We must change our thinking, too. Just as we overcame our preference for authentic furs, ivory, and tortoiseshell, we must retrain our preferences toward domesticated meats and away from wild meats, including fish, for wild animals once again to flourish.

Humankind is thus well-prepared to understand an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what’s natural.

It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whales killed in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982.34 The Commission’s moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, according to the economists who did the

Rather than being the main culprit in the destruction of forests, factories have been, and remain, an engine for saving them.

To forecast market collapses, Shell’s scenario planning depended on thinking in counterintuitive, contrarian ways, and continually seeking new evidence, rather than relying on assumptions.

As such, the intense media and public focus on plastic, like the intense focus on climate change, risks distracting us from other equally important—perhaps more important—threats to endangered sea life, which may be easier to address than climate change or plastic waste.

Our prosperity is made possible by using energy and machines so fewer and fewer of us have to produce food, energy, and consumer products, and more and more of us can do work that requires greater use of our minds and that even offers meaning and purpose to our lives.

Globally, the history of human evolution and development is one of converting ever-larger amounts of energy into wealth and power in ways that allow human societies to grow more complex.

Many experts thus believe that rich nations seeking to reduce plastic waste in the oceans should improve trash collection in poor ones. “Improving waste management infrastructure in developing countries is paramount,” wrote the authors of a major study in 2015. Doing that would “require substantial infrastructure investment primarily in low- and