Previously posted on December 10, 2021 under a different title. For some reason, I feel like reposting this now...
Paul Kingsnorth is a British writer and former Green activist. His most well known book seems to be "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist" (I haven´t read it). I never heard of the man before I read his recent essay "The Vaccine Moment" about how the COVID pandemic is used by the establishment to adopt increasingly authoritarian forms of control.
The "documentary" linked to above is really an extended interview with Kingsnorth, who currently resides in Ireland together with wife and kids. I assume it summarizes the main points of this thinking, except maybe on one issue. Kingsnorth says very little about his spiritual quest. I don´t know what exact religious views he had in 2019, when the interview was presumably taped, but he has moved from atheism to Buddhism, Wicca and Orthodox Christianity (in that order).
Kingsnorth gave up on really existing environmentalism some time ago. He controversially asserts that climate change can´t be stopped. The protests against it will inevitably fail, since most people with a non-sustainable lifestyle don´t want to change. (I assume Kingsnorth believes that the poor in the global south really want to transition to the same non-sustainable lifestyle as people in the global north already enjoy.) The industrial machine will continue to feed on the world´s resources and destroy the climate until it simply collapses, an event that may lay about 100 years into the future. Climate change and all its attendant problems thus doesn´t have a solution, per se, but is rather a predicament we have to cope with as best as we can. Kingsnorth´s own way of coping is to live as sustainably as possible on a farm, grow his own vegetables, plant trees, and homeschool his kids.
Kingsnorth believes that the environmentalist movement has sold out to the technocratic-capitalist system it was intended to fight. It thinks climate change can be stopped by an "alternative" form of industrialization, for intance by massive investment in wind farms, which destroy the environment and can´t really replace fossil fuels anyway. Meanwhile, "sustainability" has become a business idea, with every corporation having its own green-washing officer. The affluent middle class tries to relieve itself of guilt by buying itself into "sustainability" through electric cars and the like. Even if succesful, this would simply lead to a technocratic world in which humans are controlled by their own machines, and nature is super-exploited almost into oblivion.
But it can´t succeed, since the Western Idea of Progress is a myth, a kind of "religion" of modernity. The fervor around fusion power or a manned mission to Mars, which are both impossible, show that we are dealing with an irrational faith. The belief in quick techno-fixes is ultimately hollow, since our civilization lacks a real sacred core. In this interview, Kingsnorth says he isn´t sure what kind of spiritual tradition we should adopt, only that it has to be nature-centered and based on the idea that humans are mortal parts of a larger web of life. He positively references Thomas Berry, a Christian theologian who sounds almost like a Green pantheist.
There was a time when I couldn´t stand people like Kingsnorth. He is an almost stereotypical "demoralized former leftist" who leaves the Movement and the Struggle in favor of purely individual solutions of the most petit bourgeois kind imaginable. The farm thing isn´t particularly original! But what if he is right? When French anarcho-Bordigist Camatte left the left to join a survivalist commune in the Cevennes during the 1970´s, it was easy to see him as a kookish quitter. The 2020´s are somewhat different. What if the real kooks are the people who continue protesting in the streets in the belief that somehow they can save the world within ten years? Or convince the politicians and green-washing capitalists to do it for them...
Maybe one day we will end up on the farm next to Kingsnorth´s...
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