Searching for a ‘technofix’ to climate change has many dangers. Could radical humility save the planet?

In 1989, environmentalist Bill McKibben announced to the world that nature was dead. Due to the rapid rate and scale of anthropogenic climate change, he argued, the idea of nature as an entity independent of human activity had become obsolete.

Review: Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? – Richard King (Monash University Publishing)

A new book by Richard King, Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet?, conducts a postmortem on this idea of “nature”. And it describes a dangerous ideology that has taken root at the heart of the environmental movement.

King considers the moral, political, social and economic implications of a particular way of attempting to solve climate change, known as the “technofix”. This mindset looks for “a technological solution to tackle a social or environmental issue”.

We are, King suggests, entering “a period in which mitigation and adaptation are giving way to re-engineering”. As the consequences of climate change become harder to ignore and the environmental and moral costs of inaction become too high, “radical interventions such as geoengineering and de-extinction are taking root in the imaginations of thought leaders and policymakers across the globe”.

But solutions that come in the guise of technological progress may harbour dangers to the planet that we can’t fully fathom or control.

Brave New Wild examines proposals involving nuclear power, geoengineering, de-extinction approaches to conservation, nanotechnologies capable of manipulating matter at a molecular level, smart technologies and interplanetary colonisation. It outlines potentially terrifying scenarios associated with the technofix mindset.

King describes, for example, the risks that come with developments in nanotechnology. Billions of self-fuelling and self-replicating nanomachines deployed to clean up an oil slick could run out of control and lead to an environmental disaster of planetary scale:

Given that every new nanite created would need to consume some of the Earth’s resources to use as fuel or source material, the resulting army could reduce the biosphere to dust within a matter of days. The grey goo would consume the world.

It has also been suggested that mining the moon “will be feasible by the end of the decade”. King notes that some see this as a positive scenario, because the moon is uninhabited and a “barren, airless wasteland”. But he points out there are many potential hazards to such work: lunar dust pollution, the proliferation of space junk and debris, and risks to workers, including mental health problems, physical disabilities, exploitation and death.

Anthropocene thinking and moral hazards

King grounds his critique of the “technofix” in an analysis of the concept of the Anthropocene: a period when human activity is altering the conditions of life on a planetary scale and leaving perceptible traces in the geological record.

This development, King argues, “places humanity at the centre of the Earth story, suggesting that whatever challenges the planet faces will need to be solved by Homo sapiens, the species whose destructiveness is inseparable from its genius”.

Paired with the concept of the “death of nature”, Anthropocene thinking is a deadly precursor to the types of technological interventions that, King argues, will fundamentally change humanity’s relationship to the environment.

The problem is not only that technology can escape human control, with catastrophic consequences. Accepting a perspective that subjugates the non-human world to purely human ends has moral and ethical implications.

“The Anthropocene narrative,” King writes, “tends to encourage a view of nature as infinitely malleable – something that can and should be shaped by human hands, to human ends – and this perspective is likely to reproduce the arrogance and lack of principled reflection that placed us in this situation in the first place.”

Removing the separation between human and non-human nature actually makes it easier to exploit the natural environment, including other humans. This mindset – which King terms “ecomodernism” – “repeats the error of industrial capitalism, and even modernity itself, in treating the environment as an abstract entity that can be endlessly manipulated.”

Responsibility towards nature

In response to the ecomodernist mindset, which “effectively abolishes nature as a category distinct from humanity by making everything humans do effectively identical with it”, Brave New Wild suggests an alternative: what King terms “ecohumanism”.

He argues that nature is at once an idea and a phenomenological reality. “Human beings in short, are always part of and always apart from the natural world: nature defines us, and we define nature.”

This view may appear to be the same as that taken by proponents of the technofix. For King, however, our idea of nature actively shapes our experience of reality: “our ability to recognise ourselves as animals marks us out from all the other animals, while the suite of powers (intellectual, technological) from which that self-recognition is inseparable imposes upon us certain responsibilities – to ourselves and to parental nature.”