Rupert Read

Ecological philosopher and green activist

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  • Audio and video
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  • Academic CV
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  • Writings
  • Audio and video
  • Books
  • Academic CV
  • Events
  • Why I accept donations
  • In the media
  • Contact
  • Writings

    Mourn and organise: On the power of truth in a world awash with lies

    21 December 2022 /

    This article first appeared on ABC Religion and Ethics. Upon learning that he was about to die, the Swedish-American labour activist and songwriter Joe Hill wrote a telegram to Bill Haywood, the founder of the Industrial Workers of the World. It read: “Goodbye, Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!” The (para)phrase “don’t mourn, organise” received a boost in popularity when a collection of Hill’s songs were released under the title “Don’t Mourn — Organize!: Songs of the Labour Songwriter Joe Hill”. The phrase was subsequently used by the Boston Globe as the title of an article honouring the American playwright, philosopher, and socialist thinker Howard Zinn when he…

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    Greenpeace protesters at the Conservative Party conference.

    Who Voted For This, Liz?

    5 October 2022

    ‘Stubborn Optimism’ Will Pave the Way to Climate Disaster

    5 December 2022
    Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in London and threw tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on 14 October 2022. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

    Will disruptive action help save the planet?

    30 October 2022
  • Writings

    How dolphins and whales can teach us to survive

    15 December 2022 /

    Who are you?  You go to work, hang out with friends, care for your family. You may have a favourite meal or song or movie or memory. You read certain books, purchase a specific newspaper, have your own affiliations, and vote in a certain way. You are you in a way no one else can be. But how much of you did you chose?  From the day you were born you have been bombarded by person-shaping experiences, from your parents, teachers, friends, media, and society at large. No opinion you hold about any subject can exist without these shapely experiences, and thus the ‘pure’ you, unhindered by others, is practically…

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    ‘Stubborn Optimism’ Will Pave the Way to Climate Disaster

    5 December 2022
    Greenpeace protesters at the Conservative Party conference.

    Who Voted For This, Liz?

    5 October 2022

    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022
  • Audio and video

    An unprecedented crisis and lack of sufficient awareness 

    14 December 2022 /

    “The moderate flank stands for mass action on climate, action that will consist largely in “doing” what needs to be done in response to this crisis. We all now know that there IS a crisis, and that Government are not acting adequately on it. It’s time for us to do what is necessary, together, from the ground up, to make our communities resilient, and to make our workplaces and businesses and progressions truly climate-positive.” – Rupert Read. Excerpt from panel discussion with Robin Celikates, Andreas Malm, Eva von Redecker, and Rupert Read on the question “What is to be Done? Climate Crisis and Political Activism”. This was the closing event…

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  • Audio and video

    The rationale for the new moderate flank strategy

    12 December 2022 /

    Excerpt from panel discussion with Robin Celikates, Andreas Malm, Eva von Redecker, and Rupert Read on the question “What is to be Done? Climate Crisis and Political Activism”. This was the closing event of the Conference “Politics of Nature: Philosophical Perspectives on the Anthropocene” (Oct 20-21, 2022), organized by Thomas Khurana (Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy, https://cpkp.net/) and the ICI Berlin (https://www.ici-berlin.org/).

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  • Writings

    EARTH VS. FUTURISM

    28 November 2022 /

    From the way stock markets and for-profit firms operate to the way the media news-cycle works, chronic short-termism is landing humanity in desperate straits. We’re hurtling off a cliff, and hardly even preparing to make our landing softer. We’re crossing what scientists call planetary boundaries, which we ought to have stayed on the safe side of. The most well-known boundary is: maintaining a safe climate.

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    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022
    Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in London and threw tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on 14 October 2022. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

    Will disruptive action help save the planet?

    30 October 2022

    Mourn and organise: On the power of truth in a world awash with lies

    21 December 2022
  • Image of a sunset from space
    Writings

    Is “longtermism” the cure or the sickness?

    5 October 2022 /

    This article was first published by ABC Religion and Ethics here. Central to my work in recent years has been an anguished concern that our species and our political and economic systems are dangerously short-termist. I contend that we need to become long-termist. We need to practice precaution, looking before we leap. We need to plan for the seventh — and, indeed, the seven-hundred-and-seventy-seventh — generation. And so we need to overcome the tendencies of politicians to look no further than the next election (or even the next news cycle), of companies to look no further than the next quarterly report, and increasingly of Stock Market investors to look no…

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    A still from the film Avatar 2.

    Avatar 2 should make us completely rethink our relationship with the planet

    21 December 2022

    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022
    Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in London and threw tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on 14 October 2022. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

    Will disruptive action help save the planet?

    30 October 2022
  • Writings

    Why I’ll be giving poems as presents this Christmas

    15 December 2021 /

    I’m no Clement Clarke Moore (“Twas the night before Christmas…”) but I’d like to think when my family and friends read my Christmas offerings to them, they will get the same warm, cosy feeling evoked by that much loved poem. It’s a true gift from the heart, not just because I have spent time thinking about that person and what they mean to me but also because I’ve spent time thinking about the planet and what it means to all of us. Whatever else you can say about 2021, it has opened the eyes of many more people that the Earth (and everything on it) is in big trouble –…

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    Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in London and threw tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on 14 October 2022. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

    Will disruptive action help save the planet?

    30 October 2022

    Mourn and organise: On the power of truth in a world awash with lies

    21 December 2022
    Greenpeace protesters at the Conservative Party conference.

    Who Voted For This, Liz?

    5 October 2022
  • book cover of Parents for a Future.
    Books

    Parents for a Future: How loving our children can prevent climate collapse

    1 January 2021 /

    Parents for a Future is a book authored by Rupert Read and published by UEA Publishing Project. That our ecological future appears grave can no longer come as any surprise. And yet we have so far failed, collectively and individually, to begin the kind of action necessary to shift our path away from catastrophic climate collapse. In this stark and startling little book, Rupert Read helps us to understand the direness of our predicament while showing us a metaphor and a method — a way of thinking — by which we might transform it. From the relatively uncontroversial starting point that we love our own children, we are introduced to…

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    Book cover of A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. The book has a green cover with the title emblazoned in the middle.

    A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment

    30 October 2018
    Book cover of Wittgenstein Among the Sciences. Contains eight raised fists and one upwards facing open palm against a red background.

    Wittgenstein among the Sciences: Wittgensteinian Investigations into the ‘Scientific Method’

    9 September 2016
    Cover of Do you want to know the truth?

    Do you want to know the truth? The surprising rewards of climate honesty

    4 November 2022
  • Book cover of Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy
    Books

    Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy: Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations

    25 November 2020 /

    Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy is a book authored by Rupert Read and published by Routledge. In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein ‘school’, of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport. Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive (and destructive) patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in…

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    book cover for A Timeline of the Plague Year. The image contains a union jack flag with red virus molecules surrounding it.

    A Timeline Of The Plague Year: A Comprehensive Record of the UK Government’s Response to the Coronavirus Crisis

    14 April 2021
    Book cover of Film as Philosophy. Features a black and white still of a man and a woman looking out over a burning city.

    Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell

    1 January 2005
    Book cover of Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution. It features a picture of Kuhn overlaid with the title.

    Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution

    1 October 2002
  • Writings

    Fully automated luxury barbarism

    10 May 2020 /

    ‘This is not a book about the future but about a present that goes unacknowledged’, Aaron Bastani writes in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani does not set out to describe what an ideal communist society would look like. Instead, he spends the bulk of his book making the argument that capitalism is unable to cope with a set of problems that will eventually lead to its destruction and implores us instead to create a better economic model built around the creation and distribution of abundance. What makes the book interesting is that the problems its author identifies are primarily found in capitalism’s relationship to technology; and in particular, in technology’s…

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    Image of a sunset from space

    Is “longtermism” the cure or the sickness?

    5 October 2022
    Greenpeace protesters at the Conservative Party conference.

    Who Voted For This, Liz?

    5 October 2022

    Biodiversity: Targets, Optimism, and Lies

    21 December 2022
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