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0. Introduction

I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them to us in class. None of us found that strange. We knew that when we grew up, this would be our fight: to take on the loggers and whalers and seal-clubbers who were destroying our planet and save the Earth for the next generation.

What\xa0happened\xa0to that? I don\u2019t mean the Pollution Demons: they\u2019re still around, I think one of them runs Trump\u2019s EPA now. What happened to everything else? To those teachers, those movies, that whole worldview?

Save The Whales. Save The Rainforest. Save Endangered Species. Save The Earth. Stop Slash-And-Burn. Stop Acid Rain. Earth Day Every Day. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Twenty-five years ago, each of those would invoke a whole acrimonious debate; to some, a battle-cry; to others, a sign of a dangerous fanaticism that would destroy the economy. Today they sound about as relevant as \u201cFifty-four forty or fight\u201d and \u201cRemember the Maine\u201d. Old slogans, emptied of their punch and fit only for bloodless historical study.

If you went back in time, turned off our Pollution Demon movie, and asked us to predict what would come of the environment twenty-five years, later, in 2018, I think we would imagine one of two scenarios. In the first, the world had become a renewable ecotopia where every child was taught to live in harmony with nature. In the second, we had failed in our struggle, the skies were grey, the rivers were brown, wild animals were a distant memory \u2013 but at least a few plucky children would still be telling us it wasn\u2019t too late, that we could start the tough job of cleaning up after ourselves and changing paths to that other option.

The idea that things wouldn\u2019t really change \u2013 that the environment would neither move noticeably forward or noticeably backwards \u2013 but that everyone would stop talking about environmentalism \u2013 that you could go years without hearing the words \u201cendangered species\u201d \u2013 that nobody would even know whether the rainforests were expanding or contracting \u2013 wouldn\u2019t even be on the radar. It would sound like some kind of weird bizarro-world.

Just to prove I\u2019m not imagining all this: