As with “Wolf Hall,” the central character in “Bring Up the Bodies” is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from “Wolf Hall” declares, “He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.”

This is, incidentally, Cromwell’s own assessment, but he’s saved from vanity by the fact that his confidence is not just well-placed but precisely placed; he is the ultimate realist, and he possesses that most potent of assets, an excellent knowledge of himself. In the thousands of fictional retellings of Henry’s reign — most of them focused on his ambitious second wife, Anne Boleyn — Cromwell is typically depicted as a ruthless schemer. He got rid of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when Henry wanted Anne, and he got rid of Anne, too, when the time came. The first ejection led to the foundation of the Church of England and the second to the execution of six people.

As Mantel tells it — she describes the novel as “a proposal, an offer,” rather than an assertion of historical truth — Cromwell represents the vanguard of a new era, one in which ability trumps noble birth. He can countenance any number of insults from the arrogant aristocrats he works with because he knows that “chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the money lender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and the kings are their waiting boys.”

He would never dream of voicing such thoughts, of course, and part of the marvel of Cromwell the character is his self-control. “I never forget myself,” he tells the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire at a moment when his temper has been sorely provoked. “What I do, I mean to do.” The style Mantel employs to write about this exemplar of the will is declarative to the point of bullishness; her voice is his. The character’s allure lies in his energy and his resilience, and it’s thrilling to hitch your readerly perspective to a man who can seemingly do anything and furthermore has the nerve to try.

But if Cromwell is a man of action, he’s also, at age 50, prone to reflection and haunted by the dead. “Bring Up the Bodies” opens with falconry in the picture-book English countryside during the king’s summer “progress” (a sort of nationwide tour) of 1535. Cromwell’s falcons are named after his two daughters, who, with his beloved wife, died in London’s intermittent epidemics. He hasn’t forgotten them, but it’s significant that he’s memorialized them as birds of prey. Above all, Cromwell nurses a grudge against all who participated in the downfall of his mentor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Yet, he is not without warmth. A conscientious and covertly tender householder, he presides over the lives of assorted dependents from various social classes. His carefully concealed soft spot for distressed gentlewomen and exiled court figures like Catherine and her daughter, Mary Tudor, leads him to make small but largely unappreciated efforts on their behalf.

We are shown that Cromwell is ruthless — there’s passing mention of hangings in Ireland, among other things — but we also know that he is loyal. This is his saving virtue. His allegiance is to England and to Henry, who, like the late Cardinal, has recognized his worth and raised him up. Some of the more notorious highlights of Cromwell’s career — the dissolution and sacking of monasteries and other Church property and the execution of Thomas More, depicted in “Wolf Hall” — are cast in this light: England’s riches should belong to the state, not to Rome, and be utilized for the benefit of her king and people. Like a modern Labor Party politician, Cromwell tries to pass poor laws and work programs in the face of mighty resistance from Parliament and the aristocracy.

Throughout the first two parts of “Bring Up the Bodies,” this is the Cromwell we accompany. He is the king’s most valued councilor and is effectively running the country. His enemies are preening, scornful and often foolish noblemen, out to promote clannish interests or reconciliation with Rome. Anne Boleyn, his former ally, has turned on him, and turned off the king. “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist,” Cromwell thinks. “He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does,” yet she has overestimated her own security. They are two of a kind, perhaps, but unlike him, she has let her success go to her head and will, in consequence, lose both.

Discouraged by Anne’s inability to give him a son and harried by the vixenish ways that once enthralled him, Henry falls for Jane Seymour, “a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.” It becomes Cromwell’s job not only to clear the way for Jane to become Henry’s third wife, but to make the king feel that he is justified in discarding a second spouse. Cromwell pursues this goal in the conviction that sooner or later Anne would have come after him and his friends.

That’s the setup, but as the interrogation and trials of Anne and her alleged lovers commence, Mantel carries the reader into harrowing territory. Cromwell tricks a foppishly romantic musician into boasting of having slept with the queen (Mantel does not endorse the view that the man was tortured into this admission) and conducts a series of interviews with the four doomed noblemen accused of being her lovers and of plotting against the king. The four also happen to be Cromwell’s political enemies and, furthermore, key participants in a satirical court entertainment that depicted Cardinal Wolsey being dragged to hell by devils. “He needs guilty men,” Cromwell tells himself. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”

Political horror is not a new literary mode — you can find it in the New Testament as well as in such 20th-century works as George Orwell’s “1984.” However, the protagonist in those stories is invariably the victim. “Bring Up the Bodies” devotes 270 pages to developing its hero, investing the reader in the superiority of his personality and cause, and then ushers him into the interrogator’s chair. Cromwell is contriving to send these people to the scaffold for crimes they quite possibly did not commit, however “guilty” they may be of others. Because he is our man ever bit as much as he is Henry’s man, we are, in some obscure way native to the laws of fiction, implicated. These are not easy chapters to read, although they are magnificently realized.

As assured as her implacable protagonist, Mantel walks the edge of a very sharp knife in the last part of “Bring Up the Bodies.” I don’t believe she cuts her feet on it, but sometimes it felt as if she were cutting mine. It’s impossible to repudiate Cromwell, but embracing him has become infinitely complicated. Of all the many fictional depictions of the moral quandaries involved in the exercise of great power, this may be one of the most disturbing. It comes much closer than any I’ve ever encountered to letting you know how it must feel to manage the fate of a nation: how intoxicating and how very, very perilous.

Hall, a creative-writing professor and crime novelist, teaches a course on “megabestsellers,” books that have sold in the “multiple millions” and that have gone on selling for decades after they were originally published. He considers a list of 12: “Gone With the Wind,” “Peyton Place,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Valley of the Dolls,” “The Godfather,” “The Exorcist,” “Jaws,” “The Dead Zone,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Firm,” “The Bridges of Madison County” and “The Da Vinci Code.” Though the list seems fairly diverse, Hall insists that they all share 12 common elements — to such a degree, in fact, that they are all “permutations of one book, written again and again for each new generation of readers.”

This is sorta true and sorta not, depending on what your needs are. It is indeed a fact that bestsellers often feature “fractured families,” spiritual quests or doubts, “didactic” interludes that assure the reader he or she is learning something, “hot button” issues of the day and — in my favorite of Hall’s coinages — a theme he dubs “Bumpkins vs. Slickers.” But so do a lot of other books, from truly great novels to justly forgotten flops, American and otherwise. How helpful is it to point out “universal” traits of bestselling books if they turn out to be universal traits of most books? “Vanity Fair” is every bit as much a rags-to-riches story as “The Godfather,” and nostalgic yearning for a lost pastoral idyll has been a major literary motif since Virgil’s Eclogues.

Is it any surprise that popular characters ranging from Scarlett O’Hara to Michael Corleone tend to show “a high level of emotional intensity that results in gutsy and surprising deeds”? Or that readers prefer characters who “act decisively” rather than engaging in “navel gazing”? A successful plot, Hall explains, is one that quickly establishes a conflict or dilemma so that readers are “drawn forward by the momentum of the unfolding story as one complication after another challenges the central character and the original dramatic question mutates into another question and another.”

Well, of course it does. Yet, in Hall’s defense, I would point out that he is a creative writing teacher. For some reason, it is often the very people who say they want to write novels who seem to have the least understanding of what other people want to read. So Hall has no doubt seen countless examples of would-be authors — including people determined to work in commercial genres — who simply don’t grasp the most elementary principles of storytelling. While “Hit Lit” may seem, to many readers, like the literary equivalent of instructions on how to boil water, the sad truth is that plenty of those who speak contemptuously of Dan Brown’s prose are writers who could not get a child interested in a fairy tale.

True, I, too, would never call Brown a “good writer” — yet many very successful novelists are not: Stieg Larsson, for example. A book doesn’t have to be especially well-written, plausible or original to be a bestseller (although it can be). The characters don’t have to be particularly interesting, as John Grisham proves again and again. In fact, if there is one trait that all of the bestsellers Hall considers absolutely share, it’s that a lot of people like them.

That statement isn’t as inanely tautological as it may sound. As Hall points out, the common belief that publishers deploy splashy, expensive promotional campaigns to snow the public into buying millions of copies of terrible books is quite mistaken; publishers do not have that kind of power. Hall quotes the fabled editor Michael Korda on the subject (and Korda, having launched Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins, ought to know): “At least half the books on any given week’s bestseller list are there to the immense surprise and puzzlement of their publishers.” Publishers can provide a book with the ideal conditions in which to catch on, but only the genuine enthusiasm of the reading public will make it an ongoing hit. Word of mouth — one reader raving to another about how much he or she enjoyed it — is the single determining factor. And you can’t buy that.

So why does that public fall in love with some crappy books but not others? Hall makes one of his strongest points almost in passing: The bestsellers he considers are, he notes, “unique and creative mash-ups of traditional genres.” “Unique” may be stretching it, but most of them do combine familiar elements in less familiar ways — the recipe for successful genre fiction. “Gone With the Wind” transported the career-woman melodramas of its time into a historical romance. “The Godfather” is a family saga grafted onto a gangster story. The sensational historical-religious conspiracy theory at the center of “The Da Vinci Code” had already appeared in a nonfiction bestseller; Brown’s brainstorm was to change the delivery mechanism to a fast-paced thriller.

And more often than you might think, luck and timing play a deciding role. Anyone in the romance-publishing industry will tell you that the current racy bestseller, E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey,” is fairly typical of the low-profile genre called erotic romance. Thousands of titles with more or less the same characters and themes — many of them better-written and arguably more interesting than “Fifty Shades of Grey” — were on the market long before James came along. But James emerged from the word-of-mouth factory that is Twilight fandom, and as a result her books introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to a genre they didn’t know existed, much as Stephenie Meyers had introduced them to the vampire romance novel a few years before.

Still, the essential quality separating most tentpole bestsellers from the rest of the genre pack remains an enigma. Why did “The Help,” among all the earnest, sentimental historical women’s fiction published in the past 20 years or so, sell 10 million copies? It’s easy, once the feat has been accomplished, to attribute a book’s success to this or that feature, but picking winners beforehand is another trick entirely. The one predictive factor that readers (and therefore publishers) consistently rely on is brand loyalty; an author who has done it once, they assume, is likely to do it again. That’s why the most consistent aspect of the bestseller lists is the reappearance of the same names, over and over.

Here’s something else you can count on: A person who can’t fathom why the public fell in love with Lisbeth Salander or Edward Cullen is probably not going to be able to write something they’ll like just as much. Whiling away a couple of summer afternoons reading a trashy novel is a harmless way of wasting time. But writing a book even you wouldn’t want to read? That’s just killing it.

What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.

This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable. The reader wants to feel the story is going somewhere, that its events follow from each other in meaningful, but not too obvious ways. When a story can go anywhere, it feels meaningless. In Mary Shelley’s novella, which is saturated with the Western tradition of the tragedy, Viktor Frankenstein’s character is such that he must create a monster, and the monster’s body is such that he can never belong among human beings however much he yearns to. A “Frankenstein” that ended with either misfit finding a comfortable place in the world would be a travesty.

But that doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t long for the story to unfold otherwise; that’s the nature of tragedy. The great insight that writer Dave Morris brings to this adaptation of the novel is that while a reader cannot significantly change the outcome of the story, the interactive element can change the shading and flavor of the tale. It can be mournful and reflective or action-packed. The creature and his creator can show greater or lesser ambivalence about their own behaviors. The ambiguity of both figures is baked into Mary Shelley’s novella, and while Morris has nearly doubled the word count of the original, this mostly amounts to playing up or down what’s already there.

Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take a moment here to point out to all future narrative app developers that hiring a real writer who actually knows what he or she is doing is totally worth it.) He’s moved the setting to revolutionary France, a choice that shows shrewd understanding of the idealistic political climate that affected Shelley’s thinking; the new Republic is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s also eliminated much of the 19th-century framing of the tale and converted it into two present-tense narrations. One is Frankenstein’s dialogue with either himself or a (possibly imaginary) companion. The other is a second-person account of the monster’s first weeks of life as it spies on a family of dispossessed French nobility and has the chance to observe the loving relationships it can never enjoy itself.

Morris presents the reader with choices I’ve not encountered in other interactive fictions. Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil? Does the most recent development make you (the monster) feel hope or despair? Is the revolution the dawn of a brave new world or a descent into chaos and barbarity? While I’m usually skeptical that present-tense narration increases the “immediacy” of a story, in this case, it really does work, particularly in the sections concerning the monster. Depending on your own outlook, you may urge him to keep trying to connect with humanity, or promptly forward him on to homicidal rage.

In either case, the narrative is shaped not by the reader deciding to turn left or right, to go down into the cellar or to get out of the house — the usual actions offered on the choose-your-own menu. Instead, the options have more to do with personality and interpretation, beliefs and ideas. As a result of the reader’s choices, the characters seem more like him- or herself, with a concurrent ratcheting up of emotional investment. To my surprise, I found myself more moved by this adaptation of the Shelley novel than I have been by the source text. (Although the app does include the original if you want to compare and contrast.) This is the only interactive fiction I’ve ever read with that quintessential, old-fashioned readerly avidity: the hunger to know what happens next. Of course, I already knew, but that didn’t matter at all.

The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion — which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master’s “Rhetoric” is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it’s their own idea) throughout his book. “He was the first person,” Leith writes of Aristotle, “really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself.”

Rhetoric is also, to be blunt, the art of talking people into things, and it flourishes in courtrooms and on campaign trails, in singles bars and television commercials, over dinner tables and in Internet forums. Leith, a British journalist and novelist, wants to revive the formal appreciation of rhetorical technique, but he acknowledges that today it’s precisely when we are most aware of rhetorical skill that we condemn it. If Barack Obama won the presidency largely on his strengths as an orator (a testimony to rhetoric’s importance if there ever was one), that same eloquence has become a stick to beat him with in the hands of his critics. Rick Santorum is typical in dismissing Obama “just a person of words.” “It seemed,” Leith writes of the 2008 election, “that though we expected politicians to make speeches, we didn’t like them to be too good at it.”

This isn’t precisely true; Obama’s supporters celebrate his speechmaking. But the potshots do illustrate the contemporary ambivalence toward smooth-talking of any kind. Whereas the ancients admired rhetoric as a consciously mastered skill, we prefer (we think) people who speak “from the heart” — if not quite spontaneously, then at the very least approximating a free outflowing of their supposedly true selves. To appear to have thought too much about what you’re saying, to be obviously conscious of it as a performance, is to seem insincere. No wonder the study of rhetoric per se has fallen by the wayside.

But of course, as Leith also points out, “being anti-rhetoric is, finally, just another rhetorical strategy.” “Words Like Loaded Pistols” sports a fabulous assortment of examples of time-tested rhetorical gambits in action. Exhibit A for “anti-rhetorical rhetoric” is Sarah Palin’s taped television address following the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others in Arizona. The lunatic gunman, some observers felt, had been egged on by the paramilitaristic language and imagery of right-wingers in general and Palin’s own website in particular. Leith breaks down Palin’s statement using classical rhetorical terminology, but he also holds it up as an illustration of the ironic paradoxes of anti-rhetoric. “The way she chose to defend herself against trial by media was through the media; while denying that words could be held responsible for inciting hatred and violence, she asserted that media reporting on her” was inciting hatred and violence.

In further case studies, Leith examines the rhetorical technique of everyone from Eminem and “South Park” to Frederick Douglass, the courtroom combatants in “A Few Good Men,” Richard Nixon and his famous Checkers speech and Earl Spencer in the eulogy for his sister, Princess Diana. Interstitial chapters highlight “Champions of Rhetoric”: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Cicero and Martin Luther King Jr., etc. (not excepting Hitler, because whatever else can be said about the man, he knew how to fire up a crowd).

Although this greatest-hits element is key to the appeal of “Words Like Loaded Pistols,” Leith also provides a brisk overview of rhetorical principles and terms — the latter of which, in tongue-twisting Greek and Latin, many readers will promptly forget. (It is amusing to learn that the lyrics to the Carpenters’ “Close to You” present a textbook specimen of hypophora.) However obscure the terminology may seem to modern readers, however, the thinking underlying it is rock solid.

And to judge by much of the public speaking and ostensibly persuasive writing one sees these days, it’s also woefully neglected. “Words Like Loaded Pistols” isn’t a how-to book, but chances are that anyone who reads it will acquire a trick or two. Many a catastrophic best-man toast or limping pitch meeting demonstrates the need for a better understanding of the elementary guidelines laid down well over 2,000 years ago: Know your audience and strive to portray yourself as one of them; adjust your style to the tenor of the occasion; consider starting with a tactical concession; and so on. The marvel is not that the old techniques still work, but that we ever persuaded ourselves that we could do without them.

Atwood appears in the documentary; she is shown working on her manuscript and giving her talks, which were commissioned by the celebrated Massey Lectures series in Canada. Her ideas link stories that include the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Canadian mogul Conrad Black’s prison stint, efforts to unionize tomato farm workers in Florida, and most memorably, a neighborhood feud in Albania that resulted in a family being unable to leave their home for fear of being killed by their enemies.

Atwood, in addition to being one of the grande dames of world literature, is a veritable font of curious information and lore on everything from pest control (“Cockroaches hate cucumber peel,” she informed me) to ancient trading systems to hockey. She emits a string of sardonic wisecracks with the lockjawed, deadpan delivery of Philip Marlowe. In other words, she’s really fun to talk to, and the release of “Payback” gave me a fine opportunity to do so.

You make no claim to prescience about the financial crisis that hit just as the book version of “Payback” came out. What inspired it instead?

In a former life I was a student of Victorian literature, which you can’t be without coming smack up against money to an even greater extent than if you are, for instance, an Elizabethan scholar. The 19th century is the one where money becomes the big determinant. The big story is the industrialists, who are making kajillions of dollars some of the time, and at other times are undergoing big busts in which they close factories and everyone’s thrown out of work.

That’s when investment in the stock market became a thing. People didn’t really understand it. (And they still don’t!) Little old ladies would put their money in and they’d get an income, but then something would happen, as in “Cranford,” and they’d lose all their money.

“Wuthering Heights,” when you’re 20, is about the mad passion of Cathy and Heathcliff. When you’re 50, it’s about, “Where did Heathcliff make his money? How did he get so rich?” What was the Great Gatsby doing that caused him to have all those nice pastel shirts — which have always struck me as a nice detail — and that allowed him to pursue his passion for Daisy? What was he doing? There was something dishonest; something having to do with money that we didn’t entirely understand but we knew was shady.

The film is so wide-ranging in its topics that I did wonder if someone who hadn’t read the book would find it easy to see the connections.

I think it all hangs together. It’s a necklace with first one bead, then a different bead, then a different bead. And then a repetition of the pattern. I’m the string. [Jennifer Baichwal] strings it together at the end with that wonderful device of having each of the people interviewed read a little bit from the end of the book, which — boo-hoo! — it makes me cry every time. Especially the Mexican tomato worker reading to his son in Spanish.

It seems an especially challenging project to visualize onscreen because one of your arguments is that debt is imaginary.

No, money is imaginary. Debts are real. Let’s pretend that you save Mr. Brown’s life. What does he owe you?

He owes me “his life.”

You come to him later and say, “Will you write a recommendation for college for my niece?” and he says no. How do you feel?

Outraged!

There you go. That’s why it’s real. It’s real because it’s a visceral, emotional thing and we all know that. We all know that when the engagement breaks up, you give back the ring. People who keep the ring are really [makes a face of great disgust].

These are emotional balances. They’re in us long before money enters the picture. They’re in us as kids, little kids. “It’s not fair,” kicks in probably between 3 and 4, big time. His cookie is bigger, I want one too.

It’s certainly true of primates. If I scratch your back, you owe me one and I’ll remember that. We’re social beings, always exchanging — exchanging good for good and also payback for wrongs. Even if we’re not actually exchanging wrongs, we’re certainly thinking about it. Which is why we like to read a good revenge story now and again.

Speaking of revenge, the feuding Albanians in the film …

That is so amazing. Joined at the hip. How are they ever going to get out of it? Because it’s become so meaningful, particularly to the one who wants the vengeance.

With that story, even more than most of the others in the film, you go through a journey. At first, I felt so sorry for this family confined to their house while their fields fall into disrepair. That their enemy is wearing a shiny leather jacket that makes him look like a nightclub gangster doesn’t help. But then, later in the film, he lifts up his shirt to show the gruesome scars on his abdomen where the other man shot him, several times, and that really drives it home: He shot him. I don’t think I could forgive someone who’d done that to me.

Also, in that culture, if you just give it over, you’re a wuss. Some of those situations apparently do get resolved. There are mediators who work on it, and sums of money change hands. There’s a big party and everybody’s pals. But not with this outfit. It doesn’t look as if that’s going to get finished any time soon.

It’s the most primal example of debt in the film, but the segments about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are close. There is a debt that can never be repaid.

Not with money. You can pay money to the people involved, but you can’t pay money to the fish. There isn’t a money equivalent. There’s a habitat-restoration equivalent which you could see in money terms, but nature doesn’t deal in money. Nature deals in chemistry and physics. If you create a disequilibrium in nature that is very large, ultimately that will affect you. It’s not that nature is punishing you; it’s that if you kill all the blue-green algae in the ocean, you can’t breathe.

Then there are the farmworkers in Florida. How do they fit into your concept of debt?

Jennifer went out to find real-life, visceral, dramatic stories that illustrated the core ideas of the book. The farm workers’ story is about disequilibrium in the financial system. If one percent is at the top, who’s at the bottom? You’re pretty much looking at it with the farm workers. That’s at the bottom of what we eat and buy.

Some people might find it difficult to see how that relates to debt.

Because they’re thinking of debt only in money terms. Money is a fairly late addition to the human arsenal of tools. Trading preceded money. Money is just an invention. It has no value in itself. You can’t eat it, you can’t smoke it, you can’t drink it or live in a house made of it, and you can’t wear it to keep you warm. It’s a token of exchange, and it facilitates exchange at a distance.

We think of debt as connected with that, but it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg thing. In fact, debt is connected with any form of exchange, with who owes what to whom and are they getting fair value. Is it fair value if you work ten hours a day and you can’t make a living wage?

Both book and film end with urging us to reconceive debt.

What if we stopped thinking of it as just something having to do with our credit cards and instead think of it in terms of equilibrium and imbalance? What arrangement of those things would be healthier for us?

But if most people’s feeling for debt is as primal as you say it is, can it be reframed in that way, say, to be more environmentalist? Can you get them to feel that they owe a debt to nature?

Well, they used to. That’s where religion originated. The earliest gods were vegetation gods; or weather gods; or in hunting societies, animal gods. When you get into agriculture, you have grain gods, dying and rising gods. You owed them sacrifices, partly because they were giving something to you, and you owed them something back. Now we need to graduate to the understanding that while we don’t have to throw ourselves into the ocean to propitiate the blue-green algae, if we kill it — and with it a major source of oxygen — then it’s curtains for us.