A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope

"After twenty years of campaigns, though, he sensed that the movement was going nowhere-and missing the deeper point. Too many environmentalists had "no attachment to any actual environment," he complained; they talked up the Earth but showed "no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth." A few years earlier, he had co-founded the Dark Mountain Project to promote what he would call "dark ecology." Its manifesto declared the fight against climate change lost and a "collapse" inevitable."

"So, in the same year that the People's Climate March drew the largest crowds the cause had ever seen, Kingsnorth moved in the opposite direction. He left England for rural Ireland, where, with his wife, who had been a psychiatrist, and their two children, he set about making a new life as a smallholder-planting trees, keeping animals, clearing brambles. He cut grass with a scythe and smashed the porcelain toilet in his house to replace it with one that composted waste."

Paul Kingsnorth spent two decades as a prominent environmental activist, working with Greenpeace and EarthAction and engaging in direct-action protests. He also achieved literary recognition with the novel The Wake. Growing disillusioned, he concluded mainstream environmentalism lacked genuine place-based attachment and co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, advocating a bleak "dark ecology" and accepting an inevitable collapse. He relocated from England to rural Ireland with his family, embracing smallholding practices such as planting trees, keeping animals, cutting grass with a scythe, and installing a composting toilet. He writes on Substack, The Abbey of Misrule, and has criticized COVID-vaccine mandates.

Read at The New Yorker