A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live
with hope in "an age of ecocide"
Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist--an 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 Environmentalist
gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in
Kingsnorth's 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 we've lived and how we should live.
