Cleansing Fire: The Passion of Paul Kingsnorth (Eureka Street, paywalled)

Towards the end of 2009, in a testy exchange of letters in The Guardian, the British authors Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot set out two very different approaches to climate change and its attendant crises. For Kingsnorth, who initiated the correspondence, the only sane approach to those crises was to reject the civilisation that had caused them, and that had failed, and would continue to fail, to reverse them. For Monbiot, however, such an attitude was tantamount to nihilism. As he put it in his initial reply to Kingsnorth: “I detect in your writings … an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this [environmental] apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society.” [More here.]