“Why sustainability is bad for the environment” by Paul Kingsnorth

*I cannot unequivocally endorse Paul Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. After that time, following his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Kingsnorth’s slide from Green anarchism to proto-fascism became undeniable.

Editor’s note: When I have reposted others’ writing here without permission, I have tried to remain within the bounds of fair use by limiting my reposting to excerpts and linking to the original. In this series, I’m going to be reposting the six entire essays by Paul Kingsnorth originally published at the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp.) in 2012.

The reason for this transgression is that, with the exception of the first part, the series has been removed from the ABC website (for reasons unknown). I was able to recover all six parts, which had been archived, using the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive. Others have reposted some parts of the series here and there on the internet, but I wanted them all to be accessible in one place, as they are an excellent, accessible, and relatively short (each about a 6-7 minutes read) introduction to Kingsnorth’s critique of mainstream environmentalism. (Of course, if Kingsnorth requests they be taken down, then I will.)

I am indebted to many different writers for guiding me into a Post-Doom awareness, but Paul Kingsnorth stands out among them. He recently announced that, with the completion of the third installment of his fictional series, he is going to retire from writing altogether. I am skeptical, because he (like me) has a muse who won’t leave him alone. But, in case he is true to his word, I think preserving his writing will be that much more important.

This is the first of a 6-part series. You can find Michael Dowd’s audio recording of his reading of the entire series here.

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FOR MANY YEARS, I called myself an ‘environmentalist’. I don’t use the word anymore, though the things that motivated me to do so are still important to me – perhaps more than they ever were.

I became an environmentalist because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places and to natural beauty. From that reaction came a feeling, which became a series of thoughts: that such things are precious for their own sake; that they are food for the human soul; that they need people to speak for them to, and defend them from, other people because they cannot speak our language and we have forgotten how to speak theirs; and because we are killing them to feed ourselves and we care about it, sometimes, but we do it anyway because we are hungry, or we have persuaded ourselves that we are.

These are not very common sentiments within the mainstream of the green movement today. Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. You won’t hear many greens today talking about their emotional reactions to the wild world. Instead, you’ll hear them promoting something called ‘sustainability’.

We hear this curious, plastic word everywhere. But what does it mean? It does not mean what it ought to: defending the non-human world from the ever-expanding empire of industrial humanity. Instead, it has come to mean sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ which is needed to do so.

A strange confusion has come about. A movement which started out working to sustain nature at large, in the face of human attacks upon it, has ended up campaigning to sustain industrial civilisation instead.

Let me give one example of this. If contemporary ‘sustainability’ is about anything, it is about carbon. Carbon and climate change. To listen to most environmentalists today, you would think that these were the only things in the word worth talking about. The business of ‘sustainability’ has become the business of preventing carbon emissions.

This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then ‘zero-carbon’ is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we ‘need’ without producing greenhouse gases and there will be no need ever to turn the lights off; no need ever to slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places which environmentalism came into being to protect.

And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonised by enormous ‘solar arrays’, glass and steel and aluminium, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of 500 foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons and wires.

The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung around the coastlines. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses.

What this adds up to should be clear enough.Yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonising, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted and the non-human. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this ‘environmentalism’.

Something has gone wrong here: we have lost sight of the trees amongst all the wood. Instead of changing how we live, we are talking about changing our technologies. But it’s not enough – and it’s not the point. In the next article in this series (next week), I’ll be looking at what modern environmentalism seems to have lost sight of.

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Paul Kingsnorth is a writer, poet and recovering environmentalist. A former deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine, he is co-founder and Director of the Dark Mountain Project, a network of writers and artists who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself.