On reading Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, by Paul Kingsnorth

Let's say someone close to you gets a new car. It's a make and model you weren't familiar with -- a Toyota Solara, say. Suddenly, you can't drive anywhere without seeing Solaras. Did a fleet of Solaras suddenly flood the highways? No. You just learned to recognize them.

Reality didn't change, but your perception of it did.

And that's the essence of what Paul Kingsnorth is arguing. Grown and bred in a culture that believes in "progress" and worships the supposed cleverness of our species, people have trouble seeing what is in front of their noses.

What is in front of our noses is not a cheerful view, but neither is the view in the mirror: the planet's most invasive primate species, chewing through the landscape, displacing the planet's other inhabitants at an astonishing rate, spewing waste, all while some monkeys crow about how we're gods now and had better get good at it.

If you know in your bones that we are not gods and not going to get good at it, you'll find good company with Kingsnorth and his fellow-travelers at the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist is well worth reading in its entirety, and I can't begin to do it justice here.

The more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger analysis of where the environmental movement took the wrong road is alone worth the price of the book. The take-downs of technocratic neo-environmentalists are delicious fun. But that's not the end of the story.

The obvious criticism of the Dark Mountain writers is that they are giving up, retreating from the field of battle to save the planet. Actually, I'd say they're taking the fight to a different front -- they just want to change your head.

It sounds mushy and sentimental, but the power to change the behavior of our murderous pack of invasive primates lies with the storytellers, not the technocrats, as recent events in the political and social realms make only too clear.

Getting people to wake up to their biological, animal identities as part (but only one part among many) of an Earth system of interconnected lives strikes me as a good goal, as likely to succeed as anything else we've tried.

Which is to say, not very likely. But you can learn to live with that.