Which hard decisions are you willing to make?
As you’ve probably seen, the Trump administration just took its most damaging climate step yet by scrapping the EPA’s endangerment finding—the scientific and legal backbone for regulating greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S.
It’s a move that doesn’t just weaken specific rules; it tries to erase the underlying obligation to protect people from climate harm at all. In effect, it says: we refuse to see the danger, and therefore we will not act on it.
Turning away from a well-documented, almost certainly existential threat because it’s politically or economically inconvenient is a deeply cynical move, even for politicians.
But more often, the decisions made by leaders who care about the environment involve hard tradeoffs about what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of “saving” something bigger. Sometimes we are direct about those tradeoffs; sometimes we bury them in legalese, euphemisms, or wishful thinking. But almost all the time, novels can be more honest and capture what policy papers cannot.
That’s why Jonathan Miles’s new novel, Eradication: A Fable, is so compelling. It dives headfirst into one of these classic quandaries in nature conservation: what happens when saving an ecosystem means killing something that’s alive and looking right back at you?