Following my departure from Dark Mountain in the summer of 2019, I joined the Scottish online magazine Bella Caledonia as a contributing editor. This offered a home for an essay series that became a journey into the deep context of the new climate movements: the school strikes that started outside the Swedish parliament, Extinction Rebellion closing down bridges and junctions across London, the conversations started by Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper and David Wallace Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.
Notes From Underground is not a celebration or a critique of these movements, but an invitation to a quieter reflection on where all this is coming from, what it might tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves.
After writing ten essays in three months, I took a break – and the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic meant this break extended longer than I’d anticipated – but the series will return in the autumn of 2020.
Meanwhile, you can listen to the podcast version of the first set of essays here – or read them on Bella Caledonia.