depend on this web for most or all of their food.10 (Location 2856)
three-quarters of the crops grown within the industrial chain never reach the plate. This is due to a mixture of losses in transport, waste in households and the diversion of crops into fodder for meat production and biofuels. (Location 2858)
The persistence of small-scale farming despite its often predicted demise is testament to people’s attachment to a way of life whose advantages elude the statistical gaze. (Location 2898)
‘All through history,’ Illich wrote, ‘the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.’ (Location 2905)
the question is what to do with the privilege we find ourselves with – and contributing to softening the fall that lies ahead for all of us seems like one of the better uses it can be put to. (Location 2919)
‘No bureaucratic system is capable of stepping up to the climate crisis because the real work involves letting go of control, degrowth and slowing down – the very antithesis of what the system was designed for in the first place.’ (Location 2933)
the end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world. (Location 2954)
Philip Sherrard: ‘as it is the pursuit of the ideals and methods of modern science that has brought us into this catastrophic situation, clearly there can be no issue from it without the renunciation of those ideals and methods.’5 (Location 2968)
There’s an idea that science deals with a realm of facts that lies upstream of politics, whereas in practice the two are always entangled. (Location 2984)
From back near its beginnings, the scientific way of approaching the world has been bound up with a set of assumptions that are not derived from the activities of science but that provide the conditions for the way these activities are carried out and the authority given to their results. (Location 3000)
High among these is the assumption that whatever is real is capable of being known in the way that a scientist sets out to know things. (Location 3004)
there is really no such thing as ‘science’. There’s a set of practices, ideologically and institutionally bound together, generally carried out under the shared assumptions we have touched on, yet essentially heterogeneous. (Location 3012)
There is no single ‘scientific method’ but a set of methods and conventions that vary between fields. (Location 3014)
If it were possible to leave aside the condescension towards Indigenous knowledge, I guess you could argue that no great harm came of waiting until 2012 for the reality of those sounds to gain official recognition. The same cannot be said of the larger pattern to which this story belongs. (Location 3053)
science has been interested in measuring people’s skulls but not in listening to what those people know. (Location 3075)
science and reason are often taken to be one and the same, so that any questioning of science will be understood as emotional, romantic and irrational. (Location 3082)
In the older understanding of the term, the sensus communis refers to a faculty we each have, the faculty by which we put together the experience of our senses and form judgements about the world. (Location 3092)
Given time enough and funding, science can know many things; yet it cannot say, because it does not know, when enough is enough. (Location 3101)
Modernity is post-apocalyptic. It’s been that way from the start. It is born out of devastation: the destruction of the fabric of the living world and the destruction of the weave of culture. (Location 3108)
Here’s the ambiguity contained in talk of existential threat: it can mean a threat to the continued existence of humans and life itself, or it can mean a threat to a mode of existence, a particular way of living. (Location 3143)
for whom is there no Plan B? For British department stores that sell very fine cheese-and-pickle sandwiches or for a liveable human existence? Or were we no longer making that distinction? (Location 3149)
my encouragement would be to surrender, yes – but to surrender to the mystery, not the certainty. (Location 3163)
In the rooms where people come together to talk about the trouble the world is in, the agency is assumed to lie not with humanity in general but with people like us: the world’s most modern, most developed humans, the ones who live closest to the future. (Location 3180)
I don’t know what is worse, the totalising pessimism that results from this loss of faith or the forced optimism of those attempting to sustain it with ever more desperate and dangerous plans to bring Earth’s systems under control. (Location 3187)
We need to break the frame within which agency is assumed to be concentrated in buildings like those and this means sharpening our sense of what is at stake. (Location 3190)
How much will come through this bottleneck and in what shape – that seems to me to be what’s at stake, what remains to be settled, and our actions may yet contribute to how it all plays out. (Location 3193)
Modernity thrives on loss and cannot name it, deferring the consequences as long as possible, outsourcing them into the lives of others, calling this progress. (Location 3211)
‘A lot depends on whether people feel that the promises were broken,’ Vanessa told me, ‘or whether they see that these were false promises all along.’ (Location 3221)
A lot depends, then, on the recognition that those promises could never have been kept, that they were not only unrealistic but harmful. For only with this recognition is there a chance of working out what remains, what might be done, starting from the ruins in which we find ourselves. (Location 3226)
The first kind of work that makes sense is to salvage the good that may be taken with us from the ruins of the world that is ending. (Location 3232)
The second kind of work is to mourn the good that cannot be taken with us. (Location 3235)
tell the stories of the good things that couldn’t be saved, for those stories can be taken with us and they may turn out to be seeds. (Location 3237)
The third kind of work involves discernment: notice the things within our ways of living that were never as good as we told ourselves they were and the chance we are being given to walk away from these. (Location 3238)
The fourth kind of work is to look for the dropped threads, the moments earlier in the story that have something to tell us. (Location 3241)
‘It’s very strange, where you come from,’ says Martín Prechtel. ‘It seems to me that where you come from, everybody wakes up every day expecting to live.’ (Location 3248)
The alternative is not that you wake up expecting to die, it is that you might wake up with a sense of your life as a gift, ‘something mysteriously good’ – not an entitlement or a reward for living right, but a source of wonder and an occasion for gratitude. (Location 3254)
Modernity has gone around the world making no end of scars. Under its spell, we think the world is trying to kill us, because we have forgotten that dying is part of what we’re here for and have come to treat it as an error in need of correction. (Location 3273)
we live within stories whose ending lies beyond the horizon of our lifetimes. We will never know how all of this turns out. (Location 3276)