Dougald is one of the U.K.’s most influential voices in the climate debate. He is the co-founder (with Paul Kingsnorth) of the Dark Mountain Project, and the founder of the School of Everything (a startup inspired “by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and the educational experiments of the 1960s”). His early career included a stint working for the BBC. He lives today in a small town in central Sweden where he and his partner, Anna Bjorkman, are creating “a school called HOME”—“a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture”. He has worked with the Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre, and is an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/dougald-hine-how-do-we-make-good-ruins/id1680728280?i=1000656429196
KP: Hello, Dougal, it’s a pleasure to be connecting with you today. Thank you so much for joining me for this podcast conversation. I’ve been aware of your work, your writing, and your thinking for a while now, as have, no doubt, some others who are listening to this podcast. I’ve found it rich and full of insight. I wonder if I could just dive straight in by asking: what is the kind of question that’s driven your work that you think we should be asking ourselves? That’s the theme of this podcast, and perhaps we can start with the question and then begin to unpack your thinking on it.
DH: Well, the question that I find myself carrying as we’re heading into 2024 is this: how do we make good ruins? It’s a strange way of wording things, but how do we do a good job of ending existing structures? What might it mean to approach the time we’re in with the idea that it might be a time for making good ruins? So, I guess that’s where I want to start the conversation with you today, Kenny.
KP: Well, thank you for offering such a rich and enigmatic question. There’s so much in it that I’m looking forward to unpacking and understanding better. I wonder if I could begin by asking where it comes from—whether you can trace this question of how to make good ruins back to a particular time or experience that gave rise to it?
DH: I can trace it very specifically because it’s a question that comes to me from the work of an Italian philosopher, Federico Campagna, whom I discovered relatively recently. For years, I’d been working in this space of navigating a time of endings.
When Paul Kingsnorth and I wrote the Dark Mountain Manifesto together—which came out 15 years ago, in 2009—one of the lines people kept bringing up with us was right at the end, where we said: “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world. Together, we will find the paths that lead into the unknown world that lies ahead.”
That idea—that we’re living in a time where many things, including good things we’d never wish to lose, are coming to an end—has always been central. It’s important to be alert to the difference between this and the idea that we’re in a time where there’s nothing left worth working for or no story beyond the present. Some people are focused on desperately trying to save the way we’ve been doing things at all costs, while others fall into a kind of bleak certainty about human extinction or similar outcomes.
For a long time, my work has been about opening up space between those two extremes. There’s a lot of messy middle ground in between.
I was writing a book—At Work in the Ruins—and as I was nearing the end of it, I came across Federico Campagna. He was discussing some of these same themes from a different perspective, and I found his framing compelling.
What he said—or at least what I understood from him—was this: sometimes, you’re born into the ending of a world. This is something that has happened to others before, in other times and places. How do you know you’re living at the end of the world you were born into? A world is held together by a story, and when you’re living at the end of that world, there’s not much of that story left.
When politicians try to project bright visions of the future as extensions of the recent past, their words no longer sound convincing. Meanwhile, much of the political energy seems to come from people appealing to the past instead of the future. That might be one of the signs that you’re living at the end of a world.
In such a time, he suggests, it’s worth asking: what’s worth doing? First, stop worrying so much about making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending. Then, seek to make good ruins.
That’s where my question—”How do we make good ruins?”—comes from. I’ve been carrying it as a poetic image, speaking about it in various places, but in late 2023, it began to come into sharper focus for me. I realized there might actually be a practicality to it. Perhaps these enigmatic words contain clues to help us create a new map of where we are and what’s worth doing from here. That’s why this question is with me now, on the threshold of the new year.
KP: There’s an awful lot in what you say about Campagna that resonates. I think probably anybody who hears that can recognize it in the times that we’re living in. In your book, you use a metaphor—by, I hope I pronounced her name correctly, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira—of hospicing and midwifing. Hospicing the old world and midwifing the one that’s to come. It’s such an evocative metaphor. I wonder if you could unpack it a bit more. If we’re giving something a good ending, if we’re hospicing it, then what is it that we are hospicing and giving a good end to?
DH: Vanessa wrote this fantastic book called Hospicing Modernity, and the first time I heard her speak about that idea, it immediately clarified something for me. It describes a stance, a way of being with where we find ourselves, where you’re not trying to save modernity, you’re not trying to kill it, and you’re not trying to stage a revolution and overthrow it. What you’re trying to do is, as you say, give it a good ending.
You’re allowing it to end, allowing it to hand on the things it carries. Many of us have had experiences of endings on a human scale, where there are conversations that were never had—conversations that only happen once the end is in sight. The same might be true of this thing that Vanessa and I talk about as modernity. In its ending, it might become possible for it to hand on kinds of knowledge it couldn’t admit to itself while it looked like its promises were secure and its future open-ended.
So, what does it mean to talk about modernity? The way I usually explain it is this: modernity was that window within history where, for certain people, our proximity to the future seemed like the defining characteristic of our times. It was the best thing, the most important thing about us.
This started in certain European cities 200 or 300 years ago, where people identified with the idea that “we live so close to the future, and everyone else will catch up soon.” Over time, this idea unfolded into modernity, becoming a larger and larger story that embraced the world. It came with a promise: history is a single, converging line, heading toward the idea that things can only get better and better.
What made this narrative so resilient was that it could be told in different keys. To people feeling prosperous, it was a gentle story of reformist improvement. To those facing oppression, it became a revolutionary promise of change. But in all its forms, it animated the creation of the societies most of us were born into. By the 20th century, it became a structuring narrative for the whole world.
The promise of development, as it unfolded from the 1940s onward, treated all the countries in the world like children lined up against a wall, with their heights measured to see who had progressed furthest. The direction of travel was always the same. Instead of recognizing deep difference and plurality, everything was measured and compared. Certain societies and groups of people were positioned as those who lived “closest to the future,” while others were seen as less developed and needing to catch up.
This framing hid the possibility that those living “closest to the future” might actually have something to learn from those positioned as less developed.
By the 1970s, this narrative began to unravel. Messages were coming back from the front lines of ecological and environmental science, and changes were taking place within the most developed societies themselves. The future no longer seemed like a vehicle for collective hope. Instead, it became something we feared or sought to distract ourselves from.
This shift led to what, in academic terms, came to be called postmodernity and postmodernism. These concepts emerged because serious doubts were being cast on the promise of modernity: its vision of a single, converging line of history, development, and progress.
We’re now much further along this trajectory. The future hasn’t sounded convincing for a long time. Many responses try to “reboot” the future, to make it work again—people like Paul Mason have articulated this approach powerfully.
But my view, which aligns with Campagna and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, is that this isn’t just a temporary glitch. It’s not something that can be fixed. The sense that the future no longer works is a true description of the moment we’re living in.
To end well means allowing modernity to hand on the good things it carries—things we might take with us into the unknown worlds beyond the end of the world as we’ve known it.
The midwifing side of Vanessa’s metaphor is about assisting with the birth of something new. Its shape is uncertain—it may be wiser, but not necessarily so. It involves other forms of being human together.
In my book, I underline how this process can draw on the ways humans have made life work in other times and places. This includes knowledge and practices carried by people who are contemporaries but have been marked, on the maps of development, as living in the past or as obsolete.
It’s important, though, not to place all the responsibility on them or project onto indigenous voices or others we listen to. We need to engage with real people, living in the complexities of the present—not project an imagined “timeless wisdom” onto them.
That’s one of modernity’s tricks: to relate to others through an imagined lens rather than true dialogue. What I’ve learned from Vanessa—and from her writing on hospicing—intersects fruitfully with Campagna’s ideas about making good ruins and not worrying so much about trying to make sense according to the logic of the world that’s ending.
KP There’s an awful lot in what you say about Campania that resonates. Right, I think probably anybody who hears that can recognize it in the times we’re living in. In your book, you use a metaphor by—I hope I pronounce her name correctly—Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, of hospicing the old world and midwifing the one that’s to come. Again, it’s a really evocative metaphor. I wonder if you could unpack it a bit more. So, if we’re giving something a good ending, if we’re hospicing it, then what is it that we are hospicing and giving a good end to?
DH Vanessa wrote this fantastic book called Hospicing Modernity, and the first time I heard her speak about that idea, it immediately clarified something for me. It describes a stance, a way of being with where we find ourselves, where you’re not trying to save modernity, you’re not trying to kill it, you’re not trying to stage a revolution and overthrow it. What you’re trying to do is, as you say, give it a good ending.
You’re allowing it to end, to hand on the things it carries. Many of us will have had experiences of endings on a human scale, where conversations that were never had finally take place once the end is in sight. The same might be true of this thing Vanessa and I talk about as modernity—that in its ending, it might be possible for it to hand on kinds of knowledge that it couldn’t admit to itself while it looked like its promises were secure and its future open-ended.
When I talk about modernity, the way I usually explain it is to say: modernity was that window within history where, for certain people, it seemed like proximity to the future was their defining characteristic, the best and most important thing about them and their times. It started as a relatively local phenomenon in certain European cities 200 or 300 years ago. This sense of, “We live so close to the future, and everyone else will catch up soon,” gradually unfolded into modernity as a larger story, one that embraced the world.
By the 20th century, it became a structuring narrative for the whole world. The promise of development—from the 1940s onward—was that all countries were heading in the same direction, just at different speeds. Instead of recognizing deep differences or plurality, everything was measured and compared. Certain societies were positioned as living closest to the future, and everyone else was expected to learn from them.
One effect of this was that it hid the idea that those of us seen as “closest to the future” might have something to learn from those marked as “less developed” on the maps of modernity.
By the 1970s, though, cracks in this narrative began to appear. Messages were coming back from the frontlines of ecological and environmental science. Changes within developed societies themselves also called this story into question. Suddenly, the future no longer seemed like a vehicle for hope and collective projects. It became something to fear or distract ourselves from.
This shift led to concepts like post-modernity and post-modernism. They emerged because the projected forward promise of modernity—its vision of a single direction and converging progress—was no longer convincing. We’re now much further down that line. The future hasn’t sounded convincing, to use Campagna’s terms, for quite some time now.
Some suggest we need to reboot the future, as Paul Mason has argued. But my view, in line with Campagna and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, is that this isn’t a mistake that can be fixed. It’s a true description of the moment we’re in. We need to let modernity end well, to allow it to pass on its gifts while leaving behind its poisons.
The midwifing side of Vanessa’s metaphor is about assisting with the birth of something new. We don’t yet know its shape, but it could be, potentially, a wiser form of being human together. This requires learning from how humans have made life work in other times and places, including from people who are contemporaries of ours but whose ways of life have been marginalized.
However, this must be done without putting all the responsibility on those we’re learning from or projecting an idealized image of “timeless wisdom” onto them. It requires engaging with real people, living with the complexities of now, while moving beyond the logics of the world that’s ending.
