Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth

We know from his novels The Wake and Beast that Paul Kingsnorth is a wild and iconoclastic writer. This collection of essays confirms him as a fearless thinker too. He was once an environmental activist, fighting the rampant spread of capitalist evil throughout the world. But as the green movement began to focus on ‘sustainability’ rather than protecting wild places for their own sake, he grew increasingly distant from it.

He saw environmentalism moving into the corporate world, forgetting the sacrifices that are needed to avert climate change and instead focusing on sustaining our growth-hungry, resource-intensive societies in a ‘greener’ way. We cannot continue consuming as much as we do, he argues, no matter how ‘green’ the consumption.

Kingsnorth writes a good essay. Filled with detail and balanced thought, personal anecdote and fully-researched argument, he treads about and pokes at things, uncovering the thorny patches that are so easily avoided – like what exactly our ‘meeting our needs’ means, and what those needs might actually be. Most striking of all is his call to living, and acting, in small ways: grow carrots, try a composting loo, retreat to Ireland to feel and know what nature is again. As soon as you think in abstractions – ‘save the world’ – you have already lost.

Focus instead on living consciously, and stop consuming all that shit you don’t need.