I stopped believing in environmentalism. And did this instead...

by Paul Kingsnorth

Former deputy editor of the Ecologist, Paul Kingsnorth, explains why he became disillusioned with the parables of environmentalism, so decided to write his own instead.

It started last year with two men in a pub. It spiraled from there, and gathered in thousands of people from across the world who shared its vision. It is still expanding; so much so that the two men now have rather less time to spend in the pub, because much of their day is spent just trying to keep up with a minor global movement which they have accidentally brought into being.

This is the story of the Dark Mountain Project, a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption, of which I was one of the co-founders less than a year ago. It seems much longer; a lot has happened in a year. We seem to have touched a nerve. This is all the more interesting to me because this project began life as a response to a sense of disillusion with what environmentalism has become.

Read the rest on TheEcologist.com.

Read an interview with the author, Paul Kingsnorth, below.

Paul Kingsnorth: environmentalists have lost their way

Former deputy editor of the Ecologist, Paul Kingsnorth, tells Matilda Lee why an obsession with CO2 has distracted environmentalists, and why we may already be beyond the point of no return...

Matilda Lee: You’ve said the environmental movement has lost its way – too focused on reducing emissions, and not enough on nature. Isn’t this dismissive of the gains that have been made in the past 5 to 10 years?

Paul Kingsnorth: What I’m suggesting is that environmentalism, which has become mainstream, is so obsessed with carbon emissions reductions that it has kind of lost sight of all of the other things it was supposed to be doing.

The main narrative is that we have to reduce emissions by a certain percentage within a certain period of time and there is a small window we’ve got to act, and if we don’t use it, there’s global doom approaching. If we are honest, there is no window. It closed a long time ago.

Read the rest on TheEcologist.com.