Book Extracts: Why nature needs citizens, not consumers

📖 This article is featured in illuminem’s Curated Booklist: the influential books shaping the world sustainability debate.

Title: The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World
Author: Giulio Boccaleti
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication: May 2026 (US), July 2026 (UK)
Sustainability topics: Environmental Sustainability 🌍, Ethical Governance 🏛️

Reading Giulio Boccaletti's introduction to The Future of Nature fundamentally shifted how I understand our relationship with the natural world. His critique of traditional nature documentaries, those David Attenborough productions that present nature as something "other," a museum to visit rather than a home we inhabit, reveals how we've been conditioned to think about environmental solutions. When we see nature as separate from ourselves, as something exotic and distant that we occasionally need to "save," we misunderstand both the problem and the solution.

Boccaletti's work differs sharply from the apocalyptic narratives dominating environmental discourse. He proposes redefining modernity rather than abandoning it. His concept of "functional nature," ecosystems as essential infrastructure, like roads or water systems, suggests that managing rivers, forests, and wetlands should be as much a civic responsibility as maintaining public transit. True sustainability means integrating what surrounds us into our collective growth, not limiting ourselves within imagined planetary boundaries.

The excerpt from The Future of Nature makes clear that Boccaletti wants us to manage ecosystems in what he calls "a regime of abundance," using technology to understand and steward rather than extract and exploit. His years with The Nature Conservancy show what this looks like in practice: working with communities on river restoration, forest management, and coastal protection, treating these not as conservation projects separate from human life, but as infrastructure essential to it.

The question Boccaletti raises, and which forms the core of his forthcoming book The Environmental Republic, is one of governance and citizenship. But what does environmental citizenship actually mean? The review suggests it goes beyond voting for green policies or choosing sustainable products. It means active participation in stewarding shared ecosystems, much as earlier republics required citizens to participate in defense, justice, and common resources. Whether this vision can scale from local projects to global climate governance remains to be seen.

Excerpt from "The Future of Nature" (Mondadori) by Giulio Boccaletti 

Originally published in Italian and translated into English by the illuminem team.

"In the autumn of 2011 I was in London. It had been more than thirteen years since I'd left Italy. One evening, while I was managing onion, carrots and celery for the soffritto, I happened to look at the BBC's first channel. It was broadcasting the documentary The Human Planet. The executive producer was Brian Leith, a well-known documentarian from the Natural History Unit, the British television's specialized natural history unit. Some years later, I would find myself working with him, and it's thanks to that collaboration that this book was born. But let's proceed in order.

I'd had a long acquaintance with documentaries. In the Eighties, Piero Angela's Quark had often aired on RAI the productions of this unit. Tropical paradises, exotic animals, forests, insects, colorful birds were regular companions of the afternoon after-school hours. Then, a white-haired presenter would lie down next to an anthill, explaining its condominium habits. We were visitors; the planet, our museum.

This idea of nature, where our only presence is at most that of a narrator, has always seemed curious to me. If an alien used documentaries as a reference to understand Earth, they would conclude that there's nobody on our planet. Apart from – precisely – David Attenborough, an elderly British commentator who created this television genre. In the Fifties he became famous presenting Zoo Quest, a program in which tropical animals captured in the colonies were brought to the London zoo. From there, he went on to recount life on Earth in the so-called "Blue Chip" series, programs in which, to film animals, cinematographic techniques are used. The quality of the shots is extraordinary and allows the editing of vignettes, breathtaking narratives, struggles between life and death. The viewer is captivated by the dramatization. It's an ode to a marvelously astonishing nature. A nature far from our life. A nature that doesn't exist.

They're documentaries, but they don't document reality. They reflect an artificial idea of nature. Educational in intentions. Factual, in part. Moralizing, certainly. But it's above all entertainment. A product to make the public appreciate a reality they'll most likely never see. The idea of nature they show is so ingrained as to make us forget how much it's a fiction. That nature doesn't exist. Not in the sense that what is filmed isn't real, but in the sense that hours and hours of footage are needed to produce those sequences. The timing is televisual, not that of ecosystems. What one sees is governed by narration, not by biological processes or animal behaviors. It's an extension of what we think nature should be, aesthetic antithesis of modernity, closer to the romanticism of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa than to the scientific work of biologists.

The Human Planet struck me precisely because it didn't resemble the usual nature series. The producer, Brian Leith, had worked at length with Attenborough. In the early 2000s he had even produced a documentary for the famous presenter's fifty years of career. But in this case he had completely inverted the narration. The Human Planet was a documentary about man and the ecosystems to which he had adapted. The camera had turned 180 degrees and was looking at us, instead of the animals. Nature was the observer. We the subject.

Brian had decided to show human communities – mostly traditional ones – that had built their lives in sometimes extreme environments. The little family that crosses the glaciers of Tibet to take the children to school. The Inuit of Greenland who hunt sharks. The divers of the Philippines. The populations who live in the tropical forests of Venezuela or Congo. If he had focused only on these lifestyles, he would have run a risk of voyeurism, that of "modern" man who interprets indigenous populations as subjects to be observed, devoid of history or identity. But Brian is a sophisticated producer. In the series he had also included recognizably "modern" communities. For example, one of the episodes showed people in cities who interacted with domesticated species, like the falconers of Dubai, whose work is to use raptors to control other invasive species. The message was clear: when we talk about nature, we're talking about ourselves.

That day in 2011 I saw on the BBC the first episode of the series The Human Planet. It made me reflect on how to tell stories that could change the perception of what we call "nature." At the time I was working for a large multinational. I traveled from one continent to another, assisting governments and companies in the planning of strategic investments, mainly infrastructural. Within a year I would leave that job to become an executive in one of the world's largest environmental organizations, The Nature Conservancy (known by its acronym: TNC), of which I then became the Chief Strategy Officer. Four thousand employees around seventy countries working on ecosystem conservation projects on rivers, forests, grasslands and oceans, from which I drew many of the examples described in this book.

In 2013, I met Brian Leith for the first time. We talked for a couple of hours in a restaurant in Haymarket, in central London. From there a collaboration was born that continues even today. In 2020 we began working on a new project. An ambitious project, broad. Four years later we finished it, and millions of Americans, French, Germans, Spanish had the opportunity to see four episodes narrated by actress Uma Thurman. The series is titled precisely like this book: The Future of Nature.

Both reflect the idea that one can aspire to a world in which we haven't only "saved nature." It's a different idea of nature. A nature that isn't "other" than us, an exotic distant world, but that is an integral part not only of our daily life, but also of a new definition of modernity.

The stories I tell in The Future of Nature are based on years of experiences, accumulated over more than two decades of work in the environmental field. It's an idea of functional nature, that does things, that acts on our existence, contributing to create the material conditions necessary for contemporary social life. Above all, it's an idea of nature that contributes to solving one of the most important problems of our time: the destabilization of the planet's climate.

Obviously, for a true solution much more than a book is needed. My objective isn't to offer you a detailed map of how our environmental problems are solved. Rather, I want to demonstrate to you that we know how they can be solved. And I want to convince you that, ultimately, there's reason for cautious optimism: these solutions are accessible. It's up to us, collectively, to adopt them.

In an era of wars, pandemics and escapes toward Mars, The Future of Nature explains how to behave on Earth, as custodians of our home. It demonstrates to us that environmental management founded on principles of integration is anything but superfluous. It's a sophisticated frontier that defines a new modernization and an agenda of real progress in a world in which material conditions change before us.

To redefine modernity we must manage ecosystems in a regime of abundance. Ecosystems aren't "other" with respect to modern society, but are an essential infrastructure of it. We must include them in a manner functional to our security and our wellbeing. This requires not only knowing them, but also understanding how to use technology to manage them. Only thus will we be able to describe a truly sustainable development, not because limited by material boundaries imagined by some scientist, but because capable of integrating what surrounds us in the social and economic growth of all.

Ultimately, this is an optimistic story. The solution is found also by looking out the window, changing the ordinary management of our material reality. I want to propose to you an alternative to the apocalyptic narratives that dominate discussions on climate and biodiversity. Not because we're not facing the problem: its seriousness is indubitable, and it's existential for the most vulnerable. But this mustn't paralyze us. We must tell a different challenge, epochal for citizens and institutions: in shaping what surrounds us, we will transform our institutions and, ultimately, ourselves.

This book speaks of the future of nature. But as Brian Leith had also done with that series years ago, ultimately, it speaks of us. The future of nature – the future of which the title speaks – is ours."

This review is part of illuminem’s Curated Booklist: the influential books shaping the sustainability debate. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting exclusive insights from the world’s largest network of sustainability thought leaders. Their views expressed do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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