Author: David R Cole

Rostam J. Neuwirth 

Abstract

To assess a future scenario of the world without a WTO, the present chapter projects the reader into the distant future of the year 2048 by which time the global community is aiming to establish GAIA, the so-called “Glocal Agency in Anthropocene”. GAIA is designed as the first truly integrated global institution with a universal character with the aim to tackle the complex and multiversal governance challenges of humanity and the planet as a whole. This chapter marks both a legally and a scientifically fictitious account of the years from 2020 until 2048, from a dystopian and a utopian perspective, with the aim of highlighting the importance of cognition for legal and institutional change. The need for cognitive change is driven by changes in the environment, and by the challenges resulting from a perceived acceleration of the pace of change and the unprecedented levels of technological complexity. Both change and complexity increase the relevance of cognition, as laws and policies adopted in one area are more likely to affect their success or failure and that of the global governance system as a whole. Thus, this chapter predicts that the foremost necessity for law in the future is to build on novel and enhanced modes of human cognition to deal better with complexity and rapid change.

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Introduction

Why do we remember the past and not the future?¹

We are writing at the end of the year 2048, and marking a period of efforts towards the establishment of a new and comprehensive global governance mechanism, known, for short, as “GAIA 2048”. GAIA stands for “Glocal Agency in Anthropocene”, and describes a project for a novel institutional framework to be set up with the objective of tackling humanity’s most urgent problems and glocally governing and sustainably developing human affairs in the future.

The future is what matters the most right now, as the world is hoping to recover from the devastating effects of the time period known as the “Digital Dark Age”. This is the era from 2030 until 2045 when—as the result of an Internet blackout (outage)—all prior digital resources, including records and archives, became inaccessible and, because of the wide prevalence of the Internet of Things (IOT), the same happened to most related technical applications and utilities.² In short, this dark period wiped out all digitally or electronically stored data. As a consequence, it not only paralysed all technical facilities and caused millions of casualties, but also led to a collective loss of humanity’s memory, which, furthermore, caused a loss of identity. Many still speculate about what triggered the meltdown of the former information society based on the Internet, with the suggested causes ranging from scientific, economic, and political to cognitive and, notably, legal reasons.

For instance, scientific explanations range from a cyberattack using malware to a nuclear blackout caused by the detonation of an atomic warhead in outer space, an accident at CERN creating a black hole in Geneva following a malfunction of the Large Hadron Collider II, or a failure of the 5G network in combination with a data overload on the World Wide Web caused by states’ geopolitical struggles and the monopolistic tendencies of various tech giants. Other people invoke politico-economic explanations, simply citing the second global financial crisis of 2029, which was caused by trade and currency wars that, inter alia, eroded the finances needed for the maintenance of the Internet’s sophisticated infrastructure. Environmental factors are also often named, such as floods and rising sea levels, increased volcanic activity and earthquakes, combined with heatwaves and global pandemics, which disrupted or paralysed the energy supply by damaging its essential facilities.

Politics also played a role, as populism and racism increased, further fragmenting society into ever smaller units, down to its most vulnerable minority, the individual. Constitutional democracies came under threat from changes that were, at first, undetectably small but that eventually combined and posed a serious threat. In legal circles, the fragmentation of international law, the rise of norm conflicts due to bad regulation, overregulation and the automation that took over several fields of law³ are mentioned as the prime causes of the inability of humanity to halt the dangers of the conditions it had created for itself. It again became obvious that the rule of law needed not just legal texts but also stable institutional guarantors at both the national and the global levels.⁴

It is more likely that the blackout was due to a combination of interrelated factors in an environment characterized by an increasing complexity and ever faster pace of change. Since time immemorial, humanity has struggled with change or, notably, with its perception of change, since this perception may itself have been subject to change.⁵ However, since the last millennium many observers have noted an apparent effect of an acceleration of change or so-called “time shrinking”.⁶ This trend for change to accelerate started to pose a major threat to lawmakers and policymakers and, in particular, to law, as it became more difficult to “preserve its integrity over time, while managing to address the newly emerging circumstances that continually arise throughout our history”.⁷ Another threat to law came from unprecedented levels of technological innovation, which culminated in a situation in which the regulation of specific industries and technologies, such as those of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, big data and genetics, failed to find a successful balance between their unknown risks and their expected benefits. In short, excessive levels of specialization, not met by an adequate general understanding, led technological progress to spin out of control.⁸

Thus, by the year 2020 the international legal order had witnessed the disastrous effects of a gradual loss of control caused by decades of neglecting first subtle and later obvious signs of multiple law and policy failures. These policy failures culminated in the failed attempts to reform the most important international institutions, the United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), in a holistic and comprehensive manner. There was a failure to bridge the rift that was caused when the International Trade Organization (ITO) did not materialize; the ITO would have complemented the institutional balance between the three Bretton Woods sisters, the ITO, the IMF and the World Bank. In other words, the institutional failure of the ITO to materialize also meant that greater coherence, or to integrate trade and non-trade concerns, was renounced as an ideal for global governance. The separation between the UN on the one hand and the GATT on the other, can also be regarded as a further strong manifestation of a dualistic mode of thinking based on binary logic. Most of all, it was the beginning of a failure of cognitive modes of thinking to keep pace with technological changes in the context so as to provide a stable and coherent global institutional framework for the governance of global affairs.

Historically, the GATT 1947 was characterised as having found “itself without an inadequate legal and constitutional base and required to fill a vacuum created by the failure of the ITO”.⁹ The situation also meant that attempts to reconcile trade and non-trade concerns in both substantive and institutional terms was postponed to a distant day. This delay later led to the emergence of the “trade linkage debate”, by which different pairs of “trade and …” problems were supposed to be reconciled. Lacking their reconciliation, criticism of the WTO also became louder and culminated in the protests accompanying the 1999 Seattle WTO Ministerial Conference.¹⁰ Since then, the failure to address non-trade concerns and to achieve greater policy coherence continued and provided further momentum to the procedural crisis affecting the WTO Dispute Settlement Body. In sum, a lack of political will as much as outdated cognitive modes framed by dualistic thinking led to the law being inadequate to meet the institutional and substantive challenges.

To exemplify the impact of cognition on whether the law meets the demands put upon it, the present chapter divides the time between the year 2020 and 2048 into two opposite scenarios. First, Sect. 1 traces the lost years by drawing up a dystopian scenario, in which cognition remained largely static and dualistic, such that changes did not keep pace with the speed of technological and scientific innovation. Section 2 is more utopian, in the sense that it relies on a newly acquired cognitive mode of thinking as exemplified by synaesthesia, which not only allows for the development of actions as causes of change but also includes a review and evaluation of the consequences. The conclusion finds that an entirely new mode of cognition, triggered by linguistic changes that are reflected in a recent rise of oxymora and paradoxes, opens a new perspective on how lawyers can help to both predict and shape the future.

Dystopian Scenario: Specialization and ‘Fragmented We Fail’

In the world of theory, there are many dichotomies. In the real world, there are many divisions and divides. In the world of power, all too often, these divisions, divides, and dichotomies serve to maintain and reinforce existing imbalanced and skewed power relations between individuals, communities, governments, and nation-states. In the world of power, it is indeed divide and rule.¹¹

In attempts to describe the evolution of the multilateral trading regime from 1995 until 2048, so-called “digital historians” have argued that 11 December 2019 marked the decisive moment and unofficial date of the decline of the World Trade Organization. Although aggressive regionalism, unilateral measures and resulting trade wars as well as inertia in addressing the trade linkage debate and interinstitutional linkages between the WTO and the UN had been eroding the multilateral trading regime for some time before, it was on that day that the WTO’s dispute settlement system became dysfunctional following the expiration of the terms of two of the three remaining members of the Appellate Body (AB).¹² This left the AB with fewer than the three members required by Art. 17.1 DSU to serve on appeal cases.

As with many international organizations, nation states and other legal constructs before it, the official decline of the WTO and the multilateral trading regime as a whole started slowly and then ended abruptly. The decline was probably the result of a chain of missed opportunities for the reform and adaptation of the relevant system to changes in the context, which notably saw a strong trend towards greater convergence of various industries, technologies and products.¹³ This convergence further increased the need for the consideration of non-trade concerns and greater policy coherence. For some time, the system lingered on and ministerial conferences were merely held without achieving tangible results, continuing the deplorable tradition that began with the launch of the Doha Development Round in 2001. Most WTO members engaged in either a relapse into unilateral measures adopted at the domestic level or a rat race to join numerous regional trade agreements. However, in both cases, the most important challenges faced at that time, in the form of institutional gaps, regulatory fragmentation and overregulation, were not tackled, either nationally or regionally, let alone globally. Numerous calls and suggestions for institutional reform to achieve greater policy coherence, under the aegis of the so-called “trade linkage debate” discussing various “trade and … problems” or how to better link trade with non-trade issues, were ignored.¹⁴ In this regard, more importantly, the cognitive and conceptual dimension of trade policy was not duly considered, as “transformational change in the institutions and politics of international trade” were found to go “hand in hand with cognitive change” as Andrew T. F. Lang wrote.¹⁵ He also found a nexus between cognitive change and institutional reform being linked to the criticism of the WTO and notably the failure to address the trade linkage debate.¹⁶

As a result, from this time on, the international system, or, more accurately, the remaining “international systemic chaos”,¹⁷ was described as having moved “away from an assembly of distinct, territorial, sovereign, legally equal states toward different, more hierarchical, and in many ways more complicated structures”.¹⁸ Even though an attempt was launched in 2006 to reform the United Nations Organization in order to streamline the coordination of its many specialized organizations and to enhance the coherence of global policymaking by “delivering as one”,¹⁹ the management of this reform eventually proved to be an oxymoron before it failed altogether.²⁰ For a long time, the UN’s work in its core areas, from development to the environment, was described as fragmented, and its inefficient governance structure contributed to “policy incoherence, duplication and operational ineffectiveness across the system”.²¹

What could be framed as a “trade and technology” problem, the earlier US–China trade disputes (2017–2020), also caused frictions in the innovation of new technologies and especially in the realm of telecommunication and information technologies.²² These frictions led to a further fragmentation of the Internet and the market for information and communication technologies (ICT). Russia initiated the creation of an alternate web, which was later also used by the remaining BRICS countries, with other countries following suit. Moreover, it was common for the governance gaps and frequent legal inconsistencies between the various fragments of laws governing international trade and commerce to be abused by artificial intelligence and unregulated algorithms, those lacking a kind of lex algoritmica, meaning that global business generally operated in a “black box” inaccessible to consumers and lawmakers.²³

From a commercial perspective, the “world wide web” (www), which was intended to become a “wireless world wide web” (wwww) by virtue of the transition to the 5G network, became further fragmented by national and regional firewalls as well as restrictive measures known as geolocation measures.²⁴ Other conflicts, in the form of regulatory paradoxes framed as dichotomies, such as those of “goods versus services”,²⁵ “free trade in data versus data localization”,²⁶ or “regulatory fragmentation versus technological convergence”,²⁷ were also ignored.

In the same way, in other sectors covered by the GATT, GATS and TRIPS agreements, the multilateral trading rules were further eroded by trade disputes in which different claims were met by defences made on the basis of national security concerns.²⁸ Known as the “trade and security” problem, questions about the self-judging nature of the security exceptions widened the institutional gap opened by the split between the UN system and the GATT/WTO system caused by the failure of the International Trade Organization (ITO) to materialize. This institutional rift had, since 1948, left the world with a conflict of norms in the form of a “catch XXI” or “trade and security” dilemma.²⁹ After the WTO ruling in Russia – Measures in Transit in 2019, in which the panel held that it had jurisdiction to determine whether the requirements of Article XXI of the GATT 1994 were satisfied,³⁰ other countries simply refused to respond to requests for consultations and boycotted the relevant meetings.³¹ In the end, the invocation of the security exceptions further eroded belief in the WTO and accelerated its demise.

The broader conditions in the global economy also grew dimmer and were closely related to the “trade and energy” problem. From as early as 2005, the tipping point in the production of oil was reached, meaning that conventional crude oil production was not rising to match increasing demand.³² The “all-oil peak” meant that, after decades of controversy over its arrival, there was a drastic dampening in economic growth and, actually, the inauguration of an era of global depression.³³ Notably, for oil-producing and other resource-rich countries, the so-called “paradox of plenty” aggravated, and the ensuing economic disaster also led to, the collapse of their constitutional system, and also triggered new waves of political violence. Since human civilization was a sensitive “complex adaptive system”, other countries too, and the globe as a whole, also were drawn into a downward spiral of economic recession and political instability.³⁴ Institutionally, the proliferation and fragmentation of energy organizations and the failure to address the “global energy governance gap” by reforming existing energy agencies or creating a global energy agency, further contributed to the resulting disaster.³⁵

The complexity of the global economy could also be seen in the connection between trade, the environment and energy. In parallel, numerous efforts towards achieving greater sustainability in economic development based on renewable energies were also unable to offset the devastating effects of the disruptive consequences of the “all-oil peak” and the ensuing global energy crisis on economies and societies around the world. The result was a global energy crisis in 2033 that disrupted most global trade in both goods and services and caused stock crashes through inflationary pressures, and later accelerated the eventual collapse of the international monetary system as it had done during the 1973 oil crisis. Renewable energies were also incapable of averting the crisis, even though the impact of the 2015 Paris Agreement, adopted with the objective of responding to the threat of climate change, had no negative effect on the global economy or on countries’ welfare gains. Because of the absence of a coherent global regulatory framework, renewable energies remained expensive and investments often did not materialize. In this context, it was also a failure when the WTO membership addressed the “trade and environment” problem by, inter alia, reforming the WTO subsidies agreement, which resulted in various trade disputes challenging green policies.³⁶

The lack of global competition rules, as a result of the abandonment of a project in 2004 that was one of four “Singapore issues”,³⁷ led to the emergence of various multinational tech giants, which widely abused their dominant positions, explored tax loopholes, and competed unfairly in courts, patent offices and markets. They were also crucial in meddling in elections and were accused of undermining democratic institutions.³⁸ No efficient dispute settlement system under the multilateral trading regime, and a lack of legal standing for private parties, both natural and legal persons, in domestic or supranational courts caused further havoc and greater inequality among global citizens. As early as 2017, inequality was reported to be standing at unprecedented levels, and it was claimed that “just eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world”.³⁹ These inequalities, dividing societies around the world, not only perpetuated themselves but even increased, with devastating effects on the global economy and the environment.

Another aspect of inequality was found in the “trade and development” link, another complex and cross-cutting “trade and …” problem. Cutting a long story short, the development discourse continued along the “developing versus developed country” dichotomy, despite calls to the contrary and even its abandonment by the World Bank in 2016.⁴⁰ Even though the definition of “official development assistance” (ODA) evolved, it continued to be understood as resource flows from developed to developing countries.⁴¹ With the mindset unchanged, the language use of “developed-developing countries” also remained the same. As a result, the US and the EU continued, on the one hand, to subsidize their agricultural producers and to reap excessive benefits from royalties on various patented and copyrighted products, while on the other, they kept granting support through official development assistance programs to a large number of developing countries. This practice continued to impede the development of local industries in the targeted countries.⁴² Moreover, the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of “development status” further eroded the WTO’s status after the US began to challenge it in 2019.⁴³

At the same time, the trade and development problem was closely tied to the “trade and finance” problem.⁴⁴ Generally, the trade and finance link suffered from the failure of the ITO mentioned above, and the absence of a coherent framework for both trade and finance became manifest in the problem of so-called “currency manipulation”, that is, the depreciation of a country’s currency relative to other currencies so as to develop a large global and bilateral trade surplus.⁴⁵ Despite the three organizations, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, having pledged to enhance their policy coherence, their inter-institutional dialogues did not yield tangible results and the use of policy coherence was criticized instead as a way to introduce policy conformance.⁴⁶

Put briefly, the “trade and finance issue” also remained unsolved, and the two respective regulatory regimes of trade and of finance continued to evolve side by side in dramatically different directions in spite of being mutually interdependent systems.⁴⁷ This had a serious impact on the world as the regulatory gap between them grew even more intense while the technological reality saw them increasingly converge notably with the emergence of the blockchain technology that underlies cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies, from Bitcoin to Altcoin, proliferated and gradually disrupted business and financial services as well as the global economy.⁴⁸ This meant that, in parallel to the third currency war between the world currencies (the dollar, the euro and the yuan), which began in 2010,⁴⁹ a digital currency war also began to be waged. In this digital currency war, the traditional world currencies fought against emerging digital currencies backed both by state and non-state actors. The ensuing chaos of currency wars brought about a loss of state control over financial markets and a rise of a global underground economy thriving on tax evasion and criminal activities.⁵⁰ It all culminated in a collapse of global trade and finance and ended with the second global financial crisis of the twenty-first century, which began on “black Wednesday” of 24 October 2029.

Together with military conflicts, global health pandemics, like the large-scale outbreak of the novel coronavirus (nCoV) infectious disease, and various natural disasters, like large scales rainforest wildfires and bushfires, caused by climate change and other anthropogenic factors,⁵¹ the total disruption of the global economy created a dangerous dynamic, causing a severe migratory wave⁵² that increased the number of forcibly displaced people from about 70 million people in 2018 to 1.4 billion less than 15 years later.⁵³ The crisis of migratory flows was aggravated by national governments and courts, who denied the affected persons the status of climate refugees.⁵⁴ At the same time, after an erosion of the rule of law in the majority of countries around the world, ever more restrictive national policies regarding citizenship in general, and dual citizenship in particular, also increased the number of stateless persons, who were thus deprived of all fundamental rights within and across state borders.⁵⁵

The European Union, paralysed by endless Brexit debates and the United Kingdom’s final exit from the EU on 31 January 2020, made little progress in reforming its institutions, the single market, the single currency or its taxation system. On the contrary, past achievements in the four freedoms were scaled down as the result of nationalist policies in many member states. The EU’s so-called “Luxembourg Treaty”, negotiated under the 2029 EU Presidency of Luxembourg, added nothing that substantively remedied the lost opportunity of creating a constitution for Europe in 2001. The EU’s failure to become the world’s most competitive market (the Lisbon Strategy) extended the lost decade of the EU, which began in 2000, when, to a lost near-half century.⁵⁶

Many more regional integration projects worldwide also stagnated. For instance, the BRICS, representing 42% of the world’s population in 2014 and initially set up as a “cooperation and dialogue forum” between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in order to defy differences and make a difference in global governance, saw no progress, such as by seeking greater policy coherence based on more closely coordinating institutionalizing their cooperation.⁵⁷ Similarly, the positive effects on infrastructure development based on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initiated by the Chinese government in 2013, were largely neutralized by opposition from the US and several European countries. The African Union also failed to prevent the food security crisis that hit the African continent in 2030⁵⁸ and that pushed the achievement of the objectives enshrined in Agenda 2063 into an even more distant future.⁵⁹

In sum, despite the emergence of a creative economy, which was initially fostered by the potential of new and innovative technologies, the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals were still not realized by 2030. Across the globe, political disagreements prevented action for greater regulatory harmonization, while centrifugal forces and fragmentation intensified. Legally, a patchwork of isolated areas of law continued to grow, as did the number of regional trade agreements, which were violated or withdrawn from faster than they were negotiated. Put simply, the so-called “global governance paradox”, or the logical loop that a global platform was needed in order to create a global platform, proved a problem that was too difficult to tackle in conceptual and cognitive terms. With no consistent global legal order, fragmentation prevailed and led to the aggravation of the negative effects of “trade and …” problems on global peace and welfare.

Utopian Scenario: Synaesthesia and ‘United We Sense’

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.⁶⁰

In 2048, historians are still pondering the reasons for the collapse of the WTO. Some attribute it to isolationist US trade policies and the political turmoil around Brexit, while others tend to focus on the rise of first Asian and subsequently African countries. However, a different view identifies this failure as the beginning of the end of “end of … stories”⁶¹ or a drastic paradigm shift in cognition. Cognition had reached a tipping point in human evolution following two centuries of rapid technological innovations, which “shaped consciousness directly”.⁶²

Linguistic changes also confirmed this cognitive shift, mostly through the rise of essentially oxymoronic concepts.⁶³ As a result of these external factors, epigeneticists found biological and cognitive changes occurring in parallel. New organs of cognition hence emerged, as humans were evolving biologically and consciously. As a visible result, even by 2025 97% of new-born children displayed conditions of synaesthesia, i.e. the ability to better connect stimuli received from different sensory organs, which improved the skills to foresee developments and solve complex problems as well as enhanced their abilities of abstract thought.⁶⁴

Related changes in educational policies were implemented, with the goal of creating a “world brain”, or “an enhanced educational system through the whole body of mankind”, designed to “replace our multitude of uncoordinated ganglia, our powerless miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures with a purpose, national educational systems and the like”.⁶⁵ This goal was to be achieved by fostering oxymoronic learning methods and giving training in both bivalent and polyvalent logic, complemented by training in multilingualism and oxymoronic thinking.

For the trade and health link, the novel coronavirus (nCoV) pandemic underscored once more the strong links between international trade, public healthcare and the global economy. As a result, the global healthcare system was integrated with a future trading system and backed by a consistent set of global innovation rules consisting of competition rules, intellectual property laws and fiscal incentives, which prevented price discrimination in pharmaceutical products and secured global access to affordable medicines. Additionally, universal healthcare was provided freely by a combination of measures that combined both traditional and conventional medicines.⁶⁶ Based on further changes in perception, such as through the development of technologies for the visualization of auras,⁶⁷ medical diagnosis improved and conventional, traditional and alternative medicines as well as mental health strategies were all integrated into a coherent set of laws and policies. Further changes in healthcare were influenced by discoveries in so-called “life after life studies”, which transcended the life–death dichotomy as the result of a greater awareness of the missing link in a globally coherent health policy.⁶⁸ Research on near-death experiences scientifically confirmed popular and religious beliefs about life after life.⁶⁹

Overall, a new cognitive mindset emerged in parallel with technical tools, leading to a new conception of the areas of economics, politics and law. For instance, the global economy became more sustainable, based on the spirit of “degrowth”, which rejected the illusion of endless economic growth by advocating for a “democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability”.⁷⁰ At the same time, new and cleaner energy resources were derived from nuclear fusion developed by the ITER project, helping to decarbonize the world’s energy system.⁷¹ Various new and renewable energies complemented this.⁷²

Since a G20 initiative formulated in 2019, the global community embraced an ambitious tax agenda to improve cooperation and transparency on the basis of a strategy for a global taxation system.⁷³ This initiative originally included a global financial transaction tax to fund the new global governance system.⁷⁴ It later included a digital tax on the world’s tech giants, which levied taxes in the places where the goods and services were sold rather than the places where the company was based. It also introduced a global minimum tax rate to prevent a company from shifting its sales to a country with lower taxes. Finally, a robotic tax, aided by the creation of a single global cryptocurrency (SGCC),⁷⁵ covered all activities based on automation to compensate for the disruptive effects of automation on the global labour market.⁷⁶ Together, these measures helped to contain the outbreak of currency wars and related trade/finance disputes.⁷⁷ On the other hand, the changes in the taxation system also helped to reverse the former trend of higher income taxes as opposed to lower corporate taxes. The new system achieved an optimal balance, with around 5% income tax, 25% corporate tax (including on digital activities) and 35% robotic tax, as measures towards greater global tax justice.⁷⁸ These and other fiscal policies were introduced in coherence with other incentives to end the poverty trap.⁷⁹

The cognitive shift also remodelled the international multilevel governance system towards a “glocal” and holarchic system in which local, largely self-governing, entities were complemented by various regional regimes often organized into mega-regional blocks, with those of an inclusive global system enshrined in the GAIA Charter of 2048. Holarchy here means a system in which various self-regulating entities function as autonomous wholes in supra-ordination to their parts but, at the same time, also as dependent parts in subordination to controls on higher levels their local environment.⁸⁰ The foundation is a polyvalent logic by which the links between stakeholders at different levels are supported by a dynamic system of subsidiarity and an open method of coordination.⁸¹ It is based on a set of different criteria that the best possible level of regulation is determined without any prior bias towards either the local or the global level of governance. The same method is also applied to territorial questions, such as national sovereignty is no longer fixed but where territorial boundaries are drawn based on a similar set of criteria. Thus, like in the quantum world, different political entities, and even national governments’ competences, can overlap and even be superimposed without being perceived in conflict.

Changes in cognition facilitated the adoption of the GAIA 2048 Charter, as the global community finally found the “common language”⁸² to tackle the “global governance paradox” successfully. The paradox was that, in order to create a global legal order, the world community needed a global governance platform that had not previously existed, confirming that linguistic and cognitive changes are quintessential to institutional change.

Structurally, the GAIA 2048 was based on an institutional setting in which every “trade and …” problem was coordinated by a “coherence committee”, with the competence to avoid conflict between different policy goals. The functioning of the institutional framework was aided by an e-governance system, which used intelligent algorithms to consolidate redundant norms and detect incoherent measures. However, artificial intelligence was considered not only to be hype but also to be an oxymoron, and, in relation to law and policy, artificial intelligence measures were strictly bound by the requirement inherited from the former EU General Data Protection Regulation that they could not be implemented and enforced “without any human intervention”.⁸³

In substantive terms, existing sources of global law were codified into a single legal document, the GAIA Code, a global constitutional text that reduced the previous disarray of international laws. In this way, former conflicts between norms that arose because of dichotomies that were too simplistic to account for real complexity, be it between electronic and traditional modes of consumption of goods (GATT) and services (GATS), between IP law and competition law, or between international trade law and various subfields of general public international law in the name of “self-contained regimes”, were no longer unavoidable and irresolvable.⁸⁴ In this context, global competition rules were integrated and enhanced so as to not only guarantee the sustainable economic development of the global market but also “solve social problems ranging from unemployment to income inequality and indeed to improve the functioning of democracy itself”.⁸⁵

Other necessary changes simply came with changes in cognition and understanding, and did not require a change in language as they occurred earlier when a higher court reconsidered its established case law. For instance, in the field of global economic law, the national treatment provisions of GATT Article III, GATS Article XVII and Article 3 of TRIPS were now no longer merely interpreted as prohibiting discrimination between domestic and imported goods or services but also as encompassing “all measures having an equivalent effect on consumers in covered markets”.⁸⁶ This became necessary to cover personalized price discrimination made possible by the data economy.⁸⁷ These cognitive changes, plus a seamless global wireless web, also ended the western failure of the territorial national state.⁸⁸ As a result, the “four freedoms” related to the free movement of goods, services, persons and capital, became recognized as ubiquitous civil right and a global reality.⁸⁹

The various systemic changes resulting from cognitive changes were supported by, and helped to establish, an effective and inclusive global dispute settlement mechanism, which recognized the right to bring an action and to be heard in court (locus standi) of not only international organizations, states and multinational corporations but also natural persons.⁹⁰ It effectively aligned the former WTO Dispute Settlement system with investor–state arbitration.⁹¹ Both systems were elevated to a “world trade court” embedded within a fully-fledged global judicial body, the GAIA Tribunal, that was vested with various constitutional powers to sanction and enforce the rulings it issued.⁹² Overall, the new institutional design based on these cognitive changes was said to have helped to “improve and eventually overcome the perceived lack of legitimacy of international courts and tribunals in the eyes of the governments, the legal community and civil society”.⁹³

Conclusion: ‘Dystopian Utopia’ or Oxymora to Predict the Future by Creating It

My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.⁹⁴

A dystopian or a utopian future, does it matter? After all, from the “perspective of the brain, there’s a thin line between a good decision and a bad decision”.⁹⁵ It seems, though, that what matters to everyone is the future, because the future is “where we are all going to spend the rest of our lives”.⁹⁶ However, perhaps this must also not be the case as, paradoxically, most (or all) dichotomies have a limitation in that they not only trade accuracy for simplicity,⁹⁷ but also provide an invisible barrier to a vision of the bigger picture. This is where subtle linguistic changes may gradually trigger cognitive changes and eventually bring in legal and institutional changes, in the same way as dripping water hollows out stone, even though the cognitive habits of binary or dualistic thinking are said to die hard.⁹⁸ Easy or difficult, it is a source of encouragement for everyone, as we may, à la longue, be able to bring about the change we desire, given that institutional change is possible once a cognitive change has occurred.⁹⁹

The recent rise in the number of oxymora and paradoxes, however, seems to indicate this “creative” possibility. For instance, various concepts implicitly reflecting the tensions between prediction and destiny within the confines of past and present, such as science fiction¹⁰⁰ or free will,¹⁰¹ have been qualified as oxymora. In their context (and possibly in the context of all paradoxes), time therefore appears as the clue, or the key we need to find to unlock the limitations inherent in our current linear perception of time. The fact is that the grammar of many modern languages, conjugating verbs in the “present,” “past,” and “future” tenses, was said to not be “well-adapted for speaking about the real temporal structure of reality, which is more complex”.¹⁰² Various “nostalgic visionaries”, like Herbert G. Wells or Jules Verne, however, transcended the past–future dichotomy in their writings, thereby anticipating many future inventions.¹⁰³ Lawyers, too, can act in this way, as their work is often similar to that of science fiction authors, given that they can help in translating fiction into legal fact¹⁰⁴ or turning dreams into reality by combining “the law as it is” (lex lata) with “the law as it should be” (de lege ferenda) perspectives.¹⁰⁵

For lawyers to achieve this creative goal and to synthesize the two competing scenarios of the future beyond the WTO outlined in this chapter, it will be necessary, first, to work actively towards a cognitive change. Applied to legal reasoning, it means to transcend an exclusively dualistic mode of reasoning, which means to solely rely on the “law of the excluded middle” (i.e. “Everything must either be or not be.”).¹⁰⁶ Applied to the regulation of global trade, this kind of “either/or thinking” or that something either belongs to the sphere of trade or is classified as a “non-trade concern” must be complemented by the law of the included middle. The law of the included middle can be achieved through oxymoronic thinking by way of which, for instance, trade and non-trade concerns are not opposed to each other but where their apparent contradiction can be resolved at a higher level of reality or complexity.¹⁰⁷

More concretely, lawyers must be able cognitively to transcend the iron law of binary logic by also being versatile in reasoning based on polyvalent logic—a kind of multivalued logic in which there can be more than two truth values.¹⁰⁸ A good way to remind ourselves of this is given in the following quote: “laws may differ but they do not conflict: the only possible conflict is in the mind of the judge”.¹⁰⁹ In this regard, legal education seems the best place to begin.¹¹⁰ Thus, addressing problems by legally expressing them solely using dichotomies is no longer apt to deal with their underlying complexity. It also means that a purely static approach should be complemented with a more dynamic one to ensure that laws are adopted in a way that embraces change ex ante and makes them fit for the future. In institutional terms, a more dynamic approach is also needed, as otherwise we merely observe their initial rise and subsequent demise.¹¹¹ In this respect, discursive institutionalism provides an excellent complement, as it regards norms as “dynamic, intersubjective constructs rather than static structures”.¹¹² Ultimately, it is submitted here that, based on this cognitive change, novel models of global institutions, like GAIA 2048, can emerge.

Second, the cognitive changes of polyvalent or oxymoronic thinking, when combined with new organs of perception as symbolized by synaesthesia, will enable another important insight, which lies in the realization that the best way to predict the future is by creating (and regulating) it. This insight puts the theory of a self-fulfilling prophecy into a new light, one which proves that theory and practice are intimately linked and that sociological predictions are “products of an era, co-determinants of what they assert”.¹¹³

When applied to humanity as a whole, predicting the future by creating it (and regulating it accordingly) means that if we plan something and act upon it coherently and persistently, it is more likely to happen, eventually. This, however, first requires a cognitive change in the understanding of humanity as a divided amalgam of different peoples or nations instead of an organic whole united in its diversity. Only then can an adequate global governance mechanism capable of putting the necessary global legal order into place be expected to be brought forth. In short, the global governance paradox and other apparent contradictions can only be successfully addressed by expanding our reasoning from bivalent to polyvalent modes of thinking, as reflected in synaesthesia or in new optimized ways to receive and channel information through our different senses or, in legal terms, different institutions.

Applied to the dichotomy of the past versus the future, a new cognitive mode may one day enable humans to recall the fundamental importance of the present, that is, the magical power of the present to rewrite both the world of yesterday and the world of tomorrow. By the same token, humans can then eventually use the same magic to control the outcome between the two apparently opposite scenarios, the dystopian and the utopian one. For now, the two scenarios outlined in this chapter cannot answer the questions of whether or not, in our perception, linear time exists, or whether or not we have free will or all fate (including the fate of the WTO) is already written in a comprehensive book of destiny. This chapter is equally unable to say whether a post-WTO legal order will be able to avoid global disaster and humanity’s as well as nature’s demise. However, the hope is that the chapter shows that the many “scientifically fictitious” developments described in both the dystopian and the utopian scenarios concur in essence or are—if at all—divided by a very thin line, one merely drawn in our minds. Nevertheless, this thin line determines how we will deal with the most urgent challenges in the Anthropocene, or at any given point in time (when no longer understood as the linear process from the past to the future), because it clearly proves that today we humans cannot say that “we did not know (about the dangers and inherent consequences of our actions)”. On the contrary, we can only say “we knew but did not care”.

Notes

1. Rovelli (2018), p. 3.
2. Petersen (2014), p. 283.
3. Ashley (2017).
4. Bacchus (2003), pp. 533–550.
5. Wittmann (2016), p. 124.
6. Ten Hoopen (1995), p. 577.
7. Johnson (2007), p. 845.
8. Harari (2017), p. 51.
9. Jackson (1969), p. 51.
10. DiMatteo (2003), pp. 95 and 102.
11. Dias (2007), p. 278.
12. Lo et al. (2020).
13. Neuwirth (2015), p. 31.
14. Pauwelyn (2005), pp. 329–346.
15. Lang (2007), p. 529.
16. Lang (2007), p. 523.
17. Hopkins and Wallerstein (1996), p. 226.
18. Van Creveld (1999), p. vii.
19. United Nations High Level Panel on Coherence (2006) Delivering as One. G.A. A/61/583 (9 November 2006).
20. Baumann (2016), pp. 461–472.
21. United Nations High Level Panel on Coherence (2006) Delivering as One. G.A. A/61/583 (9 November 2006), p. 10.
22. Lawrence (2018), pp. 62–82.
23. Pasquale (2015).
24. Yu (2019), pp. 503–529.
25. Smith and Woods (2005), pp. 463–510.
26. Burri (2017), pp. 65–132.
27. Neuwirth (2015), pp. 21–50.
28. Request for the Establishment of a Panel by Qatar, United Arab Emirates – Measures Relating to Trade in Goods and Services, and Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, para. 1, WT/DS526/2 (12 Oct. 2017).
29. Neuwirth and Svetlicinii (2015b), p. 892.
30. WTO Panel Report, Russia – Measures Concerning Traffic in Transit, WT/DS512/R (5 April 2019).
31. Requests for consultations and establishment of a panel by Qatar, Saudi Arabia — Measures concerning the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, WT/DS567/1 (4 October 2018) and WT/DS567/3 (19 November 2018).
32. Murray and King (2012), pp. 433–435.
33. Hall and Klitgaard (2018), p. 109.
34. Ahmed (2017).
35. Downie (2015), p. 475.
36. Cosbey and Mavroidis (2014), pp. 11–47.
37. Demedts (2015), pp. 415–416.
38. Ginsburg and Huq (2018), p. 198.
39. An Economy for the 99%. OXFAM Briefing Paper, January 2017. https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf.
40. Neuwirth (2016), pp. 911–925.
41. Hynes and Scott (2013).
42. Moyo (2009), pp. 52–53.
43. WTO General Council, An Undifferentiated WTO: Self-Declared Development Status Risks Institutional Irrelevance (Communication from the United States), WT/GC/W/757 (16 January 2019).
44. Thomas (2000), pp. 1249–1278.
45. Staiger and Sykes (2010), pp. 583–627.
46. Grabel (2007), pp. 335–341.
47. Gadbaw (2010), p. 552.
48. Tapscott and Tapscott (2018).
49. Rickards (2011), p. 98.
50. Rogoff K (2019) The High Stakes of the Coming Digital Currency War. Project Syndicate. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-battle-for-digital-currency-supremacy-by-kenneth-rogoff-2019-11.
51. Reuveny (2007), pp. 656–673.
52. Beets and Willekens (2009).
53. UNHCR (2019).
54. Berchin et al. (2017), pp. 147–150.
55. Weissbrodt and Collins (2006), pp. 245–276.
56. Neuwirth (2020), p. 51.
57. Neuwirth et al. (2017) and Neuwirth and Svetlicinii (2019).
58. Onyutha (2018), pp. 1203–1219.
59. African Union (2017) Progress Report on the Implementation of Agenda 2063 First Ten-Year Implementation Plan. Available at: https://archives.au.int/handle/123456789/2618.
60. Wittgenstein (1960), p. 149 (5.6).
61. Neuwirth (2019b), p. 15.
62. Kern (1983), p. 1.
63. Neuwirth (2018a), pp. 23, 52 and 243.
64. Deroy and Spence (2013), pp. 1240–1253.
65. Wells (1938), p. xvi.
66. Neuwirth and Svetlicinii (2015a), pp. 330–366.
67. See also Milán et al. (2012), pp. 258–268.
68. Neuwirth (2018b), pp. 3–26.
69. Flannelly et al. (2012), pp. 651–662.
70. D’Alisa et al. (2015).
71. Fiore (2006), pp. 3334–3341.
72. Ongena (2018), pp. 114–432.
73. G20 (2019) Ministerial Statement on Trade and Digital Economy. http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2019/june/tradoc_157920.pdf.
74. Tobin (1978), pp. 153–159.
75. Ahmed (2018), pp. 697–740.
76. Abbott and Bogenschneider (2018), pp. 145–175.
77. Yi-Lin-Forrest et al. (2018), p. 567.
78. Brock and Pogge (2014), pp. 1–15.
79. Thang Dao and Edenhofer (2018), pp. 253–273.
80. Koestler (1967), pp. 102–103.
81. Neuwirth (2020), p. 51.
82. Halpin and Roeben (2009), p. 6.
83. Art. 22 Regulation (EU) 2016/679, O.J. L 119/1 (4 May 2016).
84. Jeutner (2017).
85. Wright et al. (2019), p. 294.
86. Neuwirth (2015), pp. 21–50.
87. Townley et al. (2017), pp. 683–748.
88. Strange (1999), p. 345.
89. Nett (1971), pp. 212–227.
90. Schwartmann (2005).
91. Li (2018), pp. 189–232.
92. Cottier (2015), pp. 12–14.
93. Dimitropoulos (2018), p. 569.
94. Tesla (2016), p. 46.
95. Lehrer (2009), p. xiv.
96. Rescher (1998), p. 1.
97. Kosko (1993), p. 21.
98. Segal (2008), p. 101.
99. Lang (2007), p. 529.
100. Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (2008), p. 8 (“As its name implies, science fiction is an oxymoron.”).
101. Crewe (2008), p. 23.
102. Rovelli (2018), p. 111.
103. Unwin (2000), pp. 18 and 31.
104. Fuller (1967), p. 1.
105. Virally (1981), p. 519.
106. Russell (1912), p. 113.
107. Brenner (2008), p. 4; Neuwirth (2018a), pp. 180–181.
108. Jeutner (2017), p. 151; Neuwirth (2018a), pp. 234 and 255.
109. Glenn (2017), p. 162.
110. Neuwirth (2019a), p. 45.
111. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997).
112. Schmidt (2008), p. 303.
113. Neurath (1973), pp. 405–406.

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1. University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, ChinaRostam J. Neuwirth

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Neuwirth, R.J. (2020). GAIA 2048—A ‘Glocal Agency in Anthropocene’: Cognitive and Institutional Change as ‘Legal Science Fiction’. In: Lewis, M.K., Nakagawa, J., Neuwirth, R.J., Picker, C.B., Stoll, PT. (eds) A Post-WTO International Legal Order. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45428-9_5

Rachel Bird

Original article here

Alvin Toffler, an American writer and Futurist, said that “the great growing engine of change [is] technology” (Toffler). However, Toffler did not specify exactly what it is that technology is changing – the environment? The economy? Humanity itself? In their book, The Techno-Human Condition, Braden Allenby and David Sarewitz argue that what technology is fundamentally changing is the very definition of what it means to be a human being. Although they focus primarily on relatively recent technologies that directly impact human bodies, I believe that all technological advances are changing our definition of “humanness,” in that they contribute to the creation of a new era of human impact on the environment: the Anthropocene. By viewing The Techno-Human Condition, its analysis of technological innovation, and the transhumanist movement as a whole, through the lens of the Anthropocene, it is possible to see how technologies, both those that directly interact with the body and those that do not, are changing our relationships with ourselves and our environment.
In The Techno-Human Condition, Allenby and Sarewitz analyze two separate “dialogues” concerning transhumanism and its role in today’s society (Allenby and Sarewitz 4). The first “dialogue” that they cover revolves around “the ways in which living humans use technologies to change themselves, for example, through replacement of worn-out knees and hips, or enhancement of cognitive function through pharmaceuticals” (Allenby and Sarewitz 4). This more literal definition revolves around technologies that noticeably influence the human body, and how the incorporation of non-organic, manufactured, and perhaps unnatural materials into the body changes out conceptions of who or what is a human. However, the authors focus much of their argument on the second dialogue. They contend that transhumanism is effectively a “cultural construct that considers the relations between humanness and social and technological change” (Allenby and Sarewitz 5). This broader definition allows for analysis of technologies that may not directly manipulate the human form, but nevertheless change our relationships with ourselves and our environment. However, even this definition cannot fully explain the transhumanist movement, and Allenby and Sarewitz acknowledge that it is challenging to fully encompass the goals and beliefs of a movement when that movement is continually adapting to the cultural context. The difficulty in articulating a particular definition for the transhumanist movement results in “definitional ambiguity,” which Allenby and Sarewitz resolve by concluding that more important that precisely outlining the parameters of the movement, is understanding the social implications of this ambiguity. According to Allenby and Sarewitz, “transhumanism turns out to be a conflicted vision offering a remarkable opportunity to question the grand frameworks of our time, most especially the Enlightenment focus on the individual, applied reason, and the democratic, rational modernity for which it forms the cultural and intellectual foundation” (Allenby and Sarewitz 11). In this interpretation, the problem in defining transhumanism lies not with the movement or its goals, but with the goals of the Enlightenment era itself.
According to Allenby and Sarewitz’s understanding, the Enlightenment era, which arguably preceded and perhaps even caused the Industrial Anthropocene, set the groundwork for our current cultural insistence on modernity and progress of the individual. The Techno-Human Condition describes how inventions ranging from the first railroads to modern methods of warfare are “simply an incremental continuation of one of the most fundamental trends of the Industrial Revolution” (Allenby and Sarewitz 156). For Allenby and Sarewitz, the impacts of this ncultural fascination with modernity can be broken down into the impacts of three increasingly comprehensive levels of technology. As Allenby and Sarewitz define it, Level I technology is the actual artifact or technological invention. In The Techno-Human Condition, Allenby and Sarewitz use the example of an airplane to illustrate this level. An airplane is a highly advanced technological feat, yet on its own it is a relatively simple piece of machinery which consumers expect to work safely and reliably. However, at Level II, this reliability starts to fail. Although airplanes themselves are relatively reliable at transporting passengers, tend to travel at a consistent speed, and crash remarkably rarely (despite widespread social obsession with and fears of airplane accidents) the actual time spent traveling by airplane can vary widely. However, rather than being a failure of the Level I technology, this unreliability is due to all of the factors involved in a Level II system. In The Techno-Human Condition, a Level II system is described as all of the hierarchies and systems that a Level I technology operates within. From the TSA security checkpoints, to airplane companies, baggage claim, weather delays, and overbooking, the systems that surround airplanes undermine their reliability. In this example, the Level II technology often prevents the Level I technology from doing its job. Level III technology moves from the tangible and easily definable elements of technology (the airplanes, as well as the airports, people, regulations, etc. that surround them) to a broader sense of the transformative role of airplanes and air travel. Level III technology revolves around the interactions of “Earth Systems,” which Allenby and Sarewitz define as “complex, constantly changing and adapting systems in which human, built, and natural elements interact in ways that produce emergent behaviors which may be difficult to perceive, much less understand and manage” (Allenby and Sarewitz 63). For example, airplanes have played a role in the globalization of terrorism, and the involvement of citizens in warfare and political conflict. This in turn has led to widespread fears of terrorist attacks, and increased racial and political tensions. The ability to relocate humanity to distant corners of the globe has also contributed to the spread of previously regional diseases such as AIDs and MERS, impacting the population and socioeconomic status of various groups. Furthermore, the environmental and ecological effects of the air transport industry have contributed to the changing ways humans view our relationship with and responsibility towards the earth. By extrapolating outwards from an individual technological innovation, Allenby and Sarewitz’s method of analyzing technology displays the far reaching effects that a single piece of technology can have on humanity as a whole.
​By outlining the effects of a single piece of technology on humanity, Allenby and Sarewitz hint at a larger context. Although The Techno-Human Condition focuses on how technologies will impact humanity’s conception of what is human, the book also explores how “technology-induced changes in human capabilities [might] affect the environment” (Allenby and Sarewitz x). Allenby and Sarewitz first introduce the connection between technology and human interactions with the environment in their first chapter: “Transhumanism is at best a local phenomenon in a far more pervasive reality… Indeed, many scientists are beginning to call this era the Anthropocene (meaning, roughly, the Age of Humans). The background to much discussion of transhumanism is a world in which human activity increasingly affects global systems, including the climate and the hydrological, carbon, and nitrogen cycles of the anthropogenic Earth” (Allenby and Sarewitz 10). The Anthropocene can be defined as the geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate an ecology of the earth (Fleming). As Allenby and Sarewitz explained in their descriptions of the different levels of technology, most technologies eventually have a wide global impact at Level III. Although these impacts may be unintentional and difficult to fathom from a Level I understanding of a technological innovation, by generalizing the results of individual technologies, Allenby and Sarewitz illustrate the disparate impacts of seemingly localized innovations. In this sense, all technologies which impact the “Earth Systems” at Level III contribute to an anthropogenic understanding of humanity’s role in changing the earth, and nearly all technologies do reach this Level III status (Allenby and Sarewitz 63).
​In his text, The Climate of History: Four Theses, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s first thesis posits that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of age old humanist distinctions between natural and human history (Chakrabarty). However, as the distinctions between technology and the environment become less clear, anthropogenic explanations of Earth Systems also begin to collapse humanist distinctions between the futures of nature and humanity. When the impacts of technologies spiral out into Level III, the relationship between humans and nature becomes further enmeshed. Allenby and Sarewitz also acknowledge this point when they write that technological “enhancements cannot be viewed in isolation: they are changes in highly complex and adaptive systems” (Allenby and Sarewitz 28). By changing the complex systems of interactions between humans and their surroundings, technologies that impact our characterizations of what constitute human also impact our surroundings, and by definition, the impact of humans on our environment is the primary factor of the Anthropocene.

Works Cited
Allenby, Braden R., and Daniel R. Sarewitz. The Techno-Human Condition. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011. Print.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” CRIT INQUIRY Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197-222. Print.
Fleming, Jim. “Human/Nature in the Anthropocene.” ST197. Colby College, Waterville. 15 Sept. 2015. Lecture.
Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. Toronto: Bantam, 1971. Print.

 

Josh Wodak

Institute Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Sydney 2150, Australia

Humanities 2020, 9(4), 126; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9040126

(This article belongs to the Section Transdisciplinary Humanities)

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Abstract

At the advent of the Anthropocene, life is being pushed to its limits the world over; we are currently living through the Sixth Mass Extinction to occur since multicellular life first emerged on the planet 570 million years ago. Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson sums up this push in the opening gambit of his book The Future of Life: “the race is now on between the techno-scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it”. Contra Wilson, this paper addresses the paradox arising from proposals to harness “techno-scientific forces … to save” the “living environment” while other forces continue to destroy it. By framing human-inflected evolution in an age of human-induced extinction, this article asks what could or should conservation become, if ‘conserving’ imperiled species might now require genetic interventions of the synthetic kind. Drawing upon recent key markers of “the race”, this paper presents a notional conservation for the Anthropocene—namely, that such a conservation proposes active intervention not only into ecosystems but into evolution itself. And yet, such interventions can only be considered in the context of the planetary scale that is the Anthropocene-writ-large, as per the desertification of the Amazon or the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, the spatial scale of the microbial world, and on the temporal scale of evolution. Viewed within such a context, this paper presents technoscientific conservation as paradoxically being both vital and futile, as well as timely and too late.

Keywords: cultural imaginary; environmental humanities; environmental ethics; synthetic biology; conservation biology; microbiology; Anthropocene evolution

1. Trendsetting

The journal in question is called Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The article in question is called ‘Is It Time for Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation?’. Given the current trends in ecology and evolution—from the climate crisis to the unfolding Sixth Extinction Event and beyond—the answer would appear to be self-evident. Yes, it is time. Time for what though? And when, where, what, how, and by whom? But, most importantly: why? Why is it that ‘conserving’ imperilled species might now require genetic interventions of the synthetic kind?

Probing whether it is actually “Time for Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation” poses a question which begets the thoroughly inhuman, nonhuman, and more-than-human domains at play. Namely, that any such proposed conservation must be considered in context, not only on the planetary scale that is the Anthropocene-writ-large, as per the desertification of the Amazon or the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, but on the spatial scale of the microbial world, on the temporal scale of evolution, as well as within the affective domain of the cultural imaginary that underpins technoscientific conservation. Because, if it is indeed time for measures such as Synthetic Biology Conservation, then any notional conservation not cognisant of the vastly different scales at play is as anachronistic as Holocene worldviews of both humanity and the humanities.

This article offers a framework for any such conservation, through recourse to key moments in the nascent field of technoscientific conservation. These key moments illuminate the paradoxes facing conservation, by which it appears to be both vital and futile, as well as timely and too late. This means that the real question within the question of whether it is indeed “Time for Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation” is actually whether it is too late for conservation by any means at all.

In an age of human-induced extinction on a global scale, synthetic biology is human-inflected evolution, albeit on the microbial scale, and predominantly used for perpetuating so-called human civilisation rather than benefiting the more-than-human living world. The field aims to synthesise microbial organisms into ‘biofactories’, whereby their metabolism is directed towards making medicines, bioplastics, or biofuels. This applies to microbes that have already been co-opted for human benefit since the proverbial dawn of civilisation, such as yeast for beer and bread, as well as microbes with much more recent human entanglements, through to currently non-existent but seriously proposed new-to-nature microbes notionally designed to fulfil specific desired outcomes. While the field is highly diverse, it is unified by a promissory zeal, which maintains that successful synthesis will allow for the prodigious productivity of the microbial world to be harnessed into biomanufacturing (such as swapping biofuels for fossil fuels, or bioplastic for petroleum-derived plastic), producing lower biophysical impacts.

The seismic potential of this endeavour drives both industrial and academic research, and, while synthetic biology pursues human-induced evolution of affected microbes, this paper is concerned with proposed conservation usage rather than normative applications. The potential efficacy for such usage throws the manifold objections to normative synthetic biology into a different light if, and only if, it is actually “Time for Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation”. This raises a seemingly irresolvable tension: what if the potential efficacy of synthetic biology for conservation in turn serves to justify and legitimise the field-in-general, including its normative applications? If the “mission-oriented crisis discipline” (Soulé 1985, p. 11) that is conservation biology leverages technologies that are overwhelmingly intended for sustaining so-called human civilisation, does this then obviate the ethical and moral objections to the field?

The ‘Is It Time?’ article, published in February 2017, did not have to wait long for an answer to its question. In September that year, 18 Australian scientists published what amounted to a reply in Nature Ecology and Evolution: ‘New Interventions are Needed to Save Coral Reefs’, declaring “that emerging interventions such as assisted gene flow, assisted evolution, synthetic biology and habitat engineering, operating at the appropriate organismal or ecosystem levels, are essential to build reef resilience” (Anthony et al. 2017, p. 1420). The three-page article does not explicitly propose such interventions for the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, but the co-authors’ specialised focus on this, the largest living organism on earth, left little doubt as to which reefs they had in mind.

A week before ‘New Interventions’ was published, 43 scientists held a workshop at Heron Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef, on the subject of ‘Engineering Resilience.’ The scientists, many of whom had co-authored ‘Is It Time?’ or ‘New Interventions’, were meeting to explore the application of synthetic biology out of the microbial scale, and into much larger organisms. While the principal aim of this workshop was to explore the efficacy of increasing the thermal tolerance of coral toward rising ocean temperatures, engineering such resilience goes beyond coral, to diverse kinds of flora and fauna. Similar proposals exist for specific flora and fauna that are arguably amenable to genetic intervention, in cases where all other options appear insufficient in terms of already precipitously vulnerable populations (Coleman and Goold 2019; Redford et al. 2013, 2019).

Such proposals offer a riposte to The Future of Life as per evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson in his book of this title. For Wilson, “the race is now on between the techno-scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it” (Wilson 2003, p. xii). Wherein, scientists such as the authors of ‘Is it Time?’ or ‘New Interventions’ would counter: what if harnessing the techno-scientific forces of synthetic biology becomes part of the “race” between “destroying the living environment” and “forces … to save it”? This is because the ‘Is It Time?’ question mark heralds a larger endeavour across the sciences, one comprising radical proposed responses to the Anthropocene, all offered with seemingly innocuous question mark titles. Here, there are two articles of note: complex systems theorist Richard Solé’s ’Bioengineering the Biosphere?’, published in Ecological Complexity in 2015, and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen’s ‘Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?’ published in Climatic Change in 2006 (Solé 2015; Crutzen 2006).

While these two articles refer, respectively, to intervening in the biosphere and the atmosphere, they share the interventionist ethos that underpins synthetic biology usage in conservation. Indeed, this ethos is problematically implied by the notion of the Anthropocene itself, at least for scientists of the ‘Engineering Resilience’ and ‘Is It Time?’ schools of thought. The genealogy of this ethos can be traced back to Paul Crutzen, who first coined and popularised the term ‘Anthropocene’ in 2000. In a 2011 blog co-authored with Christian Schwägerl, Crutzen brought this ethos together with its multi-scale domains:

Albeit clumsily, we are taking control of Nature’s realm, from climate to DNA… What we do now already affects the planet of the year 3000 or even 50,000. Changing the climate for millennia to come is just one aspect. By cutting down rainforests, moving mountains to access coal deposits and acidifying coral reefs, we fundamentally change the biology and the geology of the planet. While driving uncountable numbers of species to extinction, we create new life forms through gene technology, and, soon, through synthetic biology.

(Crutzen and Schwägerl 2011)

In this sense, when the 13 co-authors of ‘Is It Time?’ asked their probing question, they were effectively asking whether it is time to wield the radical and risky tools of technoscience against the onslaught of the Anthropocene. It is not Wilson’s Future of Life that is at stake here, since even if all such technoscientific conservation were to be attempted wholesale, all such interventions are inextricably entangled with inhuman, nonhuman, and more-than-human forcings, from viral irruptions to volcanic eruptions. What is at stake is rather any potential future at all for those lifeforms currently caught in a world undergoing biophysical change too rapid for them to adapt to, save by means of human-induced evolution that closes the gap by ‘Engineering Resilience’.

Humanistic responses to the Anthropocene should offer a critical lens through which we can observe how the cultural imaginary configures support or objection to such proposals. The perennial questions of the human condition do not disappear into the Anthropocene, but are rather ever-present and ever-pertinent to proposals to move from “albeit clumsily … taking control of Nature’s realm” to intentionally taking control in the not-too-distant future. At stake here is an ontological condition that undermines any simplistic grounds for supporting or objecting to such proposed synthetic biology usage. Because, if it is actually time to use synthetic biology for conservation, then ‘Trends in [Anthropocene] Ecology and Evolution’ will bear the mark of human intention, as a counterpoint to the current unintentional desecration caused by those “techno-scientific forces that are destroying the living environment”.

Intentional marks would be registered in the genome of species modified through synthetic biology, alongside the existing unintentional marks of human-induced desecration of the more-than-human living word. Such marks in the evolutionary record are analogous to the Anthropocene’s boundary layer, which will persist through the earth’s strata over geological time scales. This is simply because species subject to any human intervention that successfully confers evolutionary benefits will carry discrete genotypic marks in their human-inflected phylogenesis. Not in the domain of synthetic yeast co-opted into doing the bidding of so-called civilisation, but in the plants and animals bearing synthesised genes that have increased their capacity to adapt to prevailing biophysical conditions. In the instance of coral subjected to synthetic biology, their evolution would be ontologically unique, no longer described in journals with titles such as Nature Ecology and Evolution, but rather titles such as Anthropocene Ecology and Evolution.

2. Life Is But a Dream

Underpinning such dreams of redemption lies the cultural imaginary where more-than-human nature is coupled to technoscience. Regardless of whether or not it was born from sheer necessity born of the fierce urgency of the climate crisis, if this dream is to avoid becoming yet another waking nightmare, then there is much to be unpacked in terms of the culture that is willing the dream into being. Probing this dream is timely because, at present, it is a promise without any demonstrable means of deliverance or guarantee, set against the context of recent historic failures to deliver on prior promises for salvation through biofuels, bioplastic, bioremediation or other bio-based technofixes. As environmental philosopher Christopher Preston argues in his 2018 book The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World:

The changes we are facing are much more significant than the familiar litany of human impacts such as climate change, species extinction, and toxic pollution. Earth is entering a period in which some of its most fundamental processes are being co-opted and redesigned by engineers. Synthetic biologists, climate engineers, and nanotechnologists are reaching deeply enough into the workings of nature to alter the very metabolism of the planet we inhabit. In so doing, they promise to create an entirely new, synthetic world.

(Preston 2018, dust jacket)

For many, including the authors of strident humanities and social sciences critiques, the “promise” of “an entirely new, synthetic world” is one that will ideally never be fulfilled. These authors object to synthetic biology because, as a promissory technofix, even if it could provide material guarantees against material loss, it would still leave unaddressed the profound inequities of race, gender, and class that have disproportionately fuelled the ecological crisis, and by which the differentiated Anthropos of the Anthropocene suffers its fate. These critiques from the humanities and social sciences call instead for the curbing of capitalism, consumerism, and related hegemonic socio-cultural inequities, rather than continuing to dream of technofix substitutions (Latour 2004; Williams 1980; Wodak 2019).

Evidently, an unassailable chasm separates those in favour versus those against a Synthetic Age. While vehemently disagreeing about intentional interventions into evolution via technoscience, both sides acknowledge that the other’s stance is based on a philosophy, or rather a worldview, for how to inhabit earth in the face of impending extinction of incalculable multitudes, including our own species. Those in favour largely pivot their support on the fact that attempts to curb capitalism, consumerism and the like have been an abject failure, as has conventional conservation, which will prove even less effective in the face of biophysical change that is only going to increase in velocity and intensity. Therefore, in this line of argument, the efficacy of synthetic biology must be researched as a potential response.

Those who object do so largely on the grounds that the history of scientific and technological developments is rife with well-intended remedies for a societal or ecological ailment, that instead resulted in the ailment persisting and flourishing, alongside whatever deleterious side-effects of the technoscience used to ‘fix’ it. From atomic energy to the atomic bomb, or antibiotics to antibiotic resistance, even a cursory acknowledgment of recent technoscientific history shows a disconcerting pattern of undeliverable promises, which lead instead to multifarious and intractable novel calamities. For instance, in 1998 Nigel Clark presented a critique on ‘Nanoplanet: Molecular Engineering in the Time of Ecological Crisis’ that still applies today:

What is both heartening and horrifying about the speculative regime of molecular engineering is that it offers a technological response to these very issues [the ecological crisis]: heartening because its logic of maximal effects from a minimal intervention promises to bridge the temporal chasm between awareness of an environmental problem and effective action, [and] horrifying because a solution of this nature inevitably has so much in common with the problem it addresses.

(Clark 1998, p. 357)

It is both telling and profoundly troubling that this state of affairs describes the same chasm between those who find today’s dream of a Synthetic Age “heartening” and those who find it “horrifying”. For instance, some of the earliest research into oil spill bioremediation examined the possibility of genetically engineering bacteria that could break down the crude oil. This also provided the first patent of a lifeform, when the microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty won his case in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 and gained the right to patent his genetically engineered Pseudomonas genus bacterium. Nonetheless, despite an intervening four decades of seismic research in this arena, harnessing lifeforms to ameliorate oil spills remains a dream, not least because, like all dreams, the vision is not shared; for oil companies, the prospect of a microorganism that can eat their reserves is a nightmare that they most definitely do not want realised.

For Clark, these “heartening” and “horrifying” spectres held particular relevance to genetic engineering and subsequently to its direct descendant, synthetic biology. The contemporary relevance of Clark’s (1998) critique of molecular engineering is also apparent in his 1997 critique of genetic engineering, which according to his arguments represented the culmination of the modern drive to master the natural world [through] the application of technical rationality to its most infinitesimal and intimate recesses. The attempt to assert control over bio-physical processes at this level courts disaster of a kind which is without precedent in the history of human interventions.

(Clark 1997, p. 77)

Clark drew upon Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park as a representation of the contemporaneous cultural imaginary of genetic engineering. Nowadays, the fictional de-extinction is pursued through another application of synthetic biology, which is to resurrect extinct species such as the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon. What was merely a fable about the folly of human hubris in 1997 is now pursued as real-world response to the Sixth Extinction Event.

The title of Clark’s (1997) article, ‘Panic Ecology: Nature in the Age of Superconductivity’ still haunts today’s dream of redemption, as does his ‘Nanoplanet’ article. Clark’s “heartening” receptivity toward molecular and genetic engineering soon came to reside firmly within those who found the prospect “horrifying”, even as we became “the victims of bio-tech ‘imagineering’” according to philosopher Eugene Thacker in 2003, due to a “blatant disparity between hyper-optimism and an overall lack of concrete results (Thacker 2003, p. 106)”. A decade later, in 2013, philosopher Bensaude-Vincent found the discrepancy had only worsened, due to how the futuristic visions of today technoscientists are strikingly amnesic, so detached from the past that they are totally abstract. In particular, Synthetic Biology is often promoted as a source of technological fixes… But the concern with the damages due to the previous generations of ‘new technologies’ does not invite reflections about the next new generations, i.e., the long-term unintended consequences of all technological innovations.

(Bensaude-Vincent 2013, p. 30)

Like Thacker, Bensaude-Vincent locates the cultural imaginary of technoscience as driving the dream of redemption, wherein “in Synthetic Biology and recent biotechnologies, imagination takes a more positive and important role, which is by no means in contradiction with the exercise of reason and reasoning. Imagination provides guidelines for action because it bridges the gap between the possible and the real” (Bensaude-Vincent 2013, p. 25). Notwithstanding the legitimacy of such critiques towards normative synthetic biology, Clark, Thacker, and Bensaude-Vincent do not consider conservation applications, which raises the question of whether their critiques need to be reconsidered in the context of this proposed domain.

Nowadays, for those who do not want the dream to ever be attempted in reality, or for those who see the dream as being a fantasy that could never manifest in the world of Thacker’s “concrete results”, there is increasingly widespread acknowledgment even amongst the caveat-burdened corridors of academia that the tenure of our species is nearly at its end. In any and all eventualities. Critical theorist McKenzie Wark puts it more frankly: “this civilisation is over, and everyone knows it” (Wark 2015). Though the prospects for extinction extent to whether this biosphere is over, and who will admit it?

Of course, if it were already so, then it would be fruitless to entertain proposals for a Synthetic Age. But, when Wark uses the word “over” he means it in terms of the vague timeframe of civilizational collapse—the time it has taken past civilisations to go from inevitably “over” to actually gone has ranged from a matter of months to decades (Diamond 2004; Tainter 1990). Within this unknown temporal window, and operating out of the uncertainty and uncanniness that the spectre of the Anthropocene produces, there remain various competing worldviews that tell us how we should speak responsibly for endangered species and ecologies, and how to act accordingly. The complex ethics involved in formulating and propagating these worldviews and determining our ensuing actions will be discussed below.

Nowadays, those supporting the use of synthetic biology in conservation do so with an acute awareness of the centrality of different worldviews to such issues. For instance, just as Preston seeks a philosophical lens for examining the prospect of a Synthetic Age, there is also a philosophy underpinning the interventionist ethos advocated in ‘Is It Time?’, which argues that “the opportunity to resolve biodiversity issues may depend on a sea-change of philosophy in the conservation movement to incorporate the application of adapted genomes into the wild” (Piaggio et al. 2017, p. 98). This sea-change may be read both at face value and as metaphor, where the first reading prefigures the second. After all, if rising seas are lapping at your doorstep, would you not abandon outdated worldviews in favour of ‘anything goes’, given it is self-evident that everything is going under? This is not about pontificating in the armchair corridors of academia, but about making crucial decisions as to whether and how technoscience may be deployed as a life raft for imperilled species.

Taking Preston’s Synthetic Age as one framework for conservation in the Anthropocene, what then lies between his philosophy and that of the ‘Is It Time’ scientists? Or, to phrase it another way: what lies between the dream and the timeframe now available to turn it into reality? Once the rising seas are already lapping at our doorsteps, it is too little, too late to do anything but run away, given that there is a roughly five-decade lag between greenhouse gas emissions and discernible biophysical change. This is not to suggest that the temporal dimension is a mere half century. Rather, future climatic change, sea level rise, and so on, will continue across centuries into millennia, even if all emissions stop today (Archer 2009). Similarly, multitudes of species have already been labelled with the term ‘extinction debt’, meaning that their future extinction has been securely determined by events which have already transpired (Kuussaari et al. 2009). Such is “the race” that technoscientific conservation is up against. Such are the ecological and evolutionary trends that conservation needs to be considered against.

Dreaming and philosophy may not come to mind as central to considering human-inflected evolution in the context of human-induced extinction, but their underpinning of the entire ethos of technoscientific conservation cannot be so easily discounted. Even Alistair Elfick and Drew Endy, two synthetic biology advocates and practitioners since the field’s circa 2003 inception, readily concede that ushering in a Synthetic Age is presently still just a dream:

Scientists and engineers hold a responsibility to consider the impact of the knowledge and technology that they bring to the world. In our imagining, dreaming, and aspiring to create a set of future possibilities, it is clear that as a community, synthetic biologists need to engage in debate with wider stakeholders about the purposes of their work and whether or not these would best be achieved using synthetic biology.

(Elfick and Endy 2014, p. 24)

It is precisely this willingness to enter into debate (including debate with those opposed to the field) that arguably distinguishes synthetic biology from other contemporary forms of technoscience. Those proponents of the field who enter into dialogue often attribute their willingness to engage with debate to an open acknowledgement of the grave ethical and moral concerns about the field, and of the formidable imaginary of scientific hubris, from the Industrial Revolution-era of Frankenstein, to the post-apocalyptic-2019 of Blade Runner.

The dream is encapsulated on the cover of yet another synthetic biology event of 2017: the conference booklet to ‘SB7.0: The Seventh International Meeting of Synthetic Biology’, issued to the 900 delegates for their four-day conference at the National University of Singapore in June 2016, with Endy as one of the conveners. The cover is a drawing of a rainforest, populated by DNA, microbes, insects, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals, in particular a lioness. Yet, while the booklet detailed dozens of presentations, the vast majority had no relation to the Anthropocene, or ecological issues in general. The disjuncture is not remarked upon anywhere in conference program itself: Singapore, which means “Lion City”, is no longer a jungle, but rather a concrete jungle. The absence of dialogue within the fields that have given birth to the technologies supporting interventionist conservation is particularly worrying given that conservation is no longer about single-issue or single-place preservation, but rather wholesale interventions into ecosystems and evolution itself.

3. Jungle City

In 1854, when Alfred Russel Wallace commenced his nine-year-long immersion in South East Asia, the first place he visited was Singapore. His daily fieldwork in jungles peripheral to the then nascent colonial settlement brought him into contact with tigers—not that he saw one, but that he heard them while working there. Even at that point Wallace foresaw the dire consequences of the jungle being cleared to make way for the colonial settlement that was Singapore, remarking that if such destruction was not halted, or at least surveyed and controlled, then:

future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve.

(Wallace 1863, p. 210)

By the time he had travelled the globe and studied widely, Wallace had seen first-hand how such human-induced destruction was being repeated the world over, concluding in 1876 that “we live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared” (Wallace 1876, p. 150). For Singapore, this had taken on another layer of irony by 1930, when tigers had become extirpated, save for domestically bred individuals imprisoned in the island’s zoo. Though vast rifts lie between the human-influenced Holocene megafauna extinction that Wallace presciently recognised in 1876, such as regional extirpations of Malayan tigers in Singapore, and the 2017 of ‘Is It Time?’, ‘New Interventions’, and ‘Engineering Resilience’ calls to embark upon technoscientific conservation. Such technoscience is not akin to replanting the rainforests, with a view to making a habitat for a tiger to return to, but rather with ’Bioengineering the Biosphere’, as per Richard Sole, or ‘Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections’, as per Paul Crutzen.

Nowadays, the only place we can find a Singaporean jungle ecosystem and inhabitants as featured on the SB7.0 booklet cover is in the recreated natures of the island’s zoo. Just as dreams of restoring some actual jungle are made manifest inside the biotech laboratories of concrete jungles, the SB7.0 commercial, industrial, and academic sponsors show how the field imagines its normative applications extending from human-benefit to benefitting the more-than-human world.

While SB7.0 was no exception in having such aims, this organisation is notable well beyond its status as the key international lynchpin for the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. The 2017 conference was arguably also the first major public ‘outing’ of synthetic biology for conservation purposes. Day one entreated the delegates, the vast majority of whom were scientists, engineers or other such technical specialists, to a panel on the field’s socio-cultural dimensions entitled ‘Art, Critique, Design and Our World’. The familiar litany of humanities and social science critique of synthetic biology ensued, showing that Clark’s (1997), Thacker’s (2003) and Bensaude-Vincent’s (2013) concerns still reverberate and therefore remain relevant to the field today. However, there was a telling absence of critique of synthetic biology from non-scientists and the humanities that even remotely engaged with the then-current state of our ecological crisis.

For instance, one of the panel presenters, the artist Oron Catts, confronted the delegates with a particularly blunt and scathing critique, describing how the field forms part of what he terms the “Single Engineering Paradigm” (Catts and Zurr 2014, p. 28), alongside Crutzen’s climate engineering and Sole’s biosphere engineering, all of which will combine to manifest Preston’s dystopian Synthetic Age. Elsewhere, Catts and fellow artist Ionat Zurr ran through the same litany of objections to synthetic biology for the first five pages of their text on ‘Countering the Engineering Mindset: The Conflict of Art and Synthetic Biology’, only acknowledging at the bottom of the sixth page that “it is also a time of ecological crisis and its gloomy future predictions” (Catts and Zurr 2014, p. 33).

The fact is, if the humanities are to engage with conservation on its own terms, then it is not “also a time of ecological crisis”—it is only “a time of ecological crisis”. Regardless of the actual validity of humanities critique, this really only serves to perpetuate its seeming irrelevance when the existential threats posed to multitudes of species are relegated to page six of an aggressive riposte. To put it bluntly, the humanities and social science continue to engage with the field of conservation technoscience as if the “time of ecological crisis” was merely a background event to critique.

Conversely, for those asking ‘Is It Time For Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation’, it is truly only “a time of ecological crisis”, as they derive their answers to the question in full recognition of how conservation science is decades behind the velocity of biophysical change. For instance, the ‘Engineering Resilience’ workshop and ‘New Interventions’ publications occurred the year after the unprecedented global coral bleaching event of 2016–17, which was followed, for the first time in recorded history, by the first ever back-to-back bleaching event of 2017–18, then, yet another first, of the global bleaching event of 2019–20. Events of such frequency and ferocity were not anticipated to occur until the middle of this century, leaving us to ask whether it is not now irrelevant to ask “Is it Time”? Might the correct question be whether it is, in fact, already too late?

Given that such shattered records for ecological upheaval have become everyday affairs, the notion that the excesses of capitalism and consumerism can be reined in, inequality redressed and the tide of human-caused mass extinction stemmed is clearly completely anachronistic at this stage of the Anthropocene. The humanities are still arguing from the point of view of yesteryear conservation, when the situation may have still been salvageable, rather than engaging with the possibility that next to nothing can be saved, no matter what the potential efficacy of technoscientific conservation. As Christopher Preston argues in Climate Justice and Geoengineering: Ethics and Policy in the Atmospheric Anthropocene:

Many of the best options for dealing with the escalating climate problem are no longer on the table. The options that remain are increasingly far from ideal. What might have been a slow and orderly transition to a low-carbon economy will now have to be a rapid and lurching one. What might have been a timely and balanced research and development path away from fossil fuels and towards clean technologies will now have to be an almost impossibly quick one. Where climate engineering once looked outlandish or even repulsive, it is now becoming increasingly credible to growing numbers of observers.

(Preston 2016, p. xi)

Writing in 2016, Preston illustrates the sizeable replies that had amounted in the 10 years following Crutzen’s ‘Albedo Enhancement’ publication in 2006. In this vein, Catts and Zurr’s “gloomy future predictions” have already arrived, although, as William Gibson put it, “the future has already arrived, it is just not evenly distributed” (Gibson 2003). The future of technoscientific conservation will not be evenly distributed either, given how the economic and political disparities that fuelled the current crisis will inequitably impact on the attempted technofixes.

Day two of SB7.0 brought the focus back to those who seek to act upon these “options that remain [that] are increasingly far from ideal” for responding to human-caused extinction. In the panel session on ‘Biodiversity & Conservation’, eight scientists and conservation practitioners each delivered 12-min proposals for using synthetic biology in conservation. Their proposals pertained to endangered species, ranging from enhancing the resistance of the American chestnut tree to a fungal blight brought over a century ago in transplanted trees from Japan, enhancing the thermal tolerance of coral, synthesising the blood of the Horseshoe crab so that it is no longer harvested for its blood to be used for human vaccination manufacture, making malarial mosquitoes all male so that they cannot breed, to reduce malaria, and likewise making invasive rodents on secluded islands all male so that they cannot breed, to reduce island extinctions caused by the rodents. One of the presenters, Sonja Luz, Director of Conservation and Research at Wildlife Reserves Singapore, brought a local focus, talking about the pocket of recreated jungle in the zoo where the island’s sole tigers now live in captivity, and her receptivity to what synthetic biology could mean for zoo-based conservation. In the question-and-answer session following, the presenters were inundated with enthusiastic responses from delegates: it should be noted that, for most of the delegates, these new conservation applications represented an extreme departure from the normative applications which dominate the field. Through such outreach conferences, the dream gets extended beyond the fringe and into the mainstream, gaining currency via newfound interest from the commercial, industrial and academic stakeholders in attendance.

If 2017 was the year when synthetic biology and conservation biology left the margins and entered the mainstream of technoscientific conservation, 2018 was the year when these strange bedfellows began to be taken seriously, beyond the realm of TED talks and industry conferences. In April 2018, the Joint Task Force and Technical Working Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (hereafter IUCN) convened at Jesus College, Cambridge, for the first meeting of the Synthetic Biology and Biodiversity Conservation project. The peak international body for the “Conservation of Nature” is researching the efficacy of synthetic biology amidst the unfolding Sixth Extinction Event. The answer to the question ‘Is It Time?’ is quite simply that it has now come to this.

4. Intervention Is Better than Cure

If it is time for novel worldviews, as per the Anthropocene, and, arguably, for novel conservation practices, then it is also time to reconsider the role of language in framing a stance toward both. The Kafkaesque absurdity of the IUCN Task Force nomenclature throws the inadequacies of concepts of ‘natural’, ‘artificial’ and ’conservation’ into sharp relief: ‘natural’, for example, raises a self-contradiction inherent to the interventionist ethos. Humans are accustomed to perceiving themselves outside of, or opposed to, nature. But, given that the Anthropos is part of nature, including, therefore, all the products of our labours, how can our modes of inhabiting the earth, no matter how catastrophically irresponsible and disastrous, be an act of ‘intervening’ in that-which-we-are-always-inextricably-part-of? Surely we have only ever been working with and within nature, however unsuccessfully, and not merely ‘intervening’ in ‘nature’? Just as we have been worked on by ‘nature’ too, and just as we are composed of ‘nature.’ For we are ‘nature’, along with the entirety of the living and non-living world, as well as the cosmos to which this particular planet is hitched.

When Raymond Williams observed that nature is “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language” he was not engaging in mere semantics, but rather pointing out the prevalence for different interpretations of ‘nature’ as a word, and how they manifest vastly different worldviews. And, further, since it is a word which carries, over a very long period, many of the major variations of human thought—often, in any particular use, only implicitly yet with powerful effect on the character of the argument—it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty.

(Williams 2014, p. 169)

Therein, we see that when the ‘Is It Time?’ co-authors nod to how “the opportunity to resolve biodiversity issues may depend on a sea-change of philosophy in the conservation movement” (Piaggio et al. 2017, p. 98), this sea-change pivots on highly contested worldviews about what is nature, and thus what is natural, more so than any other concept.

This pivot has further repercussions for an interventionist ethos, as Williams presciently observed in 1980, stating that “we have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out” (Williams 1980, p. 83). This means distinctions between what is natural versus what is cultural, social, synthetic or artificial—i.e., human—are increasingly indiscernible and arguably the product of false distinctions arising from Enlightenment rationality, so-called. While the word ‘conservation’ does not command the same level of “difficulty” as ‘nature’, it too fosters worldviews that are incommensurate with the more-than-human world itself. Put plainly, the meanings of the word were decidedly different for the half a millennium before it came to refer to conservation of ‘nature’ with the emergence of modern environmentalism in the 1950s. Then again, every word-at-stake warrants such scrutiny, as Eileen Crist points out with regard to the notion of the Anthropocene, in her treatise ‘On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature’ (Crist 2013).

With regard to conservation through synthetic biology, this means that the term ‘human-directed evolution’ cannot represent the endeavour, nor can analogous conjoined terms such as ‘-designed’, ‘-engineered’, or ‘-inflected’. The “poverty of our nomenclature” concerning human effects on evolution is palpably brought to light in the artist and biologist Angelo Vermeulen’s (2006) interactive installation Blue Shift. Here, Vermeulen demonstrates a human-influenced microevolution of water fleas housed in aquaria connected to custom electronics. In the absence of any humans, yellow lights illuminate the aquaria from above, attracting the fleas to the upper water register. In the presence of nearby humans, sensor beams within the installation are intercepted, triggering blue lights above the aquaria instead. For water fleas, blue light indicates open ocean, where they are subject to higher predation than shallow water, indicated by yellow light.

However, Blue Shift deliberately tricks the water fleas: those that instinctively swim away from the blue light pass through a false bottom, housing fish which eat them. Thus, only those water fleas who (counter-intuitively) do not swim away from the blue light go on to survive and reproduce, manifesting a form of microevolution by conferring genetic traits for not-swimming-away-from-blue-light onto their descendants. Setting aside the ethical issues raised by using non-human creatures for the purposes of art, as well as other variables, such as how many generations are bred within Blue Shift, and whether the fleas are released into an open ecosystem or not after a presentation of the installation concludes, the question of whether this is human ‘-directed’, ‘-designed’, ‘-engineered’, or ’-inflected’ evolution remains an open question. The agency appears to possess something from each category, and yet no category can remotely capture the complexity of the agency at play here, even in this seemingly simple example.

A corresponding “poverty of our nomenclature” pertains to evolution vis-à-vis synthetic biology for conservation, yet with inscrutably more complex agency and causality. This raises intractable challenges for the ethics of such conservation given that these ethics arise according to the efficacy of the conservation. If the endeavour is, after all, a dream with no efficacious transferral into reality, then the corresponding ethical debate remains academic, in the sense of privileged detachment from the ecological crisis unfolding. This is ultimately due to the fact that proposed conservation is conditional on five chronological stages of experimentation: in silico, in vitro, in vivo, ex situ, in situ. And, here, the stakes are all the more ultimate; genetic and microbial interventions can only be remotely assayed when considered in their respective evolutionary contexts. If a genetic intervention is not inherited by a sufficient number of the modified organism’s descendants, then it becomes as ephemeral as the life of that population of individuals.

Furthermore, there is no singular discrete ‘intervention’ taking place. The Anthropocene thesis holds that the entirety of the Earth System has been rendered into a planetary-scale Blue Shift, though, in the scaling up, any discrete chains of causality have become subsumed within the incalculable forcings of human progeny, coupled with those of inhuman, nonhuman, and more-than-human progeny. As Wallace Broecker declared in 1987, with regard to human-caused climate change:

The inhabitants of Earth are quietly conducting a gigantic experiment. So vast and sweeping will be the consequences that, were it brought before any reasonable council for approval, it would be firmly rejected. Yet it goes on with little interference from any jurisdiction or nation… We play Russian roulette with climate, hoping that the future will hold no unpleasant surprises. No one knows what lies in the active chamber of the gun.

(Broecker 1987, p. 124)

Ethics applied to the ‘intervening’ in this “gigantic experiment” must grapple with domains and dominions that not only eviscerate categorical distinctions between the inhuman, nonhuman, and more-than-human, but also with the pitfalls that result from privileging “matters of concern” over “matters of fact.” (Latour 2004).

5. Time’s up

Just as humanities scholarship all too often falls short in its attempts to engage with the science of biology (whether evolutionary, conservation, or synthetic), so too are scientists’ limitations revealed by their attempts to critically scrutinise the “matters of concern” raised by the humanities about their own work. This was exemplified in a 2000 National Academy of Sciences conference on The Future of Evolution, when only one of the papers presented mentioned ethics at all: Paul Ehrlich’s ’Intervening in Evolution: Ethics and Actions.’ Ehrlich opened with a framing that, while not uncommon in scientific literature at the time, is ubiquitous two decades later, and not just in the sciences but across the humanities and social sciences: “There is no question that Homo sapiens, in addition to causing the sixth major spasm of biotic extinction, is also altering the course of evolution for millions of years in the future” (Ehrlich 2002, p. 5476). Following this opening, Ehrlich devotes the four pages of his paper to “what ethical obligations might this impose on scientists to respond in various ways? And … what might scientists do to be more effective in informing society of its options in this area?” (Ehrlich 2002, p. 5477). Yet, like Wilson in The Future of Life, Ehrlich laments how “the speed at which society is changing the evolutionary prospect seems fated to remain much more rapid than the rate at which society is developing ethics to deal with the challenges that change may present” (Ehrlich 2002, p. 5478).

The divergent paths have only become all the more pronounced in the two decades since, including between synthetic biology proponents and opponents. In his impassioned Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene philosopher Clive Hamilton laments how the science that has evinced the Anthropocene has also unleashed “a paradigm shift in the earth sciences” which in turn “is prompting an ontological shift in self-understanding and the human-Earth relation, although it is tragically true that the science is decades ahead of the zeitgeist” (Hamilton 2017, p. 52). For instance, on the subject of ’Intervening in Evolution: Ethics and Actions’, Ehrlich simply declared that scientists could “be more effective in informing society of its options in this area” (Ehrlich 2002, p. 5479).

Such a notion of the relationship between science and society is premised on the information-deficit model, which holds that lay citizens would make informed (and, by implication, rational) decisions pending sufficient accessible information about a scientific subject. For instance, this model presumes that, if the lay citizenry understood climate science better, they would then make less selfish, short-term, and self-destructive decisions about what climate policy to support. However, such simplistic worldviews have shown themselves to be grossly inapplicable to the notional “options” at hand. Regarding The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene, Hamilton boils these “options” down to an overly simplistic framework, albeit one without any equivalent and no sense of the real impending peril:

Humankind is now confronted with a momentous decision: to attempt to exert more control so as to subdue the Earth with greater technological power—the express purpose of some forms of geoengineering—or to draw back and practice meekness, with all of the social consequences that would follow.

(Hamilton 2017, p. 17)

While he is not referring to synthetic biology specifically, the principles apply nonetheless, as per Catts and Zurr’s earlier summation of the Single Engineering Paradigm. In any case, it is patently obvious that today’s “zeitgeist” is anything but informed and rational, least of all when it comes to using technoscience for conservation. This is because stances toward conservation are deeply shaped by emotions, rather than the ideas of a sufficiently well-informed and verifiably rational actor. Ehrlich acknowledges this when he states that his preferred form of conservation practice, which would be to bolster networks of national parks as ‘wildlife corridors’ across continents, is “where I would come down emotionally if I could ignore the practical and ethical complexities”, whereas he declares the opposing extreme to be the “technological optimists who assume that genetic engineers will soon be able to produce any needed biodiversity” (Ehrlich 2002, p. 5480).

This blurring between “matters of fact” and “matters of concern” has telling expressions in the scientific framing of synthetic biology for conservation. Putting Ehrlich’s concerns into contemporary practice, biologist Kevin Esvelt researches gene drives for purposes such as making all structurally integrated populations of mosquitos or invasive rodents male, in order to eradicate them from a region or island, respectively. Sculpting Evolution, the name Esvelt gave to the group he founded at MIT Media Lab, speaks volumes about the categorical errors of our language, let alone our actions, in terms of recognising what is at stake. Whether a single scientist operating on the micro-scale of synthetic biology or a team operating on the macro-scale of climate engineering, there is no human agency for Sculpting Evolution, as if evolution itself were some innate matter that yields to our every whim.

Esvelt conducts public talks, op-eds, blogs and interviews where he candidly acknowledges the profound ethical dilemmas that his work raises. And yet, like relegating the discussion of ethics in relation to The Future of Evolution to a mere four pages in the eponymous edited volume, none of Esvelt’s academic publications or public engagement evidences any study of, or collaboration with, actual ethicists (Esvelt et al. 2014; Esvelt and Gemmell 2017). This is not to suggest that Ehrlich, Esvelt, or any other scientist should perform the work of an ethicist, though the problem persists that scientists and ethicists are largely talking to one another exclusively in relation to “matters of concern” about multitudes of imperilled species. To scale up this Blue Shift-sized disjuncture to the planet: even if Esvelt or other such scientists collaborated with ethicists, no ethical framework genuinely commensurate with Hamilton’s “momentous decision” of whether or not to deploy technoscientific conservation could ever actually be formed. Hamilton thus concludes his book on The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene with a confession from a Professor of Public Ethics: “we have to confront the most difficult truth—in the Anthropocene we have no ethical resources to draw on. The cupboard is bare” (Hamilton 2017, p. 110).

Such is the challenge now facing not only scientists and philosophers of technoscientific conservation but the assembling policy makers, bureaucrats, legal scholars and others who mediate between dreams born of a cultural imaginary and their translation into reality. Of course, while this article focuses on societies embedded in developed-world democratic institutions and dynamics, we must also recognise the existence of societies where no consultation of either ethics or the population at large will be deemed necessary before in situ experimentation with these technologies commences, further undermining the idea that any worldview can remotely fathom the complexity, uncertainty and volatility of the state of play. Here, however, we focus on the disjuncture occurring in western democracies, and as Clark reminds, today’s disjuncture harks back to Ulrich Beck’s 1985 landmark Risk Society hypothesis about industrial modernity in the Global North (Beck [1985] 1992). Reflecting in 1998 on Beck’s hypothesis, Clark once again showed a telling prescience for the situation at hand:

As we seek to intervene in realms that we now understand to be composed of great numbers of parts undergoing a kaleidoscopic array of simultaneous interactions, a new set of demands is placed on the technological apparatus. Whatever the amount of intelligence we can program into our sub-micro or macro machine systems, the encounter with conditions of non-linearity is likely to call for responses which exceed our capacity to make sense of the situation.

(Clark 1998, p. 362)

In words that radically undermine claims toward definitive guidelines and principles, as per august bodies such as the IUCN Synthetic Biology and Biodiversity Conservation Task Force, Clark lamented back then how this disjuncture presents an enormous challenge to theory, which in relation to the frenetic feedback mechanisms of the new global networks appears as a lag-ridden and slow-replicating edifice…call[s] for public accountability of the scientific and economic apparatus seems to offer only the drag coefficient of a lost linear modernity—a world of processes ponderous enough to still allow for the fantasy of collective steering.

(Clark 1998, p. 366)

Thus, given the ends for which genetic and microbial interventions are intended, it is imperative to engage with these domains on something approximating their own terms. For, in these inhuman, nonhuman, and more-than-human domains lies the dream of human-inflected evolution as a counterpoint to human-induced extinction. In turn, the following presents an inconclusive conclusion, acknowledging that the questions asked here must largely remain both open-ended, and without definitive answers.

6. Closed Minded and Open-Ended

In the question-and-answer session following the ‘Biodiversity & Conservation’ panel at SB7.0, one of the presenters, Kent Redford, told the audience how the session’s origins went back to 2013, when the world’s first such meeting between synthetic and conservation biologists took place (Redford 2013). Held at Cambridge University, ‘How will Synthetic Biology and Conservation Shape the Future of Nature?’ brought these strange bedfellows together over three days of presentations and workshops. Redford, who convened this 2013 symposium, has since been instrumental in organising, facilitating, and convening a series of events that directly followed on from the original symposium, as well as in writing and publishing the working papers, reports, guidelines, and academic papers that emerged from these events. These events included ‘The New Genomic Solutions for Conservation Problems Workshop’ with the U.S. NGO Revive & Restore in 2015; ‘Biodiversity Conservation in the Context of Synthetic Biology’ workshop with the IUCN and the Rockefeller Foundation, also in 2015; ‘Advancing Genetic Rescue’ at the World Conservation Congress in 2016; convening the ‘Biodiversity & Conservation’ panel in 2017; forming the IUCN Task Force and a Technical Subgroup in 2018; and overseeing its policy outcomes for the World Conservation Congress in 2020.

Originally a conservation biologist, Redford is arguably emblematic of the shift from normative to experimental technoscientific conservation and also played a key role in recognising the relevance of the cultural imaginary underpinning the dream of implementing this shift. In his SB7.0 presentation, Redford not only included Raymond Williams’ aforementioned landmark interrogation of the concept of ‘nature’, and its relevance for technoscientific conservation, but also emphasised just how tenuous, uncertain, and hubristic the dream is. He did so by way of a lengthy quote from Sheila Jasanoff, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, from her “call [for] the ‘technologies of humility’”, which she defines as:

Institutionalized habits of thought, that try to come to grips with the ragged fringes of human understanding—the unknown, the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the uncontrollable. Acknowledging the limits of prediction and control, technologies of humility confront ‘head-on’ the normative implications of our lack of perfect foresight. They call for different expert capabilities and different forms of engagement between experts, decision-makers, and the public than were considered needful in the governance structures of high modernity. They require not only the formal mechanisms of participation but also an intellectual environment in which citizens are encouraged to bring their knowledge and skills to bear on the resolution of common problems.

(Jasanoff 2005, p. 227)

Which is to say that, in the context of technoscientific conservation, even those extensively engaged in the field, and in possession of the relevant scientific and/or technical expertise, maintain that the dream requires humility, not hubris. Indeed, Bensaude-Vincent offers a cautionary note when she argues that “the novel forms of life will not escape the contingencies of evolution. Since all synthetic organisms will have to take place in the world, it is unrealistic to imagine that they will have a predictable behaviour. If they are capable of evolution they are not under human control” (Bensaude-Vincent 2013, p. 30). As always—there is a more extant history behind such dreams, with Clark remarking back in 1998 that “there is a price to be paid for this novel capacity to deal with multivariate and simultaneous interactions, which is a certain loss of control—a devolution of authority from a central programmer to the synthetic system itself” (Clark 1998, p. 362).

One of the other presenters at SB7.0, the British designer and academic Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, offered a complementary tone to Redford and Jasanoff, albeit from a design rather than a scientific point of view. Having attended the ‘How will Synthetic Biology and Conservation Shape the Future of Nature?’ symposium in 2013, Ginsberg viewed the nascent field through the lens of her critical design practice. In turn, she created ‘Designing for the Sixth Extinction’, a series of fictional new-to-nature creatures, created by companies to perform bioremediation and biodiversity offsetting. Like the SB7.0 booklet cover, her designs consisted of computer-generated creatures realistically placed into photographs of actual forests, accompanied by a patent statement for each that outlined the ownership of its intellectual property, as well as its commercial value, protected through measures such as kill-switches designed to terminate the creature after a programmed duration, so that the companies’ services will always be required to manufacture more of them.

Ginsberg’s work captures both the ongoing validity of the humanities’ critique of the field, including the need for humility, as well as a measured acknowledgement that it does indeed appear to be “Time for Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation”, albeit a version of that conservation that radically redefines core concepts, including the notion of humility itself:

Our greatest challenge may be to acknowledge that the design rules for biology are unlike those for any other material. Human intention may not be enough to overcome evolution. Synthetic biology’s designs on nature require us to adapt our understanding of design, the natural world, and life itself.

(Ginsberg 2014, p. 56)

Regrettably, Ginsberg’s practice is a typically isolated instance of cultural engagement with synthetic biology, meaning that the all-important cultural imaginary can too easily be conflated with the scant examples of such engagement. This imaginary is distributed across and between diverse stakeholders, though it is commonly reduced to whatever cultural artefacts exist, as a synecdoche for the intangible and inexpressible properties of a dream. Just as Jurassic Park was used as a short-hand description of the cultural imaginary of de-extinction in its time, so too is Ginsberg’s Design for the Sixth Extinction a short-hand for our time, although any such proxies are never the sole progeny of the cultural imaginary: this imaginary is also fashioned in the laboratory, the boardroom, the policy document, and other such ‘non-cultural’ spheres.

This issue was brought to the fore by Oliver Morton, another presenter at SB7.0. His paper was a highly unusual presentation in the context of a synthetic biology conference, replete with examples drawn from myths, paintings, poetry and other cultural artefacts. Morton began his presentation by talking about a key juncture in developing his book The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. He recounted how his publisher advised him to include synthetic biology as well as climate engineering, given the former presents micro-scale, and the latter macro-scale, as proposals to mitigate the Anthropocene. Morton then explained how he resisted the advice, only to regret it later, having subsequently come to appreciate the manifold ways in which the two fields are two sides of the same coin. Essentially, Morton’s presentation encapsulated the rationale for The Planet Remade, which he described as an attempt to counter what happens when the possibilities of utopian imagination…are undercut, even betrayed, if the group doing the imagining is too small. That is currently the case, I think, for geoengineering. Listen to the discussion of the topic going on today and you will hear natural scientists who are cautiously curious about the ideas but have no real interest in trying to make them practical; you will hear social scientists and philosophers interested in providing critiques of the modes of thinking that shape the discourse; you will hear environmentalists who see in it, or project on to it, everything they dislike about centralized action, about capitalism, about mechanistic world views; you will hear the fantasies of the rich and powerful and the fears of the frightened and doctrinaire. It is too small a set of voices. The way a society imagines its future matters. And who gets to do the imagining matters.

(Morton 2017, p. 29)

During the conclusion to his presentation, the projected image above the stage changed from depicting the above-mentioned cultural artefacts, to return to the conference logo, a modified version of the image which adorned the booklet. The portrait presentation for the booklet had been turned into a circular motif, symbolising the earth, with Singapore’s skyscrapers emerging above the surface, an outer layer composed of microbes, and an inner layer composed of the same plants and animals from the conference booklet cover, and finally an innermost layer comprising the conference title SB 7.0 with eight human hands radiating out around the circle, in different skin tones to represent the diverse ethnicities and races of the differentiated Anthropos subsumed into the singular Anthropocene. This imagery presents the dream as if it were about future action, as per How Geoengineering Could Change the World, whereas those who have already awoken realise we are no longer fantasising but are already living within the dream itself.

SB7.0 was staged at the University Cultural Centre within the National University of Singapore, a kilometre from where the shoreline was when Wallace stayed there in 1854. Nowadays, one would need to travel a further 300 metres to reach the shoreline, to cross the land that has been reclaimed from the ocean through dredging, sand relocation and engineering. Which is to say that it is not so much about asking “Is it Time for Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation”, but rather time to acknowledge that we already inhabit a planet rife with the artifice and artificiality of design and engineering. At the same time, we must acknowledge that, however audacious the current proposals to extend this agency may be, they invoke increasing incursions into the inhuman, non-human and more-than-human world. Incursions, that it turns out, reveal technoscientific conservation in the Anthropocene to paradoxically be both vital and futile, as well as timely and too late.

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology (CE200100029). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Research Council.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Rubymaya Jaeck-Woodgate for feedback and editing successive drafts.

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By Nafeez Ahmed, originally published by Insurge Intelligence

Resilience version here

The Anthropocene. A proposed new geological epoch which designates a shift to a planetary age dominated by human impacts across the geological processes of the Earth. Geologists dispute the duration, precision, relevance and even accuracy of the concept. But the term has increasingly entered the scientific lexicon as increasing numbers of experts across myriad disciplines recognise that for the first time in history, the future of the entire planet — for generations if not millennia to come — is now being fundamentally determined by the activities of the human species. But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.

Human-induced global heating — terraforming the Earth beyond recognition

It is the unprecedented impact of anthropogenic climate change that has, perhaps, played the biggest role in efforts to define the Anthropocene as a distinctive new era in Earth’s history. Multiple warnings backed by a global consensus of climate scientists have warned over the last few decades that human activities, through the escalating consumption of fossil fuel resources — the burning of oil, gas and coal — is destabilising the Earth’s natural carbon cycle.

For hundreds of thousands of years, the planet has sustained an equilibrium, a ‘safe operating’ space offering an optimum environment for human and other habitation — in which the quantity of carbon emitted and absorbed by planetary ecosystems remains stable.

But since the Industrial Revolution, as human civilisation has inexorably expanded, consuming greater quantities of fossil fuel energy along the way, associated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have exponentially increased — overwhelming the planet’s capacity for absorption. The result has been a steady increase in global average temperatures.

Scientists warn that the extra addition of CO2 into the atmosphere, capturing greater heat, is in turn playing escalating havoc with the Earth’s climate, weather and ecological systems. As human civilisation continues its expansion, as it continues to burn up escalating quantities of fossil fuels, the climate science community warns that above a certain level of CO2 and global heating, planetary ecosystems will shift passed a key tipping point into a new, dangerous era — one that is outside the boundaries of the preceding hundreds of thousands of years, outside anything human beings have ever experienced.

If we continue on this pathway of business-as-usual, conservative projections suggest we are heading toward anywhere between a 3 to 6 degrees Celsius global average temperature rise.

Others, such as Schroders, the global investment firm, have suggested we could be heading toward an 8C planet due to the current rate of fossil fuel consumption — the 8C temperature projection was also suggested by a study funded by US Department of Energy’s Climate Change Research Division, which highlighted the potential impact of ‘amplifying feedback loops’ triggered by altering earth system processes that might trigger further greenhouse gas loading.

Between 4–6C, most climate scientists agree that there would be such a degree of chaos that the planet would become largely uninhabitable. The variation is complicated, and depends on a concept called ‘Earth System Sensitivity’ — how sensitive the planet’s ecosystems are to the CO2 change. But even at a conservative estimate of sensitivity, a 3C planet, to which at minimum we are likely heading, should be considered “extremely dangerous”; and a global average temperature rise within the 3–4C threshold would probably create conditions that make the core infrastructures of human civilisation increasingly unviable.

To the extent that governments are taking seriously this threat, they are doing so largely with a view to assess the implications for their own functioning — and with a view to consider how to sustain business-as-usual amidst rising instability. This is the context in which many studies have concluded that our current climate change trajectory will increase the chance of conflict. For the most part, Western national security agencies that have examined the issue agree that while climate change does not automatically produce war, it acts as an ‘amplifier’ which increases the prospect of war, due to its impacts in terms of water scarcity, the degeneration of critical food systems, the failure of conventional energy supplies, and the unpredictable impact of extreme weather events. Such impacts can sometimes devastate infrastructures and lead to the collapse of public services. In those contexts, the proliferating outbreak of wars and conflicts is widely recognised to be a likely symptom of climate change on a business-as-usual pathway.

The problem is that this usually leads to little reflection on the need to change the human system that is producing this trajectory — instead, we are largely told of the need for a greater expansion of security powers to respond to the chaos of a climate-impacted world: the intensification of the same system that produced the problem.

On the polar opposite of the spectrum, we have outright state denialism rooted in the goal of protecting the system of endless fossil fuel exploitation at any conceivable cost. It is telling that the Trump administration, as of March 2019, was considering the creation of a White House panel to dispute the findings of dozens of US military and intelligence assessments on the grave security risks posed by climate change. Which is interesting, given that the Pentagon emits more fossil fuel emissions than as many as 140 different countries.

And yet, the preoccupation with war that emerges from the narrow lens of ‘national security’ through which the human gaze is obsessed primarily with physical threats to the interests of nation-states, is ultimately counterproductive, symptomatic of the fragmentary cognitive framing in which human institutions are currently capable of thinking and acting — it focuses myopically on how to uphold the survival of the business-as-usual operations of the state and the interests lobbying through it, overlooking the global existential character of the crisis as a threat to the whole species.

At the worst end of the scale, war would be the least of our problems: we have the risk of a ‘hothouse’ Earth. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the risk of an uninhabitable planet is not simply a far off possibility that might be triggered at several degrees of temperature rise in a more distant future — it could be triggered imminently; and it is possible that it may already have been triggered at the current level of an approximate 1C temperature rise above the pre-industrial average, which NASA’s former chief climate scientist James Hansen had argued is the safe upper limit, beyond which we move into a dangerous and more unpredictable climate with some consequences that may be irreversible.

But climate change is only one facet of the crisis. Our civilisational model, which has exponentially increasing energy and resource consumption as its driving motor, has seen human activities, exploitation and waste-generation accelerate across the planet. This has driven an escalating biodiversity crisis leading to potentially irreversible changes to soils and oceans, underpinning mass species extinctions.

Human civilisation and the war on life

About 15 years ago, the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provided one of the first and most damning insights into the destruction wrought by humans that defines the Anthropocene. The report pinpointed the mid-twentieth century as a marked tipping point into a new era, where rapidly intensifying industrial agriculture accompanied an escalating collapse of biodiversity.

Consumption of food, water and fuel has not only exponentially increased, it has exponentially encroached on habitats — more in the preceding 50 years alone than throughout all of human history. The extinction rate of species was “up to one thou­sand times higher than the fossil record”, when “every thousand mammal species, less than one went extinct every millen­nium”. The UN assessment projected that the rate is still going up, and will be “ten times higher” in the near future.

The situation is now far worse than expected. This year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concluded that one million of the planet’s 8 million animal and plant species are at risk of going extinct in the near future, due to the expansion of human societies that has driven climate change, the loss of habitat, overfishing, pollution and invasive species.

Numerous studies have warned that our present trajectory is heading toward the collapse of our current form of civilisation. One model developed with NASA funding indicated that the current endless growth model of human civilisation was likely to lead to diminishing returns and deepening economic stratification, eventually culminating in collapse. All civilisations, the model seemed to show, tend to follow a growth trajectory consisting of an increasing intensification in complexity, whereby greater layers of complexity are continuously innovated to solve problems.

With each new layer, more complex problems are generated, requiring a further even more complex layer of problem-solving to address them, which in turn generates further problems. The cycle, drawing on the work of archaeologist Joseph Tainter who studied dozens of past civilisations, suggests that any civilisation will eventually collapse under the unsustainable weight of its own complexity due to excessive resource consumption and internal maldistribution of wealth — unless consumption and distribution begin to be rectified in time.

This particular model was fairly simple, focusing on a smaller number of variables to explore the general plausibility of the core hypothesis. A few years later, a far more complex scientific model with thousands of data inputs was developed by Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute. with funding from the British Foreign Office. When run forward on a business-as-usual trajectory, the model suggested that human civilisation would probably collapse around 2040 amidst an eruption of converging climate, energy, food and water crises that would devastate major economies amidst an epidemic of food riots. Conventional war might happen — but either way, the planet would likely experience a proliferation of civil unrest within, between and across borders.

This year, a scenario analysis backed by the former head of Australia’s military drew on the peer-reviewed scientific literature to outline a plausible business-as-usual trajectory, based on what we know about how planetary ecosystems can respond to human-induced CO2 emissions. The scenario took seriously the scientific evidence of a potential ‘hothouse’ Earth scenario. It suggested that by 2050, human societies would face “outright chaos” due to escalating climate-impacts on key ecosystems, with two billion people suffering from water scarcity and another billion requiring relocation just to survive. The prospects would severely strain the capacity of human civilisation to function, and increase the chances of its collapse. The authors of this analysis called on the national security sector, the agencies of war, to respond more appropriately to these risks by supporting a comprehensive World War 2 style mobilisation to transition to a post-carbon civilisation.

While perhaps well-intentioned, the report did not recognise that war agencies might be structurally incapable of undertaking such a response precisely due to their embeddedness in the institutions captured by the very same fossil fuel system — and that such a transformation would conceivably imperil their very reason for being.

Another assessment in the form of a scientific briefing commissioned to feed into the UN’s Sustainable Development report found that one of the key drivers behind the growing risk of collapse is the very nature of the endless growth model of capitalism, as currently structured. The more we escalate our consumption of resources, raw materials, minerals and energy, the more we are using up the cheapest and most plentiful resources, and therefore the greater the costs of continued production. Drawing on the pioneering work of environmentalist Professor Charles Hall, the study advocated a focus on the ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) of national and global energy systems to measure how efficient they really are (EROI measures the quantity of energy used to extract energy). The answer? Efficiency is declining for largely geological reasons. As the costs increase due to the need for greater quantities of energy and more complicated mechanisms of exploitation; the returns to society diminish. As we are using ever increasing quantities of energy and resources just to extract more energy and resources, the surplus we have left to sustain the financing of the public goods and services necessary to maintain a functioning civilisation is declining. This doesn’t mean we are running out of energy — but it means that as the energetic and environmental costs of energy extraction increase, we effectively have less and less spare to invest back into key social goods.

French economists Victor Court and Florian Fizaine showed in a recent global EROI study that we are well passed the maximum levels of efficiency. The amount of energy we can extract from fossil fuels compared to the energy used to extract it was once lucratively high — around 44:1 in the 1960s. Since then it has inexorably declined to just over 30 overall, accompanied by a long-term slow-down in the growth rate of the global economy, a decline in productivity, and an expansion of debt. At this rate of decline, by 2100 we are projected to extract the same value of EROI from fossil fuels as we were in the 1800s. While there might be more actual total energy being produced by end of century, the surplus energy available could be at nineteenth century levels if we continue on a business-as-usual path of fossil fuel-dependence.

This predicament is already driving social unrest, communal polarisation and the resurgence of populism in a situation where neither governments nor wider publics really understand why economies continue to experience chronic dysfunction, instability and tepid growth.

The report to the UN forecasted that this trajectory means that the current economic system, which depends on endless growth to survive, simply cannot be sustained. It therefore portends a future of increasing unrest without a change of course. We will inevitably shift toward a new, different type of economy — if we don’t, then we face a heightened risk of social tensions that could cascade into conflict; and at worse we may well face the danger of collapse.

War in the mirror of civilisation

The risk of collapse is inherently entwined with war — industrial civilisation’s growth trajectory has not only enabled the technologies of war, but is in turn enabled by them.

Earlier this year, the main scientific committee established to determine the accuracy and nature of the definition of the Anthropocene signed off on its initial proposal positing 1950 as the starting date for the new geological era.

The sign off is the first stage of a longer scientific process to properly investigate and test what is still, in raw scientific terms, a mere hypothesis. The scientists based their preliminary evaluations on the mid-twentieth century as a major tipping point into a new era of human interference with the Earth’s geology, characterised by industrial expansion, the proliferation of agricultural chemicals, and most significant of all, the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb. The latter’s radioactive debris became embedded in sediments and glacial ice, becoming part of the geologic record. All this demonstrates an unprecedented and unmistakeable human footprint across the planet whose impacts will be seen for decades, centuries and millennia to come.

War, then, is carved into the sinews of the Anthropocene. While the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be seen as exemplifying the inherently ecocidal dynamic of the exponential growth of human civilisation, they have also exhibited another parallel feature: the systematic proliferation of war, mass violence, and multiple forms of genocide.

These parallel features — ecocide and genocide; the destruction of our environmental life-support systems, and our direct destruction of the lives of members of our own species — do not coincide haphazardly, but are symptoms of the system of human life itself, in its current form.

From 1945 onwards, human civilisation was caught between the clash of two pseudo-scientific industrial ideologies of endless growth: capitalism and communism — the former premised on extreme privatisation and individuation, the latter premised on extreme nationalisation and collectivisation.

Both paradigms saw the Earth as little more than an external repository of resources to be exploited ad infinitum for the endless consumption of a human species, now self-defined by its capacity for technologically-driven industry.

Both promised that their paradigms would herald utopian oases of industrial prosperity for their respective societies.

In reality, both not only ‘Otherised’ the Earth itself as merely a resource to be consumed by human beings as a predator species, they simultaneously ‘Otherised’ large sections of working populations in and beyond their own demarcated territories, as little more than instruments by which to endlessly accelerate industrial productivity; and they both went on to mindlessly ‘Otherise’ each other whenever they clashed with each other (and even when they did not).

The result was that in their very different efforts to expand, both systems resulted in the mass deaths of millions of people on a colossal scale.

The Soviet Union and Maoist China deployed brutal collectivisation methods on their path toward accelerating productivity, which produced foreseeable mass deaths. This included the generation of devastating artificial famines. Stalin’s policies eliminated between 20 and 60 million people; Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused 27 million people to starve to death.

But liberal Western governments also left a trail of blood of a quite distinct kind, in the first major spate of violence since the dawn of the Anthropocene as so far tentatively defined.

From 1945 onwards, Western governments under the leadership of the United States — bearing the mantle of leader of the ‘Capitalist Free World’ — pursued a continuous sequence of direct and covert military interventions across the world. Western military interventions generated a continuum of violence in over 70 developing nations across Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East from mid-century until today.

British historian Mark Curtis calculates that the total number of direct and indirect deaths from these interventions is approximately 8.6–13.5 million — a conservative underestimate, he qualifies. The interventions were often aimed at quelling nationalist movements for self-determination. Although publicly justified as defensive actions to repel communist subversion, Curtis’ evaluation of historical archives from the US and British governments revealed that policy planners had deliberately inflated the communist threat to justify a militarism aimed at defending Western business interests and acquiring control of critical resources and raw materials. In the Middle East, the biggest prize was control of strategic fossil fuel reserves, the very lifeblood of economic growth.

Development economist J. W. Smith has offered a higher estimate of the death toll, which he puts somewhere between 12–15 million deaths directly due to Western military interventions, with further “hundreds of millions” dying as an indirect consequence of the destruction and reconfiguration of their economies. Smith traced how Western interventions paved the way for the imposition of new capitalist social relations designed to extinguish domestic resistance and forcibly integrate developing countries into the global capitalist economy.

In the twenty-first century, this war trajectory has escalated, not waned. The driving motor remains the use of force to expand access to resources and labour, in order to lubricate the ever-expanding networks of global capital. It is a process sanitised, though, by various ideologies of humanitarianism, benign developmentalism, and ‘national security’.

The principal interventions of the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, are resource wars in core ways.

British Foreign Office documents prove clearly that American and British policy-planners saw the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a way to consolidate access to one of the world’s largest oil reserves, while ensuring the continued flow of to global markets with a view to help stabilise the global economy. In Afghanistan, Congressional records have revealed longstanding US-Western efforts to establish a trans-Afghan pipeline route for the transport of oil and gas from Central Asia to Western markets, bypassing US rivals Iran and Russia. In the 1990s, the US and British even funnelled support to the Taliban in a failed bid to establish the ‘security’ needed to pursue the plan.

Consecutively, the Obama and Trump administrations both continued to back the pipeline project which remains under construction.

In the Anthropocene, resource wars are bipartisan.

Both conflicts wrought colossal violence. Although the more widely accepted estimates of deaths in the hundreds of thousands are terrible enough, higher scale estimates could be more accurate, ranging up to a total of around 4 million people killed directly and indirectly across both conflicts since 1990.

Since then, war in the Anthropocene has intensified and proliferated in new and surprising ways as the more vulnerable nodes of human civilisation have begun to experience overlapping levels of failure and collapse due to the slow acceleration of converging climate, energy, food and water crises. The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings spiralled into a protracted, coalescing amalgamation of riots, civil wars and armed conflicts encompassing multiple theatres, Syria, Yemen, Libya and beyond.

The Arab Spring had been triggered by food price shocks which were, in turn, driven by a confluence of economic-energy shocks interacting with a series of climate shocks which had led to droughts and extreme weather crises across the world’s major food basket regions. Many Arab Spring countries from Syria to Egypt to Yemen had slashed subsidies for food and fuel in preceding years, largely due to the collapse of state revenues — many of them had been former major oil exporters, but in the mid-1990s had experienced peaks of their domestic conventional oil resources. As production thus declined, so did export revenues. With subsidies in the years before 2011 disappearing, coupled with global price spikes due to rampant market speculation on commodity prices coupled with global food shortages, prices of staple foods in these largely import-dependent countries rocketed. As the price of bread became unaffordable, people across the region hit the streets.

The Earth system crisis of the Anthropocene played a critical role in prolonging and amplifying this Middle East crisis, which in turn drove migration and asylum seeking from 2011 to 2015 to an unprecedented degree. Some 11.5 percent of the population of Syria alone has been killed in the ensuing conflict. The West, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have vied for control of Syria for a range of geopolitical reasons, not least of which was its centrality to potential transhipment routes for oil and gas to global markets. Partisans of these different forces tend to absolve their favoured side(s) of complicity, but it is worth noting that prior to the 2011 uprising the State Department was actively negotiating with Syria and EU officials to push forward a pipeline route through the country to transport Iraqi oil to Europe; Russia simultaneously saw Assad’s efforts to capitalise on Syria’s strategic position vis-a-vis the region’s energy corridors as a fundamental threat to Putin’s own gas export plans — the war provided the ideal spoiler, with each side using it to try to further their own interests, the Syrian people be damned.

In the Anthropocene, so-called anti-imperialists have few qualms about fighting resource wars in their own self-interest.

The million plus migrants that turned up on the shores of Europe did so as a direct result of these wars. They were escaping devastating geopolitical conflicts amplified by vested interests, but which had also been created or exacerbated by severe droughts amplified by climate change.

According to the co-author of a key study of the climate-migration connection, Dr Raya Muttarak — a senior lecturer in geography and international development at the University of East Anglia: “The effect of climate on conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period 2010–2012, when many were undergoing political transformation during the so-called Arab Spring uprisings.” Muttarak and his team showed that climate change laid the groundwork for the simmering tensions which led to the outbreak of war in Syria and across parts of the region, by generating droughts that led to mass migration.

The mass migration triggered by these processes, in turn, have transformed and radicalised politics across the Western hemisphere. They provided the fodder for extreme nationalist narratives funded by colossal quantities of ‘dark money’ from a cross-section of trans-Atlantic right-wing elites, many of whom hold vested interests in perpetuating deregulation for fossil fuel giants and other giant corporations.

The mass migration thus stoked nativist fears that helped fuel the rise of extreme nationalist movements, which suddenly found renewed constituencies for their views and policies with increasing numbers of ordinary citizens who felt disillusioned with the prevailing order, but had no way of making sense of it. They knew, can feel, that something is deeply wrong, that the old order is collapsing, but their diagnosis is incomplete, narcissistic, fragmented and symptom-oriented. As such, it has led to incomplete, narcissistic, fragmented and symptom-oriented political reactionism.

The series of victories for the far-right that followed the eruption of Earth system crisis in the Middle East between 2011 and 2015 can thus be seen as a direct consequence of an incoherent cognitive response to the crisis, which reacted purely to its chief symptom: the desperate mass movement of vulnerable peoples.

We thus witnessed a series of seismic shifts in the reconfiguration of Western political systems, a hardening and centralising of power, a self-centring of values, a defensive rejectionism of science, and a polarising of identities, manifesting in a string of extreme nationalist wins. In 2014, far-right parties won just under a quarter of all seats in the European Parliament. In 2015, David Cameron was re-elected as Prime Minister with a parliamentary majority, a victory attributed in part to his promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Unbeknownst to many, the Tories had quietly established wide-ranging links with many of the same far-right parties that were now capturing seats in the EU. The following year in June, the ‘Brexit’ referendum shocked the world with its result: a majority vote to leave the EU. Six months later, billionaire real estate guru Donald Trump became president of the world’s most powerful country. Like the Conservatives in the UK, the Republicans too had forged trans-Atlantic connections with European parties and movements of the extreme-right. Since then, far-right parties have made continued electoral gains across Europe in Italy, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Hungary; they are now just short of a third of seats in the European Parliament — and they are rapidly consolidating elsewhere, in the Philippines, Brazil, India, Myanmar and beyond.

The troubles and tribulations of contemporary politics, the increasing polarisation between left and right, the chronic incapacity to engage constructively across ideological divides, have become a pantomime hyperreality obsessing our consciousness through our television screens, desk computers, laptops, smartphones and wearable devices. The missing link is the planetary context — the crises of contemporary politics are, indeed, tidal waves, but they are occurring on the surface of an ocean in turmoil, of which, for all intents and purposes, we remain oblivious.

Political crisis is a symptom of the accelerating Earth system crisis. And as Clausewitz famously said, war is a continuation of politics by other means.

Colonisation and globalisation in the Anthropocene

Not everyone agrees, though, that the Anthropocene began in the mid-twentieth century. Some argue that there is a strong geological case for the Anthropocene commencing with the dawn of modern global empire.

British geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have put forward a much earlier date for this unprecedented era, one that “adheres to the geological criteria for defining an epoch: 1610. This date marks the irreversible exchange of species following the collision of the Old and New worlds”, which coincided with “an associated unusual drop in atmospheric CO2 captured in Antarctic ice cores.”

This alternative dating for the Anthropocene derives from the measurable impact of farming in relation to the colonisation of America by the Spanish, a pivotal event which many historians see as marking the inception of a new, distinctive age of empire that facilitated the birth of global capitalism. The drop in CO2 at the time, visible today in the ice cores, resulted from “vegetation regrowth on abandoned farmlands following the deaths of 50 million indigenous Americans (mostly from smallpox brought by Europeans). The annexing of the Americas by Europe was also an essential precursor to the Industrial Revolution and therefore captures associated later waves of environmental change.”

This alternative dating offers a compelling re-envisioning of the Anthropocene that associates it directly with the violence of empire, with the 1610 date providing the bridge connecting the historical violence of colonial discovery with its ensuing expansionism through biological conquest.

This encompassed the mass ‘free market’ famines in Ireland and India, which saw the deaths of one million and up to 12 million respectively; as well as the trans-Atlantic slave-trade which saw the deaths of as many as 65 million Africans over five centuries — a blood-drenched international regime that was inextricably linked to the formation of a capitalist world system that helped facilitate Britain’s industrial revolution.

By this standard, the Anthropocene — encompassing the period in which the human species most profoundly and near-permanently began transforming the very geology of the Earth — simultaneously represents the rapid expansion of empire, and with it, the systematic construction of new racial categories to legitimise the emerging system of global apartheid that came with it.

In this very period, we saw the dawn of scientific racism, the formal and scientifically-justified concept of multiple races, the grotesque legacy of which we continue to struggle with today. The idea that there are different ‘races’ can be traced back to the political appropriation and distortion of neo-Darwinian theories of evolution to underpin racial hierarchies which positioned white Europeans at the pinnacle of civilised human advancement in this juggernaut of global industrial expansion.

Racism, then, is not discrimination against other ‘races’. It is the very act of creating the notion of a distinctive ‘race’ of people — that is, of possessing common generalised characteristics, an act inseparable from the very dawn of the Anthropocene, which witnessed the emergence of a civilisation defined by its insatiable hunger for resources and labour.

Polarised constructions of the ‘Other’ have played a crucial ideological function throughout the Anthropocene, cleaving human beings from the environments in which they find themselves, and cleaving them apart from each other into exploitative factions of power. And so it is no surprise that the formalisation of racism as a global system appeared to solidify during the industrial revolution, as the human species’ domination of the Earth began to reach exponential acceleration.

In the early nineteenth century, racism manifested largely as a religious ideology linked to interpretations of the Bible, viewing non-European groups as inherently inferior due to their heathen beliefs and ancestry, and frequently targeted Jews. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, racism evolved on the basis of scientifically-justified biological theories which attributed fixed traits, behaviours, characteristics, abilities and disabilities to constructed groups of people based on their supposedly distinctive biological characteristics. Since then, racism has continued to evolve and is largely underpinned by a cultural theory which still projects homogenised constructions of different social groups with common traits and characteristics, but derived instead from their affiliation to a culture, ethnicity, nation, language or faith. Often, racism today borrows from across these subliminal theories — its proponents frequently not even recognising what they are doing.

The late sociologist Stuart Hall famously described “race” as a “floating signifier”. Rather than being a fixed concept, he explained, race has always been a deeply and inherently political construct, projected by powerful dominant groups, justifying unequal power relations with other groups. As such, it is a construct that changes and adapts to historical circumstance. Far from being exclusively biologically determined, Hall showed that the new type of cultural racism moves beyond discrimination related to skin colour. Instead, it focuses on the imagined cultures of people, generalised abstractions about their beliefs and practices, projecting a hierarchy of cultures. Racialised stereotypes can thus cut across colour divides, and ‘non-racial’ categories like faith, culture and civilisation can become racist code for similar discriminatory practices. One result is the projection of an unsurpassable divide between the “West” and “the Rest”, in which “Westerners” are seen as “civilised”, “safe”, “known”, while “migrants”, “Muslims”, “asylum seekers”, “foreigners” and so on are viewed as “uncivilised”, “dangerous”, and “different”.

The deepening and acceleration of identity-politics is a defining feature of the tail-end of the Anthropocene, as the endless growth project of maximum extraction, exploitation and centralisation of resources invents and entrenches multiple divides between human beings on its path of self-legitimisation. And so, too, the devastating impacts of the Earth system crisis remain racialised, with the worst consequences disproportionately affecting the poorer, darker nations around the world.

War is, perhaps, the most visible surface-symptom of the Anthropocene’s defining feature.

In the Anthropocene, we all become Others.

It is not yet too late to begin to actively redefine the meaning of the Anthropocene.

For ultimately, the character of the Anthropocene so far is a reflection of the system of human civilisation within the prevailing paradigm. This is a life-destroying paradigm, a death-machine whose internal logic culminates in its own termination. It is a matrix of interlocking beliefs, values, behaviours and organisational forms which functions as a barrier, not an entry-point, to life, nature and reality.

And in that sense, the end of this paradigm is utterly inevitable. But this does not erase the choice before us — which is to decide whether humanity will perish in the ashes of this paradigm, or plant seeds of a new life-affirming paradigm by building out an emerging system for the flourishing of a new ecological civilisation.

If human civilisation is to survive, it will not be what we see before us — erected on the blood of millions; premised on the exhaustion of planetary resources; crushing the bones of the poor, vulnerable and weak; hell-bent on self-annihilation — that does so. This is a paradigm beguiled by a techno-hyperreality of its own projection; a utopian simulacrum of endless growth, desperately attempting to conceal its own dystopic core from self-awareness.

And so our task is to reflect on what we have truly done to each other, and to the planet; and to recognise that these two phenomena are part of the same self-defeating paradigm: one which perpetually constructs a hyperreality of divisions, borders, and boundaries around projected externalisations of the ‘Other’, seemingly necessitating exploitative, parasitical behaviours. What emerges from this recognition is the relinquishing of the binary delusions that have riven the path of civilisation for hundreds of years, and thereby an embracing of a new vision of what it means to be human — retrieving the essence of our existence as beings who, together, have come from, and will inevitably return to, the Earth itself.

Nafeez Ahmed

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist, international security scholar, policy expert, film-maker, strategy & communications consultant, and change activist. The focus of Ahmed’s work is to catalyse social change in the public interest by harnessing radical, systemic approaches to understanding the interconnections between the world’s biggest problems …

Susan M. Kidwell

PNAS April 21, 2015 112 (16) 4922-4929; first published April 20, 2015; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403660112

1. Edited by Neil H. Shubin, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and approved February 6, 2015 (received for review July 6, 2014)

Abstract

With overwhelming evidence of change in habitats, biologists today must assume that few, if any, study areas are natural and that biological variability is superimposed on trends rather than stationary means. Paleobiological data from the youngest sedimentary record, including death assemblages actively accumulating on modern land surfaces and seabeds, provide unique information on the status of present-day species, communities, and biomes over the last few decades to millennia and on their responses to natural and anthropogenic environmental change. Key advances have established the accuracy and resolving power of paleobiological information derived from naturally preserved remains and of proxy evidence for environmental conditions and sample age so that fossil data can both implicate and exonerate human stressors as the drivers of biotic change and permit the effects of multiple stressors to be disentangled. Legacy effects from Industrial and even pre-Industrial anthropogenic extirpations, introductions, (de)nutrification, and habitat conversion commonly emerge as the primary factors underlying the present-day status of populations and communities; within the last 2 million years, climate change has rarely been sufficient to drive major extinction pulses absent other human pressures, which are now manifold. Young fossil records also provide rigorous access to the baseline composition and dynamics of modern-day biota under pre-Industrial conditions, where insights include the millennial-scale persistence of community structures, the dominant role of physical environmental conditions rather than biotic interactions in determining community composition and disassembly, and the existence of naturally alternating states.

• biodiversity
• ecology
• conservation
• paleobiology
• paleoecology

The Anthropocene is an informal term that is gaining wide currency for the present epoch of Earth’s history, when humans dominate a majority of natural processes globally (1, 2). The biological effects of climate change receive the greatest attention (3–6): secular warming, ocean acidification, and novel precipitation patterns are now pervasive (7, 8) (Fig. 1). However, many other human pressures—most particularly nutrification, habitat conversion, and the overexploitation and introduction of species—also intensified with the expansion of human populations and technology during the Industrial Revolution and the post-World War II “Great Acceleration” (2, 4, 17, 18) and are equally relevant to conservation and restoration efforts, as well as to basic ecological research. These pressures, moreover, started much earlier during preceding centuries to millennia at regional scales, both on land and in coastal seas, and have been accompanied by biological-stress syndromes (19), such as decreased body size, population size, trophic levels, and diversity, as well as functional and complete extinction of species (14, 20–24). These nonclimate factors are now as global as climate change (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Historical trends in environmental conditions and technology over the last 5 million years, culminating in the Anthropocene, when human activities achieved a global signature. Most biological data (Top) are from studies conducted after World War II, and thus short-term variability has occurred in the context of trends rather than stationary means in climate, nutrients, and other human pressures. The deeper historical reach of paleobiological data challenge assumptions of stability and equilibrium and show that many populations, species, communities, and biomes had undergone significant changes in abundance, structure, and function at regional scales well before the mid-20th century. Note changes in scale along the x axis, where the present day is operationally set at 1950 CE (radiocarbon definition). Based on signals in sedimentary records and notwithstanding earlier effects on biota, geologists will likely formalize the start of the Anthropocene Epoch either at 1950 CE (i.e., when bomb-generated radionuclides appear and isotopically depleted industrial nitrates increase strongly) or at 1850 CE, with the culmination of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America, when atmospheric pCO₂ first reached the upper limit of Holocene variability (the previous ∼12,000 y) (2, 9). Sources are as follows: ocean pH (adapted from ref. 8); temperature anomalies from a 1961–1990 baseline for the Plio-Pleistocene (reprinted from ref. 6 with permission from AAAS), Holocene to 1850 CE (10), and post-Industrial Revolution (HarCRUT3 data from ref. 11), all lowered by 0.3 °C to fit the 1986–2005 baseline used to project future changes (reprinted with permission from ref. 12); human cultural evolution (2); land-animal extinction phases, regional fisheries (13), and catch-based global data (reprinted with permission from ref. 14); land conversion (reprinted from ref. 15, by permission of the Royal Society); and anthropogenic reactive nitrogen input to biosphere (reprinted with permission from ref. 16), which now equals total natural N₂ fixation (dashed line).

Today, even lakes in remote, high-altitude and -latitude settings receive atmospheric deposition of nitrates from industrial fertilizers (16, 25), and more than half of all land area inclusive of the Arctic has been converted to range, crop, or densely settled “anthromes” (15). The human footprint in marine settings has been more difficult to evaluate because these areas are further from direct observation, but seasonal hypoxia linked to the runoff of cultural nutrients occurs in all oceans and at more than 400 sites globally, having doubled each decade since the 1960s (26), and 32–57% of the world’s fisheries are assessed as overexploited or collapsed, with the remainder fully exploited (14). Both terrestrial and marine biologists now speak of a historically cumulative “Anthropocene defaunation,” a concept that includes many kinds of ecological disruption (e.g., refs. 27–30). More biological changes are almost certainly locked into place, much as additional decades of warming are inevitable from current levels of atmospheric CO₂.

For biologists now fully embedded in the Anthropocene, the disconcerting working assumptions must be that (i) any area or biota under study today is not fully natural, given current human stresses and legacies of past stress, and (ii) interannual to -decadal variability is probably superimposed upon a trend rather than a stationary mean. These realizations underscore the arbitrary nature of most proposed ecological baselines, which are often defined by the first scientific observations (usually from the early 20th century, at best), by the oldest digitized records (1980s or younger), or by the personal experience of a scientist or manager (for discussion of the shifting baselines syndrome, see ref. 31) (Fig. 1). These realizations also suggest (iii) that many analytical subjects—species and populations, communities and habitats, landscapes and gradients, ecosystems and nutrient cycles—may well be in disequilibrial states, a fundamental challenge to experimentation, modeling, and prediction. Ecologists and conservation biologists increasingly recognize that unexpected relationships and outcomes often emerge as study durations exceed a decade, that directional change in climate and other environmental factors can compromise experimental controls, and that most field experiments incorporate legacy effects, such as species depletion or habitat change, that are only later appreciated (e.g., refs. 32–34).

The thesis of this Perspective is not simply that historical data of many types are needed, but that (i) the power of young fossil records to contribute critical data has been transformed in the last few decades by three revolutions in the earth sciences and (ii) paleobiologic analysis of records from the last few centuries and millennia is already challenging our understanding of ecological dynamics and contributing to conservation, restoration, and management efforts in a young field becoming known as conservation paleobiology (for reviews, see refs. 35–40). Paleobiology relies on a fundamentally different source of biological data from that of traditional ecology, drawing on naturally accumulated assemblages of skeletal and other dead remains rather than direct observation of living individuals and interactions (Fig. 1, Top). However, death assemblages forming on seafloors and land surfaces today, the precursors of fully buried fossil assemblages, include individuals drawn from still-standing populations. This overlap in the time frames of paleobiological and modern biological data provides a means of cross-validating shared data types (e.g., phenotype, DNA, abundance, range size), testing space-for-time assumptions, answering basic “before–after” questions, and building extended time series for extant (and recently extinct) species, communities, and ecosystems. Such time series are fundamental to framing and evaluating synthetic models, much as the integration of geohistorical and modern data has transformed our understanding of climate dynamics and is unveiling the interaction of climate and carbon cycles (e.g., ref. 41). Along with sedimentary cores, which are rarely taken [e.g., at long-term ecological research sites (LTERS)], death assemblages have been a severely underexploited source of biological data.

Integrating paleobiological, archeological, and biological data—and training—will thus become only more important as the 21st century unfolds. If we are to alter the trajectories of the most troubling biological trends in the modern world, or at the least manage biodiversity and ecosystem function in the certainty of continued climate and other change, we need to understand baseline dynamics, stressors, and biotic response on the centennial and longer time frames that encompass suspected natural and anthropogenic drivers.

Three Revolutions in the Earth Sciences That Have Transformed the Power of the Fossil Record

Fidelity of (Paleo)biological Information.

The first-order concern with all geohistorical records—ice cores, tree-rings, sediment cores, and biological remains in both natural and archeological contexts—is their fidelity, or faithfulness, to the original signal. Over the past two decades, taphonomic research on postmortem processes has dramatically increased the kinds of biological information that can be confidently extracted from fossil specimens, especially from the durable tissues that are most likely to be preserved under the more or less oxygenated conditions of soils, caves, lake floors, and seabeds (shells, bones, pollen, and other biomineralized or refractory organic tissues). Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis can now exploit a larger array of materials and preservational settings than previously assumed, with a temporal scope to 1 Ma (million years ago) and full paleo-genomes now within reach (42). Diet, home range, growth rate, and other life-history information are regularly reconstructed for specimens from well-dated assemblages using many of the same isotopic, elemental, and histologic (e.g., sclerochronologic) methods applied to live-collected individuals, revealing both the vulnerability of species undergoing past population bottlenecks and their unsuspected trophic and life-history flexibility (43–46).

Taphonomic research has also quantified the reliability of paleoecological information at the community (assemblage) and metacommunity levels (for a review, see ref. 47). Concern with postmortem alteration of species richness and relative abundance has largely proven to be an oversimplification, notwithstanding the potential of interspecies differences in tissue durability, population turnover, and postmortem transportation to distort the record. In principle, the potential for postmortem bias of assemblage composition should be high where multiple generations of dead remains might accumulate before being sequestered by permanent burial, with habitats of different destructive intensity imposing a range of durations of such “time-averaging” (see table 1 in ref. 47). Despite these differences, research on the net effects of postmortem processes on community-level information, usually by comparing the naturally accumulating death assemblage with the local living assemblage, finds remarkably modest postmortem bias in a majority of cases, at least for the groups that have received the most intense evaluation (shelled mollusks, corals, land mammals, and wind-pollinated flora). Metaanalysis and modeling find that, in coastal soft-sediment habitats with minimal human modification, the difference in diversity between a time-averaged molluscan death assemblage and samples of a local, “nonaveraged” living assemblage can be predicted almost entirely from the contrast in temporal scale, much as biological samples from a large area differ from those from a small area (48, 49). Although death assemblages pool temporal variability and some spatial variability in local living assemblages, they still accurately detect environmental gradients and more closely approximate the species composition and abundance structure of the larger metacommunity, a stubborn data gap for biologists. Mammal death assemblages collected from open ground, raptor roosts, and marine flotsam have comparable ecological fidelity, with habitat- to regional-scale spatial resolution (50–52). Some clades with delicate skeletons have intrinsically poor preservation, of course, requiring analytic partitioning, and postmortem attenuation is stronger in some settings than others. Overall, however, rather than being compromised by myriad postmortem processes, death assemblages of key groups in undisturbed study areas have proven to be largely unbiased, albeit typically coarser, samples of their source communities. This fidelity is an extraordinary boon for the analysis of biodiversity, providing insights into species that are rare or otherwise difficult to sample, locally extirpated, or newly extinct (see examples in ref. 47).

A second key metaanalytic discovery is that strong live–dead discordance in species composition and relative abundance is a legacy of recent ecological change in the living assemblage: the living assemblage has apparently shifted away from its prior composition, which the time-averaged death assemblage remembers (53). This finding for marine mollusks overturns former assumptions that live–dead discordance is caused by poor postmortem preservation and seems to be general. For example, in Yellowstone National Park, elk have declined in the last decade in response to wolf reintroduction and are proportionately more abundant in death than in living assemblages; bison have increased in response to management changes and are proportionately more abundant alive than dead (ref. 54; see other examples in refs. 47 and 53, including the use of live-only species to detect new community states and species invasions). Only anthropogenic stressors seem to be capable of creating this magnitude of live–dead discordance, even in naturally variable environments such as lagoons, presumably because humans tend to produce a rapid, sustained change in environmental conditions (long-term press disturbance) or, in the case of introduced species, can overcome natural barriers to migration. Where human pressures are long-standing, or where postmortem destruction or deep burial is rapid (reducing the time frame for time averaging), baseline shifts may have occurred outside the memory of the local death assemblage, resulting in no live–dead discordance. This effect makes live–dead discordance a powerful and yet conservative method for detecting anthropogenic baseline shifts (more prone to false negatives than to false positives) (53).

Proxy Evidence of (Paleo)environmental Conditions.

For modern experimental and (geo)historical studies alike, testing for a biological response to environmental change requires environmental information that is accurate, spatially and temporally proximate, and not inferred from the populations under study. For periods before direct scientific observations—and in areas where monitoring is still limited—environmental conditions can be estimated from indirect, proxy variables that have been calibrated to direct measurements of conditions in modern environments. Data from tree rings, banded speleothems, and particulate charcoal in cores are examples of proxy records for past temperature and rainfall (e.g., ref. 35). Increasingly sophisticated analysis is reducing uncertainties in calibration and revealing the full magnitude of recent changes at the local to regional scales relevant to conservation and management (e.g., refs. 55 and 56).

The portfolio of methods is now diverse. Biological proxies remain important in all settings, for example indicator species of wetlands, seagrass, or ice cover and multispecies “transfer functions” used to infer temperature and salinity (57). However, as with niche models that use present-day bioclimatic associations to anticipate the future redistribution of species (see paleontologic tests of their reliability by refs. 58 and 59), there are concerns that the transfer–ecology approach is vulnerable to (i) failure of observed species’ distributions to reflect their full tolerances, (ii) inability to account for shifting biotic interactions and evolutionary adaptation, and (iii) assumptions of the statistical methods used (57, 60). Analysis of paleo-environmental conditions, including pollution and many aspects of ecosystem structure, has thus shifted increasingly from taxonomic to other biological, physical, and especially chemical evidence [isotopic and elemental ratios; environmental aDNA; molecular biomarkers of metabolism and organic-matter source; and indicator minerals of oxidation potential (Eh), pH, and salinity], achieving a new level of independence from ecological assumptions and expanding the dimensions of inference (e.g., refs. 45 and 61–66). For example, H isotope ratios of leaf waxes now supplement dust, pollen, and charcoal proxies of paleo-aridity, and all can survive transport to marine basins, permitting those sediments to capture the climate of both the ocean and the adjacent airshed (64). Elemental data from corals can establish that mortality is associated with the stress of anomalously high rather than low sea temperatures and can test for changes in levels and drivers of mortality (66).

Advances in Geochronology.

Testing hypotheses about biological change requires reliable information on the ages of specimens and assemblages. Decadal-, centennial-, or millennial-scale dating precision can suffice, depending on the question at hand. Recent advances in geochronology have broadened the scope of hypotheses that can be tested by (i) increasing the precision and accuracy of age estimates, (ii) expanding the list of materials that can be dated, and (iii) reducing the required mass of individual samples for analysis. For fossil records from the most recent ∼2 My, numerical age estimates rely on relatively short-lived natural radioisotopes and on cultural markers, such as nuclear bomb fallout, metal and persistent organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and introduced species.

Radiocarbon remains the principal workhorse for records extending to ∼55 thousand years ago (ka) (67). The shift to accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) ¹⁴C analysis during the 1990s improved the precision of age determinations to ±20–50 y (1 SD) for Holocene samples (the last 11.7 ka) and permitted analysis of carbon samples ∼one-tenth the mass previously required. Bomb production of ¹⁴C and dilution of ¹⁴C and ¹³C by fossil-fuel burning are persistent challenges for isolated young samples, but regional marine reservoir effects are now well-known and long tree-ring, speleothem, and coral records permit radiocarbon years to be calibrated to calendar years by accounting for natural variation in ¹⁴C production. New field, laboratory, and calibration protocols have similarly enhanced other methods. Amino acid racemization dating is applicable to carbonate shells up to ∼1 Ma in cool waters and can yield decadal resolution within the Holocene; U-Th dating is applicable to corals, speleothems, and bones up to ∼500 ka and provides decadal resolution within the last few thousand years; and optically stimulated luminescence is applicable to mineral grains deposited in terrestrial settings up to several hundred thousand years with resolution ±5–10% (66, 68–70). Naturally occurring ²¹⁰Pb, which rains out rapidly from the atmosphere, remains a powerful method with approximately decadal resolution for sediments deposited within the past ∼150 y. Bomb-generated ¹³⁷Cs is becoming more difficult to detect owing to radioactive decay, but longer lived plutonium isotopes and their daughters produced at the same time can take its place as a global geochemical marker.

Finally, both Bayesian and classical statistical inference are now used to interpolate sample ages between dated tie points within cores, typically with decadal resolution, providing more robust age models. Bayesian methods are also being used to temporally correlate records from widely separated areas, usually with a smaller loss in temporal acuity (e.g., two cores each capturing a local history with decadal resolution can now be correlated to each other with centennial precision) (71). These advances are all stunning improvements in age determination for individual specimens and host sediments, fully adequate to test for biological trends on decadal and longer scales.

Paleobiological Perspectives on Conservation, Management, and Ecological Theory

Persistence and Disassembly.

The ability of species and communities to persist over long periods is of great theoretical and practical interest, regardless of whether persistence reflects resistance to change in the face of environmental perturbation (robustness) or an ability to rebound from an altered state (resilience)—although the question of dynamics remains a key issue. At the community level, the historic range of variability of a community structure rather than of a particular species composition is now used as a dynamic target for management for federal lands in several countries (72), with paleoecological records from the last 3–4 ky used to establish the antiquity (“fundamental resilience”) of a forest type (73).

Evidence from the fossil record underscores the importance of scale and context. For example, over the last ∼6 ky of fairly stable climatic conditions, pollen analysis reveals the multimillennial persistence of terrestrial communities in many biomes and continents (73–75). Vegetation varied on decadal and centennial scales in concert with precipitation but maintained a structure and dominant functional type despite turnover in species and considerable pre-European land use. Some postcolonial, “secondary” forests have been similarly persistent for the last few centuries. In contrast, during strong climate changes between 50 and 6 ka, plant, insect, and mammal species exhibited individualistic shifts in their geographic range boundaries, meaning that species tended to relocate independently rather than as cohesive sets, resulting in novel or no-analog communities of still-extant species (refs. 76⇓–78; in the sea, see refs. 79 and 80). Until human pressures emerged, climate-driven reshuffling of species entailed little evolutionary extinction (refs. 81 and 82; and see Unprecedented and Unsuspected Changes below).

Individualistic shifts in latitude, elevation, and bathymetry are now being detected by biologists, relying on the resurvey of an area that was first studied decades ago (e.g., refs. 34 and 83–85). Such modern-day corroborations are stimulating novel analyses of living populations in light of geologic history, finding, for example, that present-day endemism is most strongly correlated with the velocity of postglacial climate change rather than with a threshold temperature or particular direction of change (86) and that populations along the margin of a species’ range still exhibit low genetic diversity, a legacy of Quaternary expansion (87). Young fossil records alone show (i) just how pervasive changes in species’ distributions are likely to become, constituting both local losses and additions, (ii) that novel groupings are most likely to emerge near the edges rather than centers of biogeographic provinces or ranges (88, 89), (iii) that species most able to cross former boundaries and those showing strongest population declines are not random draws from their parent community (79, 90), and (iv) that species associations suggesting biotic interactions are rare and inconstant (91).

All of these dynamics can be expected as climate continues to change, arguably requiring new strategic approaches to management, conservation, and restoration (refs. 80 and 92; but see ref. 93). As a further challenge, many late 20th to early 21st century communities are geologically novel assemblages because of the introduced species they include, sometimes in key roles (e.g., ref. 80; and see Ranking Multiple Stressors below), placing a premium on having data of sufficient temporal scope to test whether dynamics and ecosystem processes differ fundamentally from those of communities assembled under natural conditions.

Regardless of how we choose to respond, the lessons from young fossil records are clear. To a first approximation—that is, with the exception of some obligate relationships—environmental conditions, including substratum type and disturbance regime, are better predictors than biotic interactions in determining which species assemble into and persist as a community. On decadal and longer time frames, stable conditions promote stable, persistent communities, and environmental change promotes community disassembly and reassembly into novel communities, probably for the same reasons that community composition varies spatially along environmental gradients. Once together, species may interact strongly or weakly, with more or less cascading effects: top-down changes—depletion or elimination of higher trophic levels—and loss of habitat-forming ecosystem engineers are typically anthropogenic and can dismantle a community in the absence of other environmental change (see Unprecedented and Unsuspected Changes below). The fossil record of the dynamics of extant species across the landscape or seascape indicates that the webs of biotic interactions observed in stable communities are allowed by stable environments rather than being a fundamental cause of community stability, as is evident from their modification or dissolution when species migrate (individualistically) in response to environmental change.

Alternative Stable States, Phase Shifts, and Recoveries.

The ability of populations and communities to alternate between discrete states under a single set of conditions has been difficult to demonstrate in modern systems (small-scale patch dynamics aside). Commonly, only a single shift can be recognized and is suspected to be anthropogenic, driven either by climate, habitat modification, and/or an increase or decrease in the density of a single species, particularly a top predator or ecosystem engineer (94⇓–96). The rapid shift or collapse to a new state after some threshold stress is crossed (a nonlinear dynamic suggesting initial resistance), the ability to rebound to a former state after alleviation of stress (resilience), and the existence of warning signs for impending phase shifts, regardless of drivers, are important but challenging issues for field tests (but see ref. 97). Lags in response to stress and otherwise slow regime changes are particularly problematic for establishing cause and effect.

Lakes and coral reefs have received the greatest attention from biologists and are highly amenable to paleobiological analysis, which can test for patterns of change under fully or reasonably natural conditions where the existence of alternative stable states should be most clear. Lake and exceptionally high-resolution marine records of finfish reveal bimodal, decadal-to-centennial alternations in the abundance of key species that have persisted over millennia during pre-Industrial times (ref. 98; and see pollen studies cited above). Likely driven by climate, these alternations show that shifts in state are fully natural, perhaps with attractor states, and provide a baseline for evaluating the effects of commercial fishing and other human impacts. In the southern California pelagic system, for example, regular alternation in dominance by anchovies and sardines over the last ∼2 ka largely exonerate commercial harvesting as the primary driver of boom-and-bust populations of comparable decadal scale observed in the 20th century (99). In the NE Pacific and other oceans, strongly fluctuating populations of these species and other fish (salmon, hake) are linked to regional changes in temperature and productivity over past millennia up until climatic reorganization and commercial fishing within the last 100–150 y (98, 100). In tropical reefs, both historical documents and paleobiological analysis show that community structures have changed dramatically in the 20th century, in some cases to dominance by fleshy macroalgae or sponges (see next section). However, over the preceding 500 ky, different but remarkably consistent coral, red algal, and foraminiferal reef communities, all dominated by calcifiers, alternated on ∼100-ky time scales linked to the alternation of warm (highstand) and cooler, less favorable (lowstand) climatic regimes (101). Fossil records show that evolutionary survival entailed shifts of coral species both away from and back toward the core tropics (102) and that proximity to coral refugia during cool-water lowstands is the strongest correlate of modern-day richness in reef fish (ref. 103; for management implications, see ref. 104).

Alternating phases can thus emerge at multiple time scales. However, they are generally associated with evidence of change in environmental conditions, arguing against the existence of autogenically modulated alternating stable states in a strict sense, and some of the most impressive state changes within the last 2 My are unique to the Anthropocene (see next section). The power of fossil records for retrospective analysis could be productively focused on developing a stronger empirical understanding of possible harbingers of impending shifts, regardless of driver, such as increasing variance, decreasing resilience, and loss in trophic redundancy, and on anticipating community structures and compositions expected under future climate states (e.g., sponge-dominated reefs under ocean acidification) (105). Historical and paleobiological data that document rates and stages of past declines and recoveries (e.g., multidecadal to centennial perspectives of refs. 20, 23, 106, and 107) are also needed to frame expectations and parameterize regional models for restoration, moving beyond hypothetical diagrams of hysteresis. Compared with short-term assessments, metaanalysis using (geo)historical baselines reveals a lower frequency (10–50%) and magnitude of recovery, especially in species abundance and ecosystem structure, and finds that recoveries often require decades or more and attention to multiple stressors (ref. 106; and see Ranking Multiple Stressors below). This hard truth—even for marine systems, which are arguably less altered by human pressures than terrestrial systems (30)—needs to spur collaborative analyses and action, not discouragement or denial.

Unprecedented and Unsuspected Changes.

One of the key contributions of young fossil records is documentation of the unprecedented changes that have occurred in virtually all biomes within the last few centuries, especially evidence of sudden biotic collapse or shifts after millennia of stability or fluctuation around a stationary mean. Such data typically recalibrate our sense of scale, revealing large, unsuspected changes—mostly declines—(i) in the abundance and distribution of still-extant species and in the flexibility of their life-history and diet (e.g., refs. 31, 43, 44, and 108) and (ii) in the richness and complexity of communities and food webs (examples later in this section).

Fossil records do not carry the effort alone. Dramatic changes that occurred before professional scientific observations in an area can be revealed by written records—even the ancient Romans complained about declines in fish abundance (109)—and can be augmented by morphologic, isotopic, aDNA, and other analyses of archeological materials and museum-archived specimens (39, 110). Maps, photographs, and economic data can also draw back the veil on trends, especially for habitat and ecological changes at local-to-regional scales (23, 111–113), and experiments can test historical hypotheses of effect (e.g., ref. 114). In most instances, however, paleobiological analysis is needed to construct a documentary record that is sufficiently long, broad in scope (of taxa and environmental variables), and consistent in quality (determined by natural processes of fossil accumulation) to (i) verify or even recognize that change has occurred, (ii) evaluate the human and coupled human–natural stresses that might have caused or influenced biological change, and (iii) acquire a reasonable sample of variability and dynamics before the onset of those stresses.

Trophic simplification and diversity loss are common predictions of environmental stress, whether bottom-up (modification of nutrients and primary productivity, loss of habitat complexity, removal of habitat-former) or top-down (loss of consumers, especially predators). Top-down trophic cascades from the removal of apex consumers have now been recognized in all biomes but remain challenging for direct biological analysis: top-down effects can take years to decades to become evident due to long generation times and/or high motility of key species; processes commonly operate on much larger spatial scales than are amenable to experimentation; and populations of apex species are by now mostly reduced or extirpated (115).

Fossil records provide compelling evidence that, in the relatively recent past, many food webs were richer, with longer chains, more interactions, and different (mostly climate-controlled) dynamics of species substitution. For example, N-isotope analysis of ¹⁴C-dated bones shows that the Hawaiian petrel, a widespread and generalist oceanic predator, has fed at a significantly lower trophic level in the last 100 y than in the preceding 3,000 y, notwithstanding the arrival ∼950 y B.P. of humans to Pacific islands (116). Foraging segregation of petrel populations also decreased markedly, indicating less abundant prey. These changes suggest a rapid change in the composition of oceanic food webs well before direct scientific observation and are probably related to the development of commercial fishing. Shallow-water communities have also undergone significant simplification, mostly within the last few centuries, linked to the rise of sediment and nutrient runoff from colonial and industrial agriculture (refs. 117–119; but see ref. 120) and to top-down commercial extirpation of herbivores and filter-feeding invertebrates capable of keeping primary production in check (13). For example, the branching corals Acropora and Porites dominated Caribbean reefs for millennia (and for longer periods where records are sufficient) but, within the 20th century, have been widely replaced by turbidity-tolerant foliose Agaricia or noncalcifying taxa (refs. 121 and 122; and, in the Pacific, see ref. 118). Diatoms and other proxy records show that estuarine and lacustrine ecosystems have become more plankton-rich and detritus-based in recent decades to centuries, depending on the timing of watershed development and/or removal of key consumers, even when systems had been naturally eutrophic and episodically hypoxic over previous millennia (123⇓–125).

Simplification of food webs and diversity loss are also evident in terrestrial records over the last 50 ka, usually with human involvement and entailing high extinction intensities (29, 126–128). Significant mammal and bird extinctions started with human expansion out of Africa in the Late Pleistocene, making initial contact with independently evolved faunas and eventually reaching Pacific islands by a few thousand years ago [approximately half of all mammal species >50 kg lost by ∼11 ka) (128); loss of ∼1,000 Pacific nonpasserine landbirds alone via pre-Industrial hunting, habitat change, and species introductions (129)]. A second phase of this “sixth extinction” began in the 15th century associated with European exploitation and agricultural colonialism (e.g., ref. 29), and a third, late 20th Century phase is underway related to the latest acceleration in human populations and global markets [manifest in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List] (Fig. 1). The ecological consequences of regional species losses (and additions of introduced species) have been significant. For example, mammal food webs in Iberia exhibited relatively constant richness and structure for ∼800,000 y within the Pleistocene, with waning species being replaced by phylogenetically related species during each climate cycle, only to undergo dramatic reductions of richness and interactions in the Holocene (130). This change in structure and dynamics was not associated with a change in climate but occurred in two phases with (human-associated) extinction of mega-fauna and, as part of the Neolithic Revolution, the introduction of modern horse and cattle; the loss of specialist species actually increased connectivity, with humans as a new generalist predator (and see ref. 131).

Ranking Multiple Stressors.

Most regions today are under multiple anthropogenic pressures, but these variables occur in the context of natural processes such as orbital and other climate oscillations [El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)]. The potential for natural cycles and trends to amplify, mask, or reverse the effects of human pressure is thus a large concern in conservation. A related challenge is to disentangle the (probably compounding) effects of multiple human stressors. Rigorously determining the roles of different stressors—and of sequential application of stressors—requires datasets with sufficient temporal scope to look back past their onset, arguably a century at minimum even in remote areas and multiple centuries to millennia in many others. Given data of sufficient temporal scope, the roles of suspected stressors, human and otherwise, can be differentiated by comparing the timing, sign, and magnitude of changes in a target species or community or ecosystem (the response variable) with events in cultural history and with levels of variability and mean state before the onset of suspected activities.

The most contentious topic, among both biologists and paleobiologists, is the role of climate as a driver of biological change. In terms of species extinction, a fundamental tension exists between the persistence of most extant species despite strong Pleistocene climate variability and, on the other hand, the dramatic declines predicted for the future using bioclimatic envelope models and extrapolating from regional reductions in population sizes and genetic diversity (e.g., refs. 3, 4, 6, 82, and 84). Climate change was probably solely responsible for the extinction of some Eurasian and North American large-mammal species within the last 50 ky and may have reinforced the effects of hunting on others (132), modulating a simple “overkill” hypothesis for Pleistocene extinctions (and see refs. 126 and 128). If restricted to in situ evolution, many tetrapods will not survive projected warming unless rates of adaptation accelerate more than a thousandfold above those observed paleontologically (133).

Nonetheless, taking a global perspective of terrestrial vertebrate biodiversity over the last 2 My, the most compelling first-order pattern for elevated extinction is a close association with phases of human colonization and technological advance (e.g., ref. 127). The same can be said for marine mammals, although their extinctions arguably did not become significant until the Industrial Age (21, 23, 30, 31, 108). Among marine ectotherms, documented extinctions of corals, shelled mollusks, and fish are few, and those known are difficult to link to the present warming phase or to other warm pulses in the last 2 My (134). It is possible that, as with insects (82), the species most vulnerable to climate change were lost during the first strong Pleistocene excursions, leaving an inherently resilient subset able to survive subsequent climate changes up to the present day. Regional extirpation, short of global extinction and reflecting shifting ranges (see Persistence and Disassembly and Alternative Stable States, Phase Shifts, and Recoveries above), can still have large regional consequences, as shown by multicentennial and millennial disruptions of Pacific coral reef growth during past periods of high ENSO variability such as projected for the next century (135). The potential effects on biodiversity, community structure, and ecosystem function of the anthropogenic climate changes that are now unfolding (Fig. 1) thus should not be underestimated.

However, it would be equally wrong to underestimate the role of human pressures other than climate in creating the modern-day and future world. Overharvesting of wild species, species introductions, (de)nutrification, and other habitat modifications are intentionally excluded as “local effects” in many tests of climate impacts, but (i) are equally or more deeply rooted than post-Industrial warming, (ii) have become global since the 1950s (Fig. 1), and (iii) commonly emerge as the strongest correlates of biotic change at local to regional scales, both in biological and geohistorical analyses that consider multiple drivers (for examples, see refs. 40, 96, and the rest of this section). Such activities can have strong feedbacks on regional climate. For example, in New Zealand, pollen records show that wetland and lake landscapes today reflect changes in water balance driven by deforestation by pre-Industrial humans rather than recent or deep-past climate change (ref. 136 and in Europe, see ref. 137). The mixed results of climate-only studies may thus derive from unconsidered interacting variables (see discussions in refs. 6 and 17, and many others). Many biologists identify climate change as the greatest threat for future biodiversity loss but recognize that many changes today are smaller or different from expected, and they attribute these contradictions to other, usually anthropogenic factors (e.g., habitat conversion or invasive species that limit colonization).

Geohistorical analysis can create data of practical value while we strive to develop a general explanatory model for the roles of climate and other factors. For example, exploitation has figured in 95% of all depletions of animal species in estuaries, based on metaanalysis of nine suspected factors including climate change (20). Multiple factors (usually exploitation plus habitat loss) figure in ∼45% of losses and in 78% of recoveries of species with commercial, cultural, or other special value (for comparable analyses of reefs and recoveries, see refs. 106 and 117). Such multifactorial syntheses of data from written, archeological, and paleontological archives establish otherwise unknown baselines, provide an empirical foundation for identifying the factors that have contributed most to observed declines, allow areas to be ranked by degree of damage, and confirm that recoveries tend to require more factors than declines. In targeted areas, geohistorical data have resolved fundamental questions on native and nonnative species, altering restoration plans. For example, pollen analysis shows that plant species on the Galapagos Islands that were widespread and difficult to control are actually returning natives (ref. 138; for other examples, see refs. 40 and 47). Young fossil records also show that nonnative species that become dominant or habitat-transforming can have cascading effects on other groups—a particular concern given that many late 20th to early 21st century communities are novel assemblages because of the introduced species they include, sometimes in key roles (e.g., refs. 80 and 90).

Finally, paleontological data can be especially valuable for assessing multiple stressors on endangered species, where baseline data may be scarce and sampling living individuals is difficult or unethical (e.g., refs. 43, 44, and 108). For example, the critically endangered fish Totoaba macdonaldi in the upper Gulf of California has declined over the 20th century in both abundance and body size, and biologists suspected both direct fishing pressure and degradation of habitat in the Colorado River delta, owing to river damming. Sclerochronologic comparison of modern and 1,000- to 5,000-y-old otoliths established that Totoaba growth rates and thus sexual maturation slowed significantly coincident with river damming (139). Recovery of this traditional fishery thus cannot be achieved solely by relieving fishing pressure but will require restoration of some minimum river flow, with a binational trial flooding now underway.

Conclusions

Given extensive paleontological evidence for biotic change, the conclusion must be that, absent such long-term perspectives, most biological benchmarks—for abundance, distribution, variability, drivers, and dynamics—and rate estimates that are embedded within the last 50–100 y are probably far from natural. Natural may not be an achievable or desirable goal. However, paleobiological data for the recent past confront us with the true status of modern-day biota and with the very real potential that climate-driven changes will result in elevated extinctions rather than community disruptions alone, owing to the continued press of other human factors and damage already sustained. Paleontological data, derived both from fully buried fossil assemblages and from death assemblages that are still accumulating alongside living populations, constitute a powerful source of insights into the dynamics of extant (and recently extinct) species, communities, and ecosystems over the interdecadal to millennial time frames at which environments undergo natural and human-driven change. Improved environmental proxies, age-control, and confidence in paleobiological evidence mean that disparate data types should no longer impede the development of a rigorous “Biology in the Anthropocene” that squarely faces legacy effects, ongoing trends, and disequilibrial states as default conditions. We should in fact embrace the modern world as an unnatural experiment in progress, no matter how uncomfortable our eventual discoveries may prove to be, and commit to greater integration of modern and paleo approaches in both research and training. The fossil record’s future includes its ability to provide critical data and new time frames for conservation, management, and ecological theory.

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