In some cases, they are rooting them on quite literally. A few, like McLemore, are Travis Bickles of climate crisis, hoping to see a hard rain fall and wash away all the world’s scum. But there are also Pollyannaish connoisseurs of global warming, like ecologist Chris D. Thomas, who argues that, in fact, in the real-time vacuum of the sixth mass extinction, “nature is thriving”—inventing new species, carving new ecological niches. Some technologists and their fans go further, suggesting we should discard our bias for the present—even in the attenuated geological sense of the term “present”—and adopt instead a quasi-Taoist climate sanguinity, layered over with a futurist cast. As Swedish journalist Torill Kornfeldt asks in The Re-Origin of Species, her book about the race to “de-extinct” creatures like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths: “Why should nature as it is now be of any greater value than the natural world of 10,000 years ago, or the species that will exist 10,000 years from now?”
—
But for most who perceive an already unfolding climate crisis and intuit a more complete metamorphosis of the world to come, the vision is a bleak one, often pieced together from perennial eschatological imagery inherited from existing apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, the inescapable sourcebook for Western anxiety about the end of the world. In fact, those ravings, which Yeats more or less translated for a secular audience in “The Second Coming,” have so predominated the Western dreamscape—becoming something like the Gnostic wallpaper of our bourgeois inner lives—that we often forget they were originally written as real-time prophecies, visions of what was to come, and what would become of the world, within a single generation.
Probably the most prominent of these new climate Gnostics is the British writer Paul Kingsnorth, the cofounder, public face, and poet laureate of the Dark Mountain Project, a loose renunciation community of disaffected environmentalists that takes its name from the American writer Robinson Jeffers, in particular his 1935 poem “Rearmament,” which ends:
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future…I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.
Jeffers was, for a time, a literary celebrity in America—a love affair chronicled in the Los Angeles Times, a granite home on the California coast called Tor House and Hawk Tower, which he famously built with his own hands. But he is known today primarily as a prophet of civilizational disavowal, and for the philosophy he bluntly called “inhumanism”: the belief, in short, that people were far too concerned with people-ness, and the place of people in the world, rather than the natural majesty of the nonhuman cosmos in which they happened to find themselves. The modern world, he believed, made the problem considerably worse.
Edward Abbey adored Jeffers’s work, and Charles Bukowski called him his favorite poet. The great American wilderness photographers—Ansel Adams, Edward Weston—were influenced by him, too; and in A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor identified Jeffers, alongside Nietzsche and Cormac McCarthy, as a significant figure of what he called “immanent anti-humanism.” In his most infamous work, “The Double Axe,” Jeffers put that worldview in the mouth of a single character, “The Inhumanist,” who described “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” This would be a genuine revolution in perspective, he wrote, which “offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.”
That detachment forms the core principle of Dark Mountain—though one might better say “impulse.” It will likely animate many more groups of environmental retreatists over the next decades, if global warming makes the broad spectacle of life on Earth increasingly unbearable for some to observe, even through media. “Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence,” the group’s manifesto begins. “What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric.”
In that manifesto, written by Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine and first published in 2009, the group identifies as its intellectual godfather Joseph Conrad, particularly for the way he skewered the self-serving illusions of European civilization at its industrial-colonial peak. They quote Bertrand Russell recapping Conrad, saying that the author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim “thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.” It would be a vivid image to brandish in any era, but especially in a time of approaching ecological collapse. “We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves,” Kingsnorth and Hine write—namely, “the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature.’ ” All, they add, “are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.”
In fact, it is almost hard to think of anything that won’t be changed by just the perception of onrushing change, from the way couples contemplate the possibility of children all the way up to political incentive structure. And you don’t have to get all the way to human extinction or the collapse of civilization for true nihilism and doomsdayism to flourish—you only have to get far enough from the familiar for a critical mass of charismatic prophets to see a coming collapse. It can be comforting to think that the critical mass is quite large, and that societies won’t be upended by nihilism unless nihilism becomes the conventional view of the median citizen. But doom works at the margin, too, eating away at the infrastructure of things like termites or carpenter bees.
—
In 2012, Kingsnorth published a new manifesto, or pseudo-manifesto, in Orion, called “Dark Ecology.” In the meantime, he had grown even less hopeful. “Dark Ecology” opens with epigraphs from Leonard Cohen and D. H. Lawrence—“Take the only tree that’s left / Stuff it up the hole in your culture” and “Retreat to the desert, and fight,” respectively—and really kicks into gear with its second section, which opens: “I’ve recently been reading the collected writings of Theodore Kaczynski. I’m worried that it may change my life.”
All told, the essay, which inspired an enormous response among Orion readers, is a kind of argument on behalf of Kaczynski the pamphleteer against Kaczynski the bomber—whom Kingsnorth describes not as a nihilist or even a pessimist but an incisive observer whose problem was an excess of optimism, a man too committed to the idea that society could be changed. Kingsnorth is more of a true Stoic. “And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time?”
He offers five tentative answers. Numbers 2 through 4 are variations on new transcendentalist themes: “preserving nonhuman life,” “getting your hands dirty,” and “insisting that nature has value beyond utility.” Numbers 1 and 5 are the more radical ones, and form a pair: “withdrawing” and “building refuges.” The latter is the more positive imperative, in the sense of being constructive, or what passes for constructive in a time of collapse: “Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?”