Introduction

A Time Like No Other

Now and then there is a sudden and rapid passage to a totally new and more comprehensive type of

order or organization, with quite new emergent properties and involving quite new methods of further

evolution.

Julian Huxley

Imagine a science-fiction novel about a planet equipped with a huge bio-electronic information

network that enables its most technologically advanced species to observe changes in its weather

systems, measure the pollutants in its air and soil and water, and chart the travels of its migrant

species. On the basis of the information they gather, these beings make decisions that orchestrate

the planets life: They engineer terrains and water flows. They fine-tune the atmosphere. They

improve the survival prospects for a species here, reduce the birth rate of a population there.

They manage the planet, in short. The planet has changed profoundly from what it had been

before this information network emerged; it has become a different kind of biological system,

with new feedback loops that govern its evolution. And the beings that created this system now

play a unique role in relation to all life on their planet: they have been transformed by the same

development that has transformed the planetcreated by their creation. They are a different kind

of species. And they know it.

Earth is becoming something like that planet. I stress the something like, because we are

not bound by evolutionary destiny to create such a totally controlled world. In fact, this book will

argue that such a scenario is neither possible nor desirable. But it will also show that the world
we live in nowand will surely inhabit in the years aheadresembles the bionic world

described above more closely than it resembles the world most of us think we live in.

Earth today bubbles with visions of some dramatic leap into the futurethe Christian

judgment day, the dawn of the pan-Islamic caliphate, the technological singularity, the New Age

transformation. Meanwhile a transition that dwarfs them all is unfolding in our midst, the product

of two once-separate processes that are converging now with explosive force: The first, an

acceleration of human impacts on Earths life systems. The second, a corresponding increase in

our ability to know about the first. Most of us now have some informationand opinions,

however scantily formedabout the impacts: climate change, species extinction, depletion of

fisheries, pollution of land and water. Few of us have much idea of where that information comes

from or what it is doing to us. So an important part of our learning process will be getting

acquainted with Earths own bio-electronic information networkour new eyes and ears. We

will learn that the network doesnt merely bring information about human modifications of

Earth; it is itself another modification, one of the biggest of all time. This truth has some relation

to Marshall McLuhans famous 1960s aphorism that the medium is the message. We deal with

information about impacts, and we also deal with the impacts of information.

You may not know that this system exists. Most people dont, although it is not a secret. But

it does exist: It is interacting with the life of every ecosystem and every population of every

species, and its existence touches us all. The mechanical parts of it are satellites and ships and

airplanes; observation stations on the land, buoys bobbing on the oceans, radio transmitters on

migrating birds and mammals; data banks and modeling software and websites. The human parts

are scientists and technicians of many nations and disciplines. In its totality, this network is an

unnoticed marvel of the information age. It brings the news, both good and badever more
compete, reliable and widely accessible information about the astonishing life system we call

Earth. The network began to take form in the 20th century, and is becoming larger and more

sophisticated in the 21st because (a) we desperately need it, and (b) a lot of very capable people

are investing their lives in making it bigger and smarter. It is also more interconnected: what was

once a loose collection of activities set in motion by differentoften competingcountries and

organizations is now evolving into a global system of systems.

The network tells usboth in the information it collects and in the very fact of its existence

that Earth has become a different kind of planet. There was a time when its life forms evolved

according to rules similar to those described by Darwin and his colleagues. There was a time

when climate change was regulated entirely by astronomical forces and Homo sapiens was just

another creature running around in the woods. Now we find that the rules have changed. Every

ecosystem, every species, everything that happens in the air or the water or on the land is

affected by what people do or have done. This is why many scientists believe it is time to

proclaim an end to the Holocene Epoch, which began some ten to twelve thousand years ago

with the end of the last Ice Age, and recognize that we have now entered a new epoch, the

Anthropocene in which human activity has come to rival nature as a force in the evolution of life

on Earth. They point out that it is no longer possible to find a place on Earthcertainly not on an

Earth whose climate has been altered by industry, agriculture, deforestation and the toxic fumes

from millions of carsthat is truly untouched by human hands. Wherever you go, there we are.

And there we have been, through many more millennia than anyone suspected until quite

recently. The changes described above did not begin to happen yesterday, or even a few centuries

ago. Scientists are getting better at tracing the pasteven the distant prehistoric pastand

finding ample evidence that our remote ancestor has their own ever-growing toolkit of ways to
alter the evolutionary fates of other forms of life. They did it on a more modest scale than we do,

of course. But they did it: sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, always in happy

ignorance of the long-range effects of their actions. They hunted some species to extinction,

domesticated others, burned forests to make grazing land, and laterwith the invention of

agricultureplowed fields, dug irrigation canals, and moved useful plants from place to place.

But in the past two centuries, after several thousand years of ignoranceor, if you prefer,

innocencethe exponential curve has been sweeping upward, and we have been moving into

another stage of evolution. The driving force in it has been a two-fold process: the dynamic

interplay of escalating impacts with escalating information. Both faces of the process involve

science and technology: we become capable of doing more things that alter the life of the world

use its resources, change its waterways, wipe out some species and proliferate others. And at

the same time the scientiststhousands of them, all over the worldlearn and learn, explore and

explore, hold up a mirror to our civilization and make us know. One product of this dynamic was

the global ozone-protection regime created in the final decade of the 20th century: humanitys

greatest single achievement in evolutionary governance. It came about in response to a threat that

had troubled precisely nobody on the planet one hundred years earlier.

How and why did such a thing happen?

It certainly didnt happen because people looked up at the skies and pointed out to one

another that there wasnt as much ozone as there used to be. Rather, it was built on a growing

body of scientific knowledge about the stratosphere. It had its most exciting moments with some

truly heroic airplane flights into the frozen clouds above Antarctica to establish the cause of

ozone depletion. And it was achieved only after intense work by diplomats grappling with a new

kind of global issue.

 The bionic information system1 is making us more connected to all life than we have ever

been before, more aware of our impacts and our responsibilities. And we become more

connected yet each day with every bit of good news and bad news that emerges from the

laboratories and beams down to us from the satellites. The system is of course deeply engaged in

investigating climate change (closely related to the ozone threat, yet far more complex) and

promises to continue to be engaged for many centuries to come. We are not about to solve the

global warming problemhavent even agreed that there is such a problemand even if we do

it will still be necessary to continue monitoring not only the atmosphere and the weather systems

but also the well-being of plants and animals, the condition of the oceans and the changes in land

ecosystems all over the world. And the information will undoubtedly play a part in the decisions

of governmental bodies at all levels.

Evolution is a learning process and all the human impacts now being discoveredas well as

the fact that we are now discovering themare steps along this learning path. We begin to see

the changing patterns in human impacts on Earth: from local to global, from uninformed to

informed, from inadvertent to deliberate, and from reactive to proactive.

This book is about the various ways these four trajectories are unfolding and carrying us

rapidly into an age of evolutionary governance. I use the word governance to describe human

practicestending now to become more informed and deliberate, and definitely not restricted to

the actions of governmentsthat affect Earths life systems. The word governance (from the

Greek kubernetes, steersman) suggests guidance rather than complete control. No government,

however totalitarian its aspirations, has ever controlled all the behaviors of its citizens all the

time. And we know now that we do not control complex systems such as Earths climate. We do

1The system could as accurately be called a geonic information systemgeo as in geology. I chose
bionic partly because the word is familiar and already in use, and partly because it stresses the connection
to lifeall life.
intervene in them; I expect and hope that in the future we will intervene more effectively, that the

reality of human life in relation to the planet will be increasing power and responsibility, but

never complete and infallible control. I use the term evolutionary governance to emphasize

that our awareness of impacts has been expanding to include long-range consequences. It had to.

Ideas about human involvement in Earths ecosystems have evolved through several stages in

the modern era: in the mid-19th century came the first documentation of worldwide human

impact on ecosystems and species. In the mid-20th century, environmental and conservation

movements coalesced into a global political force. Now we seem to be torn between extremes:

orgies of denial, orgies of misanthropy. But another awareness is emerging. I will describes its

outlines in the following chapters, along with various ideas, arguments and movements that

contribute to it: the debates about the Anthropocene concept, the growth of Earth system

science and geoengineering, the system of systems development in technology, the Modern

Creation Myth. These show that we have yet another step to take, one that has been implicit in all

the others, toward mature evolutionary governanceconscious and creative engagement in the

life of the planet.

Actually a call for such a step was made explicitwith hearty masculine-by-preference

certaintyover half a century ago when biologist Julian Huxley, first director-general of

UNESCO, wrote:

It is as if man had been suddenly appointed director of the biggest business of all, the business of

evolutionappointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and

preparation. What is more he cant refuse the job. Whether he wants it or not, whether he is conscious

of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this

earth. This is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better
 for all concerned.

Others were coming to a similar conclusion around that time (as well see in Chapter One)

and since then many people have weighed in on the debates about how strongly human societies

can or should influence the course of Earths evolution. Positions range from arguments that we

must take control of it to the conviction that we must learn to leave it alone. This is an

important discussion, but the truth is that nobody has any idea of how to do either of the above.

We have yet to move to a level of dialogue in which we truly face the present situation: we cant

micro-manage all the worlds life forms and ecosystems and we cant not impact the course of

evolution. The situation requires information about what people are doing in and to the planet,

and also new frameworks of thought within which we can organize deeper dialogues, better

understanding of our own minds and feelings, more effective courses of action, andmost

importanta new sense of the role we play in Earths amazing evolution, radically different and

much better informed than current ideas on that subject.

The things we do now are evolutionary because the environmental impacts reach out

beyond the present, resonate through time and space. They are governance because that word

is well-suited to thinking about responsible action toward and within complex systems (such as

weather) that cant be totally controlled in any simple push-the-button fashion, yet afford many

points of intervention, many ways to influence outcomes. To govern.

In these pages well get acquainted with governance as something much less than total

control, and much more than the decisions of governments. It is richly and unavoidably

participatory, although in the great majority of cases the ability to make decisions that have

evolutionary impacts isnt accompanied by any awareness of what those impacts might be:

Organizations of many kinds already influence the course of biological evolution, whether they
know it or not. So do scientists who do genetic research of ecological restoration, and so do

environmentalists who protect open space and endangered species. So do population activists

who seek to lessen human population growth by lowering birth rates, and life-extension activists

who seek to increase it by lowering death rates. So did the boy who, in 1900, shot and killed the

last wild American passenger pigeona species that had numbered in the billions only a century

beforewith his BB gun.

Responsible evolutionary governance will require us to not only recognize the extent of

human power in relation to other life on Earth but also to recognize it with, contradictory as it

may sound, a certain humility. It does involve control, but it alsoequally and inseparably

involves uncertainty, learning, ethical deliberation, and the obligation to learn. It involves power

not only in relation to other life on Earth now, but in relation to the whole course of the planets

evolution. It involves nourishing into being a different sensibility, a new biophilia, a passionate

reverence for all life, for Earth, and for humanity and all its works. The most important part of

this sensibility will be our deeper learning of something we think we know already, which is that

we are an integral part of the Earth which we have begun to govern.

Its not too early to begin serious dialogue about this. If anything, it may be too late.