Inflection Point

As a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, I attended a lecture by the American novelist and environmental activist Wendell Berry. He reflected on civilization and the world by thinking about nature’s elegant solution: the organic cycles where there is no such thing as waste. Berry reminded us of what most schoolchildren know today — that nature works only when it can recycle everything. Trees take nutrients from the soil to produce leaves. These leaves return to the soil as nutrients for the next generation of growth. And so on.

But humans long ago began breaking that tidy cycle, thereby creating two wicked problems: we destructively extract resources from the environment, and we struggle to dispose of the waste. Instead of environmental harmony, we have soil degradation and deforestation at one...