Move Over, ThoreauRationalist environmentalism better prevail, and fast.

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The rational environmentalists stand at the midpoint between the utopian delusions of the global-warming deniers—something will come along to save us!—and the utopian fantasies of the romantics. They believe our crisis is not spiritual at all, but physical. Human beings didn't unleash warming gases into the atmosphere out of malice or stupidity or spiritual defect: They did it because they wanted their children to be less cold and less hungry and less prone to disease. The moral failing comes only very late in the story—when we chose to ignore the scientific evidence of where wanton fossil-fuel burning would take us. This failing must be put right by changing our fuel sources, not altering our souls.

Diagnose the problem differently, and you end up with fundamentally different solutions. You can see this most clearly if you look at the environmentalist clash over cities, over how we should live: Is the way forward to build more cities or to try to get people to flee to the countryside?

In American Earth, farmer and plant geneticist Wes Jackson ventures into the ring for the romantics by presenting a utopian vision of the United States in 2030. The major cities have experienced "drastic declines" because people finally became aware of "the spiritual dangers which arise when people no longer know or feel their rootedness in the land." They figured out "the only people who really liked the big city life were merchants and [boo! hiss!] intellectuals." The people have returned to the land and been healed.

A few pages later, sociologist Jane Jacobs struts into the ring and jabs back: "It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ill in slow-moving rustic surroundings, but it is a waste of time." Human beings are part of nature, not some alien species—so "the cities of human beings are as natural … as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters." Far from being free and somehow mystically complete, "in real life, peasants are the least free of men—bound by tradition, ridden by caste, fettered by superstitions, riddled by suspicion and foreboding of whatever is strange."

So for Jacobs, cities are ineradicable and set you free—and, crucially, they are the greenest way to live. The area with the lowest carbon emissions per person in the United States is not rural Alabama or icy Alaska. It is New York City, with its mass transit system and easy walking. If we are to deal with global warming, there need to be more densely populated cities and far fewer tree-lined suburbs.

Here are two sincere environmentalists with completely different answers for how we should live. Why? Because they are asking different questions. Jackson is asking about a supposed spiritual crisis; Jacobs is talking about an imminent physical one. I'm with the rationalists. And yet this division—which seems so plain and irreconcilable to me—keeps being muddied by the contributors to this collection. Wes Jackson offers the most romantic fantasy of the book—but he is a distinguished scientist. Al Gore offers the most lucid popular summary of hard climate science we have—and then attributes the disaster, in an unexplained leap of logic, to a "spiritual crisis." Almost all the rational accounts here let romantic tropes seep into their writing as rousing quasi-religious end lines. Why? It feels as though the rationalists don't have enough confidence in their own intellectual tradition to inspire and rouse people. It's an old Enlightenment fear: Are we too irrational and poorly evolved a species to respond to neat reason?

I don't think so. Rationalist environmentalists are close to finding a language that can rouse people to the great global game of Russian roulette we are playing without descending into cause-discrediting voodoo. You can glimpse this voice in the writings of the best environmentalists: people like George Monbiot and Mark Lynas and Jared Diamond. It locates its rock-solid facts in a compelling narrative about our species: where we can from and what we can still be if our best instincts prevail.

Yet rationalist environmentalism doesn't have a lot of time to prevail. As American Earth progresses, from the 1830s to the noughties, the scope of environmentalism grows wider and wider, as though it were a snowball tumbling downhill. If saving our species—with all its poetry and pathos and pathologies—isn't an urgent cause that inspires the kind of hardheaded passion that can sustain a determined political movement, then what is? As Denis Hayes—co-founder of Earth Day—says in this collection, "If environment is a fad, it's going to be our last fad."

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