By David Biello
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. (By last summer, the hottest on record, mass coral bleaching was racing through the world’s oceans, with more than 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef already bleached.) 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 recognize for long. Early on, 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,” 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!” 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. In Maryland, Biello visits a landscape ecologist who has pioneered investigations of human interactions with ecosystems, mapping various anthropogenic biomes, concluding that people are, in Biello’s words, “the world’s most (successful) invasive species.” Biello follows along as this ecologist programs drones to monitor forests in the anthropogenic biome known as suburban Maryland, refining ways to measure and manage relatively new landscapes. “The threat is us, the solution is in us,” Biello writes...
“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!” 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. In Maryland, Biello visits a landscape ecologist who has pioneered investigations of human interactions with ecosystems, mapping various anthropogenic biomes, concluding that people are, in Biello’s words, “the world’s most (successful) invasive species.” Biello follows along as this ecologist programs drones to monitor forests in the anthropogenic biome known as suburban Maryland, refining ways to measure and manage relatively new landscapes. “The threat is us, the solution is in us,” Biello writes...
(Robert Sullivan, continues)
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