It seemed to me, as I got older, that environmentalism was becoming preoccupied with taming these wild places – deserts, oceans, mountains – in order to harness green energy to fuel our way of life, and that of a small percentage of the world’s people in particular. Paul Kingsnorth, in his essay collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, describes modern environmentalism as ‘the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy’, and suggests that it seems to be moved these days by a strange sort of equation: ‘Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.’ So I gave
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