Harald Welzer is a professor of sustainability and design at the University of Flensberg, Germany. In 2020 he had a serious heart attack that he was lucky to survive. Not least because he took a half hour walk to the doctor while having the heart attack, which is not recommended but does make for an exciting anecdote later for doctor and patient alike. If you survive.
This brush with his own mortality changed his thinking and inspired the book. “The whole project was prompted by my recognition of the fact that I will die one day,” he writes, and The Culture of Stopping weaves together attitudes towards death and attitudes to endless economic growth in ways I’ve not seen anyone else attempt.
Western culture lives in denial of death, he suggests. We don’t know how to talk about it, plan for it, or what to say to our friends when they are bereaved. And similarly, we are poorly equipped to discuss endings more generally. It is assumed that technological advance goes on forever. Science is oriented outwards into infinity. So are the defining stories of our age, progress and growth. We have “no category of finitude and no strategy for stopping something once it has begun.”
That has consequences that will be familiar to anyone who’s dipped a toe in the postgrowth literature – climate breakdown, resource depletion, soil erosion. Welzer highlights the fact that as biomass declines and consumerism increases, the weight of all human-made objects (buildings, roads, machines, stuff) is now greater than the weight of all living things (trees, plants, animals, birds, fish, insects).
How much is too much? Can we rebalance things in favour of life, rather than our dead objects? Not without a cultural context for talking about it. “The fiction of endless progress based on endless business as usual needs to be dispelled by a culture capable of learning the art of stopping.”
In search of this culture of stopping, Welzer profiles a series of people whose jobs require them to stop. Mountaineers, for example, need to know when to pull the plug on an expedition when conditions change and it becomes dangerous. He talks to Reinhold Messner, who tells him that he abandoned about a third of expeditions. He discusses Vermeer, who painted a handful of masterpieces and then stopped – possibly finishing with a painting of himself painting, as if to conclude a chapter. Hospice carers need a context for ending. Musicians and composers know the value of a good ending.
From these sorts of examples, and many others, Welzer draws a series of observations. Stopping cements an achievement, whereas carrying on can make it banal. Stopping is a skill. It is learned. Saying goodbye properly matters, so that something is honoured rather than forgotten. These sorts of observations can help us to effectively stop the things that need to be stopped, with fossil fuels being at the top of the list.
As it unrolls across its three long chapters and one very short one, The Culture of Stopping reveals a jumble of useful and random material. There are diversions into the human heart, the nature of stupidity, what it means to be born, why the word ‘actually’ should be avoided, the card game skat. It’s an eccentric book, arrogant at times, occasionally bordering on rude, and written by someone who clearly feels liberated to say what they like. It’s also insightful, original, strangely entertaining and unexpectedly personal.
- The Culture of Stopping is available from Earthbound Books UK and US
The Earthbound Report 
Thanks, the book sounds really interesting. When I look around me, in our little overcrowded basement flat, that is with us three adults, and all of the stuff we have collected, made and stored, it’s overwhelming to think that we are only a small part of what has been made, from the huge stone buildings of my city, Edinburgh, to sofas, books(!), tech, cars, carpets, clothes, everything that is made and used by humans, and it’s unstoppable it seems. I give thanks to the planet, the rocks and stones, the rivers and trees, but feel fearful and sad that humans have used the planet to their own ends, especially now with wars raging, new tech and weapons being built, space programmes, all using more and more of Earth’s resources.
I feel sorry for the fauna and flora as much as anything, because their planet is being destroyed, their habitats are wrecked, which is extremely sad, as they are innocent in all of this, as are many humans of course.
I stopped making art in 2019, I’d had a good few years of making art about all sorts of things, environmental mostly, and I can’t get back into it, in fact I feel terrible, I have used so many inks, paper, wood, metal, plastic folders, brushes, plastic based rollers etc etc, over the years. I now make brooches from found pieces of pottery, historic pieces showing sometimes the finger prints of people who made it, 100, 150 years ago even. I do use metal pins for the backs, and some glue, and sand paper, but it’s minimal I guess, and it feels right to find and reuse things that were made, broken, and discarded, to be brought back to life so to speak. I’m not the only one doing that of course, and it’s therapy in my case, connecting with nature along the local river, talking with the birds, crows, ducks, pigeons, and often have conversations with people with their dogs and/or wee children.
We humans need to stop making things that are wrecking the planet, and start growing more food on a local basis. It’s not easy to be positive however, about humans’ intent on destroying what sustains even their own species. I used to wonder why William Blake and I think others of his time, were not too keen at all on what was happening when the industrial revolution was beginning, now I understand why.
The book reminded me of a small print I made years ago, called, ‘On Top of the World’. It’s here in ‘mixed wood engravings’. Is the world weighed down too much by human activity and will it recover, I don’t know.
https://www.hettyartinscot.com/mixed-wood-engravings
Thanks for sharing your artwork! I think resources used in the service of beauty are rarely wasted, so I wouldn’t feel bad about that. Does what we bring into the world add to its beauty, or add to the mess? And can what we create be re-absorbed into nature at the end of its life, these are the important questions.
I think what’s interesting about William Blake and contemporaries is that they saw industrialisation in its most accelerated and violent form, and the transformation of land and people that entails. We’ve now exported the worst of that elsewhere, and I expect there are older people in East Asia who have seen very similar transformations and would find Blake’s words resonate.
Those are wonderful wood engravings. I like “Transported” best. Thank you for the share.