Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays
- Jul 1, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 14
★★★★★
If, like me, you’ve given up hope that humanity will save itself, let alone can, that as-yet invented technologies will reverse the current climate crisis, that current ones, like electric cars and wind farms and solar arrays twice the size of Manhattan, can stem the tide, or that sustainability, whatever that means, offers anything but an empty hook on which we’re meant to hang our hope, and you have no idea what to do with the despair that comes with such feelings, you’ve come to the right place.
Paul Kingsnorth, who authored the otherworldly and utterly spectacular The Wake, was once an ardent activist, fighting the good fight against development and corporate malfeasance. But as the movement “matured” and the focus in many circles transitioned to sustainability rather than the defense of wild spaces for their own sake, he became disillusioned. In a moving series of essays written between 2009 and 2016, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays charts Kingsnorth’s thinking with passion, with anger, with beauty, tenderness and lyricism, and, yes, with hope.
I found in Kingsnorth a kindred spirit, someone who, seven years before I’d articulated it myself, put words to what I’d been feeling when I read, “I’ll say it plainly, because I’ve worked myself up to it: in nature I see something divine, and when I see it, it moves me to humility, not grandiosity, and that is good for me and good for those I come into contact with. I don’t want to be a god, even if I can. I want to be a servant of god, if by god we mean nature, life, the world. I want to be small in the world, belong to it, help it along, protect myself from its storms and try to cause none myself.”
I say kindred because, in the spring of 2021, six months after moving to the tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills, my time with the land reawakened the poet within me, and I wrote a poem that captured a strikingly similar sentiment, which was published later that year in The New Territory:
An Entreaty
Astronomers say
the universe
is expanding,
albeit imperceptibly,
but it’s hard not to feel
the slow creep
of tract housing,
luxury apartments
and townhomes,
of gas stations,
megachurches
and office parks
and say it is shrinking.
But I say here
on this small expanse of prairie,
on this trail that winds
from riparian bottomlands
damp and flowing from spring rains,
through rocky midlands
ablaze with buffalo bean,
wild celery, redbud, and verbena,
to the windswept plateau
still stirring from winter slumber,
that the universe is not simply expanding,
it is as infinite
as I am infinitesimal.
In a world enthralled with greatness,
it is no small thing
to want to be small
and mean it.
If words like mine and Kingnorth’s resonate, if you find solace and comfort and kinship with them, then there is much to embrace, to savor, and, yes, to sustain you in his Confessions. There are so many passages worth quoting, but I’ll conclude with this one, as it concludes Kingsnorth’s 2012 essay, “The Barcode Moment,” “This is a personal view of course, and one I have been developing for a long time, but it seems to me that a kind of strategic retreat is both the best way to ensure personal sanity and to keep the flame of a particular, pre-machine vision of humanity alive. We all choose our own personal visions. I have written about retreating and withdrawing several times before, and it has often brought down on my head accusations of ‘defeatism’ and the like from the activist-minded. But it’s not about defeat, or surrender. It’s about pulling back to a place where you can find the breathing space to be free and human again. From that, all else follows, if you can pay attention.”
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