In his Anchorage Daiily News column Steve Haycox raises a concern many readers have with my book. Here’s a response:

Professor Steve Haycox suggests a question mark for the title of my book, The Fate of Nature. If the question is whether or not nature’s fate is sealed, I agree the question is outstanding. But I don’t think there’s a question of whether we have the capacity to do the job, as an inherent part of our humanity. And I think it’s tragic that so many believe we can’t stop ourselves from consuming the biosphere, for surely that belief contains its own fulfillment.

That so many believe my book is overly optimistic, although my claim is so modest—merely that the destruction of nature isn’t completely inevitable—tells more about the ideological and media environment in which we live than the true potential of our technology or ourselves. An underlying premise of our economy and politics is that unlimited growth and personal wealth are basic human needs. In a finite world with a large human population, standards of wealth that grow without limit resemble a cancer upon the life of the planet, and that is, indeed, hopeless.

What I aim to show in the book is that our perception of ourselves as being fundamentally greedy and insatiable is a product of an intellectual and social tradition, not a universal in human experience. The spread of this ideology to the developing world certainly is a negative trend, as people seek to overshoot material wellbeing into the same surfeit of wealth, stress and unhealth we enjoy in the United States. But that outcome is not a fait accompli, and there is nothing about the human organism that makes that way of living our unavoidable goal. Many people at many times have lived otherwise.

It’s difficult to see a more positive potential future because the system in which we live—and which delivers information to us—assumes the worst in people. For example, we assume mass coercion is needed to help the environment. This idea is contained in the model of meeting environmental problems through big science and big government. Find the problem, pass a law forcing everyone to contribute to the solution. It doesn’t work because politicians cannot stay in office by forcing their constituents to make sacrifices. So studies tell us what we need to know, government fails to act, and we feel helpless.

But at a community level, people are listening, and acting. These changes are unnoticed by the corporate media, and for that reason are largely invisible to their elected leaders. The values of good-hearted local people don’t fit the ruling paradigm. But their decisions are real—to live more fulfilling lives with less, to save nature when they can, and to influence their neighbors to cherish the future, too.

Our hope may be slim, but it lies in the success of these individual and community efforts to change the values of the culture positively. Whether it works or not—the big question mark I willingly grant Professor Haycox—it is worth doing if only for our own well-being and sense of connection to the world we love.