We Are What We Pretend to Be

Kurt Vonnegut had this way of noticing small things and saying them out loud so you’d laugh and then, a second later, realize he wasn’t joking. Many of his quirky musings have stayed with me, but most of all, I keep coming back to something he wrote in Cat’s Cradle—that science is a kind of “magic that works.”

We know more today about nature—about ecosystems, biodiversity, climate, and health—than at any point in human history. In some cases, a single bottle of water can hold an entire ecosystem. Not in the way we’re used to seeing it, but in traces—skin cells, scales, pollen, and other bits of organisms drifting through a stream or ocean. With a small sample of water, scientists can read those traces and begin to tell a story: what lives here, what used to, and what might be missing.

Using environmental DNA—eDNA—scientists can now identify species that are present in a place without ever seeing them. For example, in recent work across U.S. National Wildlife Refuges, a few bottles of water revealed more than 500 species—from fish and frogs to birds and mammals. In the Midwest, an eDNA study rediscovered a mussel thought extinct for decades. And in lakes and rivers nationwide, eDNA is now being used as an early warning system—detecting invasive species before they are ever seen.

We can see what was once invisible, and we can see it in near real time. It really does feel like magic. But even magic that works has to matter. Science is essential, but to have immediate impact it needs a place to land: in communities, in decisions, in the everyday choices that shape the world around us. Knowing is not the same as changing.

The gap between what we know and what we do has a lot to do with the stories we tell ourselves. Vonnegut put it plainly: we are what we pretend to be. So it’s worth asking—what have we been pretending about nature?

Have we been treating nature as stable—something that will be there, more or less the same, no matter what we do? As something separate from us—out there, rather than something we are part of and responsible for? As something that exists primarily for our benefit—valuable for what it gives us, rather than a relationship that asks something in return?

Even in fields that celebrate our connection to nature, the story often centers on what nature does for us—its benefits, its services—more than what we owe in return. That framing is powerful, but incomplete. It can leave us informed, even appreciative, without fundamentally changing how we act.

And when we build economic and political systems on that kind of pretense, the outcomes follow. Growing risks. Widening inequities. A slow erosion of the things we depend on most.

What’s different now is that the pretense is harder to sustain. Tools like eDNA expand what we know, while narrowing the space between ignorance and awareness. It’s increasingly difficult to claim we don’t see what’s there, or that change is happening somewhere else, or that uncertainty is the primary barrier to action. One of our oldest excuses is slipping away.

We could become incredibly sophisticated at documenting decline. We could build ever more precise ways of measuring what we are losing, while leaving the systems that drive that loss largely untouched. Better instruments, same trajectory.

Vonnegut had a way of capturing that quiet resignation—“so it goes”—a phrase that can feel uncomfortably familiar in conversations about environmental change.

But most of what we’re talking about—how we manage land, water, cities, economies—is not inevitable. It reflects choices. Repeated, reinforced, and often unexamined—but choices nonetheless.

And if that’s true, then a different set of choices remains possible.

That’s where I think efforts like The Nature Record come in. At one level, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a careful accounting of what’s happening to nature across the United States—and what those changes mean for our health, our economy, our safety, and our sense of belonging.

But more than that, it’s an attempt to close the gap between knowing and doing. To translate observation into something usable. To connect data to lived experience. To bring together different ways of knowing—scientific, local, Indigenous—into a shared picture that people can actually act on. Not just a record of change, but a way of making that change legible and consequential.

So the question isn’t whether we have the capacity to understand nature. We do. The question is whether we’re willing to let that understanding shape what happens next.

Because the story of nature in the United States isn’t finished. It’s unfolding in real time, across places and communities, decisions and tradeoffs. We’re not just observing it. We’re part of it. And if it’s true that we are what we pretend to be, then what do we want nature to become?

If this resonates, I’d invite you to spend a little time with The Nature Record. Read a section. Offer a comment. Share what feels right—or what feels missing. We’re still writing this record. It will be better if more voices are part of it.