Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays [Paperback]

A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in an age of ecocide

Paul Kingsnorth was once an activistan ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on sustainability rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change.

Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild,Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalistgathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorths thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls dark ecology, which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds.

This iconoclastic, fearless, and ultimately hopeful book, which includes the much-discussed Uncivilization manifesto, asks hard questions about how weve lived and how we should live.

This book is refreshing in both a literary respect and an environmental one. What Kingsnorth argues in these essays is so radical that, if put into practice, it could effect meaningful preservation. . . . Kingsnorths is a much-needed perspective in the environmental movement, recovering or otherwise.Star Tribune(Minneapolis)

Versed in both art and science, he uses an engaging prose style to link disparate topics, from cave paintings to the space race, from the poetry of Charles Bukowski to the Norman Conquest. . . . Although he writes about feeling despair, grief,lƒ=