How the Environmental Movement Can Find Its Way Again

A central theme of my book on climate is that if we are to focus our attention on a single substance, it should be not carbon dioxide but water. Beyond greenhouse effects, water is crucial in the ways the world maintains conditions for life to thrive.

One function of water is as a vehicle of heat transport, part of the physiology of this living planet. Please watch this brand new animated video about how plants influence local and global temperatures through the movement of water.

This video, along with companion pieces on the biotic pump and hydrology, comes from an emerging understanding among many environmentalists that we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon. Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs.