Tom Princen and I share many commitments—to treading lightly on the earth, to the political potential of everyday habits, to practicing the difficult art of countercultural persuasion, to a political economy of sustainability, and to the advantages of short and earnest books.

I am grateful for his review, which raises many good points. I will respond to just three.

1. 1. On the relationship between a political vision and a nature imaginary:

   Princen says that I develop “a politics that is every bit as ‘natural’ as that premised on subject-object, life-matter dualisms, on ‘man apart from nature,’ on hierarchy and domination.” I think this is true, though I wasn't fully conscious as I wrote the book of the extent to which its rhetoric relied on an appeal—both dangerous and unfashionable—to “nature.” But yes, my political and ethical claims are closely linked to an onto-picture, a rerum natura whose logic is processual, creative, vibratory, heterogeneous.

   Much harm and suffering has been imposed in the name of appeals to nature: racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism. But it is very hard to avoid some such appeal. Maybe it is unavoidable. And Princen's comment serves as a reminder to be careful—to be alert to the tendency of even an open, porous, vibrant “nature” to reify, to become idol rather than fallible heuristic.

2. 2. On the relationship between a vital materialism and an ecological commodity-chain approach to food design, production, and consumption:

   Princen rightly points out that, by my account, fast food and its disposable packaging and the human and nonhuman materials of its design and production are all vibrant matter. So what, then, is the distinctly “vital materialist argument against fast food”?

   I don't think there is a specifically vital materialist critique. The neo-animist ontology that I try to work out and live through is not a replacement for critiques made in the name of ecological sustainability and/or human health, but might serve as a supplement or bolster to them. This nature imaginary might have a bit of affective pull for some audiences that the other kinds of critique don't. It might reinforce the point that junk food matters—it may be junk, but it isn't inert. It's dangerous and powerful stuff, and we better pay attention to what it's doing to our bodies as eaters and workers, to the bodies of the animals and plants displaced by agribusiness, to the bodies of water (such that there now exists giant swirls of plastic debris about the size of Texas in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans).

3. 3. On the claim that now is not the time for the fainthearted:

   Princen says I am “unduly cautious” in my advocacy of a vital materialist politics. That might be because I am in a discipline, political science, where claims on behalf of the agency of matter and in favor of an anthropomorphic mode of inquiry are likely to be received with great skepticism. But I agree with Princen that however dramatic a philosophy of vibrant matter may be, it pales in comparison to the drama of ecological collapse that Treading Softly has as its motive force.

   Princen is right: we are in seriously bad shape, and now is not the time for the fainthearted. The relentlessly extractive, hyper-consumptive political economy of massive waste, profound inequality, and thoughtlessness toward the future can't go on. The trick, which both of us are trying to learn, is to exercise some smart human agency before the agency of things renders it moot.