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
November 2020
Big news this month: after several years of searching, we found a place to call HOME. In December, we take ownership of two houses on a patch of land in the town of Östervåla, thirty miles northwest of Uppsala, where we’ll set about making a reality of this school called HOME.
Counting down to the start of Homeward Bound: The Climate Sessions, a four-week online course with some of my favourite thinkers, starting 15 November. I’ll also be teaching a one-off online workshop on the thinking of Ivan Illich on Tuesday 17 November.
The second series of The Great Humbling podcast is drawing to a close. Recent writing: a long read on Sweden and the pandemic and a review of Martin Shaw’s Wolferland and Alastair McIntosh’s Riders on the Storm.
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.