(from Grist.org) ‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth

AN EXCERPT:  Whenever I hear the word “hope” these days, I reach for my whisky bottle. It seems to me to be such a futile thing. What does it mean? What are we hoping for? And why are we reduced to something so desperate? Surely we only hope when we are powerless?…I don’t think we need hope. I think we need imagination. We need to imagine a future which can’t be planned for and can’t be controlled. I find that people who talk about hope are often really talking about control. They hope desperately that they can keep control of the way things are panning out. Keep the lights on, keep the emails flowing, keep the nice bits of civilisation and lose the nasty ones; keep control of their narrative, the world they understand. Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult.

TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK THE IMAGE:

ALSO READ:   Q & A: Paul Kingsnorth, green activism is ‘simply a faction of consumer society’

TO READ ALL ZBLOG POSTS, CLICK ‘THE ZEPHYR’ AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE