We must remember that purposive change is possible beyond what we direct ourselves. We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting.

We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.

Whether or not it is true that climate change exacerbates other environmental problems, the rush to name a unitary cause of a complex problem should give us pause. The pattern is familiar. It is none other than war thinking, which also depends on identifying a unitary cause of a complex problem. That cause is called the enemy, and the solution is to defeat the enemy.

To put it in more shocking terms, it doesn't matter if the skeptics are right or not, because the assumptions on which the debate is based are already enough to doom us to a dystopian future.

When we chop nature into bits in an attempt to understand it, we lose sight of the relationships among those bits. But ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.