Book Review: Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
By 2020 the environmentalist movement has become fully corporate. He has finally found a three-piece suit that fits and now comfortably glides through the innards of glass-clad CBD towers or waits calmly by the filter coffee and danishes of annual general assemblies, business card poised - ready to network. He has been doing business now for some time - green credentials and sustainability are his stock and trade. He is more Bezos than Greta.
This sentiment of Paul Kingsnorth echoes throughout his collection of essays Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. This conversion of environmentalist from hessian clad wookie to well oiled spiv came about once the movement stopped making a purely ethical appeal and made its case economic. It demanded a linguistic pivot where data supplanted poetry.
Beneath the language lurked a change in underlying assumptions. Where once environmentalism celebrated nature and recognised its intrinsic value, now it pledged allegiance to the economic articles of faith - humans are the centre of the universe and progress is steady and inevitable. Such contortions lead to a warped soul. Conservation for instance was reinvented as green capital, its worth defined by its ability to cleanse the water and air required for humans and their industry. It is this Faustian deal that has lead us to today: a green brand that is ubiquitous yet a planet that has never been in worse shape and is declining fast.
Many environmentalism books published today are dry enough to be taken with a tall glass of water. This is because the environmentalist movement has become the carbon movement - which has been overtaken with the case that the climate is changing. Hence why so many graphs and so much tabulated data haunt their pages - why they look more and more like economic texts. The author’s point in The Quants and the Poets:
Almost by accident, mainstream green politics and argument threw out most of the alternative stories it grew up with, like a child throws out his old teddy bears: that was then, but this is now, and now we are Grown Ups. This approach has left environmentalism in a position where its advocates now find themselves unable to do anything but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrial economy.
Kingnorth refuses such a route opting for evocative bristling prose and naked sincerity. This is a brave move because he is fully aware that it opens him up to salvos of sentimentality, fuzziness or elitism. But he is sure of his point - that, like poetry, nature has a beauty and worth that cannot be captured in the mechanical language business and data science - to try and do so would simply miss the point.
The finest essay in the collection is Dark Ecology. It begins innocently about Kingsnorth’s discussion of cutting grass with a scythe rather than a lawnmower. By putting a fossil fuel powered engine between us and the earth, we have lost our connection to it. A lawnmower dumbly rolls over the ground but a scythe requires the operator to work in silence, with the intense meditative concentration that allows them to see every furrow, hear every rustle. While it may seem inane recounted in this review it is Kingsnorth’s refusal for grandiosity opting to let the simplicity speak for itself that wins the day.
Throughout *Confessions * you can almost hear the scoffing and the jeers from the peanut gallery but Kingsnorth stands resolute. He freely references poets and musicians - from Bukowski to Leonard Cohen. Happy to recognise forgotten poet Robinson Jeffers as his forebear. All this is done without an ounce of irony or self-consciousness and over the course of the essay you have the sense that here is a man bearing his soul, making deeply unfashionable points and standing against the machine of progress in a battle he fully expects to lose. And that is a quieting spectacle to witness.
So too with his essay Rescuing the English where the author takes a break from discussing man’s rape of nature and moves towards interpreting England at the brink of Brexit. Kingsnorth is not shy from conjuring up a deeply romantic nation - a place of eternal dusk abounds with misty moors and deep woods where shadows pool. His point is that place is intimately linked to history and identity. It is important, Kingsnorth claims, no matter what the rootless urbanites say. Such a perspective is deeply unfashionable at a time when “England” is evoked only in the spittle-speckled and tea ringed tabloids. And of all the four countries in the UK to get misty eyed about - England.
It is at moments like these that you sense an overlap between the conservationist and conservative in Kingsnorth. Although he would reel back from such a term as he is about as far from loutish UKIP defender or the Oxbridge toff as you could imagine (although closer to the latter). He is conservative in the sense is that he is just not convinced by all the modern noise - the smartphones, the superhero movies, the chainstores, the overwhelming homogeneity in which Piccadilly circus looks like Red Square looks like Kathmandu. Locality is precious, nature is precious and both are becoming lost beneath the rolling tank tracks of the machine that is global capitalism.
If there is a unified centre in Confessions that every essay points towards it is this - that our new technological age isn’t the great deal we were told it was. The author believes we have lost agency to this machine that is controlled by nobody but influences everything. It is hard at work uprooting what connects people with something pre-scientific, something instinctive and elemental. It has become our master and is so dominant in every arena that it has hijacked our language and politics - so that even railing against it means feeding it more.
The resolution proposed: Withdrawing.
Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.“…
Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position.
At this moment Dark Ecology hits its dramatic height - the simplicity and originality of what the author proposes is like deafening silence. It has admitted total defeat and suggests a strategic retreat to continue a local scale guerilla war.
The remainder of this story continues beyond the pages of Confessions… and into Kingnorth’s movement titled Dark Mountain that he broadly calls Uncivilisation. The manifesto of which is included in the book’s epilogue. It is a place as dark and lonely as a rural English train station at winter dusk after the last train vanishes in the distance. But it is here that after countless retreats from false consolations that Kingsnorth’s ruthless intellectual honesty has finally become satisfied.