Have you ever thought when listening to earnest discussions around environment, sustainability, and climate change that something felt fantastical? Far from being able to "solve" climate change, have you ever worried that we have gone past the point of no return? If so, then "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist" by Paul Kingsnorth will give voice to your forebodings. These fifteen essays challenge fundamental pillars of our globalized society: the inevitability of progress, the power and abuse of technology, an anthropocentric view of the earth, and a desire for control that underpins so much of our economy and way of life.

The co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, Kingsnorth fits comfortably within the British tradition of rural environmentalism ("Back to the Land") and the more modern Deep Ecology movement. But he has neither the saccharine nature of elite British rural fetishists nor the deep misanthropy of the deep ecology thinkers. One could also place him firmly into the anti-Globalization movement but his disillusion with the global environmental movement and even the anti-capitalist struggle make him a quiet revolutionary still working out the implications of the development of his thinking. I see none of the arrogance one might see in similarly themed works. In some ways, I feel that he a unique thinker - quiet, reflective, neither left nor right, passionate about nature and genuinely concerned with the way we can live in the face of collapse and change (the closest intellectual relative to Kingsnorth might be E.F. Schumacher).

I see many of the pieces here as clear eyed at the challenges facing society. Have you gone past the point of no return? Simply, yes. And there is nothing our technology or cleverness can do to get out out it. What are we to do about it? For Kingsnorth and other members of the Dark Mountain Project, we need for us to reconfigure our relationship with the natural world and with each other through new stories that take into account our new realities. It was this focus on stories, art, and narrative that first attracted me to his work and I think offers more positive, if not easy, answer to the despair around us.

I recommend this book because asks questions that many may have had in the back of their minds but might not have been able to articulate. Even if you disagree with his answers, the questions are worth engaging with.