You describe how anti-environmentalists in the rural western US turned populist resentment against environmentalists in the wake of environmental victories which protected forests from logging and wilderness from mining and development. You draw on the philosopher Nietzsche, who famously argued that Christian morality, which valorized sickness, poverty, humility, had simply reversed an older "noble morality," and was motivated by resentment. Is the "ressentiment" that Nietzsche wrote about useful for understanding anti-environmentalism?

Absolutely. The idea that moralities will result in their opposite is a profound political idea. Look at the way environmentalism created its own backlash. I remember speaking to a fellow who was one of the very first paid staffers of an environmental organization in Montana. At that time, environmentalists were winning elections and accomplishing policy goals. Today, environmental groups have hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of paid, professional scientists and lawyers. And yet the movement is demonized in the rural west. He said that they aren't able to win much of anything there now in terms of wilderness protection. Isn't that an interesting puzzle? The more of you around, the worse you do.

Does the fact that Al Gore lives in a mansion and owns multiple cars trigger anti-environmentalist resentment?

I'm not worried about Al Gore's hypocrisy so much as his extraordinary faith in the one note that he's playing. I have a class reading Rachel Carson, and they thought it was just like Al Gore's movie: "the world is ending!" But I really think that Carson understood that the solution to the problem was possible. She was a sophisticated woman, she knew the power of ideas. And I think the literal text of Silent Spring notwithstanding, she understood how you would get to the solution. In retrospect it wasn't that big of a deal to limit the use of DDT in the US.

I'm surprised by your defense of Rachel Carson. It seems to me she tells a fairly resentful story of how humankind has destroyed nature -- and then describes a revenge fantasy about how super-powerful mutant bugs are going to take over the earth. Gore tells a similar story, but he seems much more sophisticated, especially in being a major booster of technology.

Al Gore's suggestion is that we all just have to grimly batten down the hatches and live in a more Spartan fashion than it turns out he himself is willing to live. His lifestyle is a problem, but the bigger problem is the grim vision he's advocating.

What can those of us who care about climate change do to avoid this so-called "resentment" backlash?

I think we need to think about transgressing some of our old boundaries. One of the things the Times has been doing is entertaining the idea that there might be geo-engineering solutions to climate change. I don't know whether big kelp beds would help carbon sequestration, but I think it odd that environmentalists tend to oppose such experiments. Politically, the potential of projects like that is just fascinating. If you find something like that that works then you're acting against the way that people think about environmentalists.

You've written that Aldo Leopold's famous "Thinking Like a Mountain" essay, which suggested that we need to think long-term, supposedly from the perspective of "Nature", has been misused by modern environmentalists. Your alternative is to call for something called "multi-naturalism." Does this shift require a new image to replace Leopold's mountain perspective? What kind of symbol or metaphor would represent multi-naturalism?

I'm trying to point out the problems that proceed from assuming that there's one nature, that it has a voice, that it can be personified. I think all of those are highly questionable.

Going all the way back to the first Earth Day, back to Rachel Carson and perhaps even before, the promise was always for a genuinely different relationship between people and all the natural things we're surrounded by. That's an extraordinary promise, and I think the frustration that many of us have is that environmentalism is an interest group, something that is of consuming importance to a very small proportion of the population.

In the "Thinking Like a Mountain" essay, you say that humility has to be enacted, not just proclaimed. Tell me about where greens are missing opportunities to enact humility.

It is terribly easy to announce that you're for poor people, or for nature. But by making that announcement you're helping to invite a certain kind of response -- one gets accused of being pompous or moralistic. Now when one enacts or performs the claim instead of just announcing it, then it can broaden the range of possible reactions and might be more of an invitation to conversation.

How did Leopold enact humility rather than moralize about it?

Personalizing nature -- turning it into something like a person, a subject rather than an object -- is a bold reversal. Leopold, at his best, performed the new way of relating with the natural world.

Another Breakthrough Senior Fellow, Roger Pielke, Jr., has criticized the ways that scientists slip in and out of doing science and politics, claiming the scientific credibility for political positions that do not necessarily follow the science. The insistence among many climate scientists that pollution limits are the single most important thing we can do about global warming is a case in point. What is your take on how scientific expertise around climate change is being used?

The vast majority of scientists just don't get politics. Technical solutions and political solutions diverge constantly -- one might even say, habitually. In the example of climate politics, scientists seem acutely unable to grasp the inefficacy of negative, prohibitory proposals. The inability to process political failure is also a mark of much science politics; certainty is for science, but politics often looks a lot more like dancing.

Is there any way to reconcile these problematic intersections between science and politics?

Consider how negative many climate scientists tend to be about positive technological responses to climate change. I'm not a climate scientist, and I don't claim to be able to evaluate all these claims. But as someone who follows politics closely, I can't help but notice how rote the scientific support for negative and regulatory proposals has been.

You bring up Nietzsche often, and it's made me think of a passage I love from Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," where he talks about the importance of the surfaces of things -- the feel of water, wind, the sun. It's similar to Nietzsche's critique of Socrates -- that he was ugly, and for the Greeks, that was enough of a refutation of capital-R "Reason."

They are both testing the intellectual fascination with depths. Abbey knew that there were deep ecologists, he knew there was a structural argument to environmentalism that involved nature, capitalism, all this stuff. When I read his works I see him being playful, creating some puzzles where others were driving for certainties. I think he's been misread a lot by environmental activists who missed that he was kidding a lot of the time. When you denounce thinking thoughtfully, that's playful. He loved to surprise, and that's a very political trait.

So can Abbey teach anything to the modern environmental movement?

Transgression against stereotypes, especially ones you've helped foster, is an interesting political tactic. At its best, the civil rights movement was just terrific at crossing people up. When everyone expected them to be somber they'd get funny. When people thought they were too self-righteous they'd enact self-doubt. Environmentalists have been so certain about everything they do. A little less certainty would be nice. Sometimes you need to surprise folks in order to get something done.