Scan barcode
A review by jeffhall
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth
4.0
Reading Paul Kingsnorth's Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays has become something of a watershed event in my life, allowing me to discover a map I didn't quite know I was seeking. As a technologist who has struggled with trying to engineer solutions to offset the impacts of climate change and general environmental degradation caused by my species, I have often heard the little voice that says "Give up, it's hopeless - the fight has already been lost." Paul Kingsnorth has heard that same voice.
This is not to say that Kingsnorth (or his readers) are defeatists, but rather realists who recognize that the Anthropocene epoch is too far advanced for us to reverse course. As a rapidly expanding human population contends with dwindling natural resources, what lies ahead is clear and unavoidable. Kingsnorth's approach is to initiate an "Uncivilization project" centered on rising "to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind."
This has led to the Dark Mountain project started about a decade ago in the UK, which despite the ominous name (lifted from Robinson Jeffers' poem "Rearmament"), is simply an attempt to tell new stories that reorient humanity away from the role of exploiter and towards the role of humble partner in the natural cycles that we have so disrupted. Such stories cannot halt the unstoppable, but they can help us to seek a path forward that leads us to accept the inevitable with clarity and sanity.
Not all of the entries in this collection are perfect pieces of the puzzle just described: Kingsnorth is an English writer strongly rooted in the soil of his native islands, and a handful of the essays are quite specific to his own local concerns, and thus somewhat impenetrable to a foreign reader. But that quibble aside, the best pieces included in this volume are truly global in scope, and refreshing in their vision and their candor. I will be revisiting the essays in this collection for the rest of my life.
This is not to say that Kingsnorth (or his readers) are defeatists, but rather realists who recognize that the Anthropocene epoch is too far advanced for us to reverse course. As a rapidly expanding human population contends with dwindling natural resources, what lies ahead is clear and unavoidable. Kingsnorth's approach is to initiate an "Uncivilization project" centered on rising "to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind."
This has led to the Dark Mountain project started about a decade ago in the UK, which despite the ominous name (lifted from Robinson Jeffers' poem "Rearmament"), is simply an attempt to tell new stories that reorient humanity away from the role of exploiter and towards the role of humble partner in the natural cycles that we have so disrupted. Such stories cannot halt the unstoppable, but they can help us to seek a path forward that leads us to accept the inevitable with clarity and sanity.
Not all of the entries in this collection are perfect pieces of the puzzle just described: Kingsnorth is an English writer strongly rooted in the soil of his native islands, and a handful of the essays are quite specific to his own local concerns, and thus somewhat impenetrable to a foreign reader. But that quibble aside, the best pieces included in this volume are truly global in scope, and refreshing in their vision and their candor. I will be revisiting the essays in this collection for the rest of my life.