INTRODUCTION
The viruses keep coming. The climate keeps warming. And the earth is rewilding in real time. We long thought that we could force the natural world to adapt to our species. We now face the ignominious fate of being forced to adapt to an unpredictable natural world. Our species has no playbook for the mayhem that is unfolding around us.
We are, by all accounts, the youngest mammalian species on Earth, with only a two-hundred-thousand-year-long history. For most of that time—95 percent or more—we lived pretty much like our fellow primates and mammals as foragers and hunters living off the land and adapting to the seasons, leaving just a skim of our imprint on the body of the earth.1 What changed? How did we become the despoilers who brought nature almost to its knees but which now has come roaring back to cast us out?
Let’s step back for a moment and look at the now worn narrative regarding our species’ special destiny. During the dark days of the French Revolution in 1794, the philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet laid out a grand vision of the future while waiting to be taken to the guillotine for high treason. He wrote:
“No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties . . . the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite . . . [the] progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.”2
Condorcet’s promissory note provided the ontological foundation for what would subsequently be called the Age of Progress. Today, Condorcet’s vision of humanity’s future appears naïve, even laughable. Still, progress is just the most recent incarnation of the ancient belief that our species was cut from a different cloth from that of other creatures with whom we share the earth. While grudgingly admitting thatHomo sapiens evolved from an ancestral pool dating back to the first glimmer of microbial life, we like to think that we are different.
During the modern era we tossed much of the theological world aside, but managed to keep hold of the Lord’s promise to Adam and Eve that they and their heirs would have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”3 That promise, still taken seriously, but without the religious overtones, has led to the collapse of our planetary ecosystems.
If there is a change to be reckoned with, it’s that we are beginning to realize that we never did have dominion and that the agencies of nature are far more powerful than we thought. Our species now seems much smaller and less consequential in the bigger picture of life on Earth.
People everywhere are scared. We are waking up to the hard reality that our species is to blame for the horrific carnage spreading across the earth—the floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes that are wreaking havoc and undermining economies and ecosystems around the world. We sense that planetary forces bigger than us and not easily subdued by the means we have relied on in the past are here to stay, with ominous repercussions. We are beginning to realize that our species and our fellow creatures are edging ever closer to an environmental abyss from which there is no return.
And now, the warnings that human-induced climate change is taking us into the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. Government leaders, the business and financial community, academia, and the public at large are beginning to question, whole cloth, the shibboleths by which we have lived our lives, interpreted the meaning of our existence, and understood the simple realities of staying alive and secure.
Although the Age of Progress is, for all inte
