Rotterdam Change Days 2025: At work in the Ruins

Dougald Hine (1977) is a British social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, in 2009 he wrote Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, together with Paul Kingsnorth. A departure from the stories that prevent us from seeing clearly the extent of the unravelling of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is underway.

That led to the co-founding of The Dark Mountain Project, a rooted and branching network of creative activity, of which he was director at large until 2019. In 2011, he was named one of Britain’s 50 top radicals by NESTA, a British charity.

In 2012, Dougald Hine moved to Sweden. There, he has been serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern (Sweden’s national theatre) and as a associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) at Uppsala University.

Together with Anna Björkman, in his small hometown Östervåla, Hine has founded A school called HOME, a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

His recent projects include Notes From Underground, a ten-part essay series for Bella Caledonia exploring the deep roots of the new climate movements, and The Great Humbling, a podcast which he presents with the futurist and ‘recovering sustainability consultant‘ Ed Gillespie.

In 2024 Dougald Hine published At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Climate Crises and Other Emergencies.

His latest writing is published on his Substack, Writing Home.