confessions of a recovering environmentalist. (paul kingsnorth)

We need to talk about Kevin, was the name of a very successful book. Substitute the word Kevin for the word ‘ecocide’ and you get an idea of what this intriguing collection of essays is and isn’t about. The essays span a decade. Kingsnorth claims at times to have lost his faith in Environmentalism as a movement, as it seeks accommodation with realpolitik, in a bid, he laments, to maintain our current way of life, rather than to radically reform it. There’s a slightly doleful essay where he talks of planting five hundred trees on the plot of land he and his partner inhabit, and then points out all the environmental compromises that were involved in the planting. (Use of plastic, machine made tools, diesel to move materials, etcetera). This points to the way in which, even this most would-be radical of environmentalists, who is dubious about windfarms and solar energy, cannot avoid the paradoxes of modernity. The very fact that you are reading his book, in my case on an iPad, feels like its testament to the inviability of his idealism.

However, these observations are to miss the point, somewhat. Because it is evident that Kingsnorth is more than aware of the paradoxes involved in his project. These essays, on the other hand, which come close to extolling the virtues of the Unabomber, and at times might even give succour to a rightist, anti-environmental movement, are a provocation, a way of broadening the discussion. Kingsnorth’s loss of faith in the environmental movement is replaced by a new kind of pantheistic faith, one that references Wordsworth, among several other key figures in the eco-literature movement. He espouses, in line with Ghosh, the importance of narrative as a means of changing perception and the dreaming of modernity, steering it towards something that can reconcile humanity with what might be its imminent decline, or at least its recalibration.

As such, his voice, which came to me via a fellow sceptic, Aris Roussinos, feels like a significant addition to this discourse. Anyone who has children, or nephews or nieces or just knows children, needs to wake up and smell the coffee, and realise that even the best case scenarios which the green movement postulates are unlikely to be realised. The change that is required, Kingsnorth argues, is a spiritual one, and once that has been achieved, the material changes that he says are inevitable will be far less difficult to face.