In these hard-hitting and deeply personal essays, Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes.
After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.
Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle. Throughout, he poses a question that resonates for many on the left today: If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?
Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cheap hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.
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.
Publication date: June 24, 2025
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
"At the end of the day, it’s ironic that Wen would name his latest offering Learning to Live in the Dark, when there is so much light in this book. It showcases backcasting—'the practice of a strategic planning approach that starts by defining a desirable future and then works backward to determine the present-day actions needed to achieve that future.'
Whether he meant to or not, Wen has manifested the praxis of backcasting by delivering us to his past writings and making them more germane than many of the present-day approaches to social and climate justice. He is assessing what it will take to retain the one thing that even an epoch of climate catastrophe must not change or take away from us if we are to survive it. As he posits towards the end of his book, 'The question, maybe the only question left at this hour, is whether we will hold on to our humanity in our desperation.' —Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright for The Progressive
“In Learning to Live in the Dark, Wen Stephenson confronts our ongoing planetary crisis in all its horrifying bleakness. But even as he looks into the abyss Stephenson is able to find rays of light within the darkness. This is a book for anyone searching for meaning and hope in an age of crisis.” —Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
“Wen Stephenson has long been not only one of the ablest thinkers about the climate crisis, but one of the most determined do-ers—an unyielding activist in the fights he describes so well. That makes this an important account on many scores, one that will nourish and sustain you!” —Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Third Act; author of Here Comes the Sun
“It’s ironic and paradoxical that Stephenson would name his latest offering Learning to Live in the Dark when there is so much light in this book that elucidates contradictions through an illumination of bold and requisite veracity. These essays deliver on what it will take to retain collective humanity in an epoch of climate catastrophe that demands the politics of solidarity and complexity rather than comfort and deference.” —Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, climate and racial justice advocate; author of Good Friday: The Death of the US Climate Movement and Pathways For Its Resurrection (forthcoming)
“To search beneath the surface, reflect deeply on what one has found, and write with a fierce honesty about it; that is the path of the finest journalists. You will find that in Wen Stephenson's essays. His journey is an inspiration.” —James Gustave “Gus” Speth, Distinguished Fellow, The Democracy Collaborative; author of They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis
“Stephenson’s approach to the human crisis speaks volumes to me. He knows it is a matter of heart as well as mind. His writer-heroes overlap with my own because they are morally clear and unafraid. Stephenson too is unafraid.” —Todd Gitlin (1943-2022), Columbia University, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage