Notes From Underground
11 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 4 years ago -A journey into the deep context of the new climate movements that have surfaced since the summer of 2018: the school strikes movement that started outside the Swedish parliament, Extinction Rebellion closing down bridges and junctions across London, the conversations started by Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation paper and David Wallace Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth. This essay series by Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project) is not a celebration or a critique of these movements, but an invitation to a quieter reflection on where all this is coming from, what it might tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves.
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Episodes
Special Edition – The Price of Life
March 19, 2020 13:00 - 11 minutes - 7.87 MBSince the last episode of Notes From Underground was published, a lot has happened in the world. As the Coronavirus pandemic reaches into all of our lives, this special episode is a reflection on the encounter to which it is bringing us – a collective encounter with parental mortality on a planetary scale. Notes From Underground began in November 2019 as an essay series and podcast in which Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project) explores the deep roots of the new climate mov...
010 – The Cost of Knowing
February 11, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutes - 40.7 MBThe climate art of Cape Farewell, Ian McEwan's novel Solar and the oil industry connections of Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand all come under scrutiny in episode 10 of Notes From Underground. This is a series of essays from Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project), exploring the deep context of the new climate movements. The first six episodes traced a series of lines from the moment of Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes, back into the longer history of indu...
009 – Crossing the Threshold
January 23, 2020 15:00 - 36 minutes - 25 MBEven when we know the facts of climate change, we don't seem to act as if we know – that's the observation from the sociologist Kari Norgaard which starts this week's essay in the Notes From Underground series. The theatre maker Chris Goode suggests that the difficulty might be that we lack 'a living-space in which to fully know what we know'. And the similarity between these two thoughts sets us on a journey across the threshold from knowledge to knowing. It's a journey that takes in the h...
008 – The Lab and the Play
January 16, 2020 09:00 - 20 minutes - 14.4 MBThis week's essay looks at the production of scientific knowledge about climate change and what we do with that knowledge. It's about the history of the relationship between science and the environmental movement, and it's about my own experiences when I was commissioned to collaborate with a climate scientist on writing a play. In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project) invites listeners into the darkness of knowing a thing like climate change and the...
007 – I Only Have One Prediction for You
January 09, 2020 13:00 - 26 minutes - 18 MBWhat can we say for sure about the future? The seventh instalment of Notes From Underground is about the predicament of mortality and the difficulty which modern industrial societies have in facing it. This week's essay marks the start of Part II of the series and over the next few weeks, I want to think about the difficulty of knowing a thing like climate change, how this knowledge changes us and what it costs us. In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Pro...
006 – The Salvage Work
December 20, 2019 17:00 - 23 minutes - 16 MB"I don’t think these are times when you can sell people a vision of ‘how not only can we save the world, but we can make all of our lives better in the process.’ There’s too much loss written into the story, too much hardship around and ahead of us, whichever path we take. I think people can smell that, whether or not they want to face it yet. It doesn’t mean we give up, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing left worth fighting for. But it may not be the kind of fight where memories of last centur...
005 – A Common Indignation
December 12, 2019 14:00 - 22 minutes - 15.2 MB'What happens next may look like failure. Or it may be a success that asks many of the questions failure would have asked of us.' The fifth episode of Notes From Underground starts in late 2018, as two movements erupt on opposite sides of the Channel: Extinction Rebellion and the gilets jaunes. It's easy enough to treat them as opposites, the one group of protesters pushing for climate action, the other standing in the way of measures to curb the use of fossil fuels. But there is another st...
004 – Emergency Democracy
December 05, 2019 19:00 - 17 minutes - 11.8 MB'When you organise politically to demand a declaration of emergency, you cannot avoid the question of democracy. If such a declaration means anything, then it marks a fork in the road. It says that our existing political systems have failed, that they have been no match for the scale of the crisis, and this seems hard to refute. But having acknowledged their failure, two paths remain: more democracy, or less.' This week's episode of Notes From Underground is a reflection on what it means to...
003 – Is There Hope?
November 28, 2019 14:00 - 14 minutes - 10.2 MB'If there is any hope worth having, in a time when we are rightly haunted by the thought of an "uninhabitable Earth", then I don’t believe it lies in the triumph of reason, nor in the recovery of an imagined past. If I have any clue where it lies, I’d say it’s in the difficult work of learning to feel and think together again...' This week's episode starts in Stockholm in the autumn of 2017, as two prominent Swedish professors meet to debate the question: 'Is there hope?' The rhetoric used ...
002 – Pulling Out the Tablecloth
November 21, 2019 13:00 - 11 minutes - 7.89 MB'The need for economic growth is a social construct, not a law of nature, but this construct is the tablecloth on which our current society has been arranged. The question we face, as the 2020s come around, is whether we can pull the tablecloth out fast enough without smashing all the plates and glasses?' In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the mome...
001 – Al Gore Didn't Want You To Panic!
November 14, 2019 13:00 - 14 minutes - 9.74 MBThe last time the climate crisis was getting this much attention, it was Al Gore striding on stage to talk us through the high-end PowerPoint presentation of An Inconvenient Truth. From Greta Thunberg to Gail Bradbrook to Jem Bendell, the strange collection of public figures at the centre of the new climate movements have little in common with Al Gore. They don't have a neat story about how it can all be OK. Their voices are powerful because we can hear their fear. In Notes From Underground...