In “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” Dark Mountain co-founder Paul Kingsnorth reminisces on formative experiences that made him develop deep feelings for the natural world, along with the consciousness that man is not at the center of the universe — in other words, the “ecocentrism” described earlier in this issue by J. M. Greer. According to Kingsnorth, while this ecocentrism was present with great purity at the heart of the early green movement, it started to disappear with the mutation of this movement into “environmentalism” (where the “environment” is considered as something “out there,” separate from people), and its passage into mainstream society:
“It took a while before I started to notice what was happening, but when I did it was all around me. The ecocentrism – in simple language, the love of place, the humility, the sense of belonging, the feelings – was absent from most of the ‘environmentalist’ talk I heard around me. Replacing it were two other kinds of talk. One was the save-the-world-with-windfarms narrative; the same old face in new makeup. The other was a distant, sombre sound: the marching boots and rattling swords of an approaching fifth column.
Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, offering instead a worldview which saw the growth economy and the industrialist mentality beloved by both as the problem in itself, was being sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the ‘progressive’ left. Suddenly people like me, talking about birch trees and hilltops and sunsets, were politely, or less politely, elbowed to one side by people who were bringing a ‘class analysis’ to green politics.
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Now it seemed that environmentalism was not about wildness or ecocentrism or the other-than-human world and our relationship to it. Instead it was about (human) social justice and (human) equality and (human) progress and ensuring that all these things could be realised without degrading the (human) resource base which we used to call nature back when we were being naïve and problematic. Suddenly, never-ending economic growth was a good thing after all: the poor needed it to get rich, which was their right. To square the circle, for those who still realised there was a circle, we were told that ‘(human) social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand’ – a suggestion of such bizarre inaccuracy that it could surely only be wishful thinking.
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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 hyper-capitalism; the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy. It is an engineering challenge; a problem-solving device for people to whom the sight of a wild Pennine hilltop on a clear winter day brings not feelings of transcendence but thoughts about the wasted potential for renewable energy. It is about saving civilisation from the results of its own actions; a desperate attempt to prevent Gaia from hiccupping and wiping out our coffee shops and broadband connections. It is our last hope.”
Because “fiery, radical, ecocentric” environmentalists gradually became a minority in a green movement that now tended to focus on “sustainability” — i.e. ways to reform the current system to make it less destructive, while insuring better human equality worldwide — Kingsnorth grew disenchanted, and now even proclaims to have “withdrawn” from activism altogether.
His discomfort at the transformations undergone by the movement as it increasingly joined the cultural and political mainstream of Western societies since the 1990s are understandable: after all, it seems to be the fate of any successful radical political ideology that the more its ideas become part of the democratic political debate, the more the party representing them loses its status as a rebellious outsider; its representatives become more skilled at brokering compromises with other parties, adapting their discourse pragmatically, and thus gradually move towards the center of the political board. (While Radicals were considered dangerous far-left extremists in nineteenth-century France, by the 1930s it had become the majority center-left party, thanks to which much of French welfare state reforms were propelled).
It is completely true that the lingo and agenda of “sustainability” has been thoroughly recuperated, superficially, by big corporations and institutions still bent on promoting economic growth and, therefore, business as usual. That was actually the reason I, too, upon finishing my own degree in Environmental Policymaking, felt somewhat disgusted by the whole affair: it seemed to me that what I had been studying was precisely the means of preserving the status quo while making sure there wouldn’t be a massive popular uprising around the planet.
However, my opinion has evolved past that disenchantment. There is indeed a case to be made that new technologies, particularly those that would come close to the notion of “convivial technology” as described by E.M. Schumacher or Ivan Illich [1] can be developed most quickly and efficiently by corporations and individuals within the current framework of capitalistic innovation. For example, although Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be particularly bent on eradicating capitalism itself, the merger of Tesla with SolarCity does have the potential to help make solar roof tiles an even cheaper and more accessible commodity in the future (obviously this is part of a much larger worldwide trend).
The ultimate goal of our societies should of course be to reduce our consumption of energy and resources drastically, so as to not even need much more of this kind of technology in the future, and to move out of our addiction to economic growth. But I now tend to believe that this kind of technological innovation, or “market activism” can help us do this, as long as it does not remain within the hands of corporations such as SolarCity for instance, and instead brings with it a “long tail” of widespread know-how that can be applied in a decentralised, individual fashion. Obviously, this technical innovation has to ally itself with social and political innovation for us to escape from the sticky, relentless and ever-resilient embrace of capitalism.
The other thing that makes Kingsnorth foam at the mouth is the irruption of the sinister “fifth column” of “washed-up Trots” and their fellow “progressive leftists” into the environmental movement. In that sense, his article forms an interesting contrast with the one that immediately preceeds it: Dougald Hine’s conversation with Vinay Gupta, whose activism primarily focuses on issues of poverty eradication. Indeed, it is hard to shake off the feeling that Paul Kingsnorth has little time for the people around the world who may feel too hungry or desperate, on an everyday basis, to spend much time admiring the beauty of a “wild Pennine hilltop on a clear winter day.” He would rather environmentalism focused exclusively on making people “understand and respect [nature], to understand our place within it and to feel it as part of ourselves”. But how exactly are Guangdong factory workers, Mumbai slum-dwellers or Somali herders fleeing drought and Islamic militias supposed to stop and admire nature? It seems obvious that very few may have time and energy for loving nature if they go hungry, and perhaps nobody at all if they feel their hunger was forced onto them by the actions of others.
The least one can say is that industrial revolutions have been a source of extremely disparate bounty for people worldwide — if only because they were engineered first and foremost by Western nations, and fueled by resources pillaged in the places they colonised around the world. But industrialisation has also been, undeniably, a factor in pulling millions of people out of poverty and developing systems that can help a majority of people gain access to better healthcare or education, for instance, and become less dependent for their survival on exhausting manual labour. [2]
While we should do away with the bathwater, let’s keep the baby: in this case, the benefits that we can draw out of industrialization, or even post-industrialization — in the form of decentralized, accessible technology and systems that can grant a more decent life to billions of people around the world. The ultimate goal should be to make this “convivial”, human-scale technology produced as locally as possible, under maximum control of the end users, and with minimal environmental impact. This is doable. But it would be morally unacceptable for inhabitants of rich countries to despoil the rest of humanity (both in the world, and future generations) of at least the fundamental benefits of this process — and therefore, environmentalism without a progressive social mindframe is pure hypocrisy.
(Naturally, the question remains: how does a species whose fundamental philosophical nature lies in producing “luxuries” — because human life with only the bare necessities is less than human — set limits to the growths of these luxuries? And how does an animal endowed with such insatiable curiosity and immense intelligence, which has kept evolving and inventing relentlessly, choose to limit the scope of its inventions/creative destruction to the scope of what wisdom would allow?)
In sum, I agree with Kingsnorth that environmentalism as part of mainstream society and politics has lost much of its radicalism and revolutionary potential — especially as it tends to be reduced to a greenwashing gimmick by corporations and governments which do not intend to modify in the least their predatory, world-destroying practices. However, on a deeper level, the compromises conceded by this movement in order to gain visibility have at the very least enabled massive research and development, on a global scale, of technologies that have the potential to become extremely useful and disruptive outside or beyond the current economic and political context — renewable energies, especially. While they are being developed by companies or institutions who intend to use them to preserve the status quo, these technologies can and should be appropriated and used by others, who happen to be share a mindset very much akin to Kingsnorth’s himself.
As for his criticism of environmentalism as having become an “anthropocentric” ideology, I simply cannot follow him down this path. To me, the only solution is to evolve past this duality of man vs. nature: the planet cannot be reduced to a set of resources for mankind to exploit; but pure or “deep” ecology without the slightest consideration of poverty alleviation and fairer political systems can only be the preserve of well-fed people — or at least people who were privileged enough to have access to well-fed teachers — and as such, nothing but an intellectual pastime. If Paul Kingsnorth wants to indulge in it as he gloomily trudges around Pennine hilltops, avoiding the sight of windmills and eager for the collapse of civilisation to bring about a better society, no one can stop him. Dreamers and idealists have always been a precious, fundamental source of inspiration for mankind. But their dreams will only be accepted as food for thought by people who have food in their bellies.
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[1] “Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.” —http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/IllichTools.html
[2] Although it should be pointed out that these systems, in most industrialised countries, have often ended up outgrowing themselves, to the extent of reducing their actual utility. For extensive analyses of this, one should of course refer to pretty much all of Ivan Illich’s body of work.