Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

About This Event

Using his book Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist as a jumping off point, Paul will explore the interplay of sustainability, environmentalism, faith and imagination. In his collection of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, he discusses the disillusion that drove him from goals such as sustainability to a radical “dark ecology,” dedicated to preserving the wild for its own sake and how the operates from a perspective of enchantment and faith.

About the speaker: Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer and thinker. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. He lives in the west of Ireland. He has written over 10 books, countless essays and spoken across the world on environmental issues Early in life, he became involved in the Dongas road protest group at sites including Twyford Down, Solsbury Hill, and the M11 link road protest in east London. After chaining himself to a bridge alongside fifty others, Kingsnorth was arrested, an event that solidified the importance of protest for him. He has subsequently worked as commissioning editor for openDemocracy, as a publications editor for Greenpeace and, between 1999 and 2001, as deputy editor of The Ecologist. He was named one of Britain's "top ten troublemakers" by the New Statesman magazine in 2001. In 2020, he was called "England’s greatest living writer" by Aris Roussinos. He was one of the founders of the Free West Papua Campaign, which campaigns for the secession of the provinces of Papua and West Papua from Indonesia, where Kingsnorth was made an honorary member of the Lani tribe in 2001.