By the same token, each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or don’t tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in? This knowledge may not show up per se in what you write, but the point is that you need to find out as much as possible about the interior life of the people you are working with.

For fifty years, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has helped protect environmentally precious areas in the world using the simplest possible method: It buys them. It buys land at market prices, making it off-limits to environmentally damaging uses, such as development or logging. This strategy has come to be known within TNC as “bucks and acres.” It had appeal to donors and benefactors, because the results of their gifts were so clear. A big gift bought a big piece of land. A small gift bought a small piece of land. As one donor commented, TNC produced “results you could walk around on.”

In 2002, Mike Sweeney, the COO of TNC California, was facing a big challenge. California is particularly important to TNC, because it contains so many environmentally critical areas. California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.) These Mediterranean climate zones occupy only 2 percent of the world’s landmass but host more than 20 percent of its plant species. If you want to buy environmentally precious land, Mediterranean climates give you a lot of bang for your buck.

In 2002, Sweeney and his staff had taken a map of California and colored in the most environmentally sensitive areas, the areas worth preserving. Astonishingly, 40 percent of the map was colored. This was a non-starter: There weren’t enough bucks out there to buy that many acres.

This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. TNC realized, wisely, that the context had grown more ambiguous, and the solutions had grown more ambiguous, but that their messages could not be allowed to grow more ambiguous. Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

A very powerful resource position produces profit without great effort, and it is human nature that the easy life breeds laxity. It is also human nature to associate current profit with recent actions, even though it should be evident that current plenty is the harvest of planting seasons long past.

Failure to recognise that economic growth is mostly better rather than more is why the sages who have repeatedly predicted that growth must end because we will run out of – first it was wood, then it was coal, then nitrates and then oil – have always been wrong. We haven’t run out of arable land and our progress will not be halted by a shortage of lithium. All physical resources have finite limits, but human ingenuity does not.