Transition Network interview: Paul Kingsnorth on living with climate change.
Paul Kingsnorth on living with climate change.
(Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist) was a piece that I wrote at a point where I felt that environmentalist had hit a wall. I still feel that, actually, and I stand by what I wrote in that essay, What it also is, is a very personal essay. It’s not necessarily a piece of advocacy. I’m not suggesting anyone else should be doing the same thing. But I think the green movement has hit a wall and I think there are certain things that can’t be achieved and that’s not being talked about, which was why I wanted to withdraw from my involvement in it.
I think one of the reasons I moved on from green campaigning to the Dark Mountain kind of writing I do now, is I kind of gave up on raising awareness as a useful response. I think that there’s a false assumption within the green movement and within all political movements actually, that if you give people enough information, and you raise their awareness, that that will lead to action. I believed that for a long time, and I can remember in the early 1990s writing about climate change and campaigning on it, no-one else in the mainstream was talking about it, it was just a few greenies.
We all believed that if people knew about this on a big scale then obviously they would act, it’s just so obvious that they would act, isn’t it? Now they know about it on a wide scale. It’s been on the front pages of newspapers for the last 10 years. Everybody knows about climate change, all the information is out there, and nothing is happening.
We assume people are being rational all the time and that if you give them facts they’ll act on the facts. That’s not really what happens. We all make assumptions based on our prejudices and intuitions and then we use the facts to back them up. Call me cynical but I think that’s the way that humans work. I think that’s the way that we all work.
If you start off on the assumption that if you raise enough awareness things will change, I think you’re in the wrong place. My conclusion personally is that the useful thing you can do is keep telling the truth, to keep being honest about what’s actually happening to provide information for people who want to act on it, but also just to hunker down really and get on with doing what useful work you can do at your local level without imagining that you can change the way that society is going, because I don’t think at the moment that you can.
My position is far less equivocal than Kingsnorth's. Human beings exhibit little rationality. Most of our decisions are driven by emotions that support evolutionary drives such as self-interest, group identity, growth, etc. There is no evidence that groups of any size larger than about 100 can follow rational paths that run counter to those evolutionary drives. Individuals can (sometimes), but groups cannot.
For more discussion of Kingsnorth's position, see Dave Cohen's article at
The Decline of Empire.