A Different Sort of Enviromentalism

Exploring the Green Movement Through the Lens of Stardew Valley

The really dangerous video games aren’t the violent ones, where you chop people in two or blast them in the face with a shotgun. The dangerous video games are the peaceful ones. Games which you could sink hundreds of hours of your time into without even knowing. Because these games don’t stress you out, they relax you. They let you get creative. And so you want to play them more and more. That’s the secret behind Minecraft. There’s just something infinitely appealing and addictive about games with stripped-down graphics and simple gameplay in an era of blockbuster games which are often so disappointing.

Stardew Valley in many ways is a game in the mold of Minecraft. It’s essentially the creation of one person: Eric Barone. Barone created everything in the game: he wrote of the characters, drew all of the art, pixel by pixel, and composed the game’s excellent soundtrack. One man, in his basement created a gaming masterpiece, all by himself.  It’s also a fundamentally creative game, a non-violent farming simulator where you can live out your farming desires to your hearts content. You can grow cranberries, cauliflowers and corn. You can go mining for silver, gold and diamonds. You can fish and forage, and you can get married and have children. Stardew Valley is the closest many people will come to living a rural life; they’ll live it through their computer screen.

The story of Stardew Valley is simple. Your dying grandfather gives you an envelope, which he commands you not to open. ‘There will come a day,’ he says ‘when you feel crushed by the burden of modern life and your bright spirit will fade before a growing emptiness. When that happens, my boy, you’ll be ready for this gift.’ And so, we fast forward many years later. You sit in an office, a simple cog in the capitalist machine working for the Joja corporation, this world’s version of Amazon. And you decide that you’ve had enough and so you open your desk drawer and reveal what’s in the envelope that you’ve been holding onto for all this time. Inside you find a letter from your grandfather. He writes that long ago he himself had a similar crisis. ‘The same thing happened to me, long ago. I’d lost sight of what mattered most in life… real connections with other people and nature. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong.’ With that he gives you ownership of his farm in the small village of Pelican Town in the region of Stardew Valley and the game begins.

Initially, you’ll find your grandfather’s farm in disrepair. It is overgrown with weeds, rocks are scattered across the fields and the farm’s greenhouse is dilapidated. However, through hard work you can put the farm back together. Everything takes time in Stardew Valley, it is not a game to be rushed. There are four seasons in game, each with a variety of crops to plant, things to forage and fish to catch. Each season takes 28 days. You begin in spring. Summer is sunny and warm. Autumn is all browns, oranges and yellows with the leaves falling from the trees and the days getting shorter. In Winter it snows and no crops grow: it is a good time to mine, build your farm and prepare for spring again. Eventually you’ll build up your farm to pristine condition. You’ll have chickens and cow, sprinklers so you don’t have to water everything and an orchard of fruit trees; it’s a big change from the 20 parsnip seeds that you are given by the village’s mayor when you first begin the game.

The best thing about Stardew Valley is the gameplay. It’s addictive and satisfying as you can literally see things growing before your eyes. You progress in a great way as the more you play the better your character becomes. However, just as important as the gameplay is the atmosphere the game creates. It is the closest thing you can get to an idyllic village life from the comfort of your bedroom. The soundtrack contributes to this, with the different melodies reflecting the changing seasons, but the game’s characters are also important. An early task you are given is to introduce yourself to everyone in the village from the bumptious Mayor Lewis to the spoilt Haley and the quiet loner Linus who lives in a tent in the mountain and is ostracized by much of the citizens. The characters are written sparsely but as you get to know them their personality quirks become clear. It’s a brilliantly evocative representation of the social aspect of village life.

Stardew Valley has become enormously popular selling over 10 million copies. For a game made by one man, without any marketing behind it, that is an enormous achievement. I think that some of the game’s success can be attributed to a modern desire for a return to rural simplicity (however idealized that vision may be). Video games often allow the player to live out a fantasy. You can enter the world of your favourite films, you can become an action hero or a football player. Stardew Valley fulfills our desire for a much more grounded fantasy and that is why it has become so successful.

Paul Kingsnorth is a British environmentalist and activist who has been called ‘England’s greatest living writer,’ authoring a trilogy of books which follows the life of a British family from the Middle Ages to the far future. He is living Stardew Valley in real life. Whilst he was at Oxford University, Kingsnorth was heavily involved in the environmental protest movement but he became disillusioned and now represents a different kind of environmentalism; one which is a far cry from the one that is in vogue today. His environmentalism is not one that is espoused by Swedish teenagers, instead it is much more grounded and realistic. Kingsnorth believes that we can no longer do anything about global warming, that ship has sailed. There is no use in holding international climates conferences to which leaders from all across the world fly to. There is just nothing we can do.

Instead, Kingsnorth urges, we must look from the global to the local. The language of globalization, open borders and capitalism has become so dominant that has, in Kingsnorth’s view, even infected the green movement. Buzzwords like sustainability or innovation and naïve hopes about just discovering the new technology or signing that one treaty have become the hallmark of many environmentalists. That, and constantly wanting to ban things. They never talk about local problems which affect people’s lives, but instead they promote a fake green lifestyle: veganism whilst still jetting off on thrice-yearly holidays, an obsession with the minutiae of climate science without any knowledge of the flora and fauna in their back gardens. For Kingsnorth, the green movement is intellectually bankrupt, and essentially pointless anyway because we are facing the inevitable. ‘This [global warming] is bigger than anything there has ever been for as long as humans have existed, and we have done it, and now we are going to have to live through it, if we can,’ he writes.

So how is Kingsnorth living through it? He has chosen to withdraw from the modern step-by-step, and live life as he thinks is best. He’s returned to tradition, moving from urban England and buying land in the Irish countryside. He’s refused to buy a smart phone, has replaced his flushing toilet with a compost toilet, and is home-schooling his children. But he has made compromises as well: owning a car and laptop – some modern conveniences are too hard to let go off.  Kingsnorth’s environmentalism is real and grounded, a far cry from the fantasy we often hear about. It requires us to make sacrifices and to educate ourselves about the world around us.

Paradoxically, as green thinking has become more and more popular, it is has become separated from concrete action. A few years ago saw so-called ‘climate strikes’ by schoolchildren all around the world – about 6 million people in total participated. It was emblematic of the situation that the green movement finds itself in. Slogans called for systematic change, but examples of change at the individual level were scant. Now individual climate action is reduced to occasional recycling, fashionable veganism and periodic Facebook posts calling for end to capitalism, and if that can’t happen than ‘at least ban the plastic straws please!’. Kingsnorth has gone in the opposite direction embracing a conservative politics of home and place and nation. He’s supported Brexit, converted to Orthodox Christianity and thrown out his toilet. He’s done the admirable thing.

Kingsnorth is, in many ways living out the fantasy that Stardew Valley is selling. The world of Stardew Valley is set in a sort of technological statis. The now ubiquitous features of modern life like cars and televisions are there, but that is about where it stops. The game could be set at anytime between the 1950s and the 2000s. Smartphones are absent, the internet is only vaguely hinted at, and above all, very few mechanised gadgets exist on your farm. Contrary to today where farming is dominated by tactors and combines the size of some small buildings, such inventions area entirely absent in the game. Almost everything is done by ‘hand’, which adds to the game’s hypotonic and relaxing rhythm. It might take a whole day to harvest the crops on your farm. You wake up early and go to bed late. It’s hard and honest thing – though of course it is entirely digital.

One of the earliest tools available in Stardew Valley is a scythe. As your farm is overgrown, you must clear that weeds and grass that has grown after decades of neglect. Unlike your other tools in the game, the scythe simply works. The axe, pickaxe, watering can, and hoe have to be aimed at a specific target space in the game. Aim it at the wrong space and you end up swinging you axe at the air instead of the oak tree. In the case of the scythe, however, it works all around – it has a wide reach and can cut several spaces of grass or weed at once. It is probably my favourite tool in game. It’s not that useful – there’s only so much grass on your farm – but it makes a satisfying sound and feels very light compared to the other tools. To use a philosophical distinction, it is good in itself, rather than just serving good ends.

In his essay ‘Dark Ecology’ Kingsnorth writes about the scythe as a mysterious, almost magical tool. It is tricky, but it is also remarkably effective and efficient – scythes or objects like them have been in use for nearly 10,000 years. Kingsnorth has for several years taught lessons in how to use a scythe all across the UK, yet, he says that the most common reaction to someone seeing him you a scythe is one of puzzlement or surprise; ‘why on earth would you use that?’ people ask, as it seems clear to them that a better alternative has been invented. In the essay, Kingsnorth compares the scythe to the mechanical alternative: the brushcutter. Of the brushcutter he writes that ‘It is more cumbersome, more dangerous, no faster, and far less pleasant to use than the tool it replaced.’. The natural question to ask would be why people continue to use it, though for Kingsnorth that question would be missing the point. ‘Brushcutters are not used instead of scythes because they are better; they are used because their use is conditioned by our attitudes toward technology,’ he writes. ‘Performance is not really the point, and neither is efficiency. Religion is the point: the religion of complexity. The myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up,’ Kingsnorth persuasively argues. Both Kingsnorth and Stardew Valley reject this impulse for endless modernity. There’s an extreme arrogance in thinking that those that came before us were our moral inferiors, that they got everything wrong. In fact, it might be us that are getting things wrong, enthralled to the religion of endless progress.

There’s a clear irony in this that has yet been unmentioned. I’m writing about a video game, about the important of returning to a natural life. A video game! Why don’t I just go outside more? A good point, at first glance, but one that can be easily addressed. Such questioning isn’t pointed at people who write about nature documentaries or films about animals, and it shouldn’t be directed at me. Stardew Valley, to overstate it slightly, is a piece of art, about nature, that I’m critiquing. It has made be think about its theme and in that it has achieved its aim. Secondly, Stardew Valley might serve as encouragement for people to go outside more, or to grow their own vegetables.  In fact, it already has, as there are many articles on Stardew Valley forums and other website where people, who even if they live in a city, are starting their own garden for the first time. So no, it is not ironic that a video game should have an ecological message.

Overall, Stardew Valley encourages us to think about the environment through its gameplay and story. It has anti-corporatist undertones and stresses the importance of hard work and community; a message that it in short supply these days. The environmentalism of Stardew Valley is one that should be fully supported. Thinkers and writers about the environment such as Paul Kingsnorth present us with a view of the current crisis that is measured and realistic – a stark difference from the literally childish screaming that is heard so often in the media. Figures from right, or at least the centre, like Kingsnorth, the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton or the radical Finnish fisherman and writer Pentti Linkola provide us with a new perspective on the environment that should give us all pause. Instead of rejecting environmentalism outright or denying global warming, conservatives should be ready to think deeply about the topic even though their inspiration can come from the most unlikely sources. Anyone want to go for a walk?

This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.