I want to be completely honest, I was not sure whether to recommend the last book I read in this section. While I was reading it, there were certain moments when I wasn’t quite sure whether it was an environmentalist essay or rather an anti-environmentalist one. The title itself already hints the author’s feelings about the topic: Confessions of a recovering environmentalist. And the author is none other than Paul Kingsnorth, former editor-in-chief of The Ecologist, the leading environmental newspaper in the United Kingdom until it stopped being published in 2009. He’s not someone we would typically label as “anti-environmentalist.” And yet, in this book, Kingsnorth moves along a very blurry line. He does not deny the ecological crisis – quite the opposite – but he speaks about it and about the ways we try to combat it with a sense of unease that can feel deeply discouraging.

The book could be described as an autobiographical essay tracing Paul Kingsnorth’s journey, in which he recalls his years as an activist involved in numerous campaigns, mobilizations, and environmental actions, as well as his time as a writer committed to the cause. In short, a person driven to act by the urgency of the situation. He also reflects on how, little by little, all of that has faded away. The feeling you get while reading many parts of the book is discouragement, seeing that despite all the efforts made, the world does not change its course. The solutions proposed are mere band aids, and even environmentalists themselves give ground, making concessions in order to reach agreements. The author does not “give up” because he stops believing in the ecological crisis or its urgency, but because he stops believing in the environmentalist activism. He questions institutionalized activism, what he sees as an excessive faith in technology, and the ideas of sustainable progress or green capitalism.

“Environmentalism has ended up in a position where no one can do anything but argue about which machines are best suited to keep feeding the relentless growth of our industrial society”

The fact that he lost faith in this “more visible” activism does not mean that Kingsnorth abandoned his values; he continues to live by them in a way he considers more coherent. Not by trying to do everything perfectly and show it – or make it go viral – but rather through a day-to-day, ordinary, and routinary perspective. His activism is more focused on inhabiting the world sustainably rather than on changing it. In the book, he explains how he moved to the countryside. He grows his own food to reduce his dependence on intensive industrial systems. He has adopted practices that many would find uncomfortable or too radical: he installed a composting toilet at home to reduce water consumption. These are not performative gestures – he doesn’t publicize them on social media or build campaigns around them. For him, they are simply the logical consequence of his way of thinking, of his ecological values. This is one of the key themes running through the book: the difference between acting to save the world and simply living according to what one believes is right.