Confessions of a recovering environmentalist and other essays / Paul Kingsnorth.

Introduction: Finding the river -- I. Collapse. A crisis of bigness ; Upon the mathematics of the falling away ; The drowned world ; The space race is over ; The quants and the poets ; A short history of loss -- II. Withdrawal. Confessions of a recovering environmentalist ; The poet and the machine ; Learning what to make of it ; the barcode moment ; Dark ecology -- III. Connection. In the black chamber ; The old yoke ; The bay ; Rescuing the English ; The witness ; Singing to the forest ; Planting trees in the Anthropocene -- Epilogue: Uncivilisation / with Dougald Hine ; The eight principles of uncivilisation.

"Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist--an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on "sustainability" rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake, and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change. Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth's thinking. In them he articulates a new vision, one that stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds."--Page 4 of cover.