Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe

Haymarket Books, 2025

In these hard-hitting and deeply personal essays, Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes.

After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.

Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle. Throughout, he poses a question that resonates for many on the left today: If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?

Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cheap hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.

Praise:

“In Learning to Live in the Dark, Wen Stephenson confronts our ongoing planetary crisis in all its horrifying bleakness. But even as he looks into the abyss Stephenson is able to find rays of light within the darkness. This is a book for anyone searching for meaning and hope in an age of crisis.” —Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

“Wen Stephenson has long been not only one of the ablest thinkers about the climate crisis, but one of the most determined do-ers — an unyielding activist in the fights he describes so well. So that makes this an important account on many scores, one that will nourish and sustain you!” —Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Third Act; author of Here Comes the Sun

“It’s ironic and paradoxical that Stephenson would name his latest offering Learning to Live in the Dark when there is so much light in this book that elucidates contradictions through an illumination of bold and requisite veracity. These essays deliver on what it will take to retain collective humanity in an epoch of climate catastrophe that demands the politics of solidarity and complexity rather than comfort and deference.” —Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, climate and racial justice advocate; author of Good Friday: The Death of the US Climate Movement and Pathways For Its Resurrection (forthcoming)

“To search beneath the surface, reflect deeply on what one has found, and write with a fierce honesty about it; that is the path of the finest journalists. You will find that in Wen Stephenson’s essays. His journey is an inspiration.”  —James Gustave “Gus” Speth, Distinguished Fellow, The Democracy Collaborative; author of They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis

“Stephenson’s approach to the human crisis speaks volumes to me. He knows it is a matter of heart as well as mind. His writer-heroes overlap with my own because they are morally clear and unafraid. Stephenson too is unafraid.” —Todd Gitlin (1943-2022), Columbia University, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

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What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice

Beacon Press, 2015

“An impassioned call to action, offering a deep well of wisdom for any person coming to terms with the climate crisis.” —Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

“In this powerful treatise …. [Stephenson] convincingly presents climate change as the definitive global environmental justice issue of our day.” —Robert D. Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie and co-author of The Wrong Complexion for Protection

“To take the climate crisis seriously is to take it personally, to let it shake your soul. Wen Stephenson has done that, in a book that beautifully intertwines his own story with the stories of other Americans who encounter the endangered world with the better angels of their nature. This is a profound, soul-stirring exploration by a twenty-first century abolitionist.” —Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties and Occupy Nation

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Excerpts:

Preface

Chapter 3. Organizing for Survival

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An urgent, on the-ground look at some of the “new American radicals” who have laid everything on the line to build a stronger climate justice movement.

The science is clear: catastrophic climate change, by any humane definition, is upon us. At the same time, the fossil-fuel industry has doubled down, economically and politically, on business as usual. We face an unprecedented situation—a radical situation. As an individual of conscience, how will you respond?

In 2010, journalist Wen Stephenson woke up to the true scale and urgency of the catastrophe bearing down on humanity, starting with the poorest and most vulnerable everywhere, and confronted what he calls “the spiritual crisis at the heart of the climate crisis.” Inspired by others who refused to retreat into various forms of denial and fatalism, he walked away from his career in mainstream media and became an activist, joining those working to build a transformative movement for climate justice in America.

In What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other, Stephenson tells his own story and offers an up-close, on-the-ground look at some of the remarkable and courageous people—those he calls “new American radicals”—who have laid everything on the line to build and inspire this fast-growing movement: old-school environmentalists and young climate-justice organizers, frontline community leaders and Texas tar-sands blockaders, Quakers and college students, evangelicals and Occupiers. Most important, Stephenson pushes beyond easy labels to understand who these people really are, what drives them, and what they’re ultimately fighting for. He argues that the movement is less like environmentalism as we know it and more like the great human-rights and social-justice struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from abolitionism to civil rights. It’s a movement for human solidarity.

This is a fiercely urgent and profoundly spiritual journey into the climate-justice movement at a critical moment—in search of what climate justice, at this late hour, might yet mean.

Praise

“Impassioned, provocative, beautifully written.”
—Mark Hertsgaard, Daily Beast

“In this harrowing, compelling call to action, Stephenson argues for radicalism, for a moral and even spiritual awakening similar to what fueled 19th century abolitionism.”
—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

“Thoughtful and self-aware…Stephenson grapples with the existential threat of environmental catastrophe by turning his gaze outward, onto the foot soldiers of the young and growing climate justice movement.”
—Chris Bentley, Chicago Tribune

“At its heart, this book is about a transformative social movement that is desperately needed and might just already be here.”
—Caroline Selle, Orion

“Readers will feel that they’ve traveled along with Stephenson and will likely be as transformed as he was as they think about what they might contribute to the environmental movement.”
—Booklist

“Wen Stephenson has written nothing less than a love letter to the student organizers, preachers, and frontline fighters struggling for climate justice across the United States. Together, these portraits coalesce into an impassioned call to action, offering a deep well of wisdom for any person coming to terms with the climate crisis.”
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

“This is a young, fascinating, in-motion movement, and Wen Stephenson captures it with grace and power. I learned a good deal about things I thought I already understood.”
—Bill McKibben, co-founder 350.org

“In this powerful treatise, Wen Stephenson chronicles the convergence of climate activism and human rights struggles in frontline communities viewed through a climate justice lens. He convincingly presents climate change as the definitive global environmental justice issue of our day.”
—Robert D. Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie and co-author of The Wrong Complexion for Protection

“To take the climate crisis seriously is to take it personally, to let it shake your soul. Wen Stephenson has done that, in a book that beautifully intertwines his own story with the stories of other Americans who encounter the endangered world with the better angels of their nature. This is a profound, soul-stirring exploration by a twenty-first century abolitionist who, when he warns that it’s too late, means that it’s not too late.”
—Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties and Occupy Nation

“It has been often said that the fight against climate disruption needs stories and heroes to bring the struggle to life. Well, look no further than Wen Stephenson’s What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other. This glorious, moving telling creates a narrative that can inspire a movement for deep change before it is too late.”
—James Gustave Speth, author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy

“In this lucid, compelling and deeply moving book, Wen Stephenson invites the reader to confront the same stark question that he himself had to confront: given the climate crisis now unfolding around me, what are my sources of hope and what shall I do with the time I’ve been given?  This marvelous book charts a path to social and political transformation that springs from a spiritual awakening to the power of love.”
—Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Ph.D., Missioner for Creation Care, Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts