The end may be very, very nigh

McIntosh wrote Soil And Soul and he's the Quaker environmentalist academic who a few years ago was a driving force behind the purchase of the Isle of Eigg by a community trust, taking the island out of the hands of generations of dreadful private landowners.

The repercussions of this incredible bit of campaigning are still unfolding - there was a change to Scottish law and, as a result, fully 2 per cent of the entire Scottish land mass is now owned by various co-operatives and community trusts.

McIntosh also wrote Hell And High Water, which is arguably the single most coherent book tackling the climate crisis while allowing a spiritual dimension into the writing. Actually, it's one of the most coherent climate-change books of all, regardless of a spiritual context.

He may have a modernist hands-off approach to his god, but his faith is earthy and unshakeable, deeply embedded in the land and the small-scale community action it inspires. This means McIntosh is someone with whom the practical, atheist and science-only left might struggle ideologically. Yet we have so much to learn from him.

It's important to remember that actually, regardless of how much we need to get rid of the misguiding hierarchies placed upon the world by religion, it doesn't matter whether there's a god or not.

Interestingly, a friend saw global new-age A-lister Deepak Chopra speak the previous night and she felt there were a lot of similarities to his talk.

Of course, McIntosh's talk cleared maybe £500 at the most, while Chopra was charging £50 per head to speak to 2,000 people at Friends Meeting House on Euston Road in London, turning over possibly £100,000 for two hours' work. That's what being friends with Bono and Oprah gets you.

McIntosh proposes an essentially triangular soil, soul and community method of surviving the climate crisis - and by "surviving" I mean his is also one of the increasing number of voices taking the more honest "It's almost certainly too late" approach to ecological activism.

We bumped into Dougald Hine of the Dark Mountain project, which I wrote about here a few weeks ago. In fact it was one of Hine's tweets that tipped us off about the gig. The added context of sitting next to Hine while McIntosh plotted paths for "a localised afterwards" was very empowering.

When I jumped onboard the Dark Mountain project - in a small way - I had no idea the level of reaction it would get in the soft left media, who've devoted astonishing acres of space to misunderstanding its fundamental precepts.

The debate between Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot was particularly fun, because Monbiot made the same admission as the entire mainstream environmental movement - that private pessimism is smothered in public optimism for the desperate sake of mobilising the people.

Yet at the same time the only thrust of attack he had was that Kingsnorth was somehow embracing the fall.

McIntosh agrees that many leading environmentalists are far more deeply pessimistic in private than in public. It's this sleight of hand, where you fail to argue with reality instead calling into question intent, that really highlights how bad things are in the eco movement.

This is where the split is and this is where the honesty is now needed. Surely it would actually be more effective, in terms of raising awareness about the climate catastrophe, if the leading mainstream eco thinkers and workers started admitting in public that we cannot win now.

We need this one last desperate trick to attempt to edge our wider population, clinging governments and greedy corporations into doing something miraculous.

I think the entire eco movement needs to stand up with one voice and say something like: "We tried our best, we warned you and warned you and instead of listening, you just stole our language and used it to perpetuate your systems." To paraphrase South Park's Eric Cartman, "Screw you guys, we're going home."

It would be one hell of a gesture. It still wouldn't work though, not while our infrastructure is owned by the profit motive.

On television recently, the Bono himself popped up at an awards ceremony in New York where Gordon Brown was given an award for international ambassadorship or some shit like that.

The relevant thing to take away is: Brown was given the award by Henry Kissinger and as part of his acceptance speech made a snide joke about how tough it is to "win an election during a recession."

The crassness of this entire event was brought into sharp relief by the presence of the little Bono himself, grinning smugly in the background.

Which side are you on?