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The following interview with writer and environmental activist Lyle Lewis is the fourth in a series produced by Vice-Versa. Lewis is a former endangered species biologist/supervisor with the U.S. Department of Interior. He founded the Western Bat Working Group and Southwestern Carnivore Committee and received awards for bat, carnivore, and natural area conservation. His career and love of the outdoors have taken him to many of the wildest places in North America, and he has spent several decades in backcountry and wilderness areas. During his professional career, he held diverse and unusual positions, including range conservationist, watershed specialist, hydrologist, fisheries biologist, ecologist, wildlife biologist, endangered species branch chief, and endangered species recovery coordinator. More than two decades of his federal career were spent in efforts to conserve imperiled species in the face of livestock grazing, logging, oil, and gas development, agricultural development, mining, recreation, highway expansion, construction, rights-of-way, and urban development. His book was published in 2022, and he posts articles and essays on .
VV Thank you, Lyle, for meeting with us again to talk about the future of humankind and our home, the Earth. Let’s start with this quotation from Steve Newman, a scientist and creator of the popular column Earthweek.
[P]erhaps the most disturbing change is not physical, it’s psychological.
The public appears to be adapting emotionally to a world that is becoming progressively more dangerous. Each record is surpassed by another. Each “unprecedented” event is soon replaced by the next one. Heat has become another headline. Climate change has become background noise.
That normalization may be one of the greatest risks we face.
This appeared on June 29 in a column titled “The Climate Crisis.” What is your response to it?
LL Steve’s observation about psychological normalization is exactly right, but I think there is another layer beneath it. We often assume that environmental crises resemble mechanical failures—that if conditions become bad enough, society will eventually decide to fix them. Many ecological systems don’t work that way.
Shifting environmental baselines allow us to psychologically accommodate deterioration precisely because most environmental damage is cumulative and largely irreversible on human timescales. Extinct species do not return. Ancient forests cannot simply be replanted into existence. Topsoil lost over centuries cannot be recreated in decades. Persistent chemicals, plastics, altered nutrient cycles, depleted groundwater, and accumulated greenhouse gases would continue shaping the planet long after emissions or releases stopped.
The expectation that there will someday be a decisive moment when humanity “turns things around” may itself be part of the psychological adaptation. But ecological history is cumulative. Every generation inherits the ecological consequences of those that came before. This expectation allows us to postpone confronting the fact that we are often choosing between preventing additional damage and living with the damage already done.
Shifting environmental baselines go further than normalization. Each generation literally loses the memory of what existed before. The reference point itself changes.
That difference matters enormously.
A child born today doesn’t merely tolerate a world with fewer insects, fewer birds, fewer salmon, smaller forests, and warmer summers. That child grows up believing this is what nature has always been. By the time they become an adult, they may fight passionately to protect an ecosystem that has already lost most of its original function. They are not accepting decline—they often don’t know decline occurred.
Evolutionary systems are more like compound interest in reverse. Every loss narrows future options. Every extinction eliminates evolutionary history. Every simplification reduces resilience. The future becomes progressively less capable of resembling the past. Future generations inherit whatever remains, not the world that existed before.
The absence of an obvious solution to many of the environmental problems itself encourages shifting baselines. If there is no obvious way back, the mind often finds another strategy: redefine what is normal.
That idea extends well beyond climate. It applies equally to biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion, microplastics, PFAS, soil erosion, ocean acidification, invasive species, and the long ecological consequences of megafaunal extinction. In many cases the challenge is no longer restoring the world we inherited, but limiting how much more of it we lose while convincing ourselves that each diminished state is simply “the way things are” while each new baseline quietly replaces the last.
VV The July 3 issue of The Good Newsletter had items like these:
- The Civil Rights Movement brought America immeasurably closer to fulfilling its promise of equality, justice, and freedom for all
Though the Civil War brought an end to chattel slavery, without the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, segregation and Jim Crow Laws, racist voting restrictions, and countless other injustices and human rights abuses might still be a reality today.
- The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in history, saving 25 million lives
Created in 2003, PEPFAR is widely credited with fundamentally altering the trajectory of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, accounting for more than 90% of PrEP initiations globally and over $120 billion in cumulative funding from taxpayers. PEPFAR single-handedly replaced despair with hope in communities all over the world.
- The national park system shows America’s commitment to preserving and protecting the immense, unique, breathtaking natural landscapes across the country for generations to come
Yellowstone National Park became the first national park in 1872, designating 2.2 million acres as solely “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Without these protections, it’s reasonable to believe that they would not exist today. The foresight to protect them is truly incredible and worth celebrating.
As I read the issue, I had a recurrent thought: “But what about recent events, which undid the good of this piece of legislation or event? Or diluted or made it ineffective?” It was a strange kind of yo-yo response to the content. I could see that the authors and editors intended the edition to be uplifting and empowering, but it evoked in me a remembrance—a yearning even—for better, more ideal times.
Attempts like this to make us feel better can create a reality filter so that we don’t experience things as they are but as someone wants us to. To me this is pernicious and keeps us from formulating real solutions to real problems. Targets change, become fuzzy and elusive.
LL Hope is valuable. Selective perception is dangerous. Those are two very different things.
I’ve published several satire pieces on Substack. Every single one has been mistaken as factual by at least some readers. That tells me something uncomfortable about the moment we’re living through. People don’t simply seek information that is true. They seek information that fits the reality they want to inhabit.
I don’t object to good news. Some of humanity’s greatest accomplishments deserve celebration. The Americans with Disabilities Act mattered. PEPFAR has saved millions of lives. Conservation has produced genuine successes. Those stories are real.
The problem begins when good news stops informing us about reality and starts accommodating us to it.
As I read the newsletter, I kept asking myself, What happened afterward? Has the accomplishment been maintained? Has it been weakened? Has the underlying problem actually improved, or has the story simply frozen a moment at its greatest success?
Humans evolved to reduce anxiety. We naturally gravitate toward narratives that reassure us the future remains manageable. That tendency creates an enormous market for optimism.
It is not surprising that major news broadcasts almost always end with an uplifting story. Nor is it surprising that writers who emphasize technological optimism or environmental reassurance often attract audiences orders of magnitude larger than those who focus on ecological decline.
The average person working a full-time job doesn’t spend their evenings reading ecological journals. Their environmental experience consists largely of dramatic disasters—a wildfire, a flood, a chemical spill—interspersed with stories suggesting that remarkable progress is continually being made.
Those stories create an understandable impression that, while problems certainly exist, someone else is solving them.
I worry less about optimism than about complacency. If people conclude that the major crises are already under control, there is little reason to reconsider how we live, consume, vote, or govern ourselves.
Hope should come from honestly confronting reality, not from filtering reality.
Humanity has become extraordinarily good at adapting to deterioration while convincing ourselves we’re making progress. Rather than reducing fossil fuel use, we turn on our air conditioners. Rather than protecting watersheds, we build desalination plants. Rather than restoring floodplains, we build flood walls. Rather than preserving ecosystems, we turn to cryopreservation. Rather than preventing collapse, we initiate assisted migration.
These responses are sometimes necessary. But they are all examples of a civilization adapting to symptoms while leaving the underlying drivers largely intact.
Accurate diagnosis has never been the enemy of progress. In medicine, engineering, ecology, and conservation, solutions begin only after we are willing to describe the problem as it actually exists.
I don’t think we need less hope. I think we need hope built on an accurate picture of the world rather than on selective attention.
VV I’m not sure I believe that there is such a thing as a humanity that can unite us and help us survive–certainly not in the U.S. Politics and economics have superseded humanity as the mode of survival. In these last few decades of our human existence, what can we expect from each other?
LL I’m not convinced that humanity has fundamentally changed. Anatomically and physiologically, we remain much the same species that emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago. For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived in relatively small groups that cooperated intensely within their own group while often competing fiercely with others.
Our capacity for kindness and our capacity for conflict likely evolved together. They are both part of the same inheritance. Today there are more than 8 billion people on the planet, each expressing a different combination of traits we often describe as good or bad. What has changed most dramatically is not human nature itself, but the ecological and social context in which those traits are expressed.
Our behavior has always been extraordinarily plastic. Our capacities for cooperation, generosity, fear, competition, and indifference likely remain much as they always were. Which of those tendencies emerges depends greatly on the environments we create for ourselves.
I was reminded of that recently in a remote area of southeastern Oregon, where a rancher I had met only once spent hours bringing me a replacement battery after my vehicle failed. In a remote landscape, helping a stranger isn’t simply an act of kindness; it’s also part of living in a place where everyone understands they may someday depend on someone else.
I don’t see that as evidence that rural people are inherently better than urban people. I see it as evidence that context shapes behavior. In a large city, that same rancher might not stop along a freeway to help someone with a disabled vehicle—not because he had become a different person, but because the risks, expectations, and social dynamics are different. I suspect I would make the same calculation.
Ecology doesn’t stop with forests and wildlife. It shapes us as well.
VV In a by St Badhon, he mentions the importance and necessity of trust in society.
LL I found the Substack article compelling because it treats societies as dynamic systems rather than collections of isolated political decisions. That’s very much how I think about ecology. Where my own work differs is mostly in scale. Peter Turchin begins with civilization and asks why societies become unstable. I’ve been asking what ecological changes made civilizations capable of reaching those scales in the first place.
To me, agriculture wasn’t simply an economic revolution—it weakened ecological feedbacks that had constrained human populations for hundreds of thousands of years. Surplus made possible the demographic and social dynamics Turchin later models. So I see the two perspectives as complementary rather than competing: one explains the dynamics within civilization, while the other explores the ecological conditions that gave rise to it.
VV A few questions to wrap things up. (1) Have you considered writing a sequel to Racing to Extinction? (2) You are away from home a lot. Where do you go and what do you work on? And if you aren’t working, how are you spending your time? (3) Do you have any advice, in these last years of human existence, for the following groups: (a) parents with kids still living at home, (b) middle-aged folks like us, and/or (c) those who are themselves in their last years?
LL I’ve been writing a sequel for the past year. It is much more systems-oriented than Racing to Extinction and examines the extinction crisis across a much longer span of ecological and human history. I’m nearing the point of having a complete draft manuscript, and my hope is to interest a literary agent and eventually pursue traditional publication.
Self-publishing has its place, but its reach is often constrained. The challenge is that there are many environmental writers working in an already crowded genre. My hope is that an agent or publisher will see my perspective as distinctive and the manuscript as something that adds meaningfully to the conversation. I’m hoping for the best and preparing for the alternative.
My trips are usually into remote parts of the West—deserts, mountains, wildlife refuges, forests, and watersheds that I want to understand more closely. Those trips almost invariably generate ideas for future writing. Both of the Mongabay articles published over the past few months grew directly from time spent in the places I was writing about.
I find it difficult to write about the environment entirely from afar. Many people do it, and often do it very well, but being present brings another dimension to my writing. It allows me to notice what is missing, what has changed, and what official descriptions often overlook. It helps that the natural world has always been one of my closest friends.
When I’m not working, I’m often still outside—camping, fishing, walking, watching wildlife, or simply spending time in places that remain relatively quiet. The distinction between working and not working has become increasingly blurred, because those experiences are also where much of the writing begins.
I’m uncomfortable giving advice because everyone faces different personal, financial, family, and health circumstances. But I would encourage those who remain connected to the living world—and who understand at least some of what is happening—to hold on to their courage.
At its core, courage is not bravery in the face of danger. It is the willingness to face what is real when reality is frightening, costly, or isolating—and to continue anyway. It requires asking: What is really happening, and how do I live honestly inside it?
The answer will be different for parents, for people in middle age, and for those approaching the end of their lives. But the people willing and able to ask that question—and then live according to their answer—are the people I respect and admire most.