Paul Kingsnorth

Paul Kingsnorth, author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist was well profiled in the New York Times magazine of Sunday, April 17, 2014, in an article entitled It's the End of the World As We Know It, and He Feels Fine (link, behind a paywall).

At that time I had a good understanding of climate change but not a lot of active participation in anti-climate-change activism.  Here was a guy who had been very active for decades, and seemed intelligent, and was saying there was essentially no hope.  All the work, all the effort, and no progress, just falling behind farther and farther.  According to the article he came under a fair amount of fire from the remaining legions of activists.

My daughter read the same article and said it was "just too sad" to accept what Kingsnorth said.  She has become active in Extinction Rebellion and The Climate Mobilization.

I followed up by reading Kingsnorth's article The Witness in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. He describes how taking a geological perspective helped reduce the despair he felt at the obvious inability of activists and politicians to stop or even to slow the "accelerating destruction." And he describes how his early introduction to Buddhism at a retreat helped as well.  "All created things perish, said Gautama Buddha. Whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation. This, it turns out, is true of an individual, a species, an ecosystem, or a planetary epoch."

A phrase I particularly recall from that article: "...false hope is worse than no hope...".  Do I believe that? In some situations?

Kingsnorth married and moved to a remote section of Britain, has two children, leads writing workshops, has made some YouTube videos, tries to live sustainably and gently on his plot of land. His preference for "no hope" over "false hope" continues, I believe.  He tries to provide a place where people with some level of despair over climate change and general environmental degradation can come together and share and examine their own thoughts and feelings.

Obviously, other people with years of activism under their belts don't all despair.  But I did notice that Bill McKibben, in his latest book Falter, says that it seems more likely than not to him now that we will experience total disaster, that the "human game has played out," but that he remains engaged. Other activists, it's hard to see how much they are keeping up a brave face not to let down the troops.