Kingsnorth published a new manifesto: Paul Kingsnorth, “Dark Ecology,” Orion, November–December 2012. This manifesto includes this passage:
What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history. Some kind of fall back down to a lower level of civilizational complexity. Something like the storm that is now visibly brewing all around us.
If you don’t like any of this, but you know you can’t stop it, where does it leave you? The answer is that it leaves you with an obligation to be honest about where you are in history’s great cycle, and what you have the power to do and what you don’t. If you think you can magic us out of the progress trap with new ideas or new technologies, you are wasting your time. If you think that the usual “campaigning” behavior is going to work today where it didn’t work yesterday, you will be wasting your time. If you think the machine can be reformed, tamed, or defanged, you will be wasting your time. If you draw up a great big plan for a better world based on science and rational argument, you will be wasting your time. If you try to live in the past, you will be wasting your time. If you romanticize hunting and gathering or send bombs to computer store owners, you will be wasting your time.
tending toward more engagement: You can see this in how quite radical thinkers about the environment and our obligations to it, from Jedediah Purdy to Naomi Klein, focus so intently on the problems of political action. In Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2015), he builds an entire practical politics out of the intuition, inarguably true, that the final and total conquest of the planet by people is marked simultaneously by its degradation; and argues that the end of that long era of natural abundance demands a more democratic approach to environmental politics, policy, and law—even when, or perhaps especially because, any alteration from the present course seems almost infrastructurally impossible. In a 2017 exchange with Katrina Forrester, later published in Dissent, he elaborated:
Here is our paradox: The world can’t go on this way; and it can’t do otherwise. It was the collective power of some—not all—human beings that got us into this: power over resources, power over the seasons, power over one another. That power has created a global humanity, entangled in a Frankenstein ecology. But it does not yet include the power of accountability or restraint, the power we need. To face the Anthropocene, humans would need a way of facing one another. We would need, first, to be a we.
From a certain vantage, this may just look like conventional politics, of the kind that Kingsnorth derides as impossibly naive. They are also my politics, for what it’s worth—I nod my head in recognition when I read Kate Marvel calling for courage rather than hope, and when I read Naomi Klein rhapsodizing about a community of political resistance growing out of the local sites of protests she calls “Blockadia.” I believe, as Purdy does, that the degradation of the planet and the end of natural abundance demand a new progressivism animated by a renewed egalitarian energy; and I believe, as Al Gore does, that we should push technology to chase every last glimmer of hope for averting disastrous climate change—including unleashing, or indulging, market forces to help do so when we can. I believe, as Klein does, that some particular market forces have almost conquered our politics, but not entirely, leaving a bright shining sliver of opportunity; and I also believe, as Bill McKibben does, that meaningful and even dramatic change can be achieved through the familiar paths: voting and organizing and political activity deployed at every level. In other words, I believe in engagement above all, engagement wherever it may help. In fact, I find any other response to the climate crisis morally incomprehensible.
global mobilization: That this is a familiar analogy is unfortunate, because it blunts the intended impression: the Allies’ mobilization was unprecedented in human history and has never been matched since. We did not defeat the Nazis with a change to the marginal tax rate, as much as proponents of a climate tax want to see it as a single-step cure-all. In World War II, there was also a draft, a nationalization of industry, and widespread rationing. If you can imagine a tax rate on carbon that would produce that kind of action in just three decades, you have a better imagination than I do.
“eco-nihilism”: Wendy Lynne Lee, Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017).
“climate nihilism”: Parker used the term in explaining his decision to quit Canada’s New Democratic Party after its premier endorsed subsidizing natural gas.
“climatic regime”: In an essay titled “Love Your Monsters,” Latour elaborated a jeremiad of environmental responsibility from Mary Shelley’s parable, one that begins with a perhaps romantic plea for a clear-eyed recognition of just what we have wrought—writing that, “just as we have forgotten that Frankenstein was the man, not the monster, we have also forgotten Frankenstein’s real sin.”
Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself. When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was not born a monster, but that it became a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the laboratory once the horrible thing twitched to life.
A similar case for responsibility comes from Donna Haraway, the theorist behind the pioneering feminist Cyborg Manifesto (1985), in her more recent Staying with the Trouble, subtitled Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)—after Chthulu, H. P. Lovecraft’s many-faced monster of cosmic malevolence.
“human futilitarianism”: Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, “Tropical Depressions,” The Baffler 36 (September 2017). “Climate change means, quite plausibly, the end of everything we now understand to constitute our humanity,” Kriss and O’Hagan write. “Something about the magnitude of all this is shattering: most people try not to think about it too much because it’s unthinkable, in the same way that death is always unthinkable for the living. For the people who have to think about it—climate scientists, activists, and advocates—that looming catastrophe evokes a similar horror: the potential extinction of humanity in the future puts humanity into question now.”