Tesson says that by retreating to solitary life as a hermit he can reduce his ecological footprint upon the planet. That claim can be questioned. For a start, Tesson's temporary hermitry is funded by his ability to sell his blog as a book. So he is not actually retreating from the economy.

But more importantly, this idea of withdrawal sets up a false logic, measuring what the individual creates and consumes to say that if you consume more than you create you are an evil exploiter, a part of a planetary plague. That has an attractiveness, rather like the Egyptian hall of the dead where the soul is weighed in a balance and must not be heavier than a feather to get to heaven. Similarly, if we emit more CO2 over our lives than we remove, on balance we have made the world warmer. But the problem is that this individualist ethic of the personal footprint is misconceived, distortive and unhelpful.

Typically for a wannabe hermit, this 'walk lightly' ethic involves a false exaggeration of the role of the individual considered in isolation. The reality, in the example of CO2 emissions, is that the only way we can remove CO2 from the air is through large scale industrial cooperation in capitalist technological enterprise, for example by building several million square kilometers of algae farms on the ocean. That is disturbing for the romantic isolationist, but the ethics of escape to a hermitage are really very bad, placing fantasy in the place of analysis. What we do as an individual makes not a flying fuck's worth of difference to the planet, any more than a fart in a tornado. Most people cannot escape like a hermit, and have to learn to cooperate with each other. The results of cooperative action entirely swamp anything done without cooperation.

This sort of hermit stuff comes up in aphorisms like 'tread gently for you walk on my dreams' or 'live simply so that all may simply live'. These sort of 'zero sum' emotional tugs are not grounded in rigorous economic analysis, and actually cause harm by giving people the false impression of being an ethically correct statement.

Simple living won't save the planet from rapacious destruction. We should be aiming to bring the poor up to the standards of the rich in a sustainable way, not pretending that rich people can buy indulgences through some crazy carbon credits earned in solitary contemplation on Lake Baikal.

Robert: I certainly share your skepticism of Mr. Tesson's bona fides on the ecological footprint front. How many 'hermits of Lake Baikal' could be supported before they ran out of room and/or suitable hermit environments or started getting in each others way (thus not being hermits)? Maybe 10 or 20? That's a drop in the human population bucket. I would argue that in fact Tesson as hermit of Lake Baikal actually has a massive 'ecological footprint' in the sense that his adopted lifestyle requires a huge physical area (to be a proper hermit) so really he has 'consumed' this land, and he requires a suitable environment as well, like a big lake with fish. How many 'hermits' could live on Lake Baikal and fish without permanently damaging the fish stock? From what I can see he doesn't deal with this issue, likely because the answers would not square with his romantic, hermit lifestyle model or his apparent ecological footprint objective.

I really liked his diary entry for 18 February, where Sylvain says life in the woods allows us to pay our debts. While that is not literally true, since as Giselle has pointed out a hermit has a big ecological footprint, there is a sense in which a retreat into nature enables a recharging of the spiritual batteries, a reflection upon bigger questions. So there is the potential that contemplation of the consolations of the forest can help us to understand what industrial civilization must do to become more sustainable.

Tesson quotes Chatwin, quoting Junger, quoting Stendahl, on the connection between pleasure and danger in civilization, and says this oscillation in the Russian winter enables bold swinging between worldviews. So I don't think we should be too hard on Tesson for dreaming of life trod with a lighter tread, like Yeats among the wild swans at Coole.

On 22 Feb he expands on his ecological musing, imagining his cabin as a laboratory for longing about freedom, silence and solitude. This leads to a discussion about ecological de-growth, a decelerated simpler life that economic crisis could force upon us. I disagree with this prognosis, but it is one of the possible worlds that a solitary musing can swing between.