'If there is any hope worth having, in a time when we are rightly haunted by the thought of an "uninhabitable Earth", then I don’t believe it lies in the triumph of reason, nor in the recovery of an imagined past. If I have any clue where it lies, I’d say it’s in the difficult work of learning to feel and think together again...'

This week's episode starts in Stockholm in the autumn of 2017, as two prominent Swedish professors meet to debate the question: 'Is there hope?' The rhetoric used that night sets off strange echoes of an old argument about the history of English poetry – and sparks thoughts about what happens when science and reason are elevated into objects of faith, and how this laid the ground in which the poisoned seeds of climate denial could grow.

In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves. This is a weekly series, running through the winter of 2019/20. You can read the essays at Bella Caledonia, watch them on YouTube, or listen to them as a podcast.

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