There Is No Nature Anymore

When people say “nature,” they usually mean things humans didn’t make. Rocks. Reefs. Red wolves. That distinction is getting harder to defend by the day.

Consider this: scientists have found microplastics in the bellies of red howler monkeys and manatees deep in the Brazilian rainforest. In Yakutia, where most of the ground has never seen a human footprint, carbon emissions from our factories are melting the permafrost. Artificial light from ships—traffic that’s increasing as the polar ice cap retreats—now messes with the nightly migration of zooplankton in the Arctic Ocean. That’s one of the largest animal movements on the planet, and we’re throwing it off schedule with boat headlights.

Alpine lakes, the ones you think of as pristine, are full of synthetic chemicals. Polar bears carry flame retardants in their fat. Cesium-137 from nuclear bomb tests coats the entire planet like a thin, invisible dust.

I’m not listing these to scold you about pollution, though it is obviously bad. I’m pointing out that no corner of Earth is untouched by what we build. We have literally changed the world.

And we’ve changed ourselves too. Humans are weirdly good at bending human nature. Pharmaceuticals, surgeries, vaccines, hormones—they give us longer lives, take away pain, ease anxiety, make us faster and stronger. We’re getting glimpses of tech that will let us edit our kids before they’re born. Brain implants let paralyzed people control computers and speak through thought. Prosthetics and exoskeletons that sound like comic book props are restoring and even enhancing physical abilities. CRISPR is rewriting our DNA. And somewhere in a server farm, we’ve dumped the sum total of human knowledge into vast calculating machines, trying to build an intelligence greater than our own.

So what even is “nature” now? Is it environmentalist to try to preserve something that arguably no longer exists? Should we use technology to make the world more “natural”?

These are the questions that drove MIT Technology Review’s latest Nature issue. They’re not easy ones. Solar geoengineering is a perfect example: the idea is to fix a problem technology caused—burning petrochemicals broke the climate—by releasing particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. Some companies are already experimenting with this. It sounds like a way to restore a natural state. But it’s also a massive risk. It could benefit some countries while hurting others. It might give us an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels. The list of downsides is long.

Nature isn’t simple anymore.

The issue has stories about birds that can’t sing, wolves that aren’t really wolves, grass that isn’t grass. It looks for meaning under Arctic ice and inside our own heads—and on a distant world, in new fiction by Jeff VanderMeer. I don’t know if any of it answers the big questions. But we keep trying. That’s the one thing that still feels natural.