## Metadata - Author: [[Paul Kingsnorth]] - Full Title: Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays - Category: #books ## Highlights - Engage with any of the world’s great spiritual teachers, or many of its secular philosophers, and you will come across the claim that most of us, most of the time, are caught up in our own delusions. That is to say, we are creating our own mental maps of the world, by which we navigate its harsh tracts, and we are hugely reluctant to see these maps taken from us, or to see any of the directions printed on them questioned. These maps may be religious, philosophical, political or any variation of these things. But they mean that when we look out at the world, we don’t see the world itself, we see our own perception of it, and that perception of it is coloured by our own emotional needs. So, if we need to believe in progress, we will believe in progress. If we need to believe in Apocalypse, we will believe in that. If we need to deny the existence of climate change, or believe we can go back to the Pleistocene or forward to the Martian future, we will believe those things, and as long as we want to believe them, nothing can tear those maps from our hands. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=489)) - Like all of us, I am a foot soldier of empire. It is the empire of Homo sapiens sapiens and it stretches from Tasmania to Baffin Island. Like all empires, it is built on expropriation and exploitation, and like all empires it dresses these things up in the language of morality and duty. When we turn wilderness over to agriculture, we speak of our duty to feed the poor. When we industrialise the wild places, we speak of our duty to stop the climate from changing. When we spear whales, we speak of our duty to science. When we raze forests, we speak of our duty to develop. We alter the atmospheric make-up of the entire world: half of us pretends it’s not happening, the other half immediately starts looking for new machines that will reverse it. This is how empires work, particularly when they have started to decay. Denial, displacement, anger, fear. ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=950)) - I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo – that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out and if outside the dining-room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans. ([Location 960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=960)) - Personally, I have always been with Orwell and with D. H. Lawrence: the techno-industrial culture dehumanises us, sucks out of us some animal essence, which it is impossible perhaps to explain but can be clearly intuited by those who are paying attention. But we can’t react to this by trying to globalise or politicise these intuitions. We don’t have to be ‘activists’, campaigning to try and make our particular view of virtual technology the dominant one. This kind of approach is doomed to fail and will likely lead to despair, just as the attempt to prevent climate change and environmental crisis in this way is leading to despair. There are tides in the affairs of men, and standing on the beach ordering the waves back does not make you brave or forward-thinking. ([Location 1411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=1411)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - ‘Sell your cleverness’, advises the Persian mystic poet Rumi, ‘and buy bewilderment. ([Location 1899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=1899)) - ‘The births of living creatures are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time,’ wrote Francis Bacon in 1597. Bacon was quite open, as were many earlier philosophers, about humanity’s duty to dominate the rest of life. The most ‘noble’ aim that anyone could pursue, Bacon wrote in Novum Organum, was to ‘extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe’. ([Location 2037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2037)) - Argue that a forest should be protected because of its economic value as a ‘carbon sink’, and you have nothing to say when gold or oil of much greater value are discovered beneath it. ([Location 2113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2113)) - Speaking the language of the dominant culture, the culture of human empire that measures everything it sees and demands a return, is not a clever trick but a clever trap. Omit that sense of the sacred in nature – play it down, diminish it, laugh nervously when it is mentioned – and you are lost, and so is the world that moved you to save it for reasons you are never quite able to explain. ([Location 2115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2115)) - Spiritual teachers throughout history have all taught that the divine is reached through simplicity, humility and self-denial: through the negation of the ego and respect for life. To put it mildly, these are not qualities that our culture encourages. But that doesn’t mean they are antiquated; only that we have forgotten why they matter. This is not something we ought to be proud of. ([Location 2138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2138)) - Britain is, today, the country with the second most unequal distribution of land on Earth, after Brazil. More than 70 per cent of the land is owned by less than 2 per cent of the population. Much of this is directly traceable to Guillaume, whose twenty-second-great-granddaughter sits today on the English throne. ([Location 2220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2220)) - A nation, in other words, is about belonging – to a specific place that is not quite like another place, and to a collective of people you share things with. This kind of belonging can be stifling or liberating, and sometimes both at once, but at its best it gives us a mooring in space and time, without which we are liable to be washed away. If we want to see what a world without belonging would look like, we have only to look around. If an identity is an alliance between people and places, then airport-lounge modernity means taking the places out of the picture. All that is left is people who could be anywhere: citizens of nowhere, consumers of objects and experiences, connected by their little screens, the same white light shining into their faces from Don-caster to Dubai. ([Location 2442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2442)) - We live in an age of climate change and mass extinction, burgeoning cities, deepening immersion in technologies of distraction, the spreading ideology of mass consumption. The antidote to this global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature is the slow, messy business of getting to know a landscape. If a nation is a relationship between people and place, then a cultural identity that comes from a careful relationship with that place might be a new story worth telling. ([Location 2546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2546)) - We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual ‘autism’. ([Location 2662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2662)) - It turns out that living a simpler life can be quite complicated. ([Location 2873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2873)) - Both may give you sore arms, but there is a difference between a keyboard and a spade. A spade can still be made fairly simply. It doesn’t need constant energy to keep going. It can last a long time, if you treat it well, rather like your body. A keyboard and a spade are both products of an industrial economy, but not to the same extent, and they do not have the same purpose. One can exist independently, the other cannot. This might be a matter of degrees, but the degrees matter – and so does the intent. ([Location 2980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=2980)) - We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75 per cent of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25 per cent more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace – a figure predicted to rise to 80 per cent by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us. ([Location 3173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LYGITP7&location=3173))