This is an excerpt from Jennifer Peterson’s review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It highlights something that was present in Kingsnorth’s writing about nature as early as 2017, a way of talking about nature that had less to do with nature and more to do with an uncritical nostalgia for the past.
[Kingsnorth’s] appreciation for nature falls back on outmoded ideas about ecosystems, earth, plants, and animals, including human animals. Kingsnorth’s political caginess is tricky — his anti-globalization lament usually sounds far left, and he has described himself elsewhere as an anti-racist, feminist, anti-capitalist environmentalist — but his notion of place is distinctly nationalistic. In a particularly troubling essay “Rescuing the English,” his carefully measured tone cannot mask what amounts to a scorn for multiculturalism and defense of Brexit politics. He writes, “Is there a future, I wonder, in a kind of ecological Englishness — an identity that sees everyone in England as part of its landscapes and thus its history.” Rather than seeking ecological interconnectedness across boundaries and cultures, Kingsnorth engages in a back-to-the-land fantasy reliant on notions of homeland. It is one thing to oppose the displacement of local shops and pubs by corporate chains, but quite another to conclude that the solution to globalization is stronger borders and a mythical return to the village green. “A nation […] is about belonging — to a specific place that is not quite like another place, and to a collective of people you share things with,” he asserts, wheeling out an archaic, territorial idea of place inadequate for understanding the current complexities. Unconcerned to think through issues of diasporic, mobile, or cosmopolitan identity, Kingsnorth falls back on a reactionary vision of nationhood. His personal answer to the environmental crisis — to retreat with his family to a low-impact life in rural Ireland — is only practical for a small number of privileged landholders. This vision of smaller-scale settlement does nothing to dislodge the current way of thinking about nature as something for humans to use.
Judging from this essay collection and his recent articles in the popular press, Kingsnorth’s writing has become more impassioned lately about issues of homeland than about nature. In short, he has transmuted nature into place. This might seem to be taking us far afield from ecological thinking, except that for Kingsnorth, “nature” is the force that naturalizes his nationalism. He writes, “When I think about these questions [of nationalism], I always find myself coming back to the place itself: the woods, the fields, the streets, the towns, the beaches.” This is the age-old vision of mother nature as essence that’s been used to prop up all manner of bad ideologies such as colonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia in the name of what is “natural.” At the heart of this essentialism is Kingsnorth’s conventional insistence that nature is something apart from humans, over there; something that exists in the wilderness rather than a city park. At one point in Confessions he describes the moment of his ecological conversion as a young person: “I vowed, self-importantly, that this would be my life’s work: saving nature from people.” But nature and people are not separate warring entities. While Kingsnorth is not a fascist (despite having been accused of “opening the door wide” to eco-fascism by one website after he published a piece in the Guardian this year making a case for a “benevolent green nationalism”), he has thought himself into a corner. That an environmentalist can reach such toxic conclusions is a good illustration of why we must abandon traditional thinking about nature if we hope for an ecological future worth living.
Another End of the World is Possible 