I read Ted Nordhaus's review of Bill McKibben's latest book this morning over coffee, and something about it crystallized fifty years of professional unease. Nordhaus, who founded the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, was eviscerating McKibben's solar optimism with the kind of technical precision I'd expect from a peer reviewer, not a think tank director. The capacity factor problems, the cherry-picked Lazard data, the convenient omission of grid integration costs—all laid bare with prosecutorial thoroughness. But what struck me wasn't the technical critique. It was Nordhaus's closing observation that McKibben's book "unwittingly, written that era's eulogy"—the era when serious people believed climate change rivaled nuclear war as an existential threat and that wind and solar could power eight billion people living modern lives.

I've spent my career documenting eulogies, though I didn't think of it that way until recently.

The Arc of Observation

My observational arc spans 1968 to 2018—from undergraduate fieldwork before the Clean Air Act existed to retirement after watching ecosystems degrade despite every regulatory framework and technological advancement we threw at them. That's half a century of baseline data, and the trajectory is unmistakable: every system I studied intensively has functionally collapsed or dramatically simplified, regardless of protection status, management regime, or restoration effort.

The Breakthrough Institute has evolved considerably since Jonathan Symons wrote his 2019 academic assessment positioning them in the "social democratic tradition." They've now pivoted to leading what they call the "abundance movement"—a bipartisan coalition explicitly framed in opposition to traditional environmentalism. They co-host conferences with hundreds of attendees, claim credit for a new Congressional caucus on permitting reform, and position themselves as uniquely capable of advancing climate policy under Trump precisely because they reject "apocalyptic views" and "arbitrary emissions targets."

The abundance argument is seductive in its logic: regulatory barriers, not insufficient subsidies, now prevent decarbonization. Environmental review processes block renewable deployment. NIMBYism obstructs transmission lines. The solution is streamlining—build more, faster, everywhere. Democrats from Kamala Harris to Barack Obama endorsed this at the 2024 convention. A bipartisan House caucus is pursuing it. The American Enterprise Institute, not exactly a left-wing outfit, praised it as transcending partisan politics.

But here's what decades of field observation teaches you: both the abundance movement and the traditional climate movement operate within fundamentally anthropocentric frameworks that treat ecosystems as resource bases or carbon sinks rather than as complex systems with intrinsic dynamics. Neither adequately addresses what I've watched happen on the ground.

The Landscape Conversion Continues

The abundance advocates celebrate regulatory streamlining and infrastructure development. I've observed what large-scale extraction and development do to functional ecosystems regardless of energy source. Solar arrays industrialize desert ecosystems. Wind farms fragment migratory corridors. Transmission corridors bisect habitat connectivity. Mining operations for battery materials devastate watersheds. The specific technology changes; the landscape conversion continues.

McKibben's framework, while opposing fossil extraction, still promotes industrial-scale renewable buildout requiring extraordinary material throughput and landscape transformation. When Nordhaus mocks McKibben's solar enthusiasm by noting that California—McKibben's showcase—has some of the nation's highest electricity prices and routinely curtails solar generation, he's making a technical economic point. But from an ecological perspective, California has also converted vast areas to energy infrastructure while biodiversity continues declining.

Neither movement seriously confronts what fifty years of observation shows: industrial civilization at current scale is incompatible with biodiversity conservation regardless of energy source or regulatory structure.

Economic Forces and Ecosystem Collapse

The real force driving change is economic from the human perspective and ecosystem collapse from the planetary side. I watched both operate across five distinct political-economic regimes: post-war expansion, 1970s resource crisis and limits-to-growth discourse, 1980s-90s deregulation and globalization, the 2008 financial crisis and fracking boom, and the recent renewable emergence. Economic imperatives toward resource extraction remained constant. So did ecosystem degradation trajectories.

The temporal dimension matters enormously. Someone beginning ecological work in the 1990s or 2000s has normalized conditions I observed as catastrophic decline. They've accepted degraded baselines as reference conditions. Shifting baseline syndrome isn't just a concept—it's what I've watched happen in real time. Each generation of ecologists, each cohort of advocates, accepts ecosystem functioning far below what existed decades earlier.

When I jokingly call myself a "forensic ecologist" now, there's uncomfortable truth in it. Forensic scientists examine what's already dead to determine cause of death. Most of my field sites have become crime scenes where industrial civilization is the perpetrator. My baseline data serves as evidence of what existed before. I'm increasingly documenting endpoints, establishing causes of death, creating records for whatever comes after.

The Restoration Myth

I asked whether any restored ecosystems have achieved pre-disturbance biodiversity levels. The literature is unambiguous: none have. A global meta-analysis explicitly found that "terrestrial ecosystem restoration increases biodiversity and reduces its variability, but not to reference levels." The UN Decade on Restoration diplomatically acknowledges "it is not always possible—or desirable—to return an ecosystem to its original state." Rewilding experiments show mixed results at best, with passive restoration often outperforming active intervention. Pleistocene rewilding remains mostly theoretical.

What restoration actually achieves is improving conditions relative to degraded states and creating "novel ecosystems"—a euphemism acknowledging we can't recreate what was lost. Every "success story" claims comparative improvement, never absolute equivalence to reference conditions. My 1968 baseline observations are now irreplaceable data showing what systems looked like before current degraded states became normalized.

This empirical reality—that neither regulatory tightening nor technological advancement altered fundamental biodiversity trajectories—contradicts both movements' core assumptions. The abundance movement assumes better technology choices and streamlined regulation enable continued growth compatible with environmental protection. The climate movement assumes sufficient mobilization and carbon focus will prevent catastrophe. Fifty years of data suggest both are wrong.

Dark Humor and Hard Truths

My dark humor mantras have evolved: "We are all doomed, extinction is forever including us, nature won't recover if the planet has toxic levels of CO2 and an average surface temperature lethal to forests and ocean temperature lethal to plankton." It sounds catastrophic, and friends worry about my mental state. But the humor distances me enough to process profound loss while staying functional.

The planet has survived much higher CO2 concentrations and temperatures than current trajectories suggest. Life persisted, diversified, eventually recovered. What won't survive is this particular Holocene configuration of ecosystems and most current species assemblages, including potentially us in current form. The biosphere is more resilient than any particular species or ecosystem type. That's still bleak from the perspective of someone who spent decades studying these particular ecosystems, these particular species, these particular ecological relationships. What I watched degrade won't return on any timescale meaningful to humans.

Weeds in Cracks

I live in the urban landscape matrix now, studying weeds in cracks. It's a sad alternative to old growth forest—the systems I built two off-grid solar-powered field stations to study intensively. But characterizing it as merely "sad" risks dismissing what I'm actually observing. Urban ecology documents how ecosystems reorganize under maximum human pressure. Those matrix-adapted species aren't just degraded remnants—they're taxa that persist under conditions that killed everything else. That's evolutionary selection operating at unprecedented intensity.

My historical observations from intact systems through decline to matrix adaptation create complete temporal documentation of Anthropocene transition. Most ecologists only observe one phase. The weeds in cracks represent whatever biodiversity survives the conditions both political movements are creating—whether through abundance-driven industrialization or climate-driven fragmentation and protection.

What concerns me most isn't my own emotional processing—the dark humor seems healthy given what I've witnessed. What concerns me is the broader failure to acknowledge hard truths. Both movements resist the implication that solving the problem requires absolute reductions in aggregate material throughput, genuine economic contraction in wealthy nations, substantial human population reduction over time through humane means, and focus on preserving remaining intact systems rather than optimizing degraded ones.

Neither abundance advocates' "build more efficiently" nor climate advocates' "mobilize for transformation" engages with the possibility that industrial civilization at current scale is fundamentally unsustainable. Both movements may be sophisticated forms of denial—ways to maintain belief that sufficient cleverness can preserve industrial civilization's material base while avoiding hard limits.

Teaching the Next Generation

But I'll always be a scientist, whether as hobby, teacher, or mentor. My granddaughter will grow up in a world where shifting baselines accelerate faster than my generation experienced. Having someone who can say "I watched these systems when they were functional, here's what we lost, here's how it happened, here's what persists and why" gives her cognitive tools most of her generation won't have.

The baseline data in my memory and field notes becomes increasingly valuable as fewer people remain who observed pre-1980s ecosystem functioning. When meta-analyses discuss "reference ecosystems," they're often using data from periods I observed directly. That knowledge dies with my cohort if it isn't transmitted.

My commitment to mentoring her—teaching her to observe carefully, think critically, maintain scientific discipline even when studying degraded systems, process loss without succumbing to paralysis—feels like the most valuable contribution I can still make. She'll inherit a world I helped document the decline of but couldn't prevent. The least I can do is give her clear eyes about what happened and the intellectual tools to work with what remains.

The urban weeds I study now give us current systems to observe together. We can discuss succession in disturbed habitats, selection pressures in anthropogenic environments, which traits predict persistence under human pressure. Whether I find it intellectually compelling or just maintain observational habits to stay engaged matters less than keeping the practice alive to pass forward.

I've documented the Holocene's ending. Now I teach someone who'll live through whatever comes next. That's not consolation—it's continuation of the work under changed circumstances. The forensic ecologist has one more job: ensuring the evidence survives even if the ecosystems didn't.