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A review by mchester24
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth
3.0
To read the my full review, check out my blog post about the book here: http://chesterenergyandpolicy.com/2018/06/06/confessions-of-a-recovering-environmentalist-and-other-essays/
I was initially attracted to Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth by the title. Obviously, Kingsnorth is still someone who cares deeply for environmental and green issues, so his coy self-identification as a ‘recovering environmentalist’ and his frustration with the state of today’s ‘green’ movement intrigued me enough to pick his book up from my local bookstore. What I quickly realized was that Kingsnorth was not merely frustrated, but had rather completely denounced what the movement had become and was using these essays as a means of reflection on how the movement, and Kingsnorth himself, got to where they are today. He explains:
"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 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."
Essentially, as he fought for what he thought was important in nature, he saw little to no progress while a new concept of ‘sustainability’ co-opted the green ideals, taking them in a direction in which he did not agree. As someone embedded in the energy industry specifically, I read through Kingsnorth’s writings to try and understand his perspective, a self-described eco-centric who cares predominantly about allowing the Earth to persevere at its natural state while characterizing humanity’s excesses as truly secondary. While I was able to gather some nuggets of insight and wisdom that I find will be important for me to keep in mind moving forward, more than anything I found myself rejecting the attacks on today’s green energy movements. While Kingsnorth would have us return to more ancient times before technology progressed if it meant preserving the natural world, I would accuse him of letting the ideal of perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because we don’t have a silver bullet picked out that allows human progress to continue in a way that preserves the natural world around us perfectly does not mean those with such ideals should just give up and retreat to the woods (as Kingsnorth romanticizes)– we should harness our collective ingenuity to find a middle ground that preserves and restores natural spaces while allowing all the profound good done by human progress (fighting hunger, disease, and more) to continue.
I was initially attracted to Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth by the title. Obviously, Kingsnorth is still someone who cares deeply for environmental and green issues, so his coy self-identification as a ‘recovering environmentalist’ and his frustration with the state of today’s ‘green’ movement intrigued me enough to pick his book up from my local bookstore. What I quickly realized was that Kingsnorth was not merely frustrated, but had rather completely denounced what the movement had become and was using these essays as a means of reflection on how the movement, and Kingsnorth himself, got to where they are today. He explains:
"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 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."
Essentially, as he fought for what he thought was important in nature, he saw little to no progress while a new concept of ‘sustainability’ co-opted the green ideals, taking them in a direction in which he did not agree. As someone embedded in the energy industry specifically, I read through Kingsnorth’s writings to try and understand his perspective, a self-described eco-centric who cares predominantly about allowing the Earth to persevere at its natural state while characterizing humanity’s excesses as truly secondary. While I was able to gather some nuggets of insight and wisdom that I find will be important for me to keep in mind moving forward, more than anything I found myself rejecting the attacks on today’s green energy movements. While Kingsnorth would have us return to more ancient times before technology progressed if it meant preserving the natural world, I would accuse him of letting the ideal of perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because we don’t have a silver bullet picked out that allows human progress to continue in a way that preserves the natural world around us perfectly does not mean those with such ideals should just give up and retreat to the woods (as Kingsnorth romanticizes)– we should harness our collective ingenuity to find a middle ground that preserves and restores natural spaces while allowing all the profound good done by human progress (fighting hunger, disease, and more) to continue.