THE UNNATURAL WORLD
The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age
David Biello
Scribner; 294 pages; $26
The term Anthropocene is geological shorthand for a world of carbon-induced climate havoc — i.e., the world in which we now live, a world where, given the frightening pace of global warming, all bets are off. In The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age, David Biello, the science editor for TED and a contributing editor at Scientific American, sets off on a tour of our Anthropocenic world, to scout for ideas on how we might now live on a planet that our grandparents won’t recognise for long. Early on, Mr Biello visits with a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester, who tells him, bluntly, “We’ve reset the Earth’s biology.” For some people, “that is the argument of the Anthropocene — a warning that our bad ways will quickly lead to our extinction,” Mr Biello writes. “But for others, it’s a challenge. How do we make a good human epoch?”
The Unnatural World is a travelogue with that good human epoch in mind, a trip around the world to meet people working out new ways for humanity to live as well as survive. At the University of Leicester, the paleobiologist describes the man-made fossils that mark human presence — the stratum of plastics, soot and radionuclides that stain the Earth everywhere from lake bottoms to mountaintops. “Massive technofossils like London and Shanghai will call out to the future: Something was here!” Mr Biello writes.
Indeed, the defining feature of the new world is a tangle of what we consider natural and what we don’t, nature not ended but morphed. He maintains a kind of upbeat morbidity while describing a database of extinct creatures’ genomes, everything from mammoths to giant beavers. Yet, work to revive particular species inevitably comes off as the sort of hubristic scientific thinking that got us into this Anthropocene era to begin with. Mr Biello notes complications. Say we brought back sky-darkening flocks of passenger pigeons, extinct since 1914: Would we need to revive the American chestnut trees (gone by way of an invasive fungus) that provided their food?
Cities might be our greatest invention as creatures; they are where we herd, reflecting how we think, our shining hope as far as handling our own growth is concerned. How we manage the metabolic intake and output of cities is likely to determine the way that future archaeologists debate the merits of human civilisation in whatever comes after the Anthropocene. To consider cities, Mr Biello travels to China, talking to a lawyer at the local environmental protection bureau in Rizhao, a city on the Yellow Sea coast that hopes to be carbon neutral one day. “I don’t know when we will succeed, but we will move in that way,” the lawyer says. Mr Biello examines ways China uses waste as an energy source — America take heed, or mourn, given the Trump administration’s stated attitudes toward carbon reduction — as well as the Chinese government’s trade-off of shoddily built nuclear power plants for less smog.
The Unnatural World is detail-packed, almost to a fault, but a dramatic high point comes when Mr Biello recounts how a man living in the United States (him) fares as an Anthropocenic Homo sapiens, which is either really impressive or really distressing, depending on your scruples: “The average American uses 90 kilograms of stuff each day, day in and day out. We consume 25 per cent of the world’s energy despite being 5 per cent of the world’s population. We lust for the latest gadget, which hides away minerals wrested from beneath the Congo, among other places, deep in its innards.”
Managing the Anthropocene, then, comes down to issues of economic inequality, and given the tech obsession in wealthier nations, it’s hardly surprising that a book by a first worlder dwells on technological fixes like geoengineering. Eventually, Mr Biello winds up looking to Silicon Valley for a titanium bullet. Vinod Khosla, the billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems, exhorts us to seek, in Mr Biello’s words, “rare innovation,” the kind of “black swan” idea “that goes on to have extreme impact” — though this is how venture capitalists think as opposed to scientists, who rely on communities of data gatherers. “Experts are as good as dart-throwing monkeys,” Khosla declares. Then, as if jet-lagged, Mr Biello concludes with thoughts on Pope Francis (for his cautionary words on technology) and Elon Musk (for being Musk). “We are living in a quest that he has devised,” Mr Biello writes about Musk, “even if it isn’t entirely original to him — electric cars and solar power to clean up this planet and rockets to spread life to another one.”
The Tesla may not pollute Palo Alto, but the production of all its components and construction, involving graphite, lithium and cobalt mining, aren’t so great for the rest of the world. At this point, if there’s any hope for a “good human epoch,” it has less to do with technology than with imagining new power structures. “Local people, their voice is never heard,” a China-based official with Rare, an NGO that works with indigenous people, tells Mr Biello. In the United States, the Standing Rock Sioux’s protest of the Dakota Access pipeline through their watershed is a good example of what stewardship might look like in the Anthropocene, and Mr Biello touches on this when he visits the Naxi in the Yunnan Province of China. He meets a young Naxi woman who fights the government on behalf of her own local ecology, or anthropogenic biome. “The world gets better when women are empowered rather than marginalised,” he writes. “More economic growth, better health, less environmental destruction all go hand in hand with free women.” The roots of our cataclysm, in other words, lie in the machinery of economic and social justice. The sooner we recognise this, the sooner we can enact meaningful change.
© 2016 The New York Times News Services
