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Pilsen Community Books is thrilled to welcome Dougald Hine to celebrate the launch of his new book, At Work in the Ruins: Finding our Place in the Time of Climate Crises and Other Emergencies.

“Maybe it’s time to stop talking about climate change?” For two decades, the writer and social thinker Dougald Hine has been among the most influential voices in the environmental debate. Then one day he heard these words come out of his mouth—and realized that he would have to explain himself. At Work in the Ruins tells the story of how our ways of talking about the trouble the world is in end up making everything worse. In eloquent, deeply researched prose, Hine traces the consequences of our over-reliance on the single lens of science and opens a window onto other ways of seeing the crises around and ahead of us. This is an invitation to find the paths that lead beyond panic and polarization, to take up the work that is worth doing in the ruins.

Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he cofounded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. He has collaborated with scientists, artists and activists, serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern (Sweden’s national theatre) and as an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. At Work in the Ruins concludes the work that began with Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009), co-written with Paul Kingsnorth, and is his second title with Chelsea Green, following the anthology Walking on Lava (2017).