So, in the same year that the People’s Climate March drew the largest crowds the cause had ever seen, Kingsnorth moved in the opposite direction. He left England for rural Ireland, where, with his wife, who had been a psychiatrist, and their two children, he set about making a new life as a smallholder—planting trees, keeping animals, clearing brambles. He cut grass with a scythe and smashed the porcelain toilet in his house to replace it with one that composted waste. He’s lived there ever since, writing on his Substack, The Abbey of Misrule. In recent years, he has railed against COVID-vaccine mandates, converted to Orthodox Christianity, and fixed on the true enemy: “the Machine.” His new book, “Against the Machine” (Thesis), his first in years, is part summa, part broadside, part testament. “Sometimes,” he notes at the outset, “I feel like I’ve been writing about this thing all my life.”