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The challenge to environmentalism.

Article Excerpt
Quantity can redefine quality: meaning can and does change if something gets big enough to pass some invisible but real threshold.

Consider, for instance, how the atom bomb redefined the ways we thought about conflict and war. The old ideas--particularly that warfare was a kind of natural extension of statecraft--had survived a great deal of scaling up, from Agincourt to Antietam, from Thermopylae to Tarawa. But the explosion of the first nuclear weapon, though in some sense just a much larger version of things we'd been doing for years, clearly made us reconsider the idea of war. Oppenheimer, watching the first desert test, quoted from the Gita: "We are become as gods, destroyers of worlds." We've managed to fight plenty of nasty wars since, but we've always made sure to keep them relatively small and manageable. The intellectual edifice we'd built around battle--from just war theory to Clausewitz--no longer works very well. When you could postulate a war that could not just kill millions but poison the soil with radioactivity, potentially trigger an endless nuclear winter, and generally raise the whole concept of return to the Stone Age, sheer quantity redefined meaning.

Now, too, with the environment. The relationship between people and the natural world has been largely taken for granted for most of human history--our impact upon the...

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