Book Club: “At Work in the Ruins” by Dougald Hine

Friday October 4th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Discussion starts 7pm

We are now at capacity for this event. If you'd like to join the waiting list please email events@kairos.london.

"One of the most perceptive and thought-provoking books…Essential reading for these turbulent times." - Amitav Ghosh

In anticipation of Dougald Hine's forthcoming Kairos talk, for our next meeting we're reading "At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies".

Dougald, environmental thinker, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and co-host of "The Great Humbling" podcast, had 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?

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

Through our over-reliance on the single lens of science, Dougald writes that we are blinded 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. By standing firmly forward and facing the depth of the trouble we are in, he suggests, we'll be able to find the work that is worth doing, even in the ruins.

Book Club will now be meeting on the first Friday of every month. 

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm. Discussion starts at 7pm. Food provided. Bar or BYOB.

Free for members, £5 non-members. (Members please register in advance so we can plan numbers.)