Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Everything falls away in the end. It’s not your fault. It’s just the way it is. It’s fine.

  It’s all going to be fine.

  All quotes are from the varied and various works of the late Charles Bukowski, who also provided the inspiration for the title.

  Dark Mountain, issue 2, 2011

  The Drowned World

  Here in Cumbria, in the far north-west of England, we’ve been experiencing what are called ‘extreme weather events’ for nearly a year. Compared to what, say, the Caribbean coast experiences every year, these ‘events’ are pretty small beer, but for England, a country whose landscape is a lot more modest than its politicians or its football team, they count as extreme.

  Last autumn we had the biggest floods in living memory. People were helicoptered out of their houses and entire towns disappeared under eight feet of burst river. Then we had the hardest winter for decades, in which the roads were sheets of ice for weeks and I regularly had to ask the farmer to tow me up the hill with his tractor because my van wouldn’t make it. As I write, in July 2010, we are in the middle of the driest summer since 1929.

  While this is bad news for my struggling broad beans, it does allow a rare glimpse of a drowned past. The levels of Haweswater, the easternmost lake of the English Lake District in which I live, are currently exceptionally low, and this has brought the ghost village of Mardale Green up into the light for the first time in decades.

  The story of Mardale Green has entranced me since I first heard it as a child, when I walked in the valley. Haweswater is today a long, empty stretch of water in a valley whose only outstanding features are spiritless squares of plantation pines. In some lights it’s an eerie place; you can sense some kind of loss there, an emptiness that hangs around in the air. There’s a reason for this, and it’s below the water’s surface.

  In its natural state, Haweswater was two smaller lakes known as High and Low Water, which were separated by a narrow spit of land. They were fringed by trees and meadows, and their shores were dotted with farmsteads. At the head of the valley stood the village of Mardale Green, with its typical cluster of Westmorland stone houses, a medieval church and an inn, the Dun Bull.

  Haweswater’s valley is a dead end: there is no way, except on foot, to cross the mountain ridge known as High Street which blocks it at its western end (though the Romans managed to build a road that today still runs along this ridge; it’s a giddying achievement, often literally). Haweswater’s isolated valley community, its landscape and history, were by no means unique in this region; in many ways it was typical of Lakeland life before the coming of modernity. It was tethered to its place and to its lineage, and many of its people knew nothing else.

  I wonder, then, how the villagers felt in 1919 when they heard that the Manchester Water Corporation had secured the passing of the Haweswater Act, enabling the compulsory purchase of the valley, the construction of a dam at its eastern end and the drowning of everything in the vicinity, including Mardale Green. I wonder at the clash of cultures; at how the coming loss was conceived and assimilated by the farming families, the hunters and the shepherds whose water came from the local becks and who had no telephone lines or electricity. The new reservoir was being built to provide drinking water for the burgeoning population of the city of Manchester. For the city to grow, a village, and a way of life, had to die.

  It was all a painted miniature: progress in a nutshell. Great armies of labourers were brought in to build the dam as the locals looked on. A new village was built to house the workers and their families, for the Haweswater project would take years. Unlike the existing village, this new, twentieth-century prefab settlement had electricity, pool tables, radios, washing machines – all of the promises that the new age was bringing. Construction of the dam took ten years. During that time, life in Mardale Green went on as it had for centuries, only now with the shadow of its own end hanging over it, lengthening by the day.

  The dam’s plug was finally set two decades after the project had been given the go-ahead. Most of the village’s buildings were blown up by the Royal Engineers before the flood. The Holy Trinity church held an emotional last service for the villagers that was also attended by hundreds of people from outside the valley – so many that most had to listen to Mardale’s farewell outside on the grass through speakers rigged up by a local radio ham. The church was then dismantled stone by stone. Bodies were dug up from the churchyard and re-interred in nearby Shap. Some of the stone was used to build the take-off tower for the new reservoir, in which the old church windows can still be seen.

  The waters swallowed Mardale Green in 1939, as the world’s first fully industrialised war swallowed Western civilisation. Today, in 2010, the old stone walls that surrounded the pastures, and the shells of some of the old buildings, have come up into the light again above the lowered surface of Haweswater. The old fields are bleached white, and the remains of the drystone walls are black and slimy.

  What happened to Mardale Green is still happening, on a bigger scale and with more pain attached, across the planet. In China, more than 1.2 million people have been forcibly displaced to make way for the Three Gorges Dam: a dubious world record. In India, the Narmada Bachao Andolan have been fighting for decades to stop the Indian government building a series of over three thousand dams in the Narmada valley, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying pristine ecosystems.

  The story is always the same. An expanding economy needs water, or electric power, or both. Dams and reservoirs are planned, in the interests of national development and economic competitiveness. Villagers whose lifestyles are genuinely ‘low impact’ and ‘sustainable’ are barged out of the way, often in the most horrific circumstances, by a metastasising urban culture that claims to want to be both of these things but is not willing to pay the hard price. The city eats the country.

  The line from the authorities is always the same too: this is for everyone’s benefit. The reality is usually different; the power and the piped water go to the industrial areas, the cities, the rich suburbs. The refugees from the country go to the slums. Who notices? Who reports it? A few journalists and campaigners, but most of us never hear of these things, or care if we do.

  It wasn’t so long ago that big dams had a bad name. Initially hailed as energy saviours in the late nineteenth century, by the late twentieth the huge destruction of ecosystems and cultures that their construction usually required had become too big to ignore. But it was still not as big as the demand for the power and water that dams provide the ever-spreading Machine. Today, mega-dams are as popular as ever, and are often dressed up as yet another ‘renewable solution’ to the climate change caused by the development model they were originally part of. It’s the same old mutton, now dressed up as low-carbon lamb, and we are still hooked on it. It gives us – some of us – power, order, control, national pride. It allows us to grow, for a while. We can drown the past, and much of the inconvenient present, under hundreds of feet of water and hope it never rises again to show us what’s beneath the surface.

  Strangely, as I have been writing this it’s started to rain outside; the first rain in weeks. It’s heavy and fresh. What can be seen of Mardale Green will be no doubt be gone again soon, and Manchester will be able to breathe easier. Here in Cumbria we’ll be able to use our hosepipes to wash our cars down and water our herbaceous borders without having to worry about it. Everything will go back to normal.

  dark-mountain.net, 2010

  The Space Race Is Over

  It was perhaps most popular in the 1950s, as a new consumer society began confidently rolling off the production line, and the age of literary science-fiction arguably reached its peak. It was particularly popular with children, who read about it in comics with titles like Fantastic Adventures and Planet Stories. But many adults were equally sold on the promise offered. It was assumed fairly widely that by the year 2000 the promise would have been kept, and that humanity would benefit greatly.


  It didn’t take long for this optimism to abate, and for a few decades the idea seemed to disappear from the popular consciousness. But I’ve noticed that in the last few years that old promise has resurfaced in the popular consciousness. This time around, though, it has a different taste to it. This time around, it seems more like a threat.

  I’m referring to the human colonisation of other worlds. It seems eccentric even to write the words, but there’s no doubt that a belief in humanity’s need – perhaps its destiny – to colonise the Moon, or Mars, or other worlds known or unknown, is making a strange kind of cultural comeback. No matter that it is no more practical now than it was in the 1950s. No matter that it doesn’t look likely that it could happen within the lifetime of anyone alive today, if ever. The practicalities are not the point: it is a fantasy, a motif. It is a means of salvation.

  Back in the optimistic 1950s, with the promise of material abundance everywhere, the space race beginning, and much of the population of the Western world still excited about the possibilities offered by new technologies and a benign, avuncular science, the idea of humans some day extending their reach to other worlds seemed simply an inevitable progression. I remember believing it myself at school in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. This was the future, and it looked great. I consumed Isaac Asimov novels at a rate of knots. I was looking forward to it.

  Today, the world is a different place. The popular faith in science and technology has drained away, to be replaced by a widespread, if often unspoken, fear. From biotechnology to geoengineering, from Reaper drones to internet surveillance, the democratic promise of technology has been transmuted into an authoritarian threat. Meanwhile, that vision of science-fuelled progress has done as much damage as it has offered improvement. With the climate changing, with the sixth mass extinction well under way, with the ocean swimming in our industrial refuse, with our own chemical backwash in our breast milk and bloodstreams, it’s a harder world for techno-optimists to find a voice. We have opened the box and seen where our ambition leads, and though we might quickly close it again and look away, it is too late in the day for any kind of innocence.

  I think it is precisely this fear of the future, this feeling that we have unleashed a monster that is now beyond our control, that has given rise to the latest cultural outburst about the colonisation of other worlds. This time, the idea is not buoyed on a tide of optimism and hope, but tinged with desperation, sadness and sometimes even anger. This time, it is not our next exciting adventure, but our final hope.

  Just in the last few years, I have seen a number of people who should know better speculating about how colonising Mars may be humanity’s best prospect for a liveable future. The logic verges on the psychopathic: we have now wrecked this planet beyond the point of no return; there are too many people here, our political systems are unable to contain our technological or economic ambitions, and individual greed and desire is running out of control. There is no way that 9 billion people can live the kind of lifestyle they apparently want to live without endless conflict and ecological destruction.

  The solution? Not to change ourselves, but to find another planet on which to replay the same script. If we begin to shift people ‘offworld’, we will have new frontiers to explore. The pressure on Earth will be reduced. We will be saved, by our cleverness, from the consequences of our cleverness.

  Some of the voices that have been clamouring for humans to build themselves a presence on other worlds have been predictable enough. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, for example, a veteran of those optimistic times, called last year for ‘American permanence on the planet Mars’ within two decades. Stephen Hawking, probably the world’s most famous pop-scientist, recently insisted that ‘We must continue to go into space for humanity … We won’t survive another thousand years without escaping our fragile planet.’

  Physicists and astronauts can be excused their daydreams, but they are no longer alone. New strands have been woven into the optimistic space rhetoric of earlier times, and one of the most common is the suggestion that colonising other worlds will provide new space for humans to expand – and, perhaps crucially, may offer new resources for the toys, gadgets and machines we are mining our own planet to death to get hold of. Writing in the millionaire’s magazine of choice Forbes last year, technology writer James Conca made this case starkly: ‘Growing shortages of key inorganic elements, such as rare earth elements for all our electronic gadgets and renewable energy systems, platinum and other related metals … suggest that we may need more non-renewable resources than Earth can provide.’

  You will find arguments like this in every niche on the internet now: we need more space, we need more stuff, and we can’t find it here. Maybe it is ‘out there’ instead! Bind this bundle of blind greed and desire with a length of imperial bombast – insist that exploring space is the equivalent of exploring the oceans in an earlier age, that it is our right and our destiny – and you have a whole new fantastical mythology on your hands. Now, the planet that created us is what holds us back from achieving our potential. Note how Hawking talks of ‘escaping’ the Earth, as if the only living planet we know of, the source of all life, were a prison, and the dead vacuum of space offered the clean air of freedom. It takes a strange kind of mind to believe this. Perhaps it takes a brilliant one. ‘There are some ideas so absurd’, wrote George Orwell, ‘that only an intellectual could believe them.’

  At the same time as this seed has begun to re-establish itself in the intellectual topsoil of the industrial world, I have seen other utopian weeds begin to flourish. I recently had a conversation with a woman who told me she was looking forward to the development of the artificial uterus – a technology that is currently being explored – so that women could be relieved of the burden of pregnancy and birth. She believed it would foster gender equality.

  Perhaps related to this is the ever popular dream of the ‘Singularity’ – itself a term coined in the 1950s. The Singularity is the point at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and all bets are off about the future of our species (and presumably every other species too). The Singularity is an idea that used to be confined to the hipster idealists of Silicon Valley, but it has recently broken free and is beginning to establish itself more widely.

  There is plenty more technological utopianism that could be added to this list: the ongoing crusade by neo-environmentalists to use biotechnology to recreate extinct species, for example. Or perhaps even the increasingly dominant concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ era, the Age of Humans, in which we have changed the Earth so radically that our only option is to act as if we were not simply inhabitants but creators: to take on the mantle of gods in order to correct our mistakes. For a culture that pivots around a need for control and a deeply anthropocentric idea of human manifest destiny, the appeal of this notion is clear enough.

  What are we to make of this? Is it some strange, deranged endgame? Perhaps techno-industrial society, hyped up on its own sense of indestructibility, is hitting walls everywhere and doesn’t have the intellectual or spiritual equipment to deal with the resulting mess. All we can do is argue for more of the same: more onward momentum, more technological mediation, more control. Are these anything more than the fantasies of people whose worldview is crumbling? Are they any more than delusions?

  Certainly many of these fantasies – because this is what they are – start to fall apart on examination. Take that colonisation of Mars, for example. The writer John Michael Greer recently drew attention to a paper published in the journal Nature in 1997. A team of economists had calculated how much value was contributed to the global economy by nature, as opposed to human effort. Their results suggested that, for every US dollar’s worth of goods and services consumed by human beings each year, around 75 cents are provided free of charge by the Earth’s ecosystems. Only the remaining 25 cents were created by human economic activity. If we were to colonise a dead planet, like Mars, we would somehow need to make up that 75 per cen
t on our own, working it up from a world of dead rock and dust. How would we do it? We have no idea. In all likelihood, it would be entirely impossible.

  So, what should we call this clutching at straws? We could call it idealism, even utopianism. It is clearly both of those things. But perhaps it is something else too. Perhaps it is a modern-day form of Romanticism.

  Look up the word ‘Romantic’ in a dictionary, and you will be met with definitions like this: ‘Exaggeration or picturesque falsehood … A sense of remoteness from or idealisation of everyday life … Exaggerate or distort the truth, especially fantastically’. ‘Romantic’ is a word that is commonly thrown around, often by the kind of people who idealise Mars bases, to dismiss people who draw inspiration from the past rather than the future. It is a popular insult, which, as so many insults do, relieves the insulter of the burden of thinking.

  A ‘Romantic’, in these terms, is somebody who views the past through ‘rose-tinted spectacles’, and desires a return to it. Somebody who, for example, idealises rural communities and low-technology cultures, and doesn’t understand the harshness and horror of preindustrial life. Our ‘Romantic’ is usually a bourgeois escapist, who sees ‘nature’ as welcoming rather than threatening, doesn’t realise that life before the coming of antibiotics and television was nasty, brutish and short, and is able to hold those views only because of his or her privileged position within the protective bubble of industrial society.

  This caricature is not entirely unfounded. Certainly there are plenty of naive visions of the past around, and there are plenty of unrealistic assessments of the present as well. But it seems to me that Romanticising the past, in our culture at this point in time, is less common than Romanticising the future. The only difference is that Romanticising the future is socially acceptable.