And hopefully there's not a mountain in front of us we can't see and an ocean below instead of land. So recently I interviewed planetary risk expert Luke Kemp at Cambridge, who talked about something he referred to as the stomp effect, which describes in history, after a catastrophe, typically intense emergency government interventions are less effective than grassroots responses from the communities themselves, and that those government interventions can actually do more harm than good. How does this relate, Dugald, to the ideas in your book about where the most effective responses to the end of modernity, to landing this plane, are likely to come from? Well,

that certainly rings true to a lot of the conversations I've had over the years and a lot of the things that fed into the book. And there's also just a level at which I remember Vinay Gupta saying years ago, in a systemic crisis, you don't want to be where the central resources show up. Even before you get to that stomp effect, just because in a systemic crisis, everywhere has got something to deal with. only the most the acute worst affected places are going to get those kind of the focus of attention of those centralized resources so there is a thread running through the book which is about recognizing the strange helplessness that is the shadow side of what we have called progress and development. And this comes very much from the influence of Ivan Illich, who is one of the thinkers who's shaped my work. And I've worked with many of his surviving friends and collaborators. And Illich would say to us, you know, industrial modernity, among the things it succeeded in producing, it succeeded in producing the most helpless human beings the world has ever seen. Because until quite recently, everyone everywhere had to be part of a community which had at community level the skills of producing most of the food it needed, processing that food, looking after the sick and the dying and the young and the old, and passing on knowledge from generation to generation, and burying the dead, building homes. And the deal of industrial society is that more and more of those things are professionalised out from being held within household and community and within becoming a grown-up. Instead, your role as an individual is that you fit into one tiny place within very large systems that are now meeting those needs and are almost useless at most of the other things that would once have been part of your role as a member of a community. So rebuilding those capacities seems to me to be the best preparation that there is for the kinds of worlds that we're likely to head into for all of the reasons we've been talking about. The

economic superorganism, by its actions and by our outsourcing the wisdom to the financial markets, has capped us, most of us, at adolescence, because we haven't needed to be a full adult in the community, natural world sort of sense.

And the paradox of this is that once we start looking through this lens, we begin to realise that the standard official maps of where the knowledge lies and where the agency and capacity lies within our societies are probably badly distorted. who was born in 1938 in rural Ireland. And he used to say, you know, in the world of my childhood, if one morning everyone over the age of 14 had just vanished overnight, those of us who were left could have run the farms. We could have kept our communities going. We could have looked after each other and fed ourselves. And he said, and then I went off and went into the world of universities and philosophy and became a professor. And according to that world, where I had come from was a world that was characterized by ignorance. So part of where we get to, if we take seriously what Illich is saying about this production of a new kind of helplessness is a recognition that the people who are best equipped for navigating the skills that are actually going to be needed are often not the people who are regarded as having high status knowledge. And actually, ironically, the politicization of science that I was talking about earlier, the sort of ideological role of science, has meant that the very people who are the most strongly identified with believing in science are often also the people who are least equipped when it comes to these kinds of practical skills that are what are going to be called for to navigate the world that we're headed into.

And they're going to be the last people that are going to be willing to listen to a podcast with Duke Aldein, because it would necessitate grief and a change in identity of their place in the world, etc. But this is where we're heading. I mean, I was one of those people maybe 10 years ago thinking that science would maybe not solve these issues, but lead the way. So in your book, you emphasize the need for something called engaged surrender. Can you describe what you mean by that and why it's important? So

this comes from my friend Rebecca Bant, who is, among other things, has worked as an intensive care nurse. And she was describing the different responses that she witnessed amongst families who had a loved one in intensive care, often after an accident where the prospects were either uncertain or it was clear how this was going to end and it wasn't going to end well. And she said, you know, what she witnessed was two standard responses, one of which was people just going into denial and kind of fleeing, literally disappearing from the hospital room and being uncontactable for days because they just couldn't handle it. Another of which, which was kind of the opposite of that, but not much more helpful, was people leaning obsessively into the data, the information, everything they could find out from Google about the particular condition, the particular operations and treatments that this person was having. And then she said there was a third response that was less common, but was extraordinary for everyone when it happened, which is what she called engaged surrender, which was people who were able to be present to what was going on without leaping ahead, without needing to be certain if there wasn't certainty, if things genuinely were uncertain, but who were making the best of the time together with the loved one, with each other in the room. And she said that was an extraordinary thing to witness. And when I read that description, what struck me was how the dominant responses again this is back to this politicization of science i think you can map and i think that's what rebecca was doing when she wrote about this you can map those responses onto something like the pandemic you can see the people who were sort of wanting to just put their fingers in their ears and you know get out of there and just not not deal at all you could see the people who were obsessively leaning into, thinking they could protect themselves by obsessively, compulsively informing themselves about all of the latest conflicting data from every possible direction. And that third move, the engaged surrender of going like, what are the sensible, practical things to do here that don't rely on you know turning myself into a pretend scientist which is kind of part of what that obsessive compulsive relation to um the information looks like which don't involve pretending that i've got a secret deal with the universe that if i just do all the right things, then all the bad stuff will go away. That looks a lot like the kind of ways of showing up that I think are being called for now. So do you have any advice for people listening

who are looking to move into a type of engaged surrender or people who are listening who are working through trauma that comes from living in the middle end stage maternity what what sort of practical uh tips do you have or suggestions there's

a place on the far side of that you know that need to try and make yourself the pivot on which planetary history is going to turn. There is a place where you've given up on that, and there are still things worth doing. There's a way of doing the things that make sense according to what on your best days you hope are the trajectories that we can still be working for, where you're doing it in ways that are sufficiently life-giving, sufficiently meaningful, sufficiently grounded in relationship that on your worst days when you can't believe in those promises about how it could all possibly turn out anything other than, you know, ending very badly very soon, the things you're doing still feel worth doing. And there's a much greater resilience in finding that kind of life-giving way of doing the work that is called for than if you're doing it with a kind of a voice in your head that says, well, you know, I could be off having so much fun over here, but because I'm a virtuous person, I'm doing this instead. Or, you know, I'm doing this because I heard a presentation that said that if enough of us do this, then it's all going to be fine. Do you see what I'm describing here? That there is a kind of, again, we're back to being grownups, not needing that sort of childish private bargain with the universe, being able to inhabit the tragic aspects of what it's like to live lives like these in a world like this without succumbing to that. That, I think, is what the engaged surrender part of it is about. That makes sense. Could you give a

tangible example of what that might look like for you or someone you know or someone listening? I'll tell you a story that embodies it for me.

There's a book that arrived in the post a little while after At Work in the Ruins came out, and I got a note from the author. Her name is Maura O'Connor. The book is called Ignition, Lighting Fires in a Burning World. And she said she wrote to me, she sent me the book because she'd read At Work in the Ruins, and she felt like the story that she was telling was an example of what the work in the ruins looks like. And I read it, I was like, yeah, this is exactly that. So it's the story of someone who's a New York journalist, science journalist, and in the background of the beginnings of the book, you have this sense of being part of a milieu of people, many of whom by that point in time where she started this project that led to the book, were in that kind of pit of despair over climate and just couldn't see anything worth working for or were trying to kid themselves into a sort of implausible, wishful thinking version of optimism in order to keep going. And what she does is she goes off and trains as and works as a wildland firefighter and controlled burn fire setter. And in the story of the book, you follow her into some of the hell of, you know, there are a couple of chapters in the middle of it where she's working on the fire line and the megafires in California that are really a bit like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But you see her being changed by learning useful skills alongside and learning them from people who do not have her education or social status, who probably didn't vote for the same candidate in many cases that she voted for last time there was a presidential election. And you see the genuine respect and love that builds up between her and the people she's learning from and working with. You see the strange coalitions of people, the scientists who've been working on the stuff that goes missing from the big debates around fire and are capturing the nuance and bringing that to work alongside the experienced firefighters, the indigenous people from traditions which know a huge amount about the role of fire in North American ecosystems. And these people working alongside each other, even praying alongside each other. There's a scene where they're getting ready to do a controlled burn and they're all in a circle and three prayers are offered up, two in native languages and one in the name of Jesus. And you get a picture of how when we start to learn skills that were not the things that we were praised for if we're highly educated people in the journeys that led us to the kind of social and cultural status we might have enjoyed within the world that is not going to be made sustainable, we begin to see a path beyond the ending of that world in a way that's harder to see as long as we're sat trying to talk about, you know, how soon is it all going to be over from offices in big Western cities. And so, you know, I see other stories like that that involve people getting involved in land and food. What you get involved in is going to depend on who you are and what calls to you and what skills you have to bring to the table. But there's a pattern that I think Maura's book really exemplifies there of what it looks like

to be humbled in a helpful way. Do you think we'll see the end of modernity in our lifetimes, yours and mine, Dugald?

I think it's a bit like, remember, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. It's like the future is already over. It's just not evenly distributed. Here in Sweden, there's this history of Sweden as Valdens modernest land, the world's most modern country, which was really both a self-image and an image that lots of other countries in the West had of Sweden for a good part of the 20th century. And I'm always threatening that one of these days I'll write a book called The World's Last Modern Country about what it's like when the tide of modernity is going out and you're sort of left marooned furthest up the beach because that's a bit like the disorientation that Sweden has navigating these things today. So I think it's all patchy. And I think that things that in hindsight will get written about in ways that make them sound like they were very rapid unravelings, when you live them in the present tense, they form the background against which the ordinary everyday foreground events of your life are playing out. And that's probably going to continue to be what it looks like most of the time.

given your breadth of experience and thinking about these issues, to the viewers of this program, who are also quite fluent in the meta-crisis framing, what have you learned and what sort of advice would you give? I

think the thing that I've learned just in this past year is a greater recognition of the extent to which the uninhabitable earth that, in lots of climate conversations, we were threatening people with as a prospect later this century, actually distracts from recognizing that there are already lots of people around us who are experiencing the absence of a habitable world. There are lots, especially young people, who are not experiencing a world worth staying alive for. And that would be the case, even if the IPCC would come out tomorrow and go, guys, terribly embarrassing, we got our sums wrong, you can release as much CO2 as you want. You know, that's about all sorts of different things, only parts of which are on the the ecological side, parts of which are on the cultural and the human side that are dysfunctional and counterproductive about the ways we've been doing things around here lately. And it might be the case, I don't believe that it is, but it might be the case that you could come up with some wonderful technical magic wand solution that would fix the uninhabitable earth problem and like just somehow get rid of climate change as a threat and you'd still have the uninhabitable world problem now in the world we're actually in i don't think it's likely that that technical magic wand is going to come along and so i i think that turning to the absence of a habitable world and starting from there, starting, as you were saying earlier in this conversation, Nate, with how many of the things that make life worth living don't have a very heavy footprint. David Fleming used to say this. He used to say, yeah, I know that we all quote the thing, is it from Gandhi of the world has enough for everyone's needs, but not for everyone's greed. And we talk about needs and wants. And we say, it's the wants that are destroying the earth. He says, you know what, I'm not sure. I think the things I want are mostly quite humble and human and resemble things that my ancestors three or 30 generations ago would recognise, while the things that I need in order to participate in a modern society, like a car, like houses of the scale that we build and live in today, as badly insulated as many of them are, etc. Those things, the things that it's hard to opt out of starting from here, are actually what have the big heavy footprint so recognizing that the things that make us come alive are often actually some of the the humbler and you know treading lighter things and if we can create pockets of habitability where people especially young people have the experience that there's a world worth living for, then together we can go about negotiating the surrender of lots of the things that right now as part of this techno-economic system we can't imagine living without. but that don't actually add very much to the quality of anyone's life if it weren't for the fact that they were dependent on them for being able to pay the rent.

So you, in addition to your writing and the great humbling podcast, you run something, I believe, with your partner called A School Called Home. Is that a school for young people? And I ask because my next question I ask all my guests is how would you change the advice you just gave for young humans? And are you doing that in your school in Sweden? So our school is

people of all ages. It's we say it's a gathering place and learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. So parts of that take place in online spaces where we're joining up people from all around the world to travel more deeply into the kind of things that I've been talking with you about today. Parts of it happen quite humbly in this old shoe shop that i'm sitting in speaking to you from now as we just learn how to put into practice in this small community where we've been living for the last three and a half years what it looks like to show up and get back involved in community and to practice being part of a living culture here. What

are the barriers to our listeners starting their own versions of a school called home in the communities where they live?

Well, over the last five years or so, since we started the online side of the school, one of the really heartening things has been watching people go on journeys of precisely starting up their own kinds of, you know, kitchen table institutions. We always say it's a school that starts from the conversations that Anna and I bring together around our kitchen table. And there's that idea that that very humble scale of conviviality has actually been quite central to how humans have made life work and solved their problems at community scale throughout our species history. And therefore, we need to build up those muscles, get back into that practice. And so I think about one of our participants, Frances, who started the Spencer Street Folk School on her street in a suburban area in an ordinary American city. Just her and a friend who she'd been talking to, going knocking on everyone's doors and talking to them about, you know, what do we do if the electricity goes down for a few hours? Are there some things we could be working on together? And over a couple of years, that's been building up into a tiny institution. At the other end, you've got extraordinary radical projects like the peasantry school at Sand River Community Farm in upstate New York, where Adam Wilson has been living for four years, farming completely in the gift economy, outside of the logic of market exchange and being supported by his community and building the relationships that's making that possible. So one of the barriers that people often encounter is that they feel like it has to be big in order to be worth doing. And it doesn't. It's a long journey that someone like Adam has been on that's taken him to the place where he's involved in an experiment as wild and deeply inspiring as that. But you can start on that humbler scale. You can start with inviting a few people over for dinner or just paying attention to the things that are already going on and getting involved with some of the local associations or whatever it is in the place where you live. And there are going to be different obstacles depending on where you are and where you're starting from. But when you think about it in terms of, well, what's something that if it were just two or three of us getting together once a week or once a month would be worth doing, and that that might be the seed of something that has life in it, that's where I tend to encourage people to begin to experiment.