There’s no avoiding it: Things feel pretty bleak. To witness venture-capital-fueled AI domination, democracy’s steady drift toward authoritarianism, state-sanctioned genocide, and, of course, the collapse of one climate boundary after another, is to encounter a profound, at times overwhelming, sense of despair.
But what if the path forward lies in accepting, rather than resisting, this despair? In his new book, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe, climate activist and journalist Wen Stephenson argues that the only way to confront the crises of our time is to meet this despair head-on—to see it for what it is, to feel it, and to accept what it means about where we are and where we must go.
In July, Drilled spoke with Stephenson about how he processes his own climate despair; what scholars of totalitarianism like Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus can teach us about fossil fascism; and whether a mass movement for climate action might not come together until enough people are desperate enough. This conversation, as Stephenson describes the book, is about “how to live into this era of climate and political and social catastrophe…while holding on to our humanity.”
The written Q&A below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy. Content notice: The audio version of this conversation briefly discusses suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
Prefer to listen? Check out the podcast version of this conversation here, or wherever you get your podcasts:
Something that weaves throughout the book is this idea of despair. You go to great lengths to differentiate despair from nihilism or, on the other end of the feel-good spectrum, optimism and hope. Can you talk about how you think about despair in the context of the climate crisis?
Absolutely. I mean, this is the title of the book. My essay on Hannah Arendt in the time of Trump and climate was the first essay I wrote in this series, back in 2017. I was looking for someone who could help me look into the abyss. There are few who did that more productively than Arendt.
I guess the first thing that’s important to say is that given what we’re up against, despair is warranted. That’s really central for me. I say this kind of flippantly, but not really: It’s not a sin. I’m not Catholic, but I was raised in a conservative Christian family. Despair is not a sin, as some would say. It’s not, like, moral weakness or a flaw in your character. It’s entirely understandable. In fact, it’s rational on some level.
But, given those caveats, it is dangerous. It can lead to some very dark places, almost by definition, right? It’s dangerous and defeating, especially politically. For anyone engaged in social and political movements, it’s defeating. So it’s something that needs to be worked through, preferably with others, preferably in community if possible. Or, like myself, with a therapist, as I did and still do.
I guess the most important thing about the way I come at it in this book is—I found what’s required for me to live with my despair. I don’t believe despair is an end point. There was a beautiful essay by Hanif Abdurraqib in the New Yorker recently about despair. It was called “In Defense of Despair.” It wasn’t about climate change or anything, but one of the main points he was making is that it [despair] doesn’t have to be an end point.
It’s not giving up.
It’s not giving up. It’s something that you can work through and learn to live with. Even though I’ve learned to live with it, it’s still there, right? It’s still in me.
What I found I needed was not just some kind of quote-unquote “hope”—what does that word even mean anymore in the context of climate? I know a lot of people do use that term and have written about it beautifully. And I think there are good answers to that. But I just needed something sturdier. I needed resolve. For me, hope is abstract. Resolve is visceral. It’s, like, in your body. I had to kind of let go of hope—abstract, cost-free hope—in order to find my resolve.
When it comes to thinking about despair, I found the honesty around it pretty refreshing. If we are to confront this crisis of our making, pretending it’s not so bad is probably not a good place to start.
I think that’s partly what’s been driving me for several years and writing about this. There are other writers, certainly in the climate space, who have done this. I’m certainly not the only one. Shout out to Mary Heglar, who I know is a friend of Drilled and is someone who has done a wonderful job over the years of not just intellectual honesty, but emotional honesty about dealing with this.
If there’s something I can say that is, for lack of a better word, hopeful—
I am pro-hope. I think choosing hope is the only way forward. And I think it can coexist with despair. You manage to thread that needle in this book.
Just to be clear, I know plenty of people who have found their way to a more complex and deeper meaning of hope than the kind of simplistic, shallow version that gets thrown around so often. I deeply respect that. And you know what? Those folks and I are probably talking about the same exact thing. I’ve just found some other words for it.
What I have found is that for me, the resolve is found in relationship to other people. It’s found in each other. The title of my first book was, What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other. For me, the source of my resolve is that human solidarity.
And what I found over the course of a decade and a half working in social movements, mainly the climate justice movement, is that’s what it is for most people. That’s what keeps us going: each other. That sense of solidarity. That might sound somewhat pat or something, but sometimes simple things, simple statements, are true.
I don’t think it does sound pat, although I understand how people could take it that way. You mention in the book [that] words like solidarity are too often thrown around. I think you discuss it in the context of “global solidarity.” We like to talk about it, but the phrase, in some ways, has become almost meaningless.
It is meaningless without the kind of action that’s required in order to embody it and make it real. Another shout out: I’d send people to the writing of Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. They had a recent book on solidarity that is really a beautiful exploration of what it means and should mean and can mean for us right now.
The authentic solidarity, the human connection, the person-to-person engagement, the thing that keeps you going, the thing that will probably keep the climate movement going—the thing that will keep humanity going, as it has thus far—is being with other people.
Whether it’s Camus or Arendt, there is this idea that they come back to, that you surface in your book, which is a real human being in front of you, versus an abstraction of the concept of “humanity.” Describing people as “superfluous” is sort of a key tenet of a totalitarian way of seeing the world. Can you talk about totalitarianism as a way of understanding the climate crisis?
This is a really central question. I was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s great work that she first published in the early ’50s and then updated in the later ’60s. What is it that enables a political system to develop that essentially dehumanizes everyone who is under its domination?
We can go back well before the mid-20th century and look at the system of chattel slavery or the global slave trade or colonialism. I think it was [Martinican poet and politician] Aimé Césaire who made the seminal argument that, in some ways, totalitarianism and fascism in Europe in the 20th century was colonialism coming home to roost.
I was trying to somehow come to grips with what kind of mindset enables someone and a political system to pursue relentless expansion of fossil fuels in the face of the science that we have. As we all know, the leaders of the fossil fuel industry and the lobby and the politicians who are all part of that know full well what they’re doing. They know full well what the climate science says.
Some of them knew before we did.
Exactly. Exxon has known for many decades. What kind of a mindset allows you to keep the pedal to the metal and accelerate into the abyss, off of the cliff?
Arendt’s analysis of the totalitarian mindset helped me. It had to do with this belief in the limitless nature of power, and a pursuit of power and domination that requires turning entire populations of humanity—everyone under its sway—treating them as superfluous, meaning: not at all useful or relevant to the ultimate end, which is complete domination.
If you think about it, that is precisely what the fossil-capital regime is pursuing. It is a form of global domination. It is subjecting the entire human population to these catastrophic consequences and to the sheer economic and political power of this industry and its political regime.
The [mainstream] climate movement has never been one monolithic entity. But it does come in for some criticism in the book as not appreciating the extent to which more radical and revolutionary thinking is probably required if we’re to make any sort of substantive political change. Is that a fair way to summarize it?
Yes. It’s not to say that there isn’t a role for the mainstream. I’d be crazy if I thought that the entire movement was going to become as radical as I’m talking about. But it’s something well known in social movement theorizing and history, which is the “radical flank.”
The climate movement has had a radical flank for a long time. The radical flank effect has been seen many times in history. It opens up political space for the more mainstream part of the movement, the political inside game, to work. It can also shake things up and break up a situation that’s become ossified. It can create new dynamics that didn’t exist before.
I first wrote [this essay in the book] back in 2019 at almost the peak of Green New Deal advocacy and the building of the Green New Deal coalition. I’ve felt for quite a while now that the time for a mere climate movement, or even climate justice movement, has passed. I think it had passed even by 2019. And what I mean by that is, it’s clear that a climate movement, or even what we call nowadays the climate left, is never going to build enough sheer political power on its own to literally overthrow the fossil-capital regime.
I think of something that Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò wrote last year in Boston Review. He made it so explicit. He said, “The strategic imperative must be clear: nothing less than the total defeat of the organized political interests of oil, gas, and coal producers is necessary to make any other climate justice goals even a remote possibility.”
I think it’s pretty clear that no individual, siloed social movement on the left is going to build the kind of power required to do that. So what we need, and I think what we’ve always needed, is not so much a climate movement or a climate left as an actual left. A resurgent, revolutionary left. Revolutionary can mean all sorts of things. But I’m mainly talking here about political revolution. A movement of movements—a popular front, if you want to call it that—that has both climate survival, meaning deep decarbonization, and economic and social justice at its core. That was and is the idea of the Green New Deal coalition.
But it needs to be expressly revolutionary or transformative in its political goals. That isn’t going to happen with any one individual movement on the left. Coalition building will mean including the center-left. That’s not something that’s really on the table right now, which is another reason for despair. Because we needed this yesterday. We needed this 10 years ago.
There’s a lot of self-blame, self-recrimination, in the climate movement. This feeling that we have failed. But I’m not really sure why we’ve put that entire world-saving burden on ourselves, as climate activists. It’s not like climate activists can do this on our own.
To overthrow the most powerful industry in the history of humanity.
It’s not like the climate movement alone has failed. The entire progressive left has failed. The left should have prioritized climate and climate justice decades ago. There are all sorts of reasons why it didn’t. Some of that is the blame of climate activists and the environmental movement for sure.
But at some point you’ve got to ask yourself, why wasn’t there something like a Green New Deal coalition, bringing labor and racial and social justice into one big movement, 20 years ago? Because it was clear 20 years ago what we were facing.
I think everyone from essentially the center-right on leftward at this point would not consider themselves—ourselves—climate “deniers.” But in that essay you [write], “The pretense that anything less than revolutionary political change is now required amounts to a form of denial.”
Maybe this gets back to what we were talking about before, where despair is a reflection of being honest. It seems like not just the climate movement, but the center and the left more broadly, have engaged in what in hindsight seems like at least a decade of this new climate denial of reassuring ourselves that piecemeal, incremental, market-driven, technocratic tweaks can solve this problem—whatever “solve” means.
Can you talk about why you think of this as a new form of climate denial?
It’s not denial of climate science, although it’s denial of what climate science tells us is really necessary at the political and economic level. I mean, climate scientists have been quite clear. The IPCC itself came right out and said in 2018, its famous report on 1.5 degrees C, the difference between that and 2 C, and what would be required to actually achieve 1.5 C. Now, pretty much, that game is up. We’re already passing it. But they made it very clear that it was going to require unprecedented transformative change at the political and economic level.
What I’m talking about is a kind of political denialism. “Wishful thinking” might be [a] kinder way to put it. It’s inconceivable that our current two-party system, the Democratic Party that we have today as the only opposition to MAGA and the right and the full control of the fossil fuel industry over our politics at this point—
Speaking of reasons for despair: the Democratic Party taking on Trump and MAGA.
Exactly. It’s inconceivable that the current iteration of the Democratic Party is capable of what we’re talking about. Clearly, there has to be, at the very least, a political revolution within the Democratic Party. But more likely, in order for that to even be a possibility, there has to be a broad, bottom-up, mass uprising of some sort. A truly mass movement that can force the issue and bring things to a halt.
One of the most positive developments in recent years has been the call from the UAW [United Auto Workers] and Shawn Fain for synchronous strikes in 2028—basically a general strike. That’s the level of political uprising, the kind of mass movement, that we’re talking about. It’s got to be at that scale and that level.
And that isn’t happening right away. It can’t. You don’t just snap your fingers, and a guy like me doesn’t just write an op-ed piece saying, “We need a political revolution.” As Jane McAlevey, the late, great labor writer and organizer, always said, there are no shortcuts. She was referring specifically to within labor organizing. But I think it’s true broadly of mass-movement organizing. There’s not really a shortcut to this.
On the other hand, we are not starting from scratch. There’s been a lot of movement-building over the last decade, and I think we can continue to build on that.
As we’re talking, I come back to what you write about in the very last part of the book. I don’t say this with a sense of fatalism, although it might come off that way. It does feel like there will come a point when, paraphrasing you here, enough of us are desperate enough that there will be the conditions for such a movement to come together.
Yes. I don’t think that it’ll just be climate that will cause that desperation. That was what I’m getting at there. I wrote that in 2019. I was like, “The only thing worse than climate catastrophe is climate catastrophe plus fascism.” Which, I hate to say, is kind of where we are.
That’s been an idea that has circulated for a long time. We’ve known for decades, and people have warned, that climate change could very easily give rise to the kind of social breakdown that could lead to fascism. And, of course, we’ve had fascistic forms of control and governance in this country and elsewhere for a long time.
But I don’t think what you said there is fatalistic in the least. I don’t see it that way because the whole premise is to fight. No one in my book is talking about folding up their tent and going home. It’s [about] being honest and facing up to the conditions that we have and that what we are going to be living into in the coming decade.
Those are the conditions under which we’re going to have to practice politics, in which we’re going to have to build movements and going to have to fight. In some ways that’s going to make our task far more difficult. And maybe in some ways it might actually open up opportunities.
When we accept or come to terms with the fact that the old rules don’t really apply anymore, I think there’s a sense of freedom that can follow.
Exactly.
In writing these essays, did you, personally, get where you wanted to get or where you needed to get, whether that’s a sense of clarity or peace of some kind?
That’s a tough question because some days I feel that way and other days I don’t. I guess it depends on when you catch me.
How about right now?
I would say that right now I feel about as mentally healthy as I probably ever get. Which isn’t to say that I’m entirely mentally healthy. The despair is always there. I use this phrase in the book: I’m “on the other side of despair.” I’ve worked through it. That doesn’t mean it’s just gone away and everything is great, everything is fine. But I’m learning to live with it.
Again—I can’t stress this enough—the healthiest things I do, the healthiest things in my life, are being part of communities of people who are actually working together on this. Being in isolation, being a self-sufficient individual, is not the way.
There’s a question you ask in the book, and I wanted to pose it to you: “What does a life of radical commitment look like?” I’m wondering if you have an answer that satisfies you, for now.
There are two operative terms in that question, “radical” and “commitment.” The kind of radicalism I’m talking about is the kind that has a radical analysis. It’s on that intellectual level that sees the problem in a radical sense of going to the root of the problem—which for me and many others increasingly is our capitalist system and the legacy of colonialism and slavery.
But it also refers to a kind of radicalism—I don’t want to say merely of tactics. On a personal level, willingness to do and say the things that will be called “extreme,” called “unreasonable,” well outside the Overton window of polite and reasonable discourse. We can look at all sorts of examples from history. The abolitionists were the radicals of their time and were considered dangerous and extreme. Pretty much in every successful social movement in American history, the people who led those movements were the radicals of their time. They were considered extreme.
Let’s say I reach a point where I get it. I’ve reached that point, intellectually and internally, in terms of my resolve to take action or say the things that need to be said. [Then] the commitment part, I think, has to do with the long haul. Staying in it, sticking with it, for the long haul. That really is what the book is all about. Where does that kind of commitment come from? I just don’t know. The best answer I have is that it comes from my comrades, right? From that collective sense of solidarity.
But that’s, in some ways, too easy an answer. It’s spiritual, for lack of a better word. Doesn’t mean it’s religious in any conventional sense, but for some people it is. For me, it actually is. Somehow it requires an introspection and a level of self-inquiry into parts of ourselves that we don’t really understand.
