EXIT STRATEGY

A leading “dark ecologist” warns against hope.

- BY CAL REVELY-CALDER

In 2014, Paul Kingsnorth was sunk in doubt. He was forty-one and had been on the green movement's front lines since the nineteen-nineties—working for Greenpeace and EarthAction, chaining himself to a bridge, getting teargassed outside a G-8 summit. In the course of two decades, he had become one of Britain’s leading environmentalists, and an accomplished novelist, too: “The Wake,” set in eleventh-century Lincolnshire and written in cod—Old English (“When i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time”), was long-listed that summer for the Booker Prize.

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. He’s lived there ever since, writing on his Substack,