"We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."
Tom Smith: Orion Magazine have posted the audio from their web event with Paul Kingsnorth (of the fantastic Dark Mountain Project), Lierre Keith (of Deep Green Resistance), and David Abram (author of Spell of the Sensuous).
These three writers have had a profound influence on my own thinking, starting with Kingsnorth's early work One No, Many Yeses, right up to the recent release of the Keith's co-authored book Deep Green Resistance, and hold great relevance for the web of thought explored on this blog.
The focus of the discussion is primarily Kingsnorth's essay Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, which was first published in Dark Mountain Volume 1 and which lucidly and poetically explores the ideologies hindering the modern environmental movement, looking at where it has been tragically sidetracked. Importantly, he critiques such things as the technocratic carbon accounting which is increasingly swallowing up the activity of environmentalists, and laments the sacrificing of what remains of the wild for things such as industrial wind power stations (he describes the neutral, friendly term "wind farm" as Orwellian) just so that we can try to continue our unsustainable lives.
The essay closes with a sense of withdrawal, a dismayed withdrawal away from mainstream environmental approaches ("I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words.")
This is the point where Paul's work merges powerfully with that of Abram. Modern environmentalism has become an abstraction, an attempt to, for example, reduce carbon to 350ppm by a certain date, we have only X months to do this and the clock's ticking etc. etc. Such abstraction is a reflection of the modern world, and distances us from the reality that surrounds us - our situation in nature, in the here and now. We get so caught up in words and targets and carbon that we forget what it is that we're trying to save and end up, as is presently the case, trying to save the only thing we now know - industrial civilization - instead of trying to prevent human destruction of the non-human (and human) world. As Abram states in The Spell of the Sensuous, "Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities."
The thought-provoking audio's available here and the original article here .
Enjoy!
This is the point where Paul's work merges powerfully with that of Abram. Modern environmentalism has become an abstraction, an attempt to, for example, reduce carbon to 350ppm by a certain date, we have only X months to do this and the clock's ticking etc. etc. Such abstraction is a reflection of the modern world, and distances us from the reality that surrounds us - our situation in nature, in the here and now. We get so caught up in words and targets and carbon that we forget what it is that we're trying to save and end up, as is presently the case, trying to save the only thing we now know - industrial civilization - instead of trying to prevent human destruction of the non-human (and human) world. As Abram states in The Spell of the Sensuous, "Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities."
The thought-provoking audio's available here and the original article here .
Enjoy!
