Referring to a poem by Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt wrote that the dark times of early-twentieth century Europe were characterised not by an occlusion of the brightly lit world of public affairs but by the capacity of this world to hide its atrocities out in the open. Dark times, whenever they occur, happen in this way through the medium of some supposedly transparent rationalisation, Arendt writes. In Brecht’s ‘To Those Born Later’, written in exile in the late 1930s, the speaker appeals to future generations not to blame him too harshly for having failed to avert the catastrophe:

Thinking about the impasses of environmental politics today often feels like being in the position of Brecht’s speaker, striving to explain to some future society that the darkness did not look so dark, that it all seemed to happen in the plain light of day. It is a matter of learning to see the darkness for what it is. James Bridle has argued that this is a ‘new dark age’ precisely because our current, massively distributed, networked technologies cannot give the fully illuminated picture of the world that we believe technoscientific reason should do. Bridle argues that the task, then, must be to learn to live in the absence of enlightenment’s certainty, to inhabit the darkness as a space of possibility in which unknowing is not only unavoidable but necessary. This is a profoundly ecological position, and so it is no surprise that he refers to ecocritical theorist Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperobject’ to characterise technological networks. Environmentalists have long understood that we live in a lighted clearing surrounded by a much greater, denser, darker mass of planetary life. The sunny optimism of ‘bright green’ environmentalism, with its faith in technological solutions, is frequently criticised. This is an ecological critique of light, in which the public world of politics (what Arendt describes as a ‘space of appearances’) is decentred by an appeal to something fundamentally withdrawn from the lumen naturale of human reason. The chromatics or shades of ecopolitics, ranging from dark to bright, suggest degrees of commitment to this position.