{"id":3495431,"date":"2023-02-14T10:52:19","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T10:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2023-02-14\/at-work-in-the-ruins-review\/"},"modified":"2025-04-03T00:10:17","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T00:10:17","slug":"at-work-in-the-ruins-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2023-02-14\/at-work-in-the-ruins-review\/","title":{"rendered":"At Work in the Ruins: Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The writer Dougald Hine is currently on a\u00a0speaking and meeting tour of the UK<\/a>\u00a0to talk about his new book\u00a0At Work in the Ruins<\/em>, published yesterday. Time was that I might have also called Dougald \u2018a climate campaigner\u2019, but reading\u2014so far\u2014the first couple of chapters it could have been subtitled, \u2018Why I am no longer talking about climate\u2019, rather than the subtitle preferred by the publishers, which was the more nuanced and SEO-richer \u2018Finding our place in the time of science, climate change, pandemics, & all the other emergencies.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)<\/em><\/p>\n

Anyway, during the course of the week Dougald has published both an extract from the actual introduction to the book, and an extract from a section that he later discarded. This sort of thing is catnip to writers, so I\u2019m going to include some extracts from both here. Here\u2019s\u00a0one from the published book<\/a>. For, if we are sitting in the ruins, we need to know what it is that is ending, and that it will end. The extract starts with a quote from Ben Okri:<\/p>\n

\u2018In these times, all we can do is be a sign,\u2019 a father tells his daughter in Ben Okri\u2019s novel The Freedom Artist. \u2018We have to help to bring about the end of the world.\u2019 We must do this, he goes on, so that a new beginning can come. \u2018But first there must be an end.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hospicing<\/h3>\n

But many ends are possible. One of the problems of reading books like this is that it points you to other books, and I was immediately attracted by the title of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira\u2019s book\u00a0Hospicing Modernity<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The title invites us to a kind of work in which the focus is not on saving modernity, or bringing it down, or rushing to build what comes afterwards, but doing what we can to give it a good ending. To let it hand on its gifts and teach the lessons that may only become apparent as the end approaches\u2026 No one I\u2019ve met has more to offer by way of tools for the work of hospicing, but the way Vanessa tells it, this must be accompanied by a work of midwifery: assisting with the birth of something new, unfamiliar and possibly (but not necessarily) wiser.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a similar vein he also quotes the philosopher Federico Campagna, who also talks of living at the end of a world.<\/p>\n

In such a time, he suggests, 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 \u2013 as Vanessa would say \u2013 \u2018presently unimaginable\u2019.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good ruins<\/h3>\n

All of this resonated with me because when I explain how the Three Horizons framework works, I often use a quote from the American politician John Vasconcellos, which I learned from the work of Graham Leicester:<\/p>\n

We need to be hospice workers for the dying culture and midwives for the new.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I also liked the idea of \u2018good ruins, clues and starting points\u2019, which spoke to me of a certain humility in imagining how future generations might want to shape the world they inherit from us.<\/p>\n

[slide-anything id=’3472166′]<\/p>\n

The introduction\u00a0that didn\u2019t get used<\/a>\u2014his editor proposed that he cut it, and Hine accepted the suggestion\u2014was more sweeping, big picture history, flashing past the Aztecs and Hindu mythology to land in a Europe that had found science and lost its mythos:<\/p>\n

History is written by the victors, but their memories are short. \u2018Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand by the rest of the world,\u2019 Sven Lindqvist points out. \u2018Our most important export was violence. All over the rest of the world, we were seen as nomadic warriors in the manner of the Mongols or the Tartars. They ruled from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.\u2019\u2026 (W)hen our ship-borne warriors crossed the horizon into other people\u2019s worlds,\u00a0we<\/strong>\u00a0were the barbarians.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Europeans<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s a version of that world that is ending now, and there\u2019s a passage in this unused introduction that connects the fate of many cultures when they met those Europeans with the fate that we can see for ourselves now. This, at least, is the observation of the anthropologists Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, in their book,\u00a0A World of Many Worlds<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The world of the powerful is now sensitive to the plausibility of its own destruction in a way that may compare, at least in some ways, with the threat imposed on worlds sentenced to disappearance in the name of the common goods of progress, civilization, development, and liberal inclusion.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or, as Hine summarises:<\/p>\n

We went around the world, ending other people\u2019s worlds and calling it progress, and now it dawns on us that our world too could end.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Narrative sweep<\/h3>\n

He says of this unused piece that he\u2019s glad the editor made this suggestion, because the big narrative sweep did not sit well with the rest of the book, which is more intimate, \u201ca story told from a particular place and time, shaped by personal experiences\u201d. All the same, Blaser and de la Cadena\u2019s idea remains central to the narrative of\u00a0At Work in the Ruins<\/em>, and he says that\u00a0A World of Many Worlds<\/em>\u00a0made the deepest impression on him in his work on his book. (Another one for the reading list, perhaps).<\/p>\n

One of the reasons for this is that they describe a fork in the road that follows from the realisation that one\u2019s world is ending, especially when that world has been used to terraforming lands and cultures into its own likeness:<\/p>\n

it can be a humbling moment, brought down to earth and able to hear at last what those on the receiving end of Western projects of colonisation, salvation, modernisation and development have been trying to tell us for generations. Or it can be the licence for the grandest version of that project yet: an attempt to turn our planetary home and all those we share it with, our human kin and our more-than-human kith, into an object of global management and control.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Decline<\/h3>\n

There needs to be an ending. One of my continuing touchpoints in all of this is\u00a0the base case of\u00a0The Limits to Growth<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(in this case the 30th anniversary edition) in which global industrial production per capita stagnates and then declines at some time in the 2020s, and global population starts to decline sometime in the 2030s. It\u2019s the base case because it assumes our behaviour as a species doesn\u2019t change. In their model, technology doesn\u2019t help here: it delays the crash, but the crash, when it comes, is faster and harder.<\/p>\n

And what I take from this is that we don\u2019t get to choose whether or not there is an ending. We only get to choose what kind of ending we have, and therefore what we have left to build from.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n

This article was also published on my\u00a0Just Two Things Newsletter<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Teaser photo credit: 1906 San Francisco earthquake<\/a>: Ruins in vicinity of Post and Grant Avenue.. By Chadwick, H. D – This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., Public Domain, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=2128556<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And what I take from this is that we don\u2019t get to choose whether or not there is an ending. We only get to choose what kind of ending we have, and therefore what we have left to build from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3495437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[252042,213522,213526,213525,79720],"tags":[163844,97321],"class_list":["post-3495431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-acceptance-and-agency","category-inspiration","category-act-inspiration-featured","category-featured","category-society","tag-buildingresilientsocieties","tag-collapseofindustrialcivilization"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3495431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3495431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3495431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3511770,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3495431\/revisions\/3511770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3495437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3495431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3495431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3495431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}