Reliable sources tell me that you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover. Until you actually read the thing, though, it's the only data you have to go on. So here's what I first noticed about Abundance, Ezra Klein's and Derek Thompson's zeitgeisty manifesto touting a construction-oriented liberalism: the wildlife. At risk of describing a jacket that you've already seen on a thousand podcast promo posts and airport bookstore racks, Abundance's cover depicts a planet neatly divided in two, with skyscrapers and farms and solar arrays juxtaposed against a jungly hemisphere replete with swooping birds and happy deer. It all recalls Half-Earth, the idea proposed by the biologist E.O. Wilson that 50 percent of our landscape should be devoted to the conservation of nature. So far, so good.
Look a little closer, though, and you'll notice something odd: The animals don't really make sense, at least not on the cover of a book about American politics. The deer, which has the white spots of a fawn but the majestic rack of a trophy buck, is probably an Indian chital. The most conspicuous bird appears to be a scarlet ibis, a species native to South and Central America. Wherever you can find these fantastic beasts, it generally ain't this continent.
Klein and Thompson didn't design their cover, obviously, and perhaps demanding flawless zoological fidelity is unfair—after all, this isn't a book about animals. The problem is that Abundance's pages aren't any savvier about nature than its exterior is. This is a vision of America's future that has hardly a word to say about forests, oceans, fresh water, ecosystems, or wild animals—about anything that isn't made by and for humans. The authors imagine a planet in which you might see a "last-mile delivery drone" hover "like a hummingbird," but in which flesh-and-feather birds don't much figure.
Snarking at Abundance has become something of an online progressive bloodsport: There's the critique about power, the critique about neoliberalism, the critique about something called "solar communism." You might call mine the Nature Critique. Klein and Thompson broadly frame their book around this question: "What is scarce that should be abundant?" To their minds, those absences include housing, clean energy, and scientific innovation, which, they argue, are largely constrained by pesky laws and regulations imposed by well-meaning liberals. In my own naive, biophilic little brain, though, the word "scarcity" primarily conjures the wild critters that our planet is hemorrhaging. Scarcity is the nearly 3 billion birds missing from North America, the 81 percent decline in migratory fish, the Insect Apocalypse. It's the Florida panther and the smalltooth sawfish and the boreal toad and the grasshopper sparrow. It's the phenomenon that some scientists have cheerily dubbed "biological annihilation"—the tendency, in our human-dominated age, of once-abundant animals to become, well, rare.
That isn't the kind of scarcity that Abundance cares about. The closest Klein and Thompson come to including nature in their doctrine is in the first few pages, when they outline a sort of techno-utopian daydream revolving around vertical farming, geothermal energy, and desalinized seawater. With all the "cellular meat facilities" brewing ersatz chicken breasts and rib-eyes in petri dishes, we'll no longer need to devote a near-quarter of the planet to raising livestock, which does indeed sound great. "Much of that land," they write, "has rewilded."
If I were to summarize that plan in three easy steps, it would go like this:
- Technology obviates the need for livestock production and other industrial land uses.
- ???
- Rewilding!
In reality, the end of farming on many millions of acres of land wouldn't lead to conservation; it'd just lead to more development, and probably not the good kind. We know this because, contrary to the stories featured in Abundance—the Bay Area's housing shortage, the thwarted high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, malign growth-control policies in Petaluma—there are places other than California. (Really!) There are places like Montana, for one, where former ranches are getting converted into clusters of mountain getaways for conservative millionaires living out their Yellowstone fantasies. In much of rural Colorado, where I live, the new homes slapped atop subdivided ranchlands have overwhelmingly been snapped up by short-term rental investment companies and petrochemical barons from Texas. (Abundance has a lot to say about how to build new units, but it's noticeably silent about how to control who buys them.) When agriculture moves out, animals don't move in—McMansions do.
Granted, Abundance diagnoses all sorts of social maladies that absolutely need treating. NIMBYs can be annoying impediments to progress whose inclusive lawn signs are belied by their contempt for affordable housing. Parking minimums, huge lot sizes, and single-family zoning are generally bullshit. As the writer Michelle Nijhuis observed in her own critique, however, Abundance "all but ignores life beyond city limits." That some places should be spared from a "liberalism that builds"—that the concerns of the Bay Area and New York City shouldn't automatically inform policy everywhere else—goes unconsidered. The ecologist Arthur Middleton recently lamented that all that Kevin Costner–inspired development in western Montana, for instance, is "carving up an ecosystem that must stay relatively intact to function," by cutting off the ancient migrations of elk, bears, and other animals. A liberalism that builds sounds dandy in Seattle, but here in the rural West, I still want a liberalism that protects, sues, and zones.
Alas, the Abundists and their allies only seem to think about land as a place to stick more humans. On his Substack, the writer Matt Yglesias, a key actor in the Abundance Cinematic Universe, mocked the desire to preserve "open space"—a landscape category that a wildlife biologist might alternately describe as "habitat"—as "a kind of English gentry attitude." A recent, risible feature in the New York Times Magazine cited Abundance approvingly while advocating for more of the hellish, car-dependent sprawl that's already devouring a football field of land every two-and-a-half minutes in the American West. The article noted that the country's housing growth has recently migrated to the Southwest, which boasts a "surplus of open land," as though land were widgets whose manufacturer had misread the market. Another term for "surplus of open land" is "where the animals still live."
It's hard not to read a general distaste for conservation between the lines of Abundance itself. Klein and Thompson acknowledge that environmental legislation has produced some positive outcomes—cleaner air has saved countless lives, and, at least for now, our rivers no longer spontaneously ignite. But they seem mostly exasperated by laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, which they regard as part of the irritating "procedural architecture" that's clogged the rapid construction of clean-energy infrastructure. Klein and Thompson are, at root, decarbonization bros whose narrow version of environmentalism has a lot to say about solar farms and transmission lines and nuclear reactors, but little about peregrine falcons and pronghorn antelope and Chinook salmon—and nothing about what to do when industrial renewables and nature inevitably clash. It all recalls the iconoclastic writer Paul Kingsnorth, who once described the clean-energy buildout as "business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon."
Apologies for the dorky confession, but: I'm a fan of Ezra Klein! He uses his humongous platform to boost my favorite authors, inveigh against predatory social media companies, and combat the gerontocracy. Klein and Thompson don't want to gut environmental laws altogether, just to streamline and occasionally suspend them. But by bemoaning America's cumbersome regulatory apparatus, the Abundists play into the hands of people who want to unleash hell. The Trump administration has, to name just a few of its horrific ideas, announced its intent to sell public lands to developers, ginned up a farcical energy emergency to justify more drilling, and proposed to reinterpret the Endangered Species Act so that it doesn't actually protect habitat. These are all transparent favors to corporate cronies, of course, but the administration has framed these measures as necessary for housing supply and energy security, Klein's and Thompson's favorite priorities. Depending on who's deploying it, the word "abundance" can mean more solar panels and high-speed rail—or more offshore oil rigs and mega-highways.
Klein and Thompson decry the rise of "everything-bagel liberalism," whereby every housing or energy project gets weighted down with the pet priorities of a thousand niche interest groups. Well, if insisting that development should also account for "animals," "ecosystems," and "nature" makes me an everything-bageler, pass the shmear, baby. I appreciate places like Eagle Mountain, Utah, a fast-sprawling exurb (not great) with a prolix zoning code to protect the deer migration corridor that runs through it (better!). Or take Chaffee County, Colorado, my home, whose commissioners recently passed a new land-use code that will nudge new housing away from the highest-quality wildlife habitat, better protect streams and wetlands, and encourage the preservation of open space (guess we're the English gentry now). Not every developer is thrilled, but I'll take an abundance of elk and eagles over a few more wildfire-prone townhouses any day.
Nature, much as we want it to, doesn't magically protect itself. To get from techno-utopia to the rewilded Xanadu on the cover of Abundance, you mostly need more of the things that Klein and Thompson profess to hate: more rules, more process, more lawsuits blocking developers from bulldozing fragile ecosystems. So what the hell: Let's compel contractors to use bird-safe glass on all those glittering new skyscrapers, pass zoning codes that stymie development in wildlife-migration corridors, and make sure that our new high-speed rail lines come with animal bridges, whether or not they raise costs and slow construction. Klein and Thompson might call this stuff excessive seasoning on the political everything-bagel. But without it, true abundance is becoming pretty damn scarce.
