‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays’ Attempts to Escape the Progress Trap

The title explains itself; the author promotes himself. In chapters taken from previously published pieces, mostly between 2010 and 2016, this English writer follows two bold novels which explore the predicament of men within hostile nature, seeking isolation or solving it. The Wake (Graywolf, September 2015) reconstructs in a modern reworking of Old English the consciousness and vocabulary of a Saxon warrior who flees to the forest and then the fens after the Norman Conquest, The Beast (appearing the same month as this anthology) follows his distant descendant, who wakes into a world that seems empty of anyone else after an unexplained catastrophe. Sparely narrated, full of fear and confusion, these fictions resonate.

Their creator channels into his nonfiction a similarly stark sensibility. Best known at least among an intellectual or academic fringe, for co-founding the Dark Mountain Project, Kingsnorth seeks, as his protagonists do, a retreat to the human scale amid social breakdown. This resists not only rapacious capitalism (no surprise there) but those within the environmentalist Left co-opted by corporate cant.

His attention roams. The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, supposedly satanic bar codes, composting toilets, Google Glass, his native and suburbanly subsumed county of Middlesex, and another poet, John Betjeman, speckle a few of his pages. The range of his curiosity and learning span the commonplace and the rarified. He may begin with a peek at “extreme weather conditions”, nose about his former residence in Cumbria, peer into Fukushima, and sketch out the battle between “Quants” and Poets. He affirms the specter of Kali Yuga in biophilia. In the opening essays, he prepares for the collapse of it all.

The title essay begins with autobiographical reflections as he grows up in the late reign of Thatcher, then the ’90s with their fervent marches, dutiful protests, and diligent weekends in communion with idealized Earth. Of his youthful identification as an environmentalist, Kingsnorth observes how this term is practically “de rigueur” among the “British bourgeoisie” of his and subsequent generations. He laments how our new world is online and loves it as the virtual happily edges out the natural.

So far, this is all expected if one has been following Kingsnorth’s trajectory. Where he begins to set out a distinctive if the venerable position is in his decision to withdraw. He refuses “to let the Machine advance”. In the section on ecocentrism, he sharpens his critique. Scolded by his posturing peers for his realism, he recounts the binaries of the bien-pensant. “Motorway through downland: bad. Wind power station on downland: good.” Kingsnorth challenges those too cowed by supposedly correct thinking to speak out against “sustaining a population of 10 billion people” as if this presents no problem for the social justice activists. He turns from these “washed-out Trots” and their fealty to corporate sponsorship, “saving a planet”, where all claim green initiatives yet cheer sustained growth.

Similar to an unnamed Bill Joy, who elaborated “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” for Wired in the first year of this century, Kingsnorth nods to the prescient manifesto by Ted Kaczynski. You don’t have to agree with the Unabomber’s methods to ponder how “the political left is technological society’s first line of defense against the revolution.” This is more ideologically barbed than Joy’s caution about scientific hubris, but both critics warn of the unholy alliance between progressives and technocrats. Transhumanists have surely not diminished in clout since 2000, as Silicon Valley attests.

The term dark ecology is not new, but Kingsnorth applies it to the function of his scythe. He critiques the control of technological power and the loss of autonomy. This “progress trap”, where equality and improvement depend upon the conjunction of top-down inventions and liberal cooperation with the capitalist system, looms for this author as a clear and omnipresent danger. The solution, if one is able to flee the city for a back-to-the-land role as this family man in County Galway, is to act and leave.

For his audience, given few are able to rely on a living as a writer while moving to the back of beyond, Kingsnorth mentions his naiveté. This admission failed to serve as a palliative, at least for this reviewer, who wondered the fate of the farmers whose land he bought or of their neighbors, among which his grandparents numbered. That British transplant appears to consider little their long plight.

In the last section of his anthology, he seeks connection, which suffers from repetition as he recounts his life and thoughts in various media within the half-dozen years leading to his Irish relocation. Recovering the sacred for a secular mindset, he restores the numinous’s awe and caution. He rejects the “New Gods” of the “post-world world”, eager to tinker with nature as if to improve upon it.

How this situation came about leads Kingsnorth, in the second promising phase of this collection, to confront the “self-loathing” of the English left. He incorporates “The Old Yoke” that bonded the now-mocked Little Englander to a locale and an identity. Rather than join his British comrades in derision, he champions (if now from a West of Ireland address) his native land’s identity and claim to its own dignity. He demonstrates his willingness to remain open to views and authors with whom probably very few, if any, among his cohort in a comfortable English chattering class would now side. He may disagree with much of their worldview, but at least Kingsnorth seeks out wisdom, not scorn.

He aims for an “unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves.” He appends his co-written “Dark Mountain Manifesto” (2009). “Uncivilisation” contemplates the crumbling of our own myth of progress. Taking inspiration from the poet Robinson Jeffers, who departed a century ago from Los Angeles for La Jolla and then Carmel, the luxury of Kingsnorth’s reclusive ilk, who can afford to live out the pastoral idyll, persists. This class gap remains: how do everyday wage slaves survive out West, let alone raise a family, without this thinker’s Oxford education? His readers, many likely resigned to a conurbation, may, if they are supposedly lucky, survive past eco-collapse. Kingsnorth conjures them, at least as harried protagonists of the ancient line of Buckmaster, who fend for themselves in very altered little Englands. This is a genre of fiction that few of his readers will want to witness as fact.