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WORK TITLE: The Unnatural World
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://davidbiello.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
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NATIONALITY:
https://davidbiello.com/about/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-biello-7142497/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and writer. Scientific American, writer and then writer/editor, 2005-. Also host of the 60-Second Earth podcast and a contributor to the Instant Egghead video series. Appears on radio, including WNYC’s The Takeaway, New Hampshire Public Radio’s (NHPR) Word of Mouth, and Public Radio International’s (PRI) The World; hosted the documentary Beyond the Light Switch, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Nautilus. Contributor to Websites, including Aeon, L.A. Review of Books, and Yale e360.
SIDELIGHTS
David Biello is a journalist who primarily writes about the environment and energy. He has been a contributor to Scientific American magazine for more than a decade, writing both for the magazine and for the Website. Biello regularly appears on radio and television and served as host of the documentary Beyond the Light Switch, which focuses on what the future of energy may look like. Biello’s first book was an illustrated children’s book titled Bullet Trains: Inside and Out.
In his second book, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age, Biello presents his case that human innovation and adaptation are necessary to save the planet. In the process, Biello profiles a disparate group of people, from scientists who want to fertilize the seas to a low-level government worker in China who is working to clean up his city.
Biello makes it clear that the greatest threat to earth is humans. Writing in the introduction to The Unnatural World, Biello notes: “From deep beneath the ground, where we busily hollow out yawning cavities in pursuit of fossil fuels, to the sky, where carbon dioxide molecules released by our relentless incessant burning will trap heat for longer than our species has walked the planet, we now drive the process some still like to think of as nature.” Biello goes on to note humanity’s effect on climate change and the danger it presents, claiming it will represent “a new epochal designation” due to global warming, mass extinction, and technologies ranging from plastics to nuclear weapons. Biello later remarks: “The choices made this century will help set the course for the entire planet for at least tens of thousands of years.”
The author presents a strong cautionary argument against humankind’s tendency to deny its paramount and often damaging role in what what scientists have proposed to call the Anthropocene Epoch. This epoch dates from the time when humans began to make a significant impact on the earth’s geology and ecosystems. Biello makes out that the epoch is still ill-defined but that it may date back 250 years or so to the invention of the first practical coal-burning steam engine.
Biello traces the history of human’s impact on the earth, from the nature and origins of cities to the difference between wilderness and what he calls “wildness.” He emphasizes the role humanity is playing in the rapid extinctions of plants and animals around the world and the literal mountains of waste that humans produce. “Biello’s stance and sympathies are quite clear, but he thankfully avoids polemics,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who went on to comment that Biello makes a “balanced” presenatation and that “he is keen to show that every coin has a second face, not least the face of hope vs. despair.”
Although Biello acknowledges that the future may look grim, he goes on to show how various people and organizations are working to correct the course of humankind and civilization before they are changed drastically and not in good ways. Many of the profiles focus on scientists and academicians, such as researchers at the University of Maryland who are using drones to study deforestation. Biello also explores projects in China to establish “circular economies.” In these economies waste becomes assets, and carbon neutrality becomes a primary goal of society.
Biello emphasizes that trying to develop a state-of-the-art technological fix for current problems should be a top priority but that it is not necessary to depend solely on such a fix. For example, he stresses his belief that a solution lies in new power structures and emphasizes that empowering women could make the difference to the planet’s future. To illustrate this point, Biello discusses several women who have made or are trying to make a difference for the future of the world, such as a woman in Naxi, China, who is doing battle with the Chinese government to save the local ecology where she lives.
“The Unnatural World is a travelogue with that good human epoch in mind, a trip around the world to meet people working out new ways for humanity to live as well as survive,” wrote New York Times Online contributor Robert Sullivan. Writing for Outside Online, Harley Rustad remarked: “While other authors and journalists focus solely on the looming dark cloud or the indomitable heat wave, Biello arrives with positivity—‘despair is an ideology we cannot afford’—and tools: monitoring forests with drones, geoengineering our oceans, cloning extinct species, creating the electric car.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Biello, David, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age, Scribner (New York, NY), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2016, Carl Hays, review of The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age, p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of The Unnatural World.
Library Journal, November 1, 2016, Cynthia Lee Knight, review of The Unnatural World, p. 95.
Publishers Weekly, September 5, 2016, review of The Unnatural World, p. 70.
ONLINE
David Biello Website, https://davidbiello.com (June 24, 2017).
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com (December 9, 2016), Robert Sullivan, “Looking to the Future of Our Humans-First World,” review of The Unnatural World.
Outside Online, https://www.outsideonline.com/ (November 16, 2016), Harley Rustad, “Humans Screwed Up the Environment. Can We Engineer Our Way Out?,” review of The Unnatural World.
I am an award-winning journalist writing primarily about the environment and energy. I am working on a book about whether the planet has entered a new geologic age as a result of human impacts and, if so, what we should do about this Anthropocene. I’ve been writing for Scientific American since November 2005 and have written on subjects ranging from astronomy to zoology for both the Web site and magazine. I’ve been reporting on the environment and energy since 1999—long enough to be cynical but not long enough to be depressed. I am the host of the 60-Second Earth podcast, a contributor to the Instant Egghead video series and author of a children’s book on bullet trains. I also write for publications ranging from the L.A. Review of Books to Yale e360, speak on radio shows such as WNYC’s The Takeaway, NHPR’s Word of Mouth, and PRI’s The World as well as host the duPont-Columbia award winning documentary “Beyond the Light Switch” for PBS. Occasionally, folks invite me on TV to perform as a talking head, which is also occasionally fun. And in case you were wondering, I happen to think Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is a surprisingly good read.
David Biello is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on the environment and energy since 1999. He is currently an editor at Scientific American, where he has been a contributor since 2005, and he also contributes frequently to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Yale e360, Nautilus, and Aeon. Biello has been a guest on radio shows, such as WNYC’s The Takeaway, NHPR’s Word of Mouth, and PRI’s The World. He hosts the ongoing duPont-Columbia award-winning documentary Beyond the Light Switch for PBS. The Unnatural World is his first book.
pg. 4
Biello, David. The Unnatural World
Cynthia Lee Knight
141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p95.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Biello, David. The Unnatural World. Scribner. Nov. 2016.288p. notes. ISBN 9781476743905. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781476743929. SCI
The effects of steadily increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seem to be everywhere: rapidly shrinking glaciers, warmer and more acidic oceans, thawing permafrost, rising sea levels, and higher temperatures. Journalist Biello (Scientific American and other publications) examines the viability of technologies for reducing carbon dioxide levels. These "technofixes" include ocean fertilization to create plankton blooms that suck up carbon dioxide, energy sources that don't burn fossil fuels (solar, wind, nuclear power), biodigesters (mechanical stomachs) that convert organic material into usable gas, carbon capture and storage technologies, and electric cars. Biello also explores the environmental costs of China's tremendous economic expansion and efforts to reduce its use of coal. Surprisingly, for a science book, there are no in-text author citations. While some content is based on author interviews, other material includes facts and statistics that are not general knowledge. VERDICT Despite the lack of references, this thoughtful analysis of how we might move toward a more sustainable civilization is recommended for readers who enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe and for anyone who follows the latest developments in climate geoengineering.--Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Knight, Cynthia Lee. "Biello, David. The Unnatural World." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 95. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830421&it=r&asid=069809427689e955d33c7ac8054eb000. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467830421
The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age
Carl Hays
113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age. By David Biello. Nov. 2016. 288p. Scribner, $26 (9781476743905); e-book, $13.99 (9781476743929). 304.2.
Among climate scientists who agree with the current consensus that global warming is real, a sizable number now argue that, despite the international agreements to lower carbon emissions, devastating changes to the environment are inevitable and not easily reversible. In this compelling call to action, award-winning environmental journalist Biello argues most of the damage will be due to humankind's history of denial about its starring, and often detrimental, role in what scientists are now calling the Anthropocene Epoch. More than voicing a grim assessment, however, Biello also peers over the shoulders of innovators hoping to right civilization's ship before it literally drowns under rising seas. Off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, Biello visits with scientists experimenting with submerged iron particles that feed oxygen-producing plankton. At the University of Maryland, researchers are now using drones to better study deforestation, while a California genetics lab is investigating "de-extinction" technologies. Although some geoengineering schemes, like iron fertilization, have proved controversial, Biello's absorbing work presents a hopeful alternative to the widespread media forecasts of planetary gloom and doom.--Carl Hays
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hays, Carl. "The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 6. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771159&it=r&asid=14d15059ee92a30ca077fe871c7c8738. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771159
David Biello: THE UNNATURAL WORLD
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
David Biello THE UNNATURAL WORLD Scribner (Adult Nonfiction) 26.00 ISBN: 978-1-4767-4390-5
In his first book, Scientific American editor Biello argues that it is not a lack of money or technology that prevents our addressing environmental and societal ills but rather a lack of motivation.The author, who hosts the ongoing PBS documentary Beyond the Light Switch, believes we are writing a new chapter in the history of the Earth, much of it composed in ignorance. We are terraforming our own world without conscious design, exerting global influence without the exercise of global responsibility. The linchpin of his book is the Anthropocene, the idea of a geologic epoch in which humankind represents the world-changing force of nature for the first time. Biello's stance and sympathies are quite clear, but he thankfully avoids polemics. His approach is unusually balanced; he is keen to show that every coin has a second face, not least the face of hope vs. despair. As the author notes, we must mature as a species, ditch short-term thinking, and recognize that we are now influencing outcomes in ways we can't foresee. It is our fatenot just the planet'sthat hangs in the balance. Biello advocates a fundamentally new perspective on where we live and how, assuring that we have the tools to address almost any challenge, if not yet the will. His book is also an expansive ecological history of past, present, and future. Exceptionally well-researched if occasionally repetitive, the book is crammed with astonishing facts and fascinating speculations. Biello examines the inefficiencies of our neo-fossil age, the nature and origins of the city, wildness (as opposed to wilderness), humanity's role in the pace of extinctions, the appalling lack of electricity and clean water in much of the world, a new space race, waste as the foundation of modern society, and varied concepts of geoengineering. In this well-written, significant book, Biello insists that humans, the world's most successful invasive species, have the ability to engage in planetary protection and human survival, but it will require wisdom, innovation, and restraint.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"David Biello: THE UNNATURAL WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181790&it=r&asid=0f08fe2b052737f6770267f9e8e3c748. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181790
The Unnatural World
263.36 (Sept. 5, 2016): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Unnatural World
David Biello. Scribner, $26 (288p)
ISBN 978-1-4767-4390-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Like many before him, science journalist Biello explores the roots of the Anthropocene epoch, its global consequences, and possible solutions. He articulates the common-sense position that if planetary degradation is to be stopped, humans must be a part of that action: "The threat is us, the solution is in us. It takes a grown-up, rational species to recognize we are not alone and to provide for the protection of others, who have less control." Biello focuses on a number of individuals with big, largely technological, ideas to save humankind, including a scientist who wants to fertilize the ocean to increase the growth of phytoplankton and thus soak up massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He also examines efforts in China to build "circular economies" where waste is transformed into assets and society moves toward carbon neutrality. Perhaps most importantly, Biello points out that it's not necessary to wait for a grand technological fix: "If there is a simple solution to our present problems, it might be summed up as: Empower women with clean power." Biello presents some interesting anecdotes and introduces some creative individuals, but his conclusion that only "relentless work" will make the world better is underwhelming. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Unnatural World." Publishers Weekly, 5 Sept. 2016, p. 70. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463513602&it=r&asid=147836840c35436c88c22b01a16bdd46. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463513602
Looking to the Future of Our Humans-First World
By ROBERT SULLIVANDEC. 9, 2016
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A delegate in front of a display at the COP22 climate change conference in Marrakesh, 2016. Credit Pool photo by Mark Ralston, via Associated Press
THE UNNATURAL WORLD
The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age
By David Biello
294 pp. Scribner. $26.
The term Anthropocene is geological shorthand for a world of carbon-induced climate havoc — i.e., the world in which we now live, a world where, given the frightening pace of global warming, all bets are off. (By last summer, the hottest on record, mass coral bleaching was racing through the world’s oceans, with more than 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef already bleached.) In “The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age,” David Biello, the science editor for TED and a contributing editor at Scientific American, sets off on a tour of our Anthropocenic world, to scout for ideas on how we might now live on a planet that our grandparents won’t recognize for long. Early on, Biello visits with a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester, who tells him, bluntly, “We’ve reset the Earth’s biology.” For some people, “that is the argument of the Anthropocene — a warning that our bad ways will quickly lead to our extinction,” Biello writes. “But for others, it’s a challenge. How do we make a good human epoch?”
“The Unnatural World” is a travelogue with that good human epoch in mind, a trip around the world to meet people working out new ways for humanity to live as well as survive. At the University of Leicester, the paleobiologist describes the man-made fossils that mark human presence — the stratum of plastics, soot and radionuclides that stain the Earth everywhere from lake bottoms to mountaintops. “Massive technofossils like London and Shanghai will call out to the future: Something was here!” Biello writes.
Indeed, the defining feature of the new world is a tangle of what we consider natural and what we don’t, nature not ended but morphed. In Maryland, Biello visits a landscape ecologist who has pioneered investigations of human interactions with ecosystems, mapping various anthropogenic biomes, concluding that people are, in Biello’s words, “the world’s most (successful) invasive species.” Biello follows along as this ecologist programs drones to monitor forests in the anthropogenic biome known as suburban Maryland, refining ways to measure and manage relatively new landscapes. “The threat is us, the solution is in us,” Biello writes.
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The Unnatural World David Biello
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He maintains a kind of upbeat morbidity while describing a database of extinct creatures’ genomes, everything from mammoths to giant beavers: “Tough decisions have to be made about what species to save outright, what species to save for later by freezing genetic data that may come in handy, and what species to, with due respect, allow to perish, as has been the norm on this ever-changing planet for billions of years.” Yet work to revive particular species inevitably comes off as the sort of hubristic scientific thinking that got us into this Anthropocene era to begin with. Biello notes complications. Say we brought back sky-darkening flocks of passenger pigeons, extinct since 1914: Would we need to revive the American chestnut trees (gone by way of an invasive fungus) that provided their food?
Cities might be our greatest invention as creatures; they are where we herd, reflecting how we think, our shining hope as far as handling our own growth is concerned. How we manage the metabolic intake and output of cities is likely to determine the way that future archaeologists debate the merits of human civilization in whatever comes after the Anthropocene. To consider cities, Biello travels to China, talking to a lawyer at the local environmental protection bureau in Rizhao, a city on the Yellow Sea coast that hopes to be carbon neutral one day. “I don’t know when we will succeed, but we will move in that way,” the lawyer says. Biello examines ways China uses waste as an energy source — America take heed, or mourn, given the Trump administration’s stated attitudes toward carbon reduction — as well as the Chinese government’s trade-off of shoddily built nuclear power plants for less smog.
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“The Unnatural World” is detail-packed, almost to a fault, but a dramatic high point comes when Biello recounts how a man living in the United States (him) fares as an Anthropocenic Homo sapiens, which is either really impressive or really distressing, depending on your scruples: “The average American uses 90 kilograms of stuff each day, day in and day out. We consume 25 percent of the world’s energy despite being 5 percent of the world’s population. We lust for the latest gadget, which hides away minerals wrested from beneath the Congo, among other places, deep in its innards.”
Managing the Anthropocene, then, comes down to issues of economic inequality, and given the tech obsession in wealthier nations, it’s hardly surprising that a book by a first worlder dwells on technological fixes like geoengineering. (I found myself imagining an Anthropocene that ends well when Bruce Willis in his spaceship saves us all.) In Germany, Biello meets Victor Smetacek, who attempted in 2009 to dust the Indian Ocean with 20 metric tons of iron sulfate, in the hope that proliferating plankton blooms would suck carbon from the atmosphere. He and his team were forced to turn back, for fear of plankton farming unleashing another greenhouse gas (methane), or perhaps causing an ocean dead zone. In the New Jersey Palisades, Biello inspects a carbon injection process, in which carbon dioxide is sucked from the air and pumped underground, filling sandstone crevices, a sort of reverse frack. In this case, as in most geoengineering schemes in the Anthropocene, environmental fixes beget concerns, which (perhaps) beget new fixes.
Eventually, Biello winds up looking to Silicon Valley for a titanium bullet. Vinod Khosla, the billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems, exhorts us to seek, in Biello’s words, “rare innovation,” the kind of “black swan” idea “that goes on to have extreme impact” — though this is how venture capitalists think as opposed to scientists, who rely on communities of data gatherers. “Experts are as good as dart-throwing monkeys,” Khosla declares. Then, as if jet-lagged, Biello concludes with thoughts on Pope Francis (for his cautionary words on technology) and Elon Musk (for being Musk). “We are living in a quest that he has devised,” Biello writes about Musk, “even if it isn’t entirely original to him — electric cars and solar power to clean up this planet and rockets to spread life to another one.”
The Tesla may not pollute Palo Alto, but the production of all its components and construction, involving graphite, lithium and cobalt mining, aren’t so great for the rest of the world. We don’t need rare innovations so much as old-fashioned political tools. Almost everybody knows what’s going on with the climate, even the most carbon-guilty: The oil company Exxon, while dismissing scientists’ evidence of climate warming, worried in the 1980s about the effect of a climate-induced rise in sea levels on its offshore rigs. Likewise, just about everybody knows that things can be changed. Biello cites London’s 1821 decision to build underground sewers to stop deadly cholera outbreaks, a project that was completed in six short years.
At this point, if there’s any hope for a “good human epoch,” it has less to do with technology than with imagining new power structures. “Local people, their voice is never heard,” a China-based official with Rare, an N.G.O. that works with indigenous people, tells Biello. In the United States, the Standing Rock Sioux’s protest of the Dakota Access pipeline through their watershed is a good example of what stewardship might look like in the Anthropocene, and Biello touches on this when he visits the Naxi in the Yunnan Province of China. He meets a young Naxi woman who fights the government on behalf of her own local ecology, or anthropogenic biome. “The world gets better when women are empowered rather than marginalized,” he writes. “More economic growth, better health, less environmental destruction all go hand in hand with free women.” The roots of our cataclysm, in other words, lie in the machinery of economic and social justice. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can enact meaningful change.
Robert Sullivan’s books include “The Meadowlands,” “Rats” and “The Thoreau You Don’t Know.”
Humans Screwed Up the Environment. Can We Engineer Our Way Out?
In 'The Unnatural World,' journalist David Biello argues that while humans have gotten Earth into a mess, we also have the power to fix it
By: Harley Rustad
Nov 16, 2016
Humans Screwed Up the Environment. Can We Engineer Our Way Out?
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The "earthrise" view from Apollo 8, photographed in 1968, has been called one of the most influential environmental photographs ever taken. David Biello introduces his book, 'The Unnatural World,' with the scene. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In 1968, a member of the Apollo 8 mission took a photograph from space: Earth in a single frame. Most of us will never get this truly global perspective: we have a hard enough time thinking past our immediate point of view, stuck five or six feet above the ground. When the photo first appeared, it sparked a new consideration of human impact on climate and the environment that extended well beyond our personal bubbles.
This is the story environmental journalist David Biello uses to open his first book, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age ($26; Simon and Schuster), out November 15. The title signals his book’s lofty goal for an equally expansive view of the earth and its future. The setting is the Anthropocene, our current geological epoch defined by dominant human influence on nature. Depending on who you ask, this age began anywhere from 250 to 50,000 years ago. Most agree, however, that there is no end in sight and that we aren't good news for the environment.
But, Biello argues, this period isn’t marked just by our negative interference, but also by our capacity for control and adaptation. We are the protagonists of this age, “turning the wildest wilderness into a kind of farm or a living system that serves human needs,” Biello writes. Instead of overlords, he places us as Earth’s “unwitting gardeners.” We may have arrived here out of mistake or ignorance, but we now have the option, and increasingly the capability, to either nurture and tend or remake wholly anew.
While other authors and journalists focus solely on the looming dark cloud or the indomitable heat wave, Biello arrives with positivity—“despair is an ideology we cannot afford”—and tools: monitoring forests with drones, geoengineering our oceans, cloning extinct species, creating the electric car. These tools are undeniably optimistic options, and Biello doesn’t gloss over the complications. In the book’s first chapter, he dives right into a controversial attempt to “fertilize” a patch of ocean off the Galapagos with iron, which would stimulate plankton growth and then oxygen production. It’s a fascinating example of the ethical questions that will only become more common in the coming decades: Are the processes that made life on Earth possible are no longer enough? Do we really know that the risks aren’t greater than the benefits? And who should have the power to decide?
Our hands have always shaped our environments—hunting of large mammals en masse, early forms of agriculture, urbanization. Today, Biello notes, they're responsible for “uprooting forests, besmirching the skies, and befouling the seas, with results that are all too visible.” These results may well be visible to the alert ecologist, glaciologist, and climatologist. But for most of us, they’re far from view. They are the disappearing old-growth forest hundreds of miles from the nearest city, the glacier calving in the Arctic, and the bleaching coral far off shore. The challenge today lies in bringing these global examples, both stark harbinger and hushed innovation, into the living rooms of many, and The Unnatural World does so with vivid characters—not just the Elon Musks of the world—and storytelling.
All of this lends The Unnatural World refreshing energy, especially in a time when most news on the environment is exceedingly grim. But all of this positivity can most likely be attributed to the one deliberate gaping hole in the book: there’s hardly any mention of politics. Biello rarely alludes to the millions of people who deny anthropomorphic climate change, blame vast and uncontrollable terrestrial and even cosmic forces, and challenge the idea that we need to change and adapt. Our capacity for constructive action—reshaping our habits and landscapes for good—is often undermined by a susceptibility for inaction and willful blindness. Biello can't be blamed for not directly addressing these concerns; if he had, the book would be twice as long. But this is The Unnatural World's dark cloud. Whether we actively pave over a grassland or passively ignore the acidification of an ocean, both are characteristic of the Anthropocene.
Biello is clearly on the side of action. “Perhaps the purpose of this Anthropocene idea is to encourage us to plant seeds,” he writes. But some of the tools he presents as options for future environmental stewardship will be read as Band-Aid solutions that accept our cinder-coated habits as unfaltering. Two examples: Fracking with CO2 to trap the gas underground and “air capturing” CO2 after it is emitted. The question of a stable future lying not in cultural change but in adaptation, technological or otherwise, is one that may not sit well with more zealous environmentalists.
True, many think that the answer is to step back, let nature be nature, and all will correct. But Biello’s case is worth hearing out. We aren’t standing before a verdant garden in need of some weeding; we are at the gate of one that is already covered in patches of brown and grey. A future that is both economically prosperous and environmentally stable will require a heavy hand. As a scientist tells Biello early in the book, “There’s no point in hanging on to things or saying it used to be like this. That’s changed, anyway. We’ve changed everything.”