A reading list for the end of the world

In a time when lies are the coin of the realm, an honest reckoning is refreshing! And there are few things more delicious than having inchoate thoughts and feelings, and then finding those ideas, refined and crafted into words of perfect clarity, in a book.

That's how I felt when reading Paul Kingsnorth's Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, a collection of his essays, most of which were written for the Dark Mountain Project, which he co-founded. Perhaps you've heard of it.

The point of Dark Mountain was to gather like-minded creative thinkers to share ideas and stories about the current situation and the unimaginable future -- about the violence our species has done to our planet and how to live with that, going forward. These are no longer radical, fringe ideas, and Kingsnorth is resigning from running Dark Mountain this month, because he feels he's said his bit. More on Kingsnorth later.

Yes, these are good days to be talking about the end of the world as we know it. I've moved on from reading Kingsnorth to reading Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, by Roy Scranton. Holy cow! Prophets of doom come in a variety of flavors. Scranton is the fire-breathing sort. More on him later as well.

Shaken to the core by Scranton's book, Wen Stephenson brooded for two years and then produced this essay, about reading Hannah Arendt:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/learning-to-live-in-the-dark-reading-arendt-in-the-time-of-climate-change/#!

Stephenson's book is next on my list.