At Work in the Ruins: An Evening with Dougald Hine, Alastair McIntosh, Caroline Ross & Dougie Strang

Galgael, 15 Fairley St, Govan, Glasgow G51 2SN

This event has now passed.

“I’ve long felt Dougald Hine an elder to our environmental movements.” – Gail Bradbrook

“At Work in the Ruins is essential reading for these turbulent times.” – Amitav Ghosh

To mark the publication of At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies, we invite you to an evening with Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project), Alastair McIntosh, Caroline Ross and Dougie Strang.

At Work in the Ruins is the fruit of years of conversations and collaborations with climate scientists, artists and activists. “Climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer,” Dougald writes, and the book is a reckoning with these questions, their significance for the climate movements that emerged in 2018/19 and the way that the pandemic has changed the context in which we answer them. It’s also 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.

There are threads in the book that trace back to the impact of Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul, which Dougald first read at the age of 25, having walked away from what had looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. The journey this led him on included founding the Dark Mountain Project with Paul Kingsnorth – and it was Dougie Strang who brought Dark Mountain to Scotland in 2010, organising the first in a series of Carrying The Fire gatherings. Caroline Ross became another close Dark Mountain collaborator and her work – making art without oil from “found and ground” materials – features in the discussion of the future of science in the closing chapters of At Work in the Ruins.

Out of this weave of friendship and mutual inspiration, and held in the powerful history of Galgael, we invite you to join us for a special evening that will be the first public launch event for At Work in the Ruins in the UK.

There will be a book stall and signing as part of this event.

NOTE: The Galgael space will be chilly on a February evening, so please wear warm clothes and bring a blanket.

Praise for At Work in the Ruins:

“Here is a book that explores the public understanding of science around climate change, Covid and social movements. Asking if we demand too much of science, Hine points beyond the ‘dark hubris’ of despair. With eloquence and honesty, he invites us to the hope of deeper mystery that life on earth might yet unfold.” – ALASTAIR MCINTOSH, author of Soil and Soul and Riders on the Storm.

“A deep reflection on the foundations of the destructive path humanity has been pushed on, driven by colonialism, modernity and fossil fuel addiction, the love for centralisation, control, consumerism, certainty.” – VANDANA SHIVA, author of Terra Viva

“I consider this book a must-read for all those activists feeling lost, desperate and perhaps subject to ‘press-on-itis’. Let’s find our curiosity together, hold each other as we navigate the turbulence and face our lack of roadmap. For me, reading this book was like having a long and honest supper with an old friend around a warming fire. I finished it with a relieving sigh, feeling nourished, heart opened, humanity seen.” – GAIL BRADBROOK, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion

“Let Dougald Hine’s masterful storytelling mark you; let his song of loss and longing, his call to fugitivity, dispossess you of your steady gait and poise. Perhaps then we, collectively infected, might together witness the incomprehensible.” – BAYO AKOMOLAFE, founder of The Emergence Network