Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Come. Join us. We leave at dawn.

  The Eight Principles of Uncivilisation

  We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

  As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

  Robinson Jeffers

  We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

  We reject the faith that holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

  We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories that underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.

  We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

  Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will re-engage with the non-human world.

  We will celebrate writing and art that is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.

  We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.

  The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we shall find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

  2009

  PAUL KINGSNORTH is the author of Beast and The Wake, which won the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Folio Prize, and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize. He is co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, a global network of writers, artists, and thinkers in search of new stories for a world on the brink.

  Confessions of a Recovering

  Environmentalist and Other Essays

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