William E. Connolly

But at the same time, you know, Nick and I have been concerned for a long time with the way in which the forces that try and push against that, the ecological left or the broader kind of ecological movement, you know, have been characterized for quite a long time by, you know, moments of kind of passive nihilism, if you like, sliding into passive nihilism.

This is William Connolly's phrase or what Mackenzie Walk talks, a kind of melancholic paralysis.

And so our kind of starting point for the book is this real concern that there are different moves that need to be made to reset a viable climate conversation.

And we're using, in many respects, the fields of design, architecture and planning really to think about agency, to think about democratic world making and think about ways in which you know, Labour and the dignity of Labour could have some space in a climate and environmental political project of the future.

One was my colleague, Jonathan Lear, a philosopher who died recently.

And also another colleague in Johns Hopkins, William Connolly, a political philosopher, political theorist, who also died recently.

And Conley used to work on climate change, wrote a book called Facing the Anthropocene or something like that, Facing the Planetary Water.

And he was quoted as saying that for all the problems in the history of life on this planet, life still remains sweet.

You know, governments across Western countries are increasingly becoming dependent on Silicon Valley companies for their own sort of in-house architecture and so on.

There's a term used by William Connolly in the US, which I like.

He talks about a sort of aspirational sort of fascism.

It's not just hostility to the left.