Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Paul Kingsnorth Warns You

Paul Kingsnorth wants to warn you about Neogreens who Could Destroy Nature in the name of the Environment.  In case you are the sort of greenie or environmentalist who:

  1. is stuck in the past, and/or
  2. is following the money, and/or
  3. was born yesterday, and/or
  4. doesn't know much.
This is Paul Kingsnorth's greatest article since I noticed him.  It is timely.  It is overdue.  There are too many armchair and activist environmentalists  whom are still bogged down in everybody else's Carbon Footprints.  They had forgotten Nature, and while they lost sight of it, more of it was turned over to the bidding of Mankind. 

What has made Paul a king's thorn in the backside of the Green world is that he believes it probably is too late to avert man-made climate change.   I agree with his strategy - the strategy he calls "withdrawal".  The juggernaut of the Global Human Economic Machine grows forever larger, whether or not it does so boldly or with the sinister silence of stealth technology.  Withdrawal from trying to halt a juggernaut is just as effective as throwing pebbles at it, which is what most greenie environmentalists have been doing for years.  Withdraw.   Sing, laugh and play, and actively engage in the restoration of nature.  It does not matter if economists (whom are torpid useless blobs incapable even of accountancy jobs) criticise Paul Kingsnorth as the leader of the Neopeasantry, as did Tim Worstall.   These criticisms have moved onto Twitter, and the ridiculous argument is as follows:

 I've done hard physical labour. That's why I hate it and am glad that so few others have to do it. Roll on mechanisation!
 It's been rolling on for two hundred years. That's why we're fucked. Still. I'm sure technology will save us, eh?
 What? You're serious? You're against mechanisation? Everything must be sweat of the brow? You actually mad or what?
 But it can't have escaped even your attention that industrialisation has led directly to mass extinction and climate change.

It is bad enough that we have blogging, and television, and radio, and newspapers.   The Global Human Economic Machine (GHEM) is now bogged down in piecemeal dialogues enabled by Twitter.  When even Monty Don, bless his huge hands, has had to launch a digital entity to protect and enhance his public personality, the pervasiveness of instant yet time-wasting digital communications has to be considered total.

Because of the wetness and bad weather brought on by climate change, there have been few days this summer to hear the birds tweet, but the noise on Twitter has grown louder.  There have been so few days suitable for insect flying, that bees and less popular insects are well below their usual numbers.   When the sun has come out, so too have all of mankind, in its usual rush to show that it deserves to keep its job/contract, or to pander to the status system of suburban society.  Yes, they have been mowing, strimming, hedge and bush cutting in every rare and precious moment when the weather was dry enough for bees to fly. I hate suburbanization.   All the world will one day be a contiguous suburb, as barren as the one I know now.   And all we have is Twitter to save us from a desert landscape worthy of a Jewish cemetery.

There is a contradiction of being a neo-Luddite.  You have to embrace peasant technology such as scything, while maintaining excellence in GHEM high technology, whether it be in global communications, pharmacology, or genetic manipulation.  It is obviously an uncomfortably broad spectrum of technology to master, but one where genius is essential.  This is not anything that you will learn from the Olympics, now at the crowing and crowning peak of its medalling glorifications.   Like the Roman peasants whom used to watch the gladiatorial games, a modern Olympic peasant does not understand his or her future, let alone the planet's future.

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