Paul Kingsnorth, "Confessions Of Recovering Environmentalist", "Beast"

Former deputy editor of The Ecologist, Kingsnorth is co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project, a network of writers, artists, and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself and are in search of new paradigms for a world on the brink. Kingsnorth has supplied this need with poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In his latest 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. As envisioned in his new novel, Beast, a sequel of sorts to his Man Booker-longlisted The Wake, the wild is an empty moor in the west of England. Edward Buckmaster, undergoing an acute existential crisis, is distracted from his internal demons by the realization that he’s being stalked by some kind of animal he never quite catches sight of.

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Produced by Tom Warren