Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more
The fourth article in the series written by autonomist and luddite author Mark Boyle for the British newspaper The Guardian between 2016 and 2019. In this text, he particularly critiques the co-optation of the environmental movement by eco-technocracy, which neutralizes any revolutionary perspective by reducing ecology to a simplistic technical issue — reducing the carbon footprint of industrial civilization.
You can read the other texts by Mark Boyle here:
1. Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it
2. Lessons of living like a prince outside cyberia
3. Bored? No way. Ditching technology makes life complicated and beautiful
4. Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more
5. Living without technology taught me about life in society;
6. You don’t need modern medicine to be healthy;
7. Living without technology is not romantic;
8. We must resist, revolt, and rewild ourselves;
9. Disconnecting from the industrial world helped me discover what reality really is.
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Most of us find it easier to imagine a world without pine martens, honeybees, otters and wolves than one without social media, lattes, cheap flights and dishwashers. Even environmentalism, which was once motivated by a love of the natural world, now seems more concerned with finding slightly less destructive ways of enabling an overprivileged civilisation to carry on surfing the internet and buying laptops and yoga mats than it does with protecting wildlife from its ravenous jaws.
All the talk these days is about carbon and something obscure called “sustainability”. There’s much less talk about the kind of human-scale cultures we might want to foster, or why we would even want to help sustain a culture that requires the ransacking of every square centimetre of soil, forest, ocean, river and wilderness to survive. In its understandably pragmatic, green-lite approach to reducing emissions, it lost both its vision and its soul, forgetting that a movement without either is hardly pragmatic.
So instead of defending wild places we now spend our time arguing how to best domesticate these wild places – deserts, oceans, mountains – to generate the “green” energy needed to fuel things that, up until recently, we couldn’t even imagine, let alone claim to need. Environmentalism’s increasingly urban mindset, Kingsnorth claims, can be summed up by an absurd equation: “Destruction – Carbon = Sustainability”.
To read the full version:
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