How many people agree with the statement, “We should not leave the solution to our environmental issues to environmentalists.” Two proponents of this idea are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenbeger with the Break Through Institute and author of a book by the same name, “Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Solving the Planet to Environmentalists.”

They write, “In the end, it is the global ecological crisis themselves that have triggered the death of environmentalism. For us to make sense of them, the category of “the environment” – along with the ancient story of humankind’s fall from nature – is no longer useful. The challenge of climate change is so massive, so global, and so complex that it can be overcome only if we look beyond the issue categories of the past and embrace a grand new vision for the future.”

They continue by arguing that before a new vision can be realized we must first ask, “What kind of beings are we? and What can we become?” And this is what they set out to answer; however, along the journey, I lost interest and barely held out long enough to discover the answer to these questions.

Right now, many people who read the book are thinking (or will write me) you didn’t get it. No, I got it. In fact, the answers are philosophical, engaging, well thought out, and have extreme merit. But the truth is, I like to be entertained when I read, even if it’s a nonfiction or business book, and this book felt like I was back in philosophy class in college (and for me that was one and done). Yet the philosophical arguments they lay out adeptly get us thinking into a new thought paradigm. We should no longer think about how the world can work together to solve global warming in the traditional sense of’ ‘environmentalism,’ but we must realize that true results will come when we understand that the solution to the problem lies in the intersection between ecological concern and global prosperity.