Fancy ripping out your plumbed-in lavatory and replacing it with a bucket, some pine needles and sawdust? This is Paul Kingsnorth’s new environmentalism: less concerned with arguing for grand political gestures that won’t prevent Earth’s “sixth mass extinction” in any case, rather, arguing for small change in the immediate world around us. Last year, Kingsnorth published the second instalment of his earthily brilliant Buckmaster fictional trilogy and Confessions is akin to its nonfiction companion: a collection of essays that often act as both a paean to a landscape we are losing and a mournful realisation that little that can be done about it now. The title piece is Kingsnorth at his best, a tremendous combination of the personal and the political. His views on the past and future of environmentalism are perhaps over-rehearsed over the course of a book, but taken as a collection to dip into rather than read from cover to cover, there’s plenty to enjoy, learn from and even inspire.
• Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
