Jenny Price, historian, artist, author, and Ivy League academic, thinks most environmentalists are sabotaging their own cause. Shouldering their tote bags through the organic aisle at the grocery store, they miss the bigger problem tearing the planet to pieces: the same system that is the source of their own affluence.

Price’s new book Stop Saving the Planet! An Environmentalist Manifesto, is a slim broadside, the sort of thing you can whip through in a few hours. Unlike her previous book, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, which is a carefully nuanced examination of the strange way Americans think about nature, this one is a furious polemic, leavened with humor. Price acknowledges, in passing, that the fossil fuel industry and its backers are the biggest reason environmentalists haven’t made more progress, but all the rest of the blame in this story goes to the environmentalists themselves.

Price’s basic argument comes from the long-established observation that many people see the environment as something distant and beautiful that they need to save, the mountains where they go backpacking, the jungle in a David Attenborough documentary. But in reality, Price argues, the environment is not just “out there”; it’s our food, the wood in our houses, and the metals in our computers. It’s “in here.” When people focus on saving the planet, it allows them to feel good about making tiny, token efforts without changing the fundamental tenets of the polluting system that fouls lakes, swallows cities in smog, and also gets your Amazon package delivered and supports your job. That is, the economy as we know it.

Read the full article about environmentalism and systems change by Nathanael Johnson at Grist.