At Work in the Ruins

Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All Other Emergencies

By: Dougald Hine

Narrated by: Dougald Hine

'One of the most perceptive and thought-provoking books yet written about the multiple intersecting crises that are now upending our once-familiar world. . . Essential reading for these turbulent times.' Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement

Dougald Hine, author and social thinker, has spent most of his life talking to people about climate change. And then one afternoon in the second year of the pandemic, he found he had nothing left to say.

Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological destruction want to stop talking about climate change now? At Work in the Ruins explores that question.

“Climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer,” Hine says. Questions like, how did we end up in this mess? Is it just a piece of bad luck with the atmospheric chemistry—or is it the result of a way of approaching the world that would always have brought us to such a pass?

How we answer such questions has consequences. According to Hine, our answers shape our understanding and our thinking about what kind of problem we think we’re dealing with and, therefore, what kind of responses we go looking for. “But when science is turned into an object of belief and a source of overriding authority,” Hine continues, “it becomes hard even to talk about the questions that it cannot answer.”

In eloquent, deeply researched prose, Hine demonstrates how our over-reliance on the single lens of science has blinded us to the nature of the crises around and ahead of us, leading to ‘solutions’ that can only make things worse. At Work in the Ruins is his reckoning with the strange years we have been living through and our long history of asking too much of science. 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.

For anyone who has found themselves needing to make sense of the COVID time and how we talk about it, At Work in the Ruins offers guidance by standing firmly forward and facing the depth of the trouble we are in. Hine, ultimately, helps us find the work that is worth doing, even in the ruins.

'A book of rare originality and depth—profound, far-reaching, mind-altering stuff.' Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings

©2023 Dougald Hine (P)2023 Chelsea Green

Best Book I've Read This Year

A sober meditation on the end of modernity and the future of our existence on this planet. Melancholy without slipping into doom and gloom. Proposes a third path out of the current dichotomy of either complete annihilation or technocratic materialist 'fish tank' style continuance of 'life as we know it.'

Highest recommendation.

Balm for the troubled soul

The right book at the the right time. While I don’t agree with portions of his commentary on the pandemic, his overarching insights on current society and our place in it deeply resonant with conclusions reached by this aging resident of Gaia. What will emerge from this global bottleneck is the next great adventure!

A clearer vision than most.

Hine has seen past the techno dreams and promises to what is possible. He pulls in numerous threads, from Covid to the Sami people and northern lights, to call our attention to living Earth and our relationship with her. I highly recommend this book.

Absolutely Changed my entire Worldview...

Just so illuminating - this book is a full of rich complex ideas regarding climate change and the trajectory of modernity as we, in the west, know it. A nuanced look at the response to Covid, the idea of industrial farming as feeding the world (it's actually only 30%), and gives hope but not idiocy for dealing with the world as it is, as it is becoming. I think he is so right that it is beyond the scope of governments and scientists, less out of avarice buta sheer inability to deal with the magnitude and heartbreak of it. The cartesian model in which they operate simply can't fix it and the techno savior systems for managing the environment are more of what got us here to begin with. Another reason not to touch that creepy incubator bio chicken and grow a garden however poorly (I speak for myself) and raise hens. I need to buy the book actually, listening is not enough.

This book is more about about Covid than climate change

I think the author’s view on science was completely distorted by his experience with Covid.

Big picture thinking dancing around subjects so as to complicate them

I can handle complex thinking, but this author takes the reader in circles with no definitive solution, but by several chapters in one feels deeply dissolution and depressed