A short story (about 15 minutes’ read) about the uncovenanted powers. Worth the time.
I just need to throw in here Dmitry Orlov’s idea of The Technosphere, a sort of mad borg, made mostly of techietechie devices, but including humans as expendable meat-components in its overall make up; this borg as a whole being malevolent and stupid; and - fortunately - doomed:
Nice story.
"The slave must believe he is free, or the plan fails. If people know they are oppressed, they will rebel in the end. If they believe their oppression is actually liberation, they are yours forever. "
Yes wise words from the leather armchair.
Like Orlov, I see it in much more concrete terms than Paul KN. Perhaps Kingsnorth’s message is construct your own demon or metaphor, but do realize what is changing you is …a thing.
Orlov says the Civil War was not about slavery. If so, why didn’t the Confederacy free the slaves? Had they done so the popular support for Lincoln’s war effort would have dropped to nothing and there would have been no way for the North to win. Yet nowhere that I have seen, among the elite class in the South after secession, was there an articulated demand to free the slaves in order to win the war. John Brown’s abolitionist attempt to privatize a war against slave holders was quite popular in the North. Had the Confederacy freed the slaves what activist group would have replaced the abolitionists? Poor southerners could find emotional drive for war participation because their land was ‘invaded’. But where would that emotional drive have come for Northern soldiers?
Also Orlov omits things like this ‘return of biosphere’ that has occurred in places around the world.
I read this a couple of years ago and then again this afternoon. I’m not convinced that the fairies are quite as innocuous and helpful as Bride seems to suggest. (I changed the name deliberately, as I’m sure this was the reason Paul Kingsnorth chose the name in the first place.) It’s sad that she seems to decide to make a sacrifice, but that’s a very old, pre-Biblical ritual, that seeks to cleanse us, so maybe it is appropriate.
This is very Old Testament, I know, but Evil exists, I think. One way it (they?) works is by casting spells. Fundamentally all spells do the same thing: they present a different reality you can be immersed in. If you can remember how you got there, and that it is just a spell, the worst dangers can be mitigated.
I’m reminded of the Enid Blyton Magic Faraway Tree stories. Climbing up its branches up through the clouds the characters in the stories found themselves in lands where the rules were different. Often very exotic and seductive places. You had to remember to make your way back to the tree and climb back down before the alternate reality moved away forever.
In a world where all the dominant narratives seem to be coming from the same origins where can one escape to?
Interesting: I’m a few dozen pages into a book called Islands Of Abandonment by Cal Flynn. She looks at case studies of places where the environment has been irreparably changed by human activity, Pripyat for example, and the buffer zone between the two halves of Cyprus. Nature is very resilient.
Pripyat is a beacon of hope, right now, as it cleanses itself, and re-wilds steadily, humans being largely absent. (Oh dear! That obviously makes me a human-hating eugenicist who just wants to genocide our entire species. Yeah, sure! Couldn’t possibly be any middle-ground nuance, could there? 
)
PS: Also, something that I observed in Turkiye (newly PC spelling, as the Turks spell it! ). I was at a place near Antalya, where there is a large area of ground fenced off aggressively - serious tall fences - to enclose a ‘milipark’: a national park. The fences were to keep the ubiquitous herder-tended goat flocks out.
The contrast between the inside and the outside was stark: Outside, ground covered in short, dead, blond grass, patches of bare dry soil, and no trees; inside a sea of green, even in the dry Mediterranean Summer, with dense maquis undergrowth and shrubs, and young trees growing up every few square yards. Nothing had been planted. Just the fence, with typically Turkish-fascistic protection, to keep everyone out.
I see it in many climates: where humans and our livestock and arable-ag are absent, and with no urban ‘development’, the wild roars back with amazing speed.
I have small-area examples - just a few acres here and there - where it’s happening right here where I live. One instance has gone from completely bulldozed, bare exposed-subsoil devastation to dense, multi-species wildflower meadow in fifteen years, with an entire small forest growing energetically, mainly self-planted willows, white poplar (from a nearby human-planted mono-stand), silver birch and hawthorn; though with a fringe of burgeoning young sallows which I guerrilla-planted around the edge of the ponds which the dozers also left; also freshly devastated and empty of life, now full of water plants, frogs, minnows, and on…
Apart from my sallows - just small green sticks broken off the already standing wild sallows on the edge of the devastation, and stuck into the water margin; done in a minute, no cost at all, virtually no effort - none of it was seeded by any human agency. The frogs hopped there, the minnows came as eggs in the plumage of visiting wild mallards, the bulrushes just blew in as flying seeds; and I’m only skimming the surface of the inventory of species that have spontaneously self-established here now.
Reasons to be cheerful…!
When - without any ‘benefit’ of eugenics - our currently-overshot global population has quietly shrunk itself down again to a more reasonable, steady-state level, and at the same time human economic activity has also shrunk back significantly, due to the Long Descent away from current levels of commodity-splurging (WIGIG!), I expect a lot more of this spontaneous re-greening and re-wilding to be well in hand. Mam Gaia’s heal-and-repair fecundity is like a steam-roller on speed. 