A Change from my usual technocratic reading

My normal reading tends to be on technical matters – about, for example, the dangers facing democracy; clinate change; development; or reform – in which a problem and possible causes are identified and solutions floated. I often get bored and impatient with the dryness with which an important tale is told – so it came as a great delight when I stumbled on At Work in the Ruins – finding our place in a time of science, climate change, pandemics and other emergencies by Dougald Hine (2023). Instead of the usual dryness, I find an almost poetic originality – a baring of the soul. Let Hine introduce his work

When we start to talk about climate change, we enter into a conversation that is framed 

by science. How could it be otherwise? Climate change is a scientific term. It refers to a 

set of processes that are described by the natural sciences. Yet climate change also asks

 questions that science cannot answer. Some lie downstream of the work of science. When 

it comes to what to do about climate change, responsibility passes from the scientists to the 

engineers and the economists, while psychologists and marketing experts are brought in to 

figure out how to ‘deliver the message’ and ‘drive behaviour change’. 
In the rooms where I was brought together with religious leaders and artists and Indigenous 

elders, it mostly felt as though we were being enlisted in this downstream effort. The hope 

was that we had some wisdom or experience or practice that might help the news from the 

climate scientists to reach the wider public imagination. But the point that I would make in 

those rooms – and that often seemed to land and lead to fruitful conversations with the scientists 

present – is that there are also questions that lie upstream of the work of science and take 

us beyond the frame it draws. These are not about what needs doing and how, but about 

how we got here in the first place, the nature and the implications of the trouble we are in. 

Such questions might sound abstract compared to the practical concerns of those who want 

to find solutions, but how we answer them has consequences. It shapes our understanding of 

the situation, what kind of problem we think we’re dealing with and, therefore, what kind of 

solutions we go looking for.

You could hear this vulnerability in the voices of those at the heart of the climate movements 

that erupted in 2018 and in the quieter conversations going on within the local groups that 

formed during that moment. Yet all this talk was still taking place within the vessel of science,

 and this produced strange contortions and contradictions. The language of science is 

understated by design. It is hardly suited to speaking in prophetic tones, but this was the 

signature of these movements. The strangeness of the shift in register applied as much to 

Greta Thunberg, who was fiercely careful to keep her statements within the bounds of the 

scientific consensus, as it did to Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam or to Jem Bendell, the 

Cumbria University professor whose self-published paper ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for 

Navigating Climate Tragedy’ – based on his alternative interpretation of the scientific data 

– went viral that autumn. Whether in alliance with or antagonism to the actual climate scientists

, the calls to action were increasingly framed in the name of something called ‘the science’. 

An understandable shorthand for the consensus over the key processes of climate change 

built up over decades of research by thousands of teams around the world, this way of talking 

also had the effect of invoking a singular authority whose implications remained to be seen. ‘

Unite Behind the Science’ read the placards and the hashtags, and the more this message 

was repeated, the stronger the frame of science around our climate conversations became 

and the less room there would be for looking beyond that frame.

It may seem odd to be calling a book premised on the world ending
shortly “delightful” but it is one of these rare ones which makes
you look at the world differently.There’s an excellent video discussion here for 

those of you who prefer to see the interaction and how people deal with difficult 

questions

Two things happened next to change the context of anything that any of us 

might have to say about climate change. First, in the time of Covid, the political 

invocation of science took on a new colour. Faced with a novel threat about which 

there was far less scientific understanding or consensus than climate change, politicians 

nonetheless discovered the effectiveness of introducing radical policies in the name of 

‘following the science’. Meanwhile, the implications of the demand to ‘Unite Behind the 

Science’ became clearer. I saw the people who had taught me to think carefully about 

science and the questions that it cannot answer on its own, when they attempted to 

address the questions raised by the pandemic, being told by angry, frightened readers 

to ‘Just shut up and take the fucking vaccine!’ Or being scolded by their peers for drifting 

towards ‘conspiracy theory’. In the name of ‘the science’, it is possible to decree what 

should be done and to close off the possibility of further public conversation.

And I particularly liked his image of a fork in the road

Here is what I’m seeing, then: the political contours emerging from the pandemic 

foreshadow a fork in the road for the politics of climate change. We would always have 

come to this fork, one way or another. As long as the goal was to have climate change 

taken seriously, this could unite us, however different our understandings of what taking 

climate change seriously might mean. As we near that goal, though, the differences in 

understanding come more sharply into focus. But we have reached that point, or something 

like it, under conditions in which the authority of ‘the science’ has been supercharged.
Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly lit 

highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, 

from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad 

swathe of liberal opinion and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy 

\of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale 

efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a 

version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

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. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may

recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to 

nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport 

adverts. 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. But we may well follow that 

path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent

on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without. 

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, 

from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about 

the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, 

will lead inexorably to their solutions.

A critical review of the book can be found here  

Further video discussions about the book

https://www.youtube.com/@dougald

Feb Leeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iCzlw9e2hM&ab_channel=DougaldHine better sound

April 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B42sHf9p80&ab_channel=JohnGIClarke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaCatcin7n8&ab_channel=DougaldHine