I write, I give talks, I make connections between ideas and between people, I tell stories, I bring together conversations and, once in a while, these practices give rise to projects, events and organisations.
Current trajectory
June 2022
Work on a major writing project has occupied most of my time this year and I look forward to being able to say more about that soon.
I did get six weeks away from my desk in April and May as unskilled labour on the rebuild of the Red House, the barn that we’re slowly turning into a schoolhouse. Mattias Olsson from Campfire Stories came to visit just as we were getting started and recorded this podcast with me.
In February I gave a keynote at Folk & Kultur. (That link goes to the video with an introduction in Swedish, my talk is in English.) And in July, I’ll be a keynote speaker at the European Ecovillage Gathering in Denmark.
Ed and I continue to release episodes of The Great Humbling every now and then. And I’ve voiced the audiobook of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s brilliant Hospicing Modernity.
For more about what I’m reading, writing, thinking and working on, sign up for my newsletter, Crossed Lines.
A new essay and a roundtable conversation with six artists from Sweden and the UK in this one-off collaboration with Konstnären magazine. Out on 4th June 2021.
Cover image: Caroline Ross
NEW BOOK —
WALKING IN THE VOID
The glass artists Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin invited me to collaborate on a book to accompany their exhibition at Glasmuseet Ebeltoft. I wove twelve stories around the twelve installations that form Walking In The Void, documented in Christoph Lehmann’s photographs.
This is a trail that takes us by strange routes, to the role of glass as a philosophical tool, transforming our relationship to the cosmos, and the history of bottles from the workshops of Syrian glassmakers in the first century BCE to a technological breakthrough in the 1970s that made possible plastic containers for carbonated drinks.
‘Hine’s essay accompanying the images of the show provides a lyrical and incisive element which makes this art book something more – a reflection on the proverbial “rock and a hard place” in which civilisation so dramatically finds itself today.’ — Le Stanze Del Vetro
Talking to Ingrid Rieser for the Forest of Thought podcast, June 2020.
Instead of rebooting civilisation, it’s about regrowing a living culture, as part of a patchwork of living cultures.
Recent writing
When the House Is Built, the Scaffolding Can Be Taken Down
The Price of Life
The Dream-led Dance: Ten years of learning to publish Dark Mountain
The Vital Compass: A Conversation With Vanessa Andreotti
The Curious Tale of Boris Johnson’s Heart
The role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change
What’s Happening in Sweden?
Negotiating the Surrender
After We Stop Pretending
Deschooling Revisited
The View From the Kitchen Table
Endangered Knowledge: A Report on the Dark Mountain Project
Ten Years on a Mountain: A Farewell
From the Dead Centre of the Present
The Consequences of Unacknowledged Loss
It’s Time to Start a School
Seeing in the Dark: A Tribute to John Berger
Where the Words Run Out
Believing in Holidays: A Conversation with Elizabeth Slade
Three Seasons With CEMUS
Childish Things
How Climate Change Arrives
The Fall of the Murdoch Wall
You Want It Darker
How to Deal With ‘The Nazi Philosopher Martin Heidegger’ When Writing for a General Audience
When the Maps Run Out
Spelling it Out
Pockets: A Story for Alan Garner
We Are the Only Species We Have the Option of Being: A Conversation With Anne Tagonist
Expectations of Life & Death
End of an Epoch?
The Predicament
A Journey Begins
Labour Through the Looking Glass: 15 Early Morning Speculations on the Corbyn Surge
The Friendly Society: On Cooperation, Utopia, Friendship & the Commons
Crossed Lines
An occasional letter about what I’m working on.