“Over the years, I’ve been called an anarchist, reactionary, communist, left-wing oikophile, crazy collapsitarian, woolly liberal, nativist, cave-dweller, Luddite, Romantic, doomer, nihilist, fascist and – my favourite – ‘lower middle-class eco toff.’ I am happy with all of these, and hope to collect more.”

Paul Kingsnorth, “Occasionally Asked Questions”

Paul Kingsnorth is a renowned British environmentalist, deep ecologist, and all-round interesting character. On his website,* he describes himself as 75% English, 25% Greek Cypriot, 100% European, 0% European Union, and a descendant of the Viking Earls of the Orkney Isles.

* which you can easily find via a search engine, I wouldn’t want to link to his site from a badthink blog like this.

He is both anti-capitalist and anti-economic globalization and has authored books on both subjects – though that accounts for only a small section of his bibliography.

He describes his writing as follows:

“My story is the link between people and places, and what the ongoing breaking of that link means for our world and for our souls. It is also about the ongoing destruction of the world’s wild beauty, and our fatal severance from the non-human world.”

Anyone with political or philosophical alignments close to myself may recognize the between-the-lines TL;DR of this paragraph: “Blood and Soil.”

Is Kingsnorth a Fascist? No, not really. He chooses not to pigeon hole himself politically, claiming that he’s yet to find a political tribe with whom he wishes to align. That being said, most individuals who are concerned with ecology and nature, and have enough sanity to outright reject Libtardism and Cultural Marxism, tend to channel “Fascism” to some degree. You will find Fascistic undertones running throughout Kingsnorth’s work, but you’ll find a few Communistic undertones too. As the man said, he’s not one to be pigeonholed.

On politics, Kingsnorth says the following:

“I believe that the global industrial economy – what William Cobbet called ‘the Thing’, but what we might equally simply call the human empire – is destroying the life support systems of the Earth itself, razing and homogenising the mosaic of human cultures and increasingly using humans as fodder in a techno-industrial machine which may one day supplant us. This is known as ‘progress’. Its cultural arm, individualist liberalism, is meanwhile engaged in stripping all meaning, truth and traditional support structures from our lives, in a headlong plunge towards what looks to be a glorified nihilism disguised as liberation. In opposition to this, I believe in a healthy suspicion of entrenched power, whether it is entrenched in leaders, states or corporations; decentralisation of economics, politics and culture; connection to land, nature and heritage; an attention to matters of the spirit; heterodox tolerance, freedom of expression and an appreciation of beauty.”

All in all, quite agreeable.

Recently, Survive the Jive shared an excellent hour-long documentary-interview with Kingsnorth via Twitter. The video is embedded below, and beneath it, I’ll share my favorite stills and quotes from the documentary, though I highly recommend watching the entire production – it’s bursting with wisdom and beautifully shot landscapes.

Don’t be perturbed by the title, “Battle Against Climate Change” – the documentary genuinely has very little to do with climate change, which is mentioned fleetingly only a couple of times. I suspect that the title may have been a crafty ruse to bait people who paddle around in the shallows of ecology into taking a plunge in the deep end.

The documentary is philosophical and spiritual with elements of anti-Enlightenment, anti-materialism, and the necessity to transcend small-brained left vs right politics, among other things.

Note: Those of you already familiar with my posts may know that I firmly believe the Climate Change™ or Global Warming™ agenda is psyop, originally fabricated by the United Nations and Standard Oil Co’s “Club of Rome.” The agenda has two main objectives: 1) propagating the existence of the System 2) brainwashing populations into accepting increasingly degrading, increasingly bug-like living conditions (specifically, brainwashing Whites). That’s all explained in detail in this extensive post here, which covers absolutely everything you need to know.

The most interesting take in the documentary, in my opinion, was Kingsnorth advocating a revival of Animism, or similar spiritual belief system. This is something I’ve considered as of late, having re-read a few books and recently watched the Studio Ghibli masterpiece, Princess Mononoke (which is a must-see for all environmentally-focused folks, especially if you have children – it’s a great kids film).


Anyway, here’s the documentary:



And here are my favorite quotes:

“Environmentalism is not just about protecting landscapes but about having a correct relationship with the rest of life on Earth.”

“The big question is not what technology do we use to continue the same trajectory, it’s how do we change the trajectory, and I don’t hear that question being asked in a significant way, in as many places as it should be. Even now.”

“My daughter sees fairies in the trees and she’s absolutely sure that they’re real […] if you could remember the intense relationship that you had with nature as a child it would be heartbreaking when you had to live in the middle of London and sit in an office all day.”

“I’ve got young children, I used to think they’d be old before things really got bad but I’m not sure anymore… we’re not equipped for that because of the story of progress that we believe in… progress is the religious story that we tell ourselves in western civilization.”

“The green movement originally wasn’t left or right wing, it was supposed to be an attempt to move beyond that division, putting the interests of life as a whole at the heart of our politics, rather than arguing about power dynamics that the left and right argue about.”

“The greens have been subsumed into the political left, to a really, really dangerous degree [… and] because environmentalism has gone very leftish […] protecting nature is now seen as a partisan issue, which it shouldn’t be.”

“The progressive narrative has a real problem with anything emulating the past, or anything that draws on the wisdom of the past, or anything that has roots in the land, or anything that has a connection with nature; we put that in a box labeled ‘Reactionary Romanticism'”

“Sustainability has become a kind of comfort blanket for middle class people, they can say “I’ve got an electric car” etc. etc. You can buy your way into a sustainable lifestyle. Every corporate boardroom has a Sustainability Officer green-washing the company”

“Part of the myth of progress is that we believe that we’re evolving past religion, that there’s something primitive about that sense of the sacred… if we don’t have anything that we believe is above us then we become destroyers, and put ourselves at the center of the world.”

“If there’s going to be any future to the kind of culture we’re in, or whatever it turns into, it’s got to be in finding some sense of the sacred in nature itself, either going back to, or going forward to, some almost pagan or animist sense of the divinity in everything.”

“We’re all animals, we’re all identical to the people who painted the paleolithic cave walls 30,000 years ago, biologically we haven’t changed, or very little. We’re still wild creatures, we’ve never been domesticated.”

“We like to pretend that central heating and wi-fi connections have somehow put a wall of glass between us and the rest of nature, but it’s not there, we’re still in it. We could start behaving a bit more animal-like again and it wouldn’t do us any harm at all.”

“There’s a whole aspect of our nature that has slid away, the part of us that is prepared to be honestly bewildered, that says we don’t really know what the world is, why we have the reactions to it that we do, and that there is a necessity to stand back with that lack of knowing”

“What would the world look like if you told a story that wasn’t about endless human progress? The oldest stories are always about places, always about speaking animals, always about gods, about all of the different ways of representing and personifying the rest of life.”

“Once you drop from your shoulders the self-imposed burden of having to save the world from everything… breathe a sigh of relief, and say “well what can I actually still do?” For me, it comes down to the work you have to do on yourself, what sort of person do you want to be?”