When we talk about sustainability, then, what is it that we hope to sustain? We certainly do not sustain nature “in itself.” Rather, we sustain nature as we humans prefer it. More precisely, we preserve the resources needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In one sense, we preserve nature for industry.

The human activity that has produced these environmental shifts is not isolated to one practice or one epoch, say, the consumption of carbon in the 20th century — though it may be accelerated by this. As Kolbert argues, the rise of Homo sapiens fundamentally altered the planetary ecosystem long before the invention of writing, the birth of René Descartes, or the first diesel pump. By killing off the large fauna, our prehistorical ancestors overturned the food chain that existed before us and began a separate chain of events that is still playing out. It might be that the truest meaning of human being, from the perspective of planetary history, is that we are a mass extinction event.

Mass extinctions are no doubt catastrophic, but they are only tragic if nature is viewed as something perfect that we are destroying, rather than as a state of flux in which we are participating.

Among many, the argument against sustainability elicits an emotional response. As the ecological theorist Timothy Morton writes in his book “Ecology Without Nature,” the environmental movement has become, and perhaps always was, infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia (not to mention nostalgia). This melancholia, I would argue, is connected to the death of God, or the ability to conceive God in a certain way, and stems from that Romantic transference of the divine into nature.

In either case, as with any death, first comes denial — we can save nature! — but it eventually gives way to acceptance. Talk about “sustaining” nature, or “preserving” it, only exacerbates this mourning and indulges our melancholia. Like the bereaved who must learn to speak of the dead in the past tense, if we are to move forward in our habitation of the planet, to face the future and not the past, to say “yes” to the anthropocene, we should change our language.

The contemporary French theorist Bruno Latour has also argued for discarding the idea of nature and the entire framework that puts human culture and the natural world in opposition. In its place he suggests we instead consider a unified network of “actants,” human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. Nature, after all, includes us in its list of animals, and our products differ in degree, not kind, from those of beavers, bees and spiders. Because we are necessarily engaged with it — with it’s development, history and activity — we cannot simply let nature be, as the deep ecologists wish. And because nature drives and shapes humans in ways we don’t understand, neither can we fully become its “masters and possessors,” as Descartes imagined.