I doubt I need to introduce the work of John Cobb to readers of this journal. His career has seen many firsts, from co-founding the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, CA and being one of the leading representatives of its brand of process theology to writing the first philosophical/theological book on environmental ethics. This Fortress Press edition of Is It Too Late? marks the fiftieth anniversary of that landmark publication and includes a new preface and afterword written by Cobb. Besides those new perspectives on the argument, the intervening years have made the words of the original text prophetic and have revealed Cobb's visionary insight. Despite there being a lot that he could brag about, Cobb remains characteristically humble. The frankness with which he assessed the various ecological crises the Earth would be facing when writing the original book during the summer of 1970 is also present in the new perspectives he offers on his work.His honesty is also startling when he admits that those such as himself who proclaimed a new ecological society was being realized in the 1970s failed. Just like the attempt of Jesus to save Israel from destruction, ecological theologians from decades ago were failed revolutionaries. Species are gone forever, farmland has been irrevocably changed, and seas are rising with coral dying. While there is still work to be done and hope for progress to be found in this book, it now opens with the admission of real loss. “Probably the planet will never again be as hospitable to human habitation as it was half a century ago” (xi). Other admissions are more personal, and in the new preface he apologizes for the “naive idealism” of which many progressive Christian theologians, himself included, were guilty (vii). While Cobb was an early advocate of ecological ethics and comparative theology, issues related to race, sex, and gender were not as readily embraced. He doubles down on his apologies in the new afterword, noting reasons he has since learned to abandon pejorative references to “subhuman” animals and “primitive” or “primal” people (115). Given his religious pluralism and role in promoting comparative theology, chapter 5 on non-Western views of nature holds up especially poorly. The success China has had getting its population and related resource scarcities under control is proof enough that it is not exclusively new Christian views that are fit to address ecological crises.Though apologetic in places, Cobb's honesty also remains refreshing. The original text serves as a reminder of the ways solutions have been delayed and global climate change worsened since its writing. Even in the 1970s Cobb was complaining about being told that stricter controls will solve issues with air and water quality (chapter 1). Changes in attitude and associated behaviors are what is needed, not new technologies (chapter 3). Indeed, corporations still seem to be getting away with a lot while stricter controls remain nowhere to be seen or slow to be implemented (e.g., emissions restrictions and the switch from internal combustion to electric engines in vehicles). Living simpler lives might be the solution, not further manipulation of the environment in an attempt to undue previous harmful manipulations of that environment. Decades ago, he was calling for an additional 30 percent tax on private automobiles on top of existing taxes, with that money to be invested into public transportation that would be made attractive by being both comfortable and free. Getting serious about solutions to ecological problems requires rethinking lifestyles, raising costs without raising salaries and therefore learning to get by with less. He offers the same tax advice to reduce waste of other products like wood, electricity, and water in order to subsidize education and improve mental health services (chapter 7). In a similar practical spirit, and bypassing decades of debates among theologians and within religious institutions, Cobb argues for valuing women in roles other than mothers, mandatory sex education, cheap available contraceptives, and defending abortion on straightforward realistic terms (chapter 8). “Once we have accepted the moral importance of stabilizing population, such measures will be clearly appropriate” (51). It is not the fact that Cobb knew drastic action had to be taken fifty years ago that is impressive. Reliable data on ecological issues was available then. What is remarkable is that Cobb was listening because many people continue to not listen to what they are being told. Many of Cobb's proposals for solutions remain relevant because they now come across as less likely than ever.It is hard not to think of the problems those who hold 1 percent of worldwide wealth create for the remaining 99 percent when reading Cobb's analogy comparing the ecological crisis with people ignoring problems with a ship until it is already sinking. There is a possibility that the first-class passengers will find some way to keep a walled off section afloat while all other passengers drown (12). These socio-political failings echo a theological failing in the form of well-intentioned humanism that makes people transcendent and dominating over the nonhuman world (chapters 6 and 10). Cobb's hope decades ago, a hope his work since has tried to realize, was that humanistic concern for others could be extended to the nonhuman. He thought the solution was in the problem, a new form of Christianity replacing an outdated problematic one. His attempt to tease out this new Christianity echoes forms of religious naturalism in which differences of degree, but not kind, are affirmed. “By distinguishing within nature the human and the nonhuman, we can continue to recognize the superior value of human beings without disparaging or denying the intrinsic value of other living things” (38). The new preface reflects Cobb's focus since his retirement on how such a new Christianity might only flourish in smaller local communities. Readers familiar with Pilgrim Place in Claremont, CA may think of the many novel approaches to communal living that have been tested there when reading Cobb's hope that such smaller communities can become sustainable and self-sufficient, even if nations cannot. “They will not save the world from appalling disasters, but it is possible that many of them may survive the catastrophes we now must expect” (xi). In a perhaps depressing manner, these honest assessments also make Cobb's prediction in the book's original preface prophetic. If awareness of ecological crises does not dominate public awareness, Cobb notes, “there is little chance that the measures needed for the survival of civilization will be taken in time” (xix).Cobb has also adopted a new perspective on secularism since the earlier days of his career. Cobb once viewed secularism, and the subsequent “death of God” movement, as theological partners capable of helping Christians overcome bad supernatural beliefs. Now he worries that the value-free secular worldview is allowing the pursuit of power and wealth to be undertaken at all costs, and that theologians and the institutions they serve are not doing enough to stop the late neoliberal beast from being fed (xii, xv). In fact, it is perhaps only the small local communities in which Cobb currently places his hopes for the future in which “ancient questions about life and death and how to live well” will continue to be discussed, as in his estimation modern universities have given up on them (xiii). The intertwined ecological, economic, and social crises we are facing are now construed as “the global wreck to which both religion and secularism have contributed” (xvi). Cobb also argues the main shortcoming of secularism, its value-free laissez-faire attitude, is a result of its outdated philosophical worldview.He traces the history of how the British empiricists transformed the reality of things we experience in nature into nothing but sense data that appear to the mind, perhaps owing their preservation to the impressions left on the mind of Berkeley's God (chapter 11). The philosophical picture of isolated value-free sense impressions is presented as being equally as problematic as separations of humans from nature discussed earlier in the book. As readers might expect from a process thinker, a philosophy like American pragmatism that dissolves so many classical philosophical problems by being a complete alternative to that history, Cobb argues in favor of decentering humanity and the self from philosophical debates in order to affirm the reality of things in themselves (chapter 12). The things around us exist in and for themselves, not merely as sense data for perceiving subjects. Cobb's Whiteheadian alternative understands sense perception to arise out of more basic experience.Chapter 13 remains an excellent short introduction to the core components of process philosophy. The manner in which all events receive the past, repeat it or add their own novel contribution, and then repeat that process is made clear, as is Whitehead's reason for conceiving discrete individuals as societies of events instead of static singular entities. The degree to which such societies merely repeat the past or change it accounts for the difference between the inorganic and organic. Inorganic societies simply repeat the past they are given, while living ones can introduce great degrees of novelty to what they are given—therefore demarcating the difference between a stone that remains the same over time and a person capable of great change from moment to moment. While this chapter could be deemed an unrelated tangent into process philosophy, it is meant to resolve tensions between two components of worldviews that have led to the various ecological crises we now face. Human and nonhuman are not separated according to this process view but are instead related in environments in which they make one another in relation to one another. Furthermore, every thing's self-making gives it intrinsic value that should be acknowledged and respected. This turn to the sort of process undertaken by all events hints at the theological heart of the book that is only made explicit at the end (chapter 15). “The process that we cannot manipulate but whose working we can facilitate must be discriminated from the totality of events in the universe. . . . It is the process that makes for life and the enrichment of life, variety of forms, intensity of experience, consciousness, and love” (96). By associating God with this process, Cobb's ecological and theological hopes have something to latch onto. “To it we can commit ourselves. . . . If this process is what we mean by ‘nature’ or ‘life,’ then we can and should view ‘nature’ or ‘life’ as sacred. But it will be better to speak of it as Creative Process or God” (96–97). Despite the ecological movement's failures, Cobb can continue to proclaim an ecological civilization is at hand, just as Jesus did for the kingdom of God, because both are countercultural creative transformations of the given situation (x).Throughout the book one can detect Cobb's process theology and the position that purpose is part of everything's self-realization in every moment lurking behind ecological concerns, propping up what hope remains. Cobb does not give a detailed defense of this view and its associated panpsychism in the original text, the new preface, or the afterword, beyond what appears to be a nod to Whitehead's acceptance of hard-core commonsense presuppositions for which Cobb and David Ray Griffin have been champions: “For natural science to refuse to acknowledge that purpose plays a role in nature when there is clear evidence that it does is disappointing” (xiv). Those hoping for a longer argument focused on the question of whether purpose exists in nature would do well to read Back to Darwin: A Richer Account of Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), which Cobb edited, as a companion piece to Is It Too Late?Despite having just described process philosophy and its associated view of God that can better deal with ecological crises, the book closes with a sobering and bleak assessment. Negative possibilities described by Cobb unfolded. He knows not enough progress has been made. As he notes in the new afterword, most people who reference sustainability and sustainable practices “continue to recommend policies that are in fact wholly unsustainable” (115). Rather than making do with less, more resources are being used up to meet demand. Human behavior has blown through several points of no return in the battle against changing planetary temperatures. Nonetheless, he offers a word of “realistic hope” against complacency and despair, both of which “let me off the hook” (110). Most of Cobb's proposed solutions call for drastic new laws and new ways of living, not minor tweaks that let modern industrialized life continue unabated. In both the political and theological spheres, unrestrained human desires are no longer the center around which everything revolves. Readers may be left suspicious about the ability of people to embrace such radical change, a suspicion I share. Nonetheless, even for readers not fully convinced by process cosmology and the position that there is purpose in every event, Cobb's closing words should be seriously considered. If I am correct, Cobb continues to hold onto hope because he holds onto theology.For Cobb, “our only hope is hope itself” (111). That hope is hope of participating in the Creative Process that is God, in doing something with everlasting value, even if animals perish, even if some ecological battles are doomed. If faced with scientific predictions that a species will go extinct soon, or that it will be impossible to return below a given threshold of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is possible to act with hope because such action will contribute to something greater than any one of us or even all of us together. Cobb's argument implicitly raises the following questions: If theology is abandoned, is there any basis upon which one can escape complacency and despair? When facts and figures indicate it is too late to avert certain ecological disasters, is the reality of God necessary to prompt action rather than giving up in the face of assured destruction? Those questions cannot be easily dismissed, even by those not convinced by Cobb's process philosophy and its associated model of God, and their prompting is why Is It Too Late? remains worth reading.