What Moloch Wants

Paul Kingsnorth has had an interesting career. He started as a radical environmental activist who once chained himself to a bridge to protest the construction of a highway across protected land. Then he was an eco-doomer and post-environmentalist. Then some sort of ancient-England traditionalist: he wrote a well-received trilogy of novels, the first of which is set in Lincolnshire at the time of the Norman conquest. Then, by his own account, he was a Buddhist, a Wiccan, and finally a very public convert to Orthodox Christianity. The path from radical to reactionary is now well-trodden, but he’s walked it with more self-respect than most. He’s smart for a trad guy and charismatic for an environmentalist, and his new book, an anti-tech magnum opus called Against the Machine, has been getting a lot of attention and been reviewed widely.