Most academics spend their entire careers studying basically the same field, and for a long time, I thought I would, too. I spent roughly 15-17 years studying war and warriors, publishing The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1986) and Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (1994). Both books received a fair amount of attention, especially Warrior Dreams after Timothy McVeigh's 1995 truck bomb attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. But after dozens of news media interviews and radio and television appearances (and much reflection on this media blitz) I came to the conclusion that although it's important to analyze how wars are fought and the ways war cultures sustain warfare and masculinity, writers face a serious problem. War is hell, yes. But once a writer has taken readers to a particular hell, then what? The critique of hell doesn’t necessarily lead the way to something better. Hell is a place where all hope is lost.

I concluded that I needed to understand desire and hope better. By the mid-1990s it was clear that a profound cultural change in the ways people understood nature was well underway. The modernist view that places and animals are but inert things, void of consciousness and spirit, simply “natural” resources for human use, was finally being challenged, but in subtle, fragmented ways. I thought that if I could connect these fragments then I could help increase people's desire to feel connected with land and creatures and increase hope that we can actually save the planet.

Some of my own experiences as a scuba diver and as a hiker in the mountains and deserts of Southern California also helped change my direction. In the summer of 1995 while diving off of Catalina Island I saw thousands of anchovies suddenly swarm into a great silver pulsating ball that shimmered with the fishes' neon blue stripes. Something had scared them, quite possibly me. It was an exquisite experience. I was stunned; a door had opened. When I got back on the dive boat I felt responsible for them in some way.

Once home in West LA I began research for a LA Weekly story on the struggle to save the last 1000 acres of the Los Angeles basin floor – the Ballona Wetlands – from the proposed Playa Vista development (housing for 20,000 people, office buildings galore, shopping centers, all leading to over 200,000 car trips a day). One morning a movement activist called and told me that bulldozers had begun leveling the open space on the Westchester Bluffs above Ballona. I left immediately. The second I got out of car I saw something running: a small field mouse, having fled in terror from the bulldozers, crossed the street, ran up a driveway, and then tried to claw its way through a cinder-block wall. When I finally reached the bluffs, the skeletal remains of three Native Americans had already been unearthed. I looked out at the land below and realized that if Playa Vista was built, most of its animals would end up like the mouse. No telling how many more Indian bodies would become unearthed.

At first glance Ballona did not look like much. It did not have the reefs and kelp forests of Catalina, or the redwoods of northern California. It did not have stunning mountains and canyons like the Rockies. No whitewater river flowed through it. Instead, Ballona contained an abandoned Howard Hughes aircraft plant on one end and was bordered by Ballona Creek – a giant concrete storm drain leading to nearby Santa Monica Bay. Its trees, bushes, and grasses all looked scruffy; old tin cans and beer bottles littered the landscape. The sociologist Max Weber wrote that modernization brought about the “disenchantment of the world.” To most people, that description fit Ballona. Playa Vista would be a big improvement.

But I wasn’t the only one who sensed something different out there. Two documentary film crews from the Ballona movement covertly scoured the property, capturing images of foxes, great blue herons, egrets, pelicans, and scores of fish, grass snakes, and turtles. Their nature documentaries sought to teach people the place’s hidden beauty, and point to the possibility that if the wetlands were saved and restored, a stunning nature preserve could be created. Another Ballona group formed a guerilla theater troupe, FrogWorks, with characters in frog and coyote suits who spoke to street crowds about their fears of becoming homeless, just for the benefit of developers and politicians.

Sometime in the summer of 1995 I put the pieces together. The Ballona movement was trying to create a culture of enchantment, to change how people saw the land and its creatures. Ballona, then, was a place where people were hoping to create a reenchanted world. For the next decade the fight continued, until the State of California finally stepped in and bought part of the property, ultimately leading to a 600 acre preserve and a smaller Playa Vista. I participated in that long campaign, penning over a dozen reports for LA Weekly and several op-eds in the Los Angeles Times. For these

While working on Ballona, I also began much broader research, going back to this culture’s origins in the 19th century writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, studying the formation of symbolic or totemic kinship with wild animals, and looking at all the ways lands and waters can be consecrated or sacralized. I also studied Jewish and Christian theologies about land and animals and the political implications of different doctrines.

For example, a crucial part of A Reenchanted World concerns what I call “the right-wing war on the land.” By the early 1990s conservative Protestant evangelical theologians and religious leaders began to see the idea that animals and places had some kind of spirit as a dangerous form of idolatry, even Satanism. Remember all the talk of a “New World Order”? The term comes from Pat Robertson’s book. Robertson argues that if countries signed international environmental treaties regulating pollution then the United Nations would form an army to collect taxes at gunpoint. A charismatic leader –the Antichrist – would then become head of the UN. He would work with ecumenical religious leaders espousing love of Mother Earth to form a new world religion under Satan’s control.

Robertson and his colleagues felt deeply threatened by the culture of enchantment and the environmental movement. They became important parts of the Republican constituency during the Clinton-Gore years and helped elect Bush into office in 2000. Once in office, Bush and his Congressional allies succeeded in opening up public lands in the Rocky Mountain states for oil and gas drilling. They stopped enforcing the Endangered Species Act and important parts of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water act. They facilitated the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains by allowing mining debris to be dumped in streams. They rewrote reports by government scientists indicating that global warming was both real and caused by humans.

But in 2005 the Republican coalition in Congress began to fragment and fail. Efforts to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling did not succeed. Several campaigns to rewrite the Endangered Species Act also failed, and their chief sponsor was defeated in the 2006 elections by a wind-turbine engineer supported by Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund donations and volunteers. In early 2006 the conservative evangelical coalition also began to fragment. Important leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, declaring Earth to be God’s creation and pollution a sin. Very similar ideas were first espoused by radical and liberal theologians over twenty years ago. Most branches of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism now embrace versions of this theology.

The culture of enchantment – the ideas that the Earth is sacred in a broad sense of the word and should be protected and wild animals respected as our totemic kin – are now circulating at multiple levels, from theological treatises to Hollywood animated movies and nature documentaries. (Avatar and The Cove both appeared after my book’s publication.) Newspapers now routinely run obituaries for wild animals – beached whales, bears shot by police, deer impaled on a spiked suburban fence. Funeral oratory articulates a culture’s fundamental values – our eulogies and public mourning for wild animals mean our sense of community has broadened. When the same themes begin to permeate a culture across vastly different domains it’s a sign of profound change. Cultural change in turn makes political change possible. Now is not the time to give in to despair.