“Withdrawing” is the darker half of the same admonition:
If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.
It’s an ethos, at least. And one with a pedigree. What might read at first like a radical response to a new moment of crisis is in fact a repurposing of the long and many-armed ascetic tradition, stretching from the young Buddha through the pillar saints and beyond. But unlike the conventional version, in which the ascetic impulse carries the seeker away from the pleasures of the world toward spiritual meaning in something like worldly pain, Kingsnorth’s withdrawal, like McPherson’s, is a retreat from a world convulsed by spiritual pain toward small, earthly consolations. In that way, it is a performance at grand scale of the more general prophylactic reflex we share, almost all of us, toward suffering—which is to say, simply, an aversion. And to what end? It can’t possibly be that I feel the anguish of others, and the urgency of action, through the “myth” of civilization alone—can it?
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Dark Mountain is fringe. Guy McPherson is fringe. John B. McLemore, too. But one threat of climate catastrophe is that their strains of ecological nihilism might find a home in the host of consensus wisdom—and that their premonitions may seem familiar to you is a sign that some of that anxiety and despair is already leeching into the way so many others think about the future of the world. Online, the climate crisis has given rise to what is called “eco-fascism”—a “by any means necessary” movement that also traffics in white supremacy and prioritizes the climate needs of a particular set. On the left, there is a growing admiration for the climate authoritarianism of Xi Jinping.
In the United States, the go-it-alone impulse to environmentalist separatism has been predominantly the domain of right-wing extremists—Cliven Bundy and his family, for instance, and all the imperious settlers the country has uncomplicatedly mythologized in the centuries since homesteading and range wars. Perhaps in response, liberal environmentalism has grown mostly in a more practical direction, tending toward more engagement rather than the opposite. Or perhaps it just reflects the particular demands of this cause: form a renunciation community and risk having those you’ve renounced do everything you feared they might, unleashing changes to the planet you are powerless to escape.
But this pragmatism brings its own curiosities—for instance, that many of even those who define themselves as practical technocrats of the environmental center-left believe that what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change is a global mobilization at the scale of World War II. They are right—that is an entirely sober assessment of the size of the problem, which no more alarmist a group than the IPCC endorsed in 2018. But it is also an undertaking of ambitions so inconsistent with the present tense of politics in nearly every corner of the world, that it is hard not to worry what will happen when that mobilization does not happen—to the planet, yes, but also to the political commitments of those most engaged with the problem. Those calling for mass mobilization, starting today and no later, remember—they can be counted as environmental technocrats. To their left are those who see no solution short of political revolution. And even those activists are being crowded for space, these days, by texts of climate alarmism, of which you may even feel the book in your hands is one. That would be fair enough, because I am alarmed.
I am not alone. And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops. It is one way to understand why activists in California were so frustrated with their governor, Jerry Brown, even though he established a climate program of surpassing ambition just as he left office—because he didn’t act aggressively enough to retire existing fossil fuel capacity. It also helps explain frustration with other leaders, from Justin Trudeau, who has seized the rhetorical mantle of climate action but also approved several new Canadian pipelines, to Angela Merkel, who has overseen an exhilarating expansion of Germany’s green energy capacity, but also retired its nuclear power so quickly that some of the slack has been taken up by existing dirty plants. To the average citizen of each of these countries, the criticism may seem extreme, but it arises from a very clearheaded calculus: the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.
In the meantime, environmental panic is growing, and so is despair. Over the last several years, as unprecedented weather and unrelenting research have recruited more voices to the army of environmental panic, a dour terminological competition has sprung up among climate writers, aiming to coin new clarifying language—in the mode of Richard Heinberg’s “toxic knowledge” or Kris Bartkus’s “Malthusian tragic”—to give epistemological shape to the demoralizing, or demoralized, response of the rest of the world. To the environmental indifference expected of modern consumers, the philosopher and activist Wendy Lynne Lee has given the name “eco-nihilism.” Stuart Parker’s “climate nihilism” is easier on the tongue. Bruno Latour, an instinctive insubordinate, calls the menace of a raging environment fueled by indifferent politics a “climatic regime.” We have also “climate fatalism” and “ecocide” and what Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, making a psychoanalytic argument against the relentless public-facing optimism of environmental advocacy, have called “human futilitarianism”:
The problem, it turns out, is not an overabundance of humans but a dearth of humanity. Climate change and the Anthropocene are the triumph of an undead species, a mindless shuffle toward extinction, but this is only a lopsided imitation of what we really are. This is why political depression is important: zombies don’t feel sad, and they certainly don’t feel helpless; they just are. Political depression is, at root, the experience of a creature that is being prevented from being itself; for all its crushingness, for all its feebleness, it’s a cry of protest. Yes, political depressives feel as if they don’t know how to be human; buried in the despair and self-doubt is an important realization. If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings, then we are not really, or not yet, human.
The novelist Richard Powers points his finger at a different kind of despair, “species loneliness,” which he identifies not as the impression left on us by environmental degradation but what has inspired us, seeing the imprint we are leaving, to nevertheless continue pressing onward: “the sense we’re here by ourselves, and there can be no purposeful act except to gratify ourselves.” As though initiating a more accommodationist wing of Dark Mountain, he suggests a retreat from anthropocentrism that is not quite a withdrawal from modern civilization: “We have to un-blind ourselves to human exceptionalism. That’s the real challenge. Unless forest-health is our health, we’re never going to get beyond appetite as a motivator in the world. The exciting challenge,” he says, is to make people “plant-conscious.”