Dougald Hine "Making Good Ruins: The Work of Living at the End of a World" - ClimateExistence 2023

Keynote at the ClimateExistence conference 2023 at the Sigtuna Foundation August 17. www.climateexistence.se Dougald Hine Social thinker, Writer and Speaker, a school called HOME Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he has gone on to co-found a series of organisations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. Together with Paul Kingsnorth, he is the author of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009). His latest book, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies is published by Chelsea Green in February 2023. He has given keynotes and talks on numerous platforms – from the European Commission and TEDx events to the back rooms of pubs and squatted social centres – and is a regular guest lecturer at universities, art and architecture schools across Europe. In 2012, Google invited him to São Paulo and Buenos Aires to speak at its Think Infinite! events, his work was featured as a case study in the EU’s Team Culture report on ‘the role of culture in a time of crisis’ and he was named by NESTA/The Observer in their inaugural list of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’. In 2015-16 he served as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre, bringing together a year-long artistic workshop on ‘the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change’. In collaboration with three Swedish playwrights, he wrote Medan klockan ticker (‘While the Clock is Ticking’), a play commissioned by the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, based on interviews with climate scientists about ‘what it’s like when the Anthropocene is your day job’. He is an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University and sits on the advisory board for the Penn State University Press series, Ivan Illich: 21st-Century Perspectives. Many of his books have been collaborations with visual artists, ranging from COMMONSense (2009) with Anne-Marie Culhane and Access Space to The Crossing of Two Lines (2013) with the Stockholm-based artist duo Performing Pictures. For Walking in the Void (2021), a collaboration with the glass artists Baldwin & Guggisberg, he contributed an essay in twelve parts, ’THE ASTEROID: An Anthropocene Whodunnit’. After ten years as a director of the Dark Mountain Project, he handed on his responsibilities in 2019. His recent projects include Notes From Underground, a ten-part essay series for Bella Caledonia exploring the deep roots of the new climate movements, and The Great Humbling, a podcast which he presents with the futurist and ‘recovering sustainability consultant’ Ed Gillespie. Originally from the northeast of England, Dougald is now settled in the small Swedish town of Östervåla where he and Anna Björkman are creating a school called HOME, ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture’. His latest writing is published on his Substack, Writing Home. https://dougald.nu/ Photo Dougald Hine: Ingrid Rieser