Tech companies are rapidly networking the environment in ways that will transform our perception of nature—just as social media reshaped our relationships with each other. What could possibly go wrong?
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Nature Isn't What It Used To Be
Nostalgia tugs hard at our narratives about nature. If we could just hold nature still, even for a human lifetime, then we could save it. But we cannot. In that spirit, we’ve assembled a cadre of premier writers to explore how our understanding of nature, and our connection to it, is shifting yet again—and how conservation might look very different in the twenty-first century than it did in the twentieth.
Photo: anthropocenemagazine.org
Welcome to the brave new world of artificial intelligence for conservation
Darwinian theory is based on the idea that heredity flows vertically, parent to offspring, and that life’s history has branched like a tree. Now we know otherwise: that the ‘tree’ of life isn’t that simple.
For decades, humans have modeled technology on observations of the natural world. But new discoveries about nature—and tools for manipulating it—have opened up novel approaches potentially more powerful than mere imitation to solving Human Age problems.
Trying to make nature valuable has had a disappointing track record.