Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe

by Wen Stephenson

Overview

In this series of personal and political essays, veteran writer and activist Wen Stephenson explores what it means to yearn for a better world while refusing to look away from the darkest depths of climate despair.

As the climate crisis worsens all around the globe, so does the perennial battle of hope and despair. For writer and activist Wen Stephenson, that battle is political, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. In Learning to Live in the Dark, he traces his evolution: first facing the climate-and-political abyss through a close reading of Hannah Arendt in the first year of the Trump era; responding to fatalistic climate doomists such as Roy Scranton and William T. Vollmann; his renewed political engagement via the Green New Deal and his ongoing commitment to nonviolent direct action in solidarity with the global poor; and a personal reckoning in the depths of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Engaging with thinkers from Thoreau and Dostoevsky to Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon—as well as contemporary writers such as Bill McKibben, Andreas Malm, China Miéville, and Olúfémi Táíwò—the book ends with a question that has become increasingly resonant for millions of people today: If nothing short of revolution, in some form, can salvage the possibility of a better world, ecologically and socially, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on offer, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the face of our catastrophes? In the face of soothing but toothless "solutions" to the multiple crises facing us, Learning to Live in the Dark offers hope of a sturdier kind: a sharp-edged tool for use in our own liberation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888904343
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	07/15/2025
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A contributing writer for The Nation since 2013, and a frequent contributor to The Baffler and Los Angeles Review of Books, he is the author of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice. He has written for many publications, among them The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and The Boston Globe. A former editor at The Atlantic, he has also served as the editor of the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section and the senior producer of NPR’s On Point. In 2010, he walked away from his mainstream media career and began to write and engage on issues of climate justice. As a grassroots activist and organizer in New England, he has supported and engaged in numerous campaigns of nonviolent direct action and resistance to the fossil-fuel industry and its backers.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part One
1. Learning to Live in the Dark
Reading Arendt in the Anthropocene. A personal essay.
2. Carbon Ironies
The 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 Thing
Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Olufémi Táíwò—and what global solidarity looks like now.

Interlude:
5. Walden at Midnight
Three walks with the radical Thoreau.

Part Two
6. The Social Beast
On the anti-totalitarian spirituality of Simone Weil.
7. Great Sinners
Dostoevsky, my father, and me.
8. The Rebel
Camus and the revolt against nihilism, then and now.
9. How To Blow Up a Climate Fantasy
A specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.
10. Risk And Revolution
A specter haunts the climate left. China Miéville, Andreas Malm, and not settling for eco-/genocide.
11. The Desperate of the Earth
Gaza, Fanon, anti-colonialism, and the value of humanism in a war(m)ing world

Postlude:
11. Beyond Blasphemies and Prayers
Conversations with Jane Hirshfield, poet of the present moment

Editorial Reviews

Praise for What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other
“Impassioned, provocative, beautifully written.”
—Mark Hertsgaard, Daily Beast
“In this harrowing, compelling call to action, Stephenson argues for radicalism, for a moral and even spiritual awakening similar to what fueled 19th century abolitionism.”
—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
“Thoughtful and self-aware...Stephenson grapples with the existential threat of environmental catastrophe by turning his gaze outward, onto the foot soldiers of the young and growing climate justice movement.”
—Chris Bentley, Chicago Tribune
“At its heart, this book is about a transformative social movement that is desperately needed and might just already be here.”
—Caroline Selle, Orion
“Readers will feel that they’ve traveled along with Stephenson and will likely be as transformed as he was as they think about what they might contribute to the environmental movement.”
—Booklist
“ What We’re Fighting For Now Is Each Other is impassioned, provocative, beautifully written...The great value of the book, as well as its great risk, is that it forces each of us to ask: what am I doing about the train that’s barreling down the tracks towards me, my loved ones, and all we hold dear?”
—The Daily Beast
“Wen Stephenson has written nothing less than a love letter to the student organizers, preachers, and frontline fighters struggling for climate justice across the United States. Together, these portraits coalesce into an impassioned call to action, offering a deep well of wisdom for any person coming to terms with the climate crisis.”
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
“In this powerful treatise, Wen Stephenson chronicles the convergence of climate activism and human rights struggles in frontline communities viewed through a climate justice lens. He convincingly presents climate change as the definitive global environmental justice issue of our day.”
—Robert D. Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie and co-author of The Wrong Complexion for Protection
“To take the climate crisis seriously is to take it personally, to let it shake your soul. Wen Stephenson has done that, in a book that beautifully intertwines his own story with the stories of other Americans who encounter the endangered world with the better angels of their nature. This is a profound, soul-stirring exploration by a twenty-first century abolitionist who, when he warns that it’s too late, means that it’s not too late.”
—Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties and Occupy Nation
“In this lucid, compelling and deeply moving book, Wen Stephenson invites the reader to confront the same stark question that he himself had to confront: given the climate crisis now unfolding around me, what are my sources of hope and what shall I do with the time I’ve been given? This marvelous book charts a path to social and political transformation that springs from a spiritual awakening to the power of love.”
—Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Ph.D., Missioner for Creation Care, Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts
“It has been often said that the fight against climate disruption needs stories and heroes to bring the struggle to life. Well, look no further than Wen Stephenson’s What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other . This glorious, moving telling creates a narrative that can inspire a movement for deep change before it is too late.”
—James Gustave Speth, author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy
“This is a young, fascinating, in-motion movement, and Wen Stephenson captures it with grace and power. I learned a good deal about things I thought I already understood.”
—Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org

From the Publisher