Where the hell do we go from here?

My friend Anthony Galluzzo, who I first met in Brooklyn a few years ago, wrote an interesting essay on Paul Kingsnorth’s novels and about green politics and the left’s obsession with eco-modernism. In it Anthony attempts to think through about what can exist beyond the industrial techno-utopianism thinking that monopolizes our culture and politics today — whether that techno-utopianism comes from the left or the right.

I wanted to give a shout out to Anthony’s writing when it was published it back in May, but it slipped my mind and all sorts of other things got in the way. Having a kid does that, I guess.

I will say that, at least for me, the essay is not an easy read. I’m just not widely read enough in the area Anthony explores. But I appreciate his attempt at thinking these things through. I myself have always found it hard to think and write about this topic. Because other than pointing out the obvious doom and gloom of our hyper-industrial death cult society, writing about other possible better futures and better politics requires a mix of utopianism and romantic thinking — and that has always been the most difficult thing for a cynic like me to summon. I can’t can’t help shake the belief that it’s all mostly useless and we’re all fucked.

Anyway, check out the essay, which is about much more than Kingsnorth: “On Paul Kingsnorth and Unruly Nature: The Romantic Challenge to the Left.”

For many who advocate an ostensibly technical-progressive approach to the environmental crisis, Kingsnorth’s emphasis on narrative—and, more specifically, a convivial, less exploitative relationship with the natural world—is wrong both in its methods and aims. Writing in Jacobin, for example, Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski advocate the construction of a global, “ecologically rational civilization” organized along the lines of a socialist Walmart and its global, just-in-time supply chains. Walmart provides a technical model for socialist planning in an ecologically sustainable manner, at least according to the authors, as if meeting consumer demand outside a market system represents the solution to our global ecocatastrophe rather than the problem. This proposed people’s planetary mall will be managed by scientist-technocrats (such as the authors) in order to achieve “a situation in which we accept our role as collective sovereign of Earth and begin influencing and coordinating planetary processes with purpose and direction, ever furthering human flourishing.”

Peter Frase similarly argues for high-tech solutions to biospheric collapse, such as geoengineering, while relegating the low-tech biocentrism of figures like Kingsnorth to the degraded realm of romantic story-telling, urging readers to instead “recognize that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature. Even those who acknowledge this in one breath will still fall back on metaphors like reduced ‘carbon footprint’—as if we could just step more lightly and allow nature to repair itself.”

It is, of course, an abiding faith in technological solutions, or the forces of production, coupled with a hostility to nonhuman natures that unite these disparate, even antagonistic, political tendencies. Many of these same professed radicals, exemplars of what I call the Jetsonian left…

—Yasha Levine

PS: I haven’t read Paul Kingsnorth — and to be honest something tells me that I won’t like him very much. But I plan to read his stuff when I have the time.

A coyote in Griffith Park

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