Paul Kingsnorth

Hello again.

It's been a while, but I am back; without fanfare but re-engaged nonetheless. I might be a bit slow getting back up to my previous blogging form. It's high summer, I have another blog to commandeer and, most interestingly for me, I am about to start seriously researching my long-planned novel. I've been meaning to do this for months. Well, it starts tomorrow.

Distracting me from this purpose have been various book-related events, of which there will be many more over the next six weeks (have a look at the updated list of my speaker engagements). Plus, on the back of the book, people keep asking me to write things for them. This is very flattering - although it has rather undermined my previous avowed intent to stop writing journalism. Oh well. A lot of what I've had to say has been on the subject of liberty versus the Machine, inspired of course by Mr Davis. Here's what I think of him, and here's what I think of the Machine.

Anyway, I must go and add three months worth of articles to this site. But I will be back soon, and I won't wait so long this time.

Apologies for the on-off nature of this blog recently. Work on the book has left me with little time for anything else, so I can only plead overload.

It's likely this will continue for a while and this, plus a planned holiday soon, means there may not be much going on here for a month or so. I thought I should warn you so you can make other plans.

I will be back though - and in the meantime there is still liveliness in evidence over at the Real England blog.

See you when I surface.

Sorry for the absence of posts recently. Lots is happening on the book front (look out for an extract in the Guardian this Saturday), plus I am dividing my time between here and the Real England blog. There's only so much a man can write.

I do, however, want to share the heartening news that Alastair Darling is being barred from pubs across the land, following his dastardly tax hike on beer in the budget, which will doubtless see even more locals close for ever. Personally I think this is all pretty timid stuff. I would prefer to see him strung up from a lamp post by his fingertips, next to Jack Straw and Ed Balls. That's not really anything to do with beer taxes, though. It would just be for fun.

Over at The Ecologist, I'm wondering why everything is still going horribly wrong.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, the Real England summer book tour is shaping up nicely. If you have any ideas about venues I could speak at or people who might like to hear me, drop me a line. I will buy you a pint of real ale in exchange, and I'm a man of my word (mostly).

I wouldn't normally treat you to two posts in one day but this is just great.

"The planet said environmental campaigners should change their slogan from 'Save the Planet' to something more relevant such as 'Save Your Sorry Arse'."

Never a truer word.

Here's a thing. I just came across this interview, in the Independent, with a popular beat combo known as Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. Actually it's just one guy (with a slightly rubbish name) who I have, despite my advancing age, actually heard of (he was playing a club round the corner from me last week). I should have gone and said hello because, as you will see if you read on, he is apparently inspired by my last book, One No, Many Yeses.

I like it when I hear things like this. One of the fascinating things - and sometimes one of the frustrating things - about being a writer is that you never know quite where your words are going to go, or who they're going to touch. I've had emails in the past from people who read One No and decided to give up their bank jobs as a result. It's inspired plays. I've heard from fans in Korea, Germany and Romania. Recently I got an email from a guy who had been so inspired by the book that he had had the words 'Ya Basta' tattooed on his arm. I was slightly nervous about that one; I just hope he doesn't regret it when he's fifty and hold me responsible.

When you write a book you are responsible for a mass release of words into the world. You never quite know what they will do or who they will reach, but you can be sure that they will have some kind of impact. You may never hear about most of it, but it will be out there, happening, changing things - maybe not in the ways you intended, but changing things nonetheless. All you can do as a writer is sit back and observe and take pleasure from the effects you do see. Hearing about them is what makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.

The time is fast approaching ... my new book, Real England, is published on 10th April. There's already some excitement building. Two newspapers will be serialising it towards the end of this month - more on this soon - and there are events planned and more in the pipeline.

In the meantime, I've today launched the Real England blog, to accompany the book. It'll be updated regularly, and will hopefully complement this little effort, which I will continue to write also, whether you like it or not.

Pop over and have a look. Read an extract, plan to come to an event, leave a comment, pre-order a copy ... and let me know what you think, of course.

You have to hand it to Plane Stupid: they do a great line in stunts. This morning they were up on the roof of the Houses of Parliament, being startlingly effective with their message about new airport construction. Good on them. The sheer cheekiness of it all is an inspiration in a nation in which nothing ever seems to change but for the worst. The ever-witty Gordon Brown responded by saying that "decisions should be made in this house and not on the roof of this house, and that is a very important message to send out to protesters." Isn't that brilliant? So characteristically humourless and clunking and utterly self-defeating. Good old Gordon. It was worth it just to hear that. Oh, and to read the response-by-numbers from this wanker - and the splendidly barbed comments below it.

Readers of this blog will know, of course, that I am stoically unconvinced about our ability to prevent the climate going tits up - though when I see things like this it does give me a momentary flicker of hope. Unfortunately, I then see things like this. This is an article about the world's largest building - Beijing's new airport. It's twice the size of Heathrow's Terminal Five. 97 new airports are planned for China, 45 of which will be built in the next five years. Try climbing on the roof of this and see where it gets you. Bayoneted, I would imagine, by the defenders of the Glorious Revolution.

This seems, incidentally, to be a point entirely lost on arch-tool Norman Foster, the architect responsible for this monstrosity. He was all over the media yesterday, smugly observing that it has taken less time to build his new Ozymandian construction than it has taken to hold the public inquiry into Terminal 5. He sounded like he thought this was a good thing. That's the way it tends to work, Norm, when actual people aren't allowed to get in the way. Hitler had a good line in ruthless architectural efficiency too. I'd bet he paid his architects handsomely as well.

This intriguing, if badly-scanned, graph appears in today's Guardian. It's a stark illustration of the pollution caused by the global shipping industry. The darker the area, the more particulate pollution its suffers from - and some of the darker patches overlay major shipping lanes very precisely.

More interesting than this, though, is what the Guardian's report reveals about shipping's contribution to climate change. In short: it's big. This is interesting because, in the ongoing battle to target the villains in the global emissions game, shipping has escaped almost unscathed. Keys have been scratched down the paintwork of SUVs, camps held outside airports, power station chimneys climbed and locked onto. Yet all the time the world's vast container ships, backbone of the global economy, have been going about their merry business polluting the planet in order to bring us the latest straight-to-landfill must-haves. And nobody's said a thing.

But the most interesting thing about this story, to me, is this:

This graph - which is also badly-scanned, not to mention wonky - is the big story. It compares the relative emissions of aviation and shipping - and look which comes out on top. Shipping produces 4.5% of global industrial emissions; aviation just 2%.

For a while I've been increasingly uncomfortable about the green movement's intense and, I think, irrational focus on airline emissions as a major target for their climate change campaigning. I think environmentalists have made a big mistake in making this such a major issue, and I think they're going to regret it.

Why? Firstly because, as this report shows, aviation is not the biggest problem. Car traffic is a bigger problem. Home energy wastage is a bigger problem. Forest destruction is a bigger problem. Shipping, it seems, is a bigger problem. Aircraft emissions may be the fastest-growing cause of emissions, but they're not the biggest, by a long chalk. And how fast are shipping emissions growing? Does anyone even know? I doubt it.

But this is not the main problem. The main problem is a typically green refusal to try and grasp human psychology. Flying is, I think, to most people, one of the great unalloyed benefits of 'progress.' People love it - not the journey itself, perhaps, but the destination. We can go to places our grandparents never dreamed of, cheaply and fast. People love this. They will cling to it, and do. Going all-out to tackle flying, in this context, is effectively an attack on peoples' aspirations. Once again, the greens end up looking like they want to stop people enjoying themselves. Out comes the puritan instinct, so badly-hidden, and suddenly we're all playing I-fly-less-than-you in public. It turns people off. It's dull and lentilly and counter-productive.

So why do it? It's not politically sensible. It's not tackling the biggest problem out there. It alienates people. If you really want to stop climate change (and in my view it's too late, but feel free to try) this is a suicidal way to do it. It resurrects all the old doubts people have about the greens and, instead of inspiring them, makes them feel guilty.

If I was running Greenpeace, say, or Friends of the Earth or any other big cheese green NGO, I know what I'd do. I'd take virtually everyone off my aviation campaign, and stop beating the public around the head with their desire to take their kids on holiday (oh, and did I mention that most of the environmentalists I know fly far more than Joe Public ever will?) I would put all of those people to work on my forests campaign, and I would shift the main focus of my climate change work from something negative to something overwhelmingly positive: protecting the world's rainforests.

This is a win-win-situation. The great forests of the world are falling, still, at a rate of knots. Climate change or no climate change, this is a planetary tragedy. Stop the destruction and you help stop climate change anyway. You also save thousands of species, the homes of tribal peoples and the last untouched wildernesses of the Earth. Best of all, you give the public a positive message: 'help us save the great forests and stop climate change', rather than 'don't go on holiday and stop climate change.'

That would make sense to me. Granted, it wouldn't give us the familiar thrill we get from telling people what not to do - but it does seem far more likely to actually work.

What happens to a system when its people begin to opt out of it? I asked that question a few years ago in my first book. I was talking in the context of global neoliberalism; in the context of mass movements of people withdrawing their permission from the global economy. That's still happening, though millions more are excitedly opting in at the same time.

But what about closer to home? Am I the only one who, for some time, has felt that Britain has a kind of fin de siecle feel about it? Is this how the last days of the Weimar Republic felt, as well-meaning liberals tried in vain to hold their society together as the darkness gathered ahead?

I don't know, but I know that this country increasingly seems desperate, pale, dysfunctional, and that change, big change, seems inevitable. What that change will be, and how palatable, I don't know. In yesterday's Observer, John Gray wrote an interesting piece about the collapse of the British state, and the collapse of our faith in it. In the FT a few days ago, Maurice Saatchi wrote a less good piece (you have to sign up to read this, but it's free) about the angry English and what they have to be angry about which, despite him being a bit of a tit, does touch on a couple of key points.

The main one, I think, is disenfranchisement. A state, a nation, holds together if its people trust it, more or less, and feel it has a common purpose - and that they are a common people. Today we have none of these. Many people in Britain feel, quite rightly, that their concerns are not represented by the political status quo. On a number of crucial issues, people have no voice at all. Mass immigration, for example, regularly tops the list of concerns people have about Britain's future. Whatever you think about it, you can't argue that that concern is being met by any politician. Similarly, more state power is handed to the EU almost annually, with no-one's voice being heard, despite mass anger. The state is privatised bit by bit, and will continue to be whichever party runs it. Multinational companies, from supermarkets to private healthcare firms, tear up our culture and landscape and eat it for breakfast and none of us gets a say. Something called 'multiculturalism' descends upon us from above and goes unchallenged, again, by the political establishment even while the majority of British people, whatever their skin colour, feel uncomfortable about it. Wars are started despite mass opposition. The state draws up scheme after scheme to remove our rights and liberties in a spiralling effort to put the pieces back together again

I could go on. The point is that, whatever your personal opinion on any of these things, it doesn't matter. The country is changing rapidly, those changes are not in your hands, and you cannot vote them away. The nation is fragmenting into islands - islands of wealth and poverty, islands of ethnicity and religion, islands of culture and lack of it. England, Wales and Scotland are going their separate ways (one good thing in my view), the head of Henry VIII's church wants Sharia law ... and nobody knows what the future holds. I'm by nature a pessimist, so I think it may bring darkness. What normally happens when we are gifted a combination of a failing state, internal ethnic tensions, a violent external threat, economic uncertainty and a longing for unity and purpose? I'll give you a clue: it's not enlightened liberalism.