First, I offer a big thank you to Jane Bennett for an insightful and kind review. As authors know, it is hard looking back at one's work as a mere reader, let alone in a constructively critical vein. Often as not, my reaction is: I wrote that? Bennett helped me see this work with fresh eyes. And, having read and reviewed Vibrant Matter (kudos to editor Jeff Isaac), I can see my work through an entirely different lens—vibrant materiality. In this reply, I'd like to flag two points of convergence in our work and take up the notion of “common sense.”

First, although I didn't realize it at the time, my elm story was very much about a tree once full of life, a chainsaw that took that life doing, as it were, what chainsaws do, and a keyboard stand that speaks to me—through its grain, the bark still on the back edge, the glow of the finished surface, its touch, and, yes, its history. As much as that whole incident moved me, I hadn't pushed my experienced sensibility to the fullest extent. The lesson I now take, and intend to impart, is that for the purpose of changing consciousness, extending the sensibility is key. And that extension is valuable whether it's all the way to vital materiality or just a few baby steps away from commodity.

At the same time, for the purpose of improving practice—the politics, management, institution building—I still believe a values framing is the most useful. The purveyors of commercialism and economism have so cornered the market on “value” that it is time to take it back, time to insist that every one of us (even the advertisers and economists) actually operate under a plurality of values, many incommensurate, and that, if anything, the commercial should be subordinate.

This, then, leads to a second point of convergence, what Bennett calls “the heterogeneity of the common store of wisdom” (a phrase I am hereby stealing) that makes possible a reorganization based on common sense. The “common store” metaphor, whether referring to storage or a retail store, is spot on. In previous work, the small communities I examined, each arguably sustainable on some dimension, all had some kind of general store. It was a focal point of the community, an institution that helped its members get from season to season, paycheck to paycheck. In that store was everything one needed, from bread and bait to stamps and popsicles. No single value reigned supreme. This is where the pragmatist ideal (it is right if it works, for self and others and other others) is embodied. This, to my read, is the model, not the “global commons” and its necessarily global carbon management regime, designed by confident elites and implemented by “incentivized” consumers.

Finally, Bennett interprets my approach as an “appeal to common sense.” At one level, I agree. The personal attitudes and many of the collective norms for living within our means exist. Their expression and weightings may vary, but they are in the common store; they don't need to be created de novo. A nudge here, a jab there may be all it takes for people to switch from endless consumerism to, say, sufficiency—a sense of enoughness and toomuchness, a practical orientation of doing well by doing less than the most possible.

But at another level, I worry that a “common sense” framing trivializes the challenge. If I'm right about the coming fundamental social shift occasioned by the unavoidable biophysical shift, then we'll need more than an occasional nudge and jab. The requisite politics is more than appeals, educating, or, indeed, reframing. It will entail, I expect, confrontation (with the prerogatives of the fossil fuel complex, for instance) and disengagement from parts of the contemporary political economy (what is now arguably happening in the food movement). I don't go there in Treading Softly, but I think this is where political theorists and others have to go, uncomfortable as it may be. I'd like to think that a heightened sense of vibrant materiality along with ecologically informed social organizing principles will help.