Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

by Paul Kingsnorth

  For me, the answer to that question has been at least partly discovered in this place. After years of living in cities with barely any contact with the ground, fuelled by anger and righteousness, driving myself into the ground, I decided to exchange activism for action. I decided to dig in, to use my limited powers to improve at least one small square of Earth, and to write, sometimes, about what I discovered by doing so.

  Not everyone has been impressed with this approach. Some environmental activists in particular have reacted with anger. All this talk of grief and acceptance has sounded to them like a dangerous abdication of responsibility. It’s all very well for you to run away from the ‘fight’, I have been told, but this is the fate of the Earth we’re talking about. Forests are falling; the climate is changing. Millions of people are going to die, and you are advocating doing nothing. Are you depressed? Are you burned out? Whatever is wrong with you, you need to stop talking, because you are getting in the way of the necessary work.

  My first reaction to responses like these was to defend myself, but when I got past that, I found I could easily under stand their perspective. But I still thought there was something missing. Only two ways of reacting to the current crisis of nature were offered. On the one hand, there was ‘fighting’. This fighting was to be aimed at the ‘elite’ that was destroying the planet – oil companies, politicians, corporate leaders, the rich. On the other hand, there was ‘giving up’. Giving up meant not fighting. It meant running away from a necessary battle. It meant being selfish. It meant ‘doing nothing’, and letting the planet go to hell.

  All of this hinged on a narrow definition of what doing something involved, and what action meant. It seemed to suggest that action must be something grand and global and gestural. Small actions were not actions at all: if you couldn’t ‘change the world’ there seemed little point in changing anything. Being seen to be able to say you were ‘fighting’ rather than ‘giving up’ could sometimes appear to be more important than whether that fight had any measurable impact. This military language, this focus on action-at-all-costs, this shaming of those who question it, seems strange to me. In an age in which ‘fighting for the planet’ most often means tweeting, signing petitions, writing blogs and sometimes going on a march, the rhetoric seems not only overblown but likely to obscure the value of more focused, small-scale personal commitments to changing things for the better.

  In 1978, Berry wrote to Snyder with a sense of disappointment. He had hoped that by taking on his farm and learning to run it, by engaging with the dirt beneath his feet, he would perhaps be able to step back from his concerns about the state of the wider world. It hadn’t worked. ‘I see with considerable sorrow’, he wrote, ‘that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I once thought I would. So how to keep from becoming evil? Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anything: don’t fight against even the devil, and don’t fight to “save the world”.’

  Berry was getting at something here that seems more significant to me as the years roll by. Traditional leftist ‘activism’ entrenches a kind of dependency. It involves identifying an enemy and then taking it on. Whether you are fighting or petitioning, there is always a Them who needs to sort out the problem, and that gives Us, the disempowered but righteous masses, more of an excuse to wash our hands of our own complicity, or simply to never get them dirty in the first place.

  I don’t say any of this to dismiss the value of activism, though I know it can sound like it. My point is not that political organising never works, but that it works only sometimes. When it does work, it is a useful tool. There are elites to be opposed and politicians to be held to account and planting vegetables is not the answer to everything. But nothing is the answer to everything – that’s the point. Once you start thinking you are responsible for, or can influence, everything, you are lost. When you take responsibility for a specific something, on the other hand, it’s possible you might get somewhere.

  I think now that there is a difference between action and activism. I walked away from global environmental politics because its message didn’t ring true and because even many of those who were putting it out didn’t really seem to believe it. I walked away because I was disillusioned, and because I was getting older, and because I probably was burned out; but also because that kind of activism seemed to be a block on actual, real action. I felt too complicit to keep blaming other people. If I was going to blame anyone, I would rather blame myself. I’m good at that.

  *

  In 1966, the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay bought a derelict farm in the Pentland Hills, which he spent decades transforming into a sculpture and poetry garden he named Little Sparta. For years, he barely left the place. But when friends suggested that he had simply built himself a retreat in which to hide from reality, Finlay put them straight. ‘Certain gardens’, he replied, ‘are described as retreats when they are really attacks.’

  What did he mean? Perhaps that the beauty and meaning he was constructing around him was an attack on the kind of world that thinks it is meaningless to do something so small, so local, so specific. To tend a garden, to learn to be humble, to use your skills locally rather than globally: none of this will ‘save the world’, none of it is easy to rally large groups of people behind, none of it makes a good slogan. And yet, it has an impact. Finlay said that one of the things he learned by building his garden was simply that ‘you can change a bit of the actual world by taking out a spade of earth’.

  We live in a culture that idolises ‘big-picture thinking’ and dismisses small-picture anything; that puts a premium on action and belittles contemplation. Even those of us who would like to see a very different world from the one we are living in often help to perpetuate its values with our habitual rushing around and our insistence on change over stillness. We are the people of the West, and we believe that the world must be gripped and turned to a shape. Sometimes I think that ‘saving the world’ is just another way of controlling it.

  I see this every day in my own life. I’m writing this essay in a hut at the top of our field. It is a small field, about an acre and a half, hemmed by blackthorn and maple and oak trees, which runs flat for half its length and then rolls down towards an old boreen. The previous owners had cows in it, but with the animals gone it has been running riot. Dock and creeping buttercup have sprouted everywhere, and everything has grown faster than I would have imagined possible. Until I moved here I hadn’t known that a bramble creeper can grow by a foot a day. Or at any rate, it seems like it.

  In reaction to this, my first instinct was to panic and my second was to take control. Something had to be done! The place was a mess. We had to decide what we were going to do with this field and then do it, quickly, before it became unmanageable. In other words, we needed to grip and dominate the field, shape it to our use, even though we didn’t know what that use was because we haven’t yet decided what to actually do with it.

  Slowly, very slowly, I am learning to relax about this. I am learning that it doesn’t matter if I don’t know what to do and I am learning, more significantly, that the field itself is not simply a canvas on which I can impose my designs, but a living thing with which I need to negotiate a relationship. Until I see what it is doing, what is growing where, where the wet parts are, where the frost gathers in winter, what trees are in the hedges and what birds are feeding from them, I can’t make any useful decisions about anything. Until I slow down and pay attention, I am more likely to do damage than anything else, and I am more likely to create unnecessary work for myself.

  So, recently, I had an idea. I would walk the boundaries of this field once a day for a year, and I would write down what I saw. By the end of the year, I would understand the land better. I would force myself to pay attention: something I’m not instinctively good at doing. I would tear myself out of my head and put myself into this place. I would slow down.
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  These days, when I feel like mounting an attack, these few green acres seem like the best place to plant my weapons. Because coming here is an attack on myself as well. It is a challenge I issue to the part of me that likes to build abstractions or theories designed to pin the world down, and is tempted to issue rallying cries and sketch out easy answers. It says: here is the mess and the complexity and the hard work. Never mind your concepts. Do you know how to use a mattock?

  Of course, I would be lying if I pretended that coming here wasn’t also a retreat: it is. It is a retreat from the noise and the stink of the cities, from people with their heads buried in their iPhones. It is a retreat from the tech-soaked iniquities of the modern school system, a retreat from all the marketing bullshit that is thrown at me as I walk down any urban street any day of the week. It is a retreat to a place where I can make myself known, and that I can begin to know. A place where I can gather sloes from the hedges and make them into gin and stack the bottles on top of my fridge and watch them turn slowly crimson over months. Where I can stand on my porch, as I did last night, chopping seasoned beech logs into kindling and watching the sky grow pink in the west. Where I can take a walk down the lane with my small daughter, and on the way back I can watch her climb a farm gate to pick wild plums from a roadside tree, and run home with her pockets full. I doubt I had even seen a wild plum at her age. I call that an education.

  This is what I came here for, and in these small moments I remember that. Yes, it is a retreat. But it is not just a retreat. I have more work to do than ever; it is just a different kind of work. I’ve thought for years that the best way to put a spanner in the consumer dystopia that is unfolding is to ground yourself in a place and to learn to do things with your hands – actually learn to do them, not just write about learning to do them. Grow your own carrots, learn to use an axe and a scythe, know where the sun falls and what the trees do and what is growing in the laneways. Get to know your neighbours, put down roots and stay even when you don’t want to stay. Be famous, as Gary Snyder so wonderfully suggested, for fifteen miles.

  So I’m trying to tune myself into where I am. I’m trying to force myself to slow down and listen. It doesn’t come naturally, but when I do it, I feel my perspective subtly shift. I notice the different sounds made by red-tailed and white-tailed bumblebees, or the cackling of the rook on the chimney pot in the morning, or the different times the hawthorn and the blackthorn flower. Most of what lives on this land never notices me. I am learning what to make of it, slowly and clumsily and often impatiently, and it is work that I will never get enough of, and I will never master. Nothing can be done, I think now, except what can be done. Whenever I leave this place, and however, I’d like it to be richer than it was when I found it.

  ‘Do you think it could be a general rule’, Berry asked Snyder towards the end of 1979, ‘that the only place one is urgently needed is at home?’ I think it could be. I think it is.

  2014

  * Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, Counterpoint Press, 2014.

  The Barcode Moment

  It was in religious education classes at school that I was first introduced to Satanic Barcode Theory. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, let me explain to you how it works.

  First, take a quote from the Book of Revelation:

  And he [‘the Beast’] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.

  That’s the Bible, informing you that a time will come when no one will be able to ‘buy or sell’ without the ‘mark of the Beast’ on his or her head or hand. That number is 666.

  Next, take a look at a barcode: any barcode, on any consumer product. Every barcode, you will notice, is a long array of lines of differing widths. Each of these lines represents a number. When the barcode is scanned, the scanner picks up the unique number it represents and transforms this into a price. But while each barcode is different, all have three identical ‘guard bars’ at the beginning, the middle and the end. Take a look at your nearest barcode and you’ll see them: three bars that are longer than all the others. Each of these guard bars is the equivalent of the number 6.

  Every barcode in the world, in other words, has the number 666 running through it like words through a stick of rock. So, the barcode, without which it is pretty tough these days to ‘buy or sell’ anything, is the mark of the Beast, according to the Bible and my old RE teacher. Satan is capitalism. It’s not an unconvincing suggestion.

  There are a few flaws in this theory, of course, not least of which is that no one has barcodes tattooed on their head or hand. Yet. But this, I was told, was a detail; my teacher was pretty convinced that, within a few decades, some version of the barcode would end up embedded in or imprinted on human bodies, to allow us all to transact our lives away with minimal fuss.

  When I was fifteen, this conspiracy theory was exciting. I wasn’t religious, and wasn’t in the habit of listening much to RE teachers, but this suggestion grabbed me. It satisfied the Manichaean part of my nature. The world was, in this telling, a straight battle between good and evil, and once people started tattooing barcodes on their skin it was going to be pretty damn clear which was which. At that point, those of us who were good would be able to see what was coming, and we would cut loose: run to the hills, form communes, get guns, prepare. It would be frightening, but also thrilling – and, most importantly of all, morally simple. There was no complexity. You had the mark, or you didn’t. And when the moment came, I’d never let them mark me.

  You’re quite susceptible to this kind of worldview when you’re fifteen, you’ve read The Lord of the Rings twice and you watch Star Wars every Christmas. Then you grow up and you realise, with some regret, that life is more morally complex than this. You realise that the barcode moment – the moment when the grey areas fall away and you are forced to choose, and you can take your stand with clarity – will never come.

  And then you hear about Google Glass.

  Google Glass, pioneered by the increasingly frightening Google corporation (whose own company motto, ironically, is ‘don’t be evil’) is a pair of slightly dorky-looking spectacles that stream the internet directly into your eyes, providing you, literally, with a new lens through which to see the world: one manufactured by a big and exceptionally ambitious corporation. One that defines and explains that world to you, mediated by corporate algorithms moulded to your own specific consumer preferences, which will doubtless make every effort to sell bits of it to you as well. As a breathless review of this infant technology in a geek magazine explains:

  The Google goggles can give weather information when you look out the window, show you a text message and allow you to reply with voice dictation and more. One section of the video shows the glasses informing the user that the underground system is suspended before they enter the station and goes on to give turn-by-turn walking directions to the destination … We don’t know how far away from getting hold of a pair of these we are but we hope it’s sooner rather than later.

  Google, naturally, has been regaling us with possibilities. Wearing these, you’ll be able to look at a tree and be informed what species it is; look at a cloud and get a flashing message in the sky giving you its meteorological name; look at a product and get a price. The whole world will be labelled and tagged. You’ll be an excited, well-informed robot-person, all day every day, and there’ll be no need at all for even minimal interaction with your surroundings or with other living creatures.

  I’m not qualified to say whether Google is the Antichrist, though nothing would surprise me any more. Perhaps my old RE teacher would know. But I think that, if this technology ever becomes a widespre
ad reality, this could be my barcode moment. This could be the point at which I run for the hills. Because this crosses some ill-defined but strongly felt internal line. This is the point at which technologies that up to now have merely been irritating and sometimes a bit worrying – smartphones, mobile Twitter feeds, handheld devices and the like – become actually sinister. This is the point at which our dive head first into human narcissism – our declaration that we will not interact any more with anything but ourselves and our machines – becomes stark and impossible to deny.

  But what would I be running from, and how could I escape it? This is the future. It is the direction this culture is headed in. It is the rational next step in a progressive narrative that sees us escaping from nature and merging with – becoming – machines. It is the remaking of everything in the image of the hive mind of the consumer West.

  ‘Give a Western man a job of work to do’, wrote George Orwell eighty years ago, ‘and he will immediately set about inventing a machine to do it for him.’ Today perhaps we could update this rule for the digital age: give a Western man a choice between engaging with his internal world through a machine or engaging with the external world via his body and its immediate environment, and he’ll increasingly choose the former. Perhaps it’s only a small step from the chip in your smartphone to the chip in your head or your hand. I’m not sure I’d count anything out. But certainly the endpoint of a culture that focuses on human desire above all things, rejects all previous ways of living, worships machines, sneers at the spiritual and sees the world as a collection of components to be taken apart and analysed in the service of utility, is a world in which humanity disappears further and further into narcissistic virtuality, ‘improving’ its own capabilities with its technology while the world burns around it.