Prophets of an Unknown Future

Concern for the environment used to be a cause.

It used to centre on saving patches of beloved forest from a bulldozer. Or fingering a dreadful factory that was spewing chemicals into a stream. Or saving a single species from commercial slaughter.

And the story that environmentalists told themselves to let them believe in their cause was roughly this: We can fix this problem and then everything will go back to normal.

It doesn’t work that way anymore. Concern for the environment is no longer a cause. It is far bigger. It is the acknowledgement that nothing will go back to normal. That the planet is in what scientists call a “no analogue state,” meaning they do not really know how to tell what will happen. They know only that the world is changing quickly. Possibly more quickly than it has at any other time since the first one-celled creatures emerged on the planet.

And that has what scientists would call “unknown consequences” for the...