Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Quotes

“We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“I can't speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“Increasingly, though, for those penned into cities with no view of the stars and no taste of clean air and nothing but grass between the cracks in the pavement to nourish their sense of the wild, this is no freedom at all. We have made ourselves caged animals, and all the gadgets in the world cannot compensate for what we have lost. Humans”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“Romanticizing the past' is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a ‘defeatist’ or a ‘doomer’, or claim you are ‘burned out’. They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that ‘fighting’ is always better than ‘quitting’. Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel – intuit – work out what is right for you, and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance – refusing to tighten the ratchet further – is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“Twenty-First Century Syndrome: knowing a place so well that you’re bored by the time you first visit.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“We have cut ourselves off from everything else that lives, and because we don't believe that it does live, we have ended up talking only to ourselves. We have ended what Thomas Berry called 'the great conversation' between humans and other forms of life. We are becoming human narcissists, entombed in our cities, staring into our screens, seeing our faces and our minds reflected back and believing this is all there is. And outside the forests fall, the ice melts, the corals die back and extinctions roll on; but we keep writing our love letters to ourselves, oblivious.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“These days my desire, overpowering sometimes, is for some land. An acre or two, some bean rows. A pasture, broadleaved trees, a view of a river. A small house, my kids running about. Solidity, hard ground beneath me, something there to stop me sinking. Clean air, food, meat water. Family, earth, mud, all the small wonders and irritations of life rising up to meet me as i come home. Having a home.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays

“I can't make my peace with people who cannibalise the land in the name of saving it.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays