Robert Jensen

A childhood moment on a Canadian farm shaped Bill Rees’s understanding of ecological limits, leading to the development of ecological footprint analysis and decades of warnings about global overshoot.

A new documentary, Prairie Prophecy, explores the life and work of ecologist Wes Jackson, offering a compelling vision for the future of agriculture, sustainability, and our relationship with the land.

Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.

It is ironic that technological fundamentalists believe we can do anything we set our minds to, except limit the voraciousness of the human enterprise. It will be tragic if this fundamentalism continues to determine our course and the scariest dystopian scenarios become our future.

Changing our political and economic systems to make a decent human existence possible in a big-picture future is crucial, but so is learning to live within the existing systems in ways that are decent in small ways today.

Get up in the morning, day after day, try to find something worth doing, and then do it as well as possible, realizing that failure will be routine but that small successes—sometimes really small, maybe even too small to see in the moment—make it possible to continue.