'Some theorists and scientists advocate greater inclusion of nonhuman actors in debates about ecological crisis. Bruno Latour, for example, argues that “a scien

'Some theorists and scientists advocate greater inclusion of nonhuman actors in debates about ecological crisis. Bruno Latour, for example, argues that “a science of objects and politics of subjects” must be replaced by a “political ecology of collectives consisting of humans and nonhumans.”' Uh-huh. Why should I take that more seriously than an evidence-based assessment that there's a pretty good chance that it's too late and we're fucked? The latter at least has the advantage of not being gibberish. Most people get that talking about a "dying" ocean isn't an animistic assertion of some new form of hive life. They understand that it's a metaphor, and a particularly appropriate one. People who read and study in this field should be perfectly comfortable with models that treat complex systems like ecologies and economies as having many similarities to organisms. Those models account for reality better than static ones. Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis wasn't based on some hippy religious creed. It was based on his criticism that existing climate models did not account for the fact that earth's biosphere was perfectly capable of modifying climate, and that it reacts when disturbed. You might recognize that as a fundamental principle in modern Climate Science. The article doesn't seem to offer much but a call to police each other's language and avoid appearing pessimistic. That's a difficult challenge given the nature of the problem and our success thus far in addressing it. James "the earth and I are both in the last 1% of our lives" Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1960s. James Hansen made his first forecast about these issues thirty-two years ago. That's enough time to redevelop the US Space program, from Sputnik through Apollo, more than twice. Yet we have done nothing substantial to address it. As our scientific understanding of these complex systems improves, we don't apply it to ameliorating the problem---as near as I can tell, we primarily use it to demonstrate that earlier estimates lowballed the problem and that it's really going to be much worse and sooner. When promoters of a 'Green New Deal' and Al Gore---the mightiest unexamined motive in Christendom---agree that nuclear energy must be excluded without examination because "nuclear bad, sun pretty", I find it pretty hard to take the whole thing as anything but theatre. The problem isn't that we're being too pessimistic---it's that it's becoming increasingly clear that our most pessimistic projections might be wildly optimistic. Staying optimistic in the face of a difficult project to solve a problem might be productive. Staying optimistic in the face of a problem that no one is doing anything to solve is more of a learning disability than a strategy. Maybe the best path for a solution is less "hey, we need to stay upbeat and positive" and more "it's time to start slapping some sense into some of these people." My parents' generation went to the moon. My generation decided that we'd rather get rich and then let our kids choke to death on our waste products. At least we'll deserve whatever happens to us.