Since the last episode of Notes From Underground was published, a lot has happened in the world. As the Coronavirus pandemic reaches into all of our lives, this special episode is a reflection on the encounter to which it is bringing us – a col

010 – The Cost of Knowing

Feb 11th, 2020 59m 13s

The climate art of Cape Farewell, Ian McEwan's novel Solar and the oil industry connections of Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand all come under scrutiny in episode 10 of Notes From Underground.This is a series of essays from Dougald Hin

009 – Crossing the Threshold

Jan 23rd, 2020 36m 25s

Even when we know the facts of climate change, we don't seem to act as if we know – that's the observation from the sociologist Kari Norgaard which starts this week's essay in the Notes From Underground series. The theatre maker Chris Goode sug

008 – The Lab and the Play

Jan 16th, 2020 20m 54s

This week's essay looks at the production of scientific knowledge about climate change and what we do with that knowledge. It's about the history of the relationship between science and the environmental movement, and it's about my own experien

007 – I Only Have One Prediction for You

Jan 9th, 2020 26m 6s

What can we say for sure about the future? The seventh instalment of Notes From Underground is about the predicament of mortality and the difficulty which modern industrial societies have in facing it. This week's essay marks the start of Part

006 – The Salvage Work

Dec 20th, 2019 23m 15s

"I don’t think these are times when you can sell people a vision of ‘how not only can we save the world, but we can make all of our lives better in the process.’ There’s too much loss written into the story, too much hardship around and ahead o

005 – A Common Indignation

Dec 12th, 2019 22m 8s

'What happens next may look like failure. Or it may be a success that asks many of the questions failure would have asked of us.'The fifth episode of Notes From Underground starts in late 2018, as two movements erupt on opposite sides of the Ch

004 – Emergency Democracy

Dec 5th, 2019 17m 10s

'When you organise politically to demand a declaration of emergency, you cannot avoid the question of democracy. If such a declaration means anything, then it marks a fork in the road. It says that our existing political systems have failed, th

003 – Is There Hope?

Nov 28th, 2019 14m 50s

'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 li

002 – Pulling Out the Tablecloth

Nov 21st, 2019 11m 26s

'The need for economic growth is a social construct, not a law of nature, but this construct is the tablecloth on which our current society has been arranged. The question we face, as the 2020s come around, is whether we can pull the tablecloth

001 – Al Gore Didn't Want You To Panic!

Nov 14th, 2019 14m 8s

The last time the climate crisis was getting this much attention, it was Al Gore striding on stage to talk us through the high-end PowerPoint presentation of An Inconvenient Truth. From Greta Thunberg to Gail Bradbrook to Jem Bendell, the stran

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