Confessions of a
Recovering Environmentalist
Also by Paul Kingsnorth
available from Graywolf Press
THE WAKE: A NOVEL
BEAST: A NOVEL
Copyright © 2017 by Paul Kingsnorth
First published in 2017 by Faber & Faber Limited, London
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Extract from ‘The Future’ by Leonard Cohen © Penguin Random House Canada.
Extract from ‘Going, Going’, The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
‘The Tower Beyond Tragedy’, ‘Carmel Point’, ‘Rearmament’ and ‘The Answer’ from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers courtesy of Jeffers Literary Properties.
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In memory of
Doug Tompkins (1943–2015)
‘You’ve got to get your ass in gear
and do something!’
To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human is the key to modern life.
David Foster Wallace
You can best serve civilisation by being against what usually passes for it.
Wendell Berry
Contents
Introduction: Finding the River
I Collapse
A Crisis of Bigness
Upon the Mathematics of the Falling Away
The Drowned World
The Space Race Is Over
The Quants and the Poets
A Short History of Loss
II Withdrawal
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
The Poet and the Machine
Learning What to Make of It
The Barcode Moment
Dark Ecology
III Connection
In the Black Chamber
The Old Yoke
The Bay
Rescuing the English
The Witness
Singing to the Forest
Planting Trees in the Anthropocene
Epilogue
Uncivilisation
with Dougald Hine
The Eight Principles of Uncivilisation
Introduction: Finding the River
It is hard to see the lion that has eaten you.
Carl Jung
I’ve heard it said, though I can’t remember where, that all writers spend their lives telling the same story, over and over, in different forms, sometimes without even knowing it. When I look back over these essays, I can appreciate the notion. Standing back and observing my own tics and obsessions from a distance, I can see themes emerging like springs from a mountainside. I didn’t always recognise them when I wrote them down, but now I can see a river flowing, and I think I can see its direction of travel.
I wrote the first essay in this book in 2009, shortly after the world had ended. Worlds are always ending – that, it turns out, is one of my themes, or tics, or obsessions – and 2008’s crisis of capitalism was just the most recent example. In retrospect, the global economic shock of that year looks more like the beginning of some great readjustment rather than a glitch in the machine. It looks less like a failure of markets than a sign of a much deeper malaise, which the previous years of short-term plenty (for some, at least) had disguised or made it easy to put off until another day. The burgeoning human population, a growing food and water crisis, the capture of government by corporate interests, the growing gap between the elites and the rest: everything was meshing into one. And undergirding all of this, and more important than any of it, was the ongoing attack by the industrial wing of humanity on the life of the Earth itself.
I’m writing this introduction two days after a new study about the accelerating decline of Antarctic ice was published in the journal Nature. It seems that the decline is faster than was expected, and that its impact will probably be greater than feared. We may now see a sea level rise of up to 5 or 6 feet within the next 85 years; a rate of change that was previously expected to take centuries or even millennia. This, if you’ll pardon the dark pun, is only the tip of an ecological iceberg. Extinction levels are higher than they have been for 65 million years. The Earth’s atmosphere has not contained as much carbon dioxide as it does today since humanity first evolved. We have eroded half of the Earth’s topsoil in just a century and a half, and the rest may last us only another sixty years, as we struggle to feed a ballooning and increasingly demanding human population with less fertile land. I could go on, but I suspect you’ve heard it all before and that, like the rest of us, you have no idea what to do about it, or whether anything can be done at all.
Worlds are always ending; empires are always falling; the climate has changed before; change is the only constant. These are the comforting stories we tell to get ourselves through the night. These are the words that allow us to continue to avoid looking at the enormity of what we have done and are doing. They allow us to continue to pretend, for a little while longer, that the way we are living is right and normal and inevitable and that it will continue; that these are problems that can be ironed out through the judicious application of our celebrated human cleverness. Does anybody really believe this, down at the cellular level, down in their gut? Sometimes I think that we all know, inside, in the place where we are still wild animals, what we have done. Worlds are always ending, it’s true; but not like this. This is new. This is bigger than anything there has ever been for as long as humans have existed, and we have done it, and now we are going to have to live through it, if we can.
By the time I began writing these essays, none of which I expected to end up in a book, this was the conclusion I had come to. Over the years, I had felt fury, frustration, depression, anger, determination and many other, more mixed, emotions as I contemplated the wreck we were making of a bountiful
and living world. For most of my twenties, I had put a lot of my energy into environmental activism, because I thought that activism could save, or at least change, the world. By 2008 I had stopped believing this. Now I felt that resistance was futile, at least on the grand, global scale on which I’d always assumed it had to occur. I knew what was already up in the atmosphere and in the oceans, working its way through the mysterious connections of the living Earth, beginning to change everything. I saw that the momentum of the human machine – all its cogs and wheels, its production and consumption, the way it turned nature into money and called the process growth – was not going to be turned around now. Most people didn’t want it to be; they were enjoying it. All the arguments, all the colourful campaigns, all the well-researched case studies were just washing up on the beach and expiring quietly on the sand, like exhausted jellyfish. There was no stopping what we had unleashed. We were going to eat everything, including ourselves. It was locked in now. It was too late.
My incentive for putting pen to paper at this point was simple: I was trying to work out what I thought about all this, and what to do next, and how to stay sane as I did so. Much of the resulting prose was first published either in the books or on the website of the Dark Mountain Project, which I founded in that same year, 2009. Inspired by the Modernist manifestos that had appeared a century before, at another time of global upheaval, I had drafted, with a fellow writer, Dougald Hine, a little manifesto called Uncivilisation, which was intended to act as a challenge to artists and writers. The manifesto declared (manifestos always declare; they’re noisy things) that we were not facing a crisis of economics or politics or technology, but a crisis of stories – that the tales we were telling ourselves about our place in the world were dangerously wrong, that we needed to right them and that this was at least in part a job for writers, artists and anyone else who played with the imagination for some semblance of a living. I suppose now that this was a challenge to myself as much as to anyone else: could we do better? Could I?
I have a quote pinned up above my writing desk. It’s dirty and stained, because it has been there for years. It’s from George Orwell’s essay on Henry Miller, Inside the Whale. Orwell, writing about Miller’s fiction, makes a typically stark claim. ‘Good novels’, he declares, ‘are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.’ Orwell, I think, must also have been challenging himself when he wrote those words. It was a good challenge; I’ve tried to adopt it myself, and not just for my fiction. I have tried, in these essays, not to be frightened by the consequences of where my attempts at thinking were leading me. I have tried not to lie to myself about the state of the world; not to tell myself, or anyone else, what we all wanted to hear. I haven’t always succeeded; maybe I haven’t succeeded at all. I’m sure I could have been braver. But I have done my best to try to be clear-headed and clear-eyed.
Most of the essays in this book were originally published between 2010 and 2016, in an eclectic variety of publications. Most appear here in the form in which they were first published, though a few have been edited very slightly to avoid repetition and to repair any retrospective factual holes. One of the essays, ‘Learning What to Make of It’, is published for the first time here.
Looking back, trying to find the river, I see now that the story winding itself through this book is the breaking of the link between people and places, between the past and the present, between instinct and reason, and all the consequences that have ensued and will ensue. I see that it is the silencing of what Thomas Berry called ‘the great conversation’ between humans and the rest of nature, and what this means. This book is about feeling lost, and trying to find a way again in a world remaking itself at incredible speed, a world racing away from the real towards artifice and a narrow human narcissism. Our direction of travel is clear, but our destination is not. The old is dead or dying, but the new has yet to be born. At times like these, I’m not sure anybody really has any useful answers. But maybe it is possible to at least pin down some useful questions. I have tried to do that here.
County Galway, Ireland, April 2016
I : COLLAPSE
A Crisis of Bigness
Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it’s a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled ‘growth’ are becoming impossible to deny convincingly, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair.
To listen to a political leader at this moment in history is like sitting through a sermon by a priest who has lost his faith but is desperately trying not to admit it, even to himself. Watch your chosen president or prime minister mouthing tough-guy platitudes to the party faithful. Listen to them insisting in studied prose that all will be well. Study the expressions on their faces as they talk about ‘growth’ as if it were a heathen god to be appeased by tipping another cauldron’s worth of fictional money into the mouth of a volcano.
In times like these, people look elsewhere for answers. A time of crisis is also a time of opening up, when thinking that was consigned to the fringes moves to centre stage. When things fall apart, the appetite for new ways of seeing is palpable, and there are always plenty of people willing to feed it by coming forward with their pet big ideas.
But here’s a thought: what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?
The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of Western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass-extinction event.
One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most interesting political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Karl Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Friedrich Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half-century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr’s message is a direct challenge to them. ‘Wherever something is wrong,’ he insisted, ‘something is too big.’
Kohr was born in 1909 in the small Austrian town of Oberndorf. This small-town childhood, together with his critical study of economics and political theory at the London School of Economics, his experience of anarchist city states during the Spanish Civil War, which he covered as a war reporter, and the fact that he fled Austria after the Nazi invasion contributed to his growing suspicion of power and its abuses.
Settling in the United States, Kohr began to write the book that would define his thinking. Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the time was a radical case: that small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers or superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, gigantist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of creating a world government as the next step to
wards uniting humanity. Kohr was seriously at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, drily, that his critics ‘dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet’.
Kohr’s claim was that society’s problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called ‘the human scale’: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because ‘the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself’.
Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world’s problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative. On a whistle-stop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does an entertaining job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of Western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.
To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr’s vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some of it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could lead only to more bigness, for ‘whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions’. Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Page 1
