Free Thinking - What now for environmentalism? With Paul Kingsnorth, James Thornton and Martin Goodman

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2017

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Paul Kingsnorth, former deputy-editor of The Ecologist, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and author of novels including The Wake and Beast, talks about his changing attitude to the environmental movement. Environmental lawyer James Thornton and writer Martin Goodman recount their travels from Poland to Ghana, Alaska to China, to see how citizens are using public interest law to protect their planet. Plus, critic Maria Delgado and biographer Adam Feinstein consider the lost poems of that Chilean lover of nature, Pablo Neruda. Client Earth by James Thornton and Martin Goodman is published on the 11th of May. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth is out now. The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry selected and introduced by Paul Kingsnorth is out now. Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems, by Pablo Neruda is published on Thursday 27 April 2017. Neruda a film by Pablo Larraín starring Gael García Bernal as a policeman searching for the Chilean politician Pablo Neruda played by Luis Gnecco is out in cinemas across the UK now. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music
0:27.0	when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.0	Hello and welcome to the arts and ideas download
0:34.9	from the free thinking team at the BBC.
0:38.4	On tonight's program, lawyers usually have an individual or a corporation as client.
0:43.5	I talk with James Thornton, a lawyer who represents someone, or rather something rather different.
0:51.3	The Earth. He and I discussed the heritage of American civil rights and environmentalism
0:57.3	and the language of law versus the language of literature.
1:01.2	Also unearthed poems, excuse the pun, by Pablo Neruda, Chilean senator,
1:07.5	as well as Nobel Prize-winning poet, the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language,
1:13.8	according to Gabriel Marqueth, not a bad writer himself. Neruda's poems and the recent biopic
1:19.9	on Neruda later. But first, Paul Kingsnorth, whose new collection of essays, Confessions of a
1:26.9	recovering environmentalist, lashes our consumerist collection of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,
1:28.8	lashes our consumerist way of life, but also environmentalism,
1:33.6	and instead advocates doing small, small things, including digging his own toilet.
1:41.1	If a flush toilet is a metaphor for a civilisation that wants to wash its hands of its own
1:45.4	wastes as long as they accumulate somewhere else, then a compost toilet is both a small restitution
1:50.7	and a declaration. I will not turn my back on the consequences of my actions. I will not hand
1:56.8	them over to someone else to deal with. I will not crap into clean drinking water and flush
2:01.7	it down a pipe to be cleaned with industrial chemicals at some sewage plant I have never visited.
	...

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