It may be helpful to begin by linking the argument being made in the previous chapter back to the book's opening. The same life within us which we there saw insisting on itself as undaunted hope for indefinite human flourishing, and thereby recalling us to a deeper realism than the merely empirical, we now see insisting also that we defer to our embeddedness in life at large, on pain of robbing individual existence of any chance of purpose or meaning. Hope and purpose are conceptually distinct. (One might hope for something without thinking that it really mattered, and equally one might hold firm to some cherished purpose although one had got beyond either despair or hope.) But experientially, they are closely intertwined – hope very often giving or strengthening purpose and purpose calling on, or calling forth, the hope which provides its necessary energy. Both are forms taken in human consciousness by the forward-pressing force of life. Hence, the kind of hope which we must now pursue, the transformative possibilities which it must lead us to canvass, the necessarily tragic framing of those possibilities and the absolute recoil from biocide which must drive them to take urgently revolutionary shape, all flow together from the deepest source of power that we know. That power is the strength of life itself, pitted against the gravest threat which life on Earth has faced for millennia, and realizing itself through the human species which represents, as we should never cease reminding ourselves, not only the source of that threat but also the agent which might still (just possibly) overcome it.

Agency, however, lies as we have seen initially with a very small minority. This chapter focuses on that vital sector. Given its necessary qualifications as we have identified them, what is its likely provenance, and what opportunities go with that? By what warrant could it seize those opportunities to pursue full power? What kind of programme of activity might actually take it towards power? And finally, what role would need to be played in this process by a serious green-political party, if we had one?

I must repeat here with yet more emphasis the point made at the outset of Chapter 7: the answers which I offer to these questions are exploratory, and only not more tentatively expressed because I want to spark vigorous debate.