Discuss: Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

Speaking of people who have retreated to their cabins - Will Steger has a nice place up around Ely, Minnesota, USA.  No running water, no electricity, no roads - and no wife anymore.  Anyway, Will, who crossed the Arctic and Antarctic on dogsleds, is deeply committed to fighting global warming.  You can catch his educational tour of Greenland and the melting ice-caps on the Net.

Gregory — “Kingsnorth and the “Dark Mountain Project’ are deep ecologists, it seems. Which means to hell with human society. What this really means is that I’m going to retreat to my cabin in the woods.”  Your uninformed slur against deep ecologists reveals that you have little knowledge of these excellent and sincere defenders of our world. Your presumed superiority to Mr. Kingsnorth is a little hard to swallow. Your remarks make it clear that you did not understand his essay in the least, but simply made up a version of it that you could lambaste. Classic straw man maneuver.

I did understand his essay.  That is the problem. It is not really couched in mysterious language.  I think Mr. Kingsnorth would make a good writer.  Most people do not have the personalities for politics, nor the real aptitude.  I’ve seen his same reaction from people who’ve joined other small religious or political groups, then backed out later. Kingsnorth feels violence has been done to his personality, and that is probably true.  So he’s tired and disgusted.  Fine and thanks.

Gregory — You seem to believe that ‘politics’ is the real solution to our problems. Doesn’t the total corruption and failure of that illusion concern you? The trouble with ‘realists” is that their solutions not only do not work, they make things worse. Maybe you need some time alone deep in nature to get some new perspectives?

I liked this article a lot and much of it - especially on the reasons for becoming an environmentalist - were familiar to me.

However - and I work in forest carbon projects so I am biased - I felt that the ultimate message might miss the point. Imagine a large area of untouched primary rainforest, with high biodiversity, indigenous people, and all the rest of the ecosystem and carbon “commodities”  that a forest can produce. It doesn’t matter if this is preserved in the name of “sustainability” -  nurtured by carbon credits from the fat cats’ wallets - or surrounded by dreadlocked hippies holding hands with spliffs. It is being preserved, and that’s what matters.
“Sustainability” can be a tool, it’s nauseating when the term is constantly bandied about vacuously, but it is a language humans currently understand.

Huh. This is kind of “problematic” (lolz). It’s an attempt to collapse a bunch of contradictory positions into one “anthropocentric pseudo-environmentalism,” which it can then oppose. All leftists and people who give a fig about justice for humans are declared to be pro-growth, “because the poor need it to get richer.” He seems to be dimly aware that he is actually criticizing two very distinct and opposed non-Romantic green tendencies, namely ecosocialism and green capitalism: “Today’s environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and, at the same time, with an amusing irony, it is an adjunct to hypercapitalism: the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy.” His problem is that he’s so culturally alienated from the left-greens, with their inexplicably loathesome “End-the-War signs and Palestinian solidarity scarves” and their theoretical jargon, that he doesn’t stop to consider that they are NOT the same as the capitalist or “bright” greens, and that he’s actually in agreement with a lot of their premises. For instance, he balks at the philosophical “problematization” of the concept of nature, but then he reiterates it approvingly in plain-language terms: “the ‘environment’—that distancing word, that empty concept—does not exist. It is the air, the waters, the creatures we make homeless or lifeless in flocks and legions, and it is us too. We are it; we are in it and of it, we make it and live it…” Sure, it’s a bit silly to dismiss ideas about “nature” because they’re “middle-class.” But what’s behind those critiques is mostly the need to undermine the notion that humans are not part of nature.

In the lengthy and mostly fluffy comments thread, one poster calling her-/himself “Ecoreason” makes some good, if flame-y, points. Ecoreason points out that the author’s project of writers trying to create new narratives (which makes me think of Center for Whole Communities back when I was there in ‘06) is apocalyptic and hence not new, but rather an old way of evading the responsibility for social action in tough times. I agree. I would also point out that all this postmodern talk about “narratives constructing social reality” is dangerous when it loses sight of what leftist theory calls the materiality of ideology: “narratives” or whatever we call social ideas have to be promulgated, sustained, reproduced, rennovated and enforced by material institutions and relations of power. Even a postmod like Foucault says that “theory is practice.” New narratives are only as useful as the material, organizational structures you can create to enact them. Stories and ideas are certainly necessary, but idealist Romantics like Kingsnorth are falling into the very fallacy they locate in the “materialist” left-greens who have no respect for feelings and stories, but only concrete power and production relations. These idealists believe that ideal and material are separate; otherwise they wouldn’t ascend into the hills to tell stories, and imagine that the forces destroying the planet (which have a very efficient combination of narrative and material power) will magically fall before their ghostly armies of narrative.

The false dualities of idealism/Romanticism/emotivism vs. materialism, and social vs. “ecocentric” green politics, are all that enable Kingsnorth to build up any kind of rhetorical smoke-and-mirrors game that makes left greens and bright greens, who are really mortal enemies, look like the same thing. The problem with Kingsnorth’s duality-propagating Romanticism is that it cannot distinguish between these two critically opposed wings of green politics, and thus it can only retreat from the fray into a bitter, nostalgic mountaintop irrelevance, at a time when to desert the fight is the highest imaginable treason against humanity and the planet.

Hi Robert, I don’t think Paul is “dimly aware” of anything - “starkly aware” is much closer to the truth. He is probably far better read than you or I on political matters, and also practically knowledgeable having experienced all sorts of politically-charged and divisive movements at first hand. Always check your targets before criticising, and don’t put your own words or project your own ideas into peoples’ heads - it’s very impolite.

Robert — One problem with the critics of Paul’s essay is that most of them suppose that he is putting forth some sort of agenda that others should follow. This essay is a highly personal reflection on his own lifetime of experiences in nature, and deep involvement in the environmental movement. It includes some critiques of aspects of modern environmentalism, but does not condemn it wholesale. It tells the story of how he gradually awoke to having lost the inner reason for becoming part of the save the earth movement. In working to fight the earth destroying systems of society he had become enmeshed in the very psychology and loveless materialism that was really a root cause of our mindless self-maiming of the biosphere that birthed us and sustains our life.

One of the fatal conceits of our culture is that if you just work and fight hard enough and long enough, then you can solve any problem through concentrated effort. Parallel to this misguided belief is a contempt for everything that is quiet and inward and hard to quantify. Inner work towards transforming one’s self is ridiculed as navel gazing, and of no value. The wisdom traditions of mankind are regarded as so much wishful thinking, while the real men and women of the world are busy doing practical work and actually shaping the world. 

What has been the result of all this ‘realistic’ activity on the part of the majority of humans? You are living in it now. If that reflection is lost on you, then you are mindlessly committed to pursuing the same failed methods that have landed us in this mess called civilization. Would you say that all this ferment of activity and counter activity has given rise to a world based on wisdom? Einstein said something to the effect that our problems cannot be solved by thinking based on the same level that gave rise to them. Isn’t it time to take a step back and discover some deeper basis for the world we dream of?  Paul has not come up with the answer to our difficulties, but he has decided to look deeper for answers that we do not currently have.  Godspeed.