During the five years I worked as an environmental-studies professor at a progressive private college, I undertook a small, semesterly rebellion: I had students read “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” a 2011 essay by the British writer and former green radical Paul Kingsnorth. In it, Kingsnorth chronicles his disenchantment with the activism that had once been his life’s work—the very kind of advocacy that had driven many of my students, that had driven me, into that classroom in the first place.

The essay makes the case that mainstream environmentalism has abandoned the commitments and ideas that originally defined it. Classic texts of the 1960s and ’70s, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, took a sort of acetic posture as they

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