The following is an excerpt from This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning which will be published by Blue Ear Books in September 2026.
With age, I’ve become more aware of the world’s complexity but also better equipped to come to simple, albeit painful, conclusions.
Everyone understands (or should understand) that our reality—both the physical world around us and the social world we build—is complex beyond human understanding. But based on what we can know, some conclusions seem unavoidable to me. In my new book, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, I offer three of those observations.
• Humans are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet beyond replacement levels. The most sensible path forward is “fewer and less”—fewer people consuming less energy and material resources.
• No major political or social movement supports that strategy because of “the temptations of dense energy.” There’s a lot of wasteful consumption in capitalist economies, but it’s hard for most everyone to reject the work that fossil fuels can do for us.
• Because no one has a workable plan for a graceful human retreat from overshoot, “the moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.” No one has neat and tidy answers, and being cocky about political programs and personal choices doesn’t help anyone.
We lack the collective political will to change the human trajectory in part because most of us lack the personal will to change our own energy-seeking behaviors. Yes, oil companies for decades covered up research about climate change to keep profits flowing. Yes, politicians have blocked legislation to enact even modest responses such as a carbon tax. Outrage at greed and corruption among the powerful is appropriate. I’m not blaming ordinary people but recognizing how we all are implicated.
Let’s imagine we nationalized the fossil-fuel companies and appointed a citizen board to chart a new course, redirecting assets to renewable energy. Would the citizen board’s members immediately end the extraction of oil? If they did, how would we operate the oil-based infrastructure of the world on which we all depend? How would we collectively decide on prioritizing the use of remaining oil supplies to make sure that critical infrastructure operates during a transition? How would we prioritize ongoing energy uses, since no combination of renewable energy sources could replace the dense energy of fossil fuels? Although renewable energy sources are expanding and coming down in price, the United States still generates 79 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. How would we resolve competing claims for the benefits of the remaining fossil fuels that we might decide can be responsibly used?
Some uses of energy and material resources are frivolous and wasteful by any standards—it’s hard to imagine anyone making a serious argument that yachts are essential to human thriving—but many uses of energy simply make our lives easier. Here’s an example.
Imagine that you need to dig a trench to put in a water line from a well to your home. That water pipe has to be below the frost line, which in the mountains of northern New Mexico where I live is about 4 feet down. From the well to our house is more than 300 feet, the length of a football field. Part of the reason for the distance is the setback rule from the septic system’s leach field, necessary if we want an indoor toilet, which is quite a bit handier than an outhouse, especially in the winter. That trench also carries the electricity that powers the well pump, necessary if I don’t want to pump water by hand. Back to the trench: You can dig that by hand with a shovel or use a backhoe. Digging by hand would take weeks for one person. Fire up the backhoe, and you’re done in a day, with no backache. Which do you choose?
Even our modest home, with the modern infrastructure that most of us take for granted, is dependent on the highly dense carbon of fossil fuels. The current fantasy that electrifying everything will solve our problems ignores the reality that not everything can be electrified in a sustainable manner and that the extraction of resources to construct renewable-energy infrastructure requires fossil fuel.
Through most of human history, even the wealthiest people could not have imagined the way ordinary people in affluent societies live today. Most of us understand that the profligate consumption of today’s consumer societies is not necessary for a fulfilling life. In theory, we could recognize the predicament we’re in—there is no way for 8 billion people in high-energy/high-technology societies to live sustainably—and agree to down-power. In practice, we don’t. No society knows how to overcome the grip of “things that once possessed could not be done without,” as Wallace Stegner put it.
That’s why today we face not problems but a predicament. The multiple cascading ecological crises of our era—not just climate change, but also soil erosion and degradation, chemical contamination, biodiversity loss—are the consequences of the large population and modern “lifestyles” made possible by coal, oil, and gas. We face problems that likely have no solutions, if by solutions we mean finding a way for affluent societies to continue while much of the non-affluent world scrambles to catch up.
We need to replace fantasies of endless growth with ideas about managing the contraction to that fewer-and-less world. Our chances of doing that in humane fashion rest on our ability to help each other avoid the temptations of dense energy. No matter how we assign responsibility for creating our predicament, no one is going to survive by claiming the moral high ground.
