“In the face of these dire scientific and political realities, the climate movement’s time has passed.” Someone could have read this to me without attributing the author and the first person I’d think of who has the temerity, valor, and proclivity to piss people off through unapologetic veracity would be Wen Stephenson.
The fight against fossil fuels has brought so many of us together while tearing so many of us apart—this is a contradiction that defines the relationship between myself and Wen, my dear brother and comrade, a longtime essayist, activist and climate justice correspondent for The Nation. His first book, What We Are Fighting for Now Is Each Other, introduced me to some of the most important people in my life: Marla Marcum, Tim DeChristopher, Jay O’Harra, and Wen himself. I even quoted the book when testifying to the Democratic National Committee in 2016, the year it came out, on behalf of then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe
By Wen Stephenson
Haymarket Books, 256 pages
Publication date: June 24, 2025
For years before we met in person, Wen and I corresponded through fossil-fueled communication mediums like email, social media, and Zoom calls. This is the sort of contradiction he brings to life in his new book, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe, a collection of essays that look through the lens of some of the most influential, frustrating, and necessary writers and thinkers who will continue to transcend generations.
Wen’s new book, from which the above quote about how the climate movement’s time has passed is drawn, is an invitation into his moral galaxy and the personal challenges of the depression he experienced. It tells how he found solace by looking to writers from Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, to Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, who themselves reflected on the “the abyss of their time.” As he puts it, “That’s how this book was born, as though I was trying to read and write my way out of real despair.”
The paradox of despair lies in what can be generated when humans experience so much pain that they are almost enjoined to create beautiful and veracious things. I think of Sam Cooke’s “Change is Gonna Come” and Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”— works written when both artists were subjected to so much melancholy that it became a muse and beacon.
And if it’s true that building movements requires tearing things down, pissing people off, and even losing the support of funders, publishers, and colleagues, then this is what Brother Wen has been doing for years—actually building movements through his words, his insolence, and his irrefutable ability to piss people off with his unapologetic approach to truth-telling.
Wen has pissed me off many times; it’s probably one of the main reasons I love him and his writing so much. He forces readers he may never meet, and his friends alike, to take good looks at themselves, their organizations, their vocation, and their efforts. He surfaces elements of himself, and all of us, as well as what far too many refer to as the “climate movement.” Through this elucidation, Wen engenders conflicts that are natural and necessary if our movements are to be rooted in shared humanity that does not take people in slices, but instead cherishes our flaws as much as the best parts about us.
Consider his critique of the Green New Deal, a set of proposals championed by Democrats that failed to materialize into anything tangible: “If the Green New Deal is to be as transformative as we know is necessary, then it must be more than just another legislative policy agenda for the Democratic Party,” he writes in this book. “It needs to be among the central rallying points for a revolutionary democracy movement, or “movement of movements.” Here we see an example of Wen’s ability to spark deep conversations and deep disagreements, the kind that are necessary for movements to remain relevant and effective.
Learning to Live in the Dark deals with a period I refer to as Peak Climate Activism. This was a four-year span, from 2014 to 2018, that included COP(out) 21 in Paris, the People’s Climate March in New York City, the rise of Bernie Sanders, the uprisings at Standing Rock, and the quixotic yet efficacious electoral campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the so-called Squad.
It was a time of resistance rooted in an apotheosis of hope perhaps more than shared principles. By releasing this book seven years after that period, Wen forces us to navigate contradictions and ask deep questions of ourselves and the scale of our respective and collective activism. Witness Brother Wen’s take on the prolific and profound writer Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
“Malm’s book generated a wide and largely unsatisfying debate within the climate movement and the broader left, and it was dismissed, unsurprisingly, by a lot of very serious people (including activists and policy advocates) as fringe and dangerous,” Wen writes. “This was a very serious mistake. Nothing could be more dangerous at this moment in human history than an unfounded faith in politics-and-activism as usual, and an unwillingness to take necessary, calculated risks.”
Haymarket Books
In exploring these contradictions, Wen’s writing reminds me of what Martin Luther King Jr. did when he castigated pro-Vietnam war Black civil rights leaders for choosing to be invited into the White People’s House over standing on principle against the war. Now Wen, who loves Martin Luther King with inexorable passion, would never claim to be at the same level as him, his writings certainly demonstrate that he remains influenced by King in ways that are authentic, demonstrable, and perpetual.
For while the reader can feel his frustration and his struggle with remaining a steadfast practitioner of nonviolence, they can also observe him willing himself to hold on to these values when he inquires, “If violence, armed struggle, is justified in the cause of anticolonial liberation and antifascist resistance—and in spite of my own nonviolent commitments (in solidarity with my overwhelmingly nonviolent comrades), it is hard to argue that it is not—then how could it not be justified in the struggle against global, neocolonial, fossil-fuel driven ecocide amounting to genocide in many of the world’s poorest and most oppressed places?”
Wen invites us to inquire where public self-criticism exists in the climate community, who still cosign a Democratic Party that embraces neoliberalism, remains insouciant in the face of a livestreamed genocide against Palestinian people, and champions policies that represent the antithesis of climate and social justice.
He writes: “There’s something deeply disturbing—chilling, even—about the doctrinaire insistence upon hope and optimism in Democratic and mainstream
climate movement circles. I find it chilling because it implies, on the part of the optimists (who are, by the way, almost always white, and either NGO- or party-affiliated), a readiness to settle.”
It’s refreshing to see a cis-straight white dude and ardent advocate of nonviolence from New England (and a L.A. Dodgers fan to boot) sedulously deliver the sage lessons and aphorisms of revolutionary writers like Frantz Fanon into the climate discussion. This is at a time when even some of the most progressive elements of the U.S. climate community are embracing false narratives like “abundance” and the need to decouple social justice from the climate narrative.
Fanon wrote what he believed, even when he knew it would piss people off—including some Black folks. Wen embraces this ethos as it pertains to those who consider themselves climate activists. He is damn right when he writes, “The source of collective power lies in the power of self transformation.”
At the end of the day, it’s ironic that Wen would name his latest offering Learning to Live in the Dark, when there is so much light in this book. It showcases backcasting—“the practice of a strategic planning approach that starts by defining a desirable future and then works backward to determine the present-day actions needed to achieve that future.”
Whether he meant to or not, Wen has manifested the praxis of backcasting by delivering us to his past writings and making them more germane than many of the present-day approaches to social and climate justice. He is assessing what it will take to retain the one thing that even an epoch of climate catastrophe must not change or take away from us if we are to survive it. As he posits towards the end of his book, “The question, maybe the only question left at this hour, is whether we will hold on to our humanity in our desperation.”