This idea will undoubtedly offend some readers, and I think I know why: they will see it as tampering with nature. But what in this world is natural? The number of whales, and the abundance of their foodstuffs, are largely under human control; the noise environment they live in is down to us, too, and their chemical environment is under our influence. The whales don’t live in a natural world: they live in a world we have unwittingly made for them, just as we have made it for ourselves. And when we are making changes in this postnatural world, the standard for judgment should not be a now-disappeared nature, but instead a choice about what we think can be done for the good.
It’s a standard we should be applying widely. Take the climate talks that broke down at The Hague this November, and which, under President George W. Bush, will probably stay stalled for the next four years. Most conservatives maintain that they are unconvinced about the relative importance of natural climate change and man-made climate change. If there were still a natural climate around, this might be a live issue. But all sorts of powerful unnaturalness are now woven into the complexities of the global environment; as a result, the complexity itself has become fundamentally unnatural.
Look up at the sky and you see the thin white clouds left in the wake of aircraft; look down from space and you see industrial hazes reaching across oceans. Whether the greenhouse gases we have released into the sky lead directly to higher surface temperatures or not, basic physics insists that they add more than a hundred trillion watts to the amount of energy flowing through the atmosphere–10 times the energy that humanity generates on purpose for its own use. For every tree or blade of grass that adds to the bounty of nature, humanity grows the equivalent for its own ends: our species now appears to control about half of the whole planet’s primary plant productivity. More rock and soil is moved by human agency than by the natural erosion of all the world’s winds and streams and rivers–possibly far more, since our accounting in such matters is poor. The structure of the stratosphere, and thus the amount of ultraviolet light that reaches the surface, and thus the rate at which genes mutate in the creatures of the arctic and antarctic: these are issues of human policy, not of natural law.
So to say that back when the world was natural, climate used to change all the time, is to miss the point. The world is no longer natural, and climate change cannot be treated as just one of those things that happen. It’s a part of the human world. It needs to be understood, planned for and, when feasible, controlled. Nor is this just a short-term, crisis-management approach that we will be able to discard when we get back to nature. Nature is not waiting to be rediscovered, any more than a natural climate exists within the unnatural one. Nature is gone. To reinstate it means to remove what has replaced it: the technological infrastructure for a planetary human civilization. This is not an option.
To say our world is postnatural is not to say it can’t be improved, or that technology should not be constrained in some areas, or that we should not, in some cases, try to simulate now-gone nature with exquisite fidelity. It is simply to say that these are choices we should make consciously, democratically and in an informed manner. One thing we should give great thought to is increasing the range of choices. In the second half of the 20th century many existing technologies were greatly improved, but with the important exception of biotechnology, very few truly new options opened up. Cars and power stations continued to rely, for the most part, on fossil fuels. Computers seemed to change a lot, and certainly got a great deal faster and more communicative: but even here, the fundamental operating systems have stayed remarkably static from the late ’70s onward. To make our way in the unnatural world we have unwittingly made but do not yet–and may well never–control, we need a more innovative culture of technology.
There are two problems with this. Governments are generally rather bad at encouraging technological change. And many people see technological change as exacerbating the problem. Most people still want to go back to a more natural world, and they don’t want to face up to the unacknowledged truth that makes their desire to regress so sad: there is no route back.
Once faced, though, this truth is not so bad. Nature is tooth decay and child mortality, weather without weather forecasts, nights with only the moon for light and boring whale songs. A postnatural world has huge risks, but it could also make things better.