But the new problems we’ve given it to solve are ill considered, and the solutions it produces often undesirable.
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The science historian George Dyson once described evolution itself as a kind of computational process that solves problems like how to swim, and how to fly. This strategy works because nature is cleverer than us. Recruit the forests to filter your water. Diversify the microbes in your intestines, the crops in your fields, the plants in your watershed, the research in your grant proposals. But if simplifying nature is the cause of so many modern ills, then Dunn’s policy prescription, conversely, comes down to one simple dictum: Diversify. We panic when bees fail to submit to the rote demands of industrial agriculture. We hoist plants from their natural context, consign them to vast monocultures, then act surprised when the rest of nature conspires to tear them down. We simplify this chaos, this riot of life, at our peril. That when humans spread out into new landmasses our “face mites diverged.” The impression all this arcana leaves with the reader is that we live in a much weirder, more disorienting world than we tend to appreciate. We learn that the yeasts that make beer come from the bodies of wasps. We learn that the Taung child, one of the earliest hominins known to science, was eaten by eagles. Many of us will have to move.Īlong this unsettling journey into the future, the mood is leavened here and there by oddities, which Dunn dusts off like the docent of a strange natural history museum. And as the familiar rhythms of the seasons grow more syncopated and strange, some swath of our range will be increasingly foreclosed, to God knows what geopolitical effect. But as we push the climate beyond the norms of the past three million years we will hit the hard limits of physiology. Even with the spread of air-conditioning, and all the creature comforts afforded by burning fossil fuels by the gigaton, we still mostly inhabit the same shockingly narrow band of the globe that we have for millenniums. We are animals after all, and can be studied as such by ecologists. While it might not surprise us to read that mosquitoes have a niche that affects their distribution on the planet, it might be more difficult to recognize that we humans do as well. The sooner we recognize this, Dunn argues, the better. Life is not a passive force on the planet, and much as we might presume to sit in judgment of Creation - even sorting species by their economic value to us - we live on nature’s terms. Make a world fit for bedbugs, then try to kill them with chemicals, and you’ll end up - not in a world without bedbugs, but one in which they’ve “evolved resistance to half a dozen different pesticides.” Fog a tree with pesticides and watch new beetle species tumble from the canopy by the hundreds, a “riot of unnamed life.” Chlorinate your water and, though you might wipe out most parasites, you’ll soon bedew your shower head with chlorine-resistant mycobacteria. In “A Natural History of the Future,” the ecologist Rob Dunn sketches an arresting vision of this relentless natural world - a world that is in equal measures creative, unguided and extravagant.
Nature ceaselessly advances, trespasses, embarrasses our every effort to keep it at bay, and ultimately bursts through. The metaphor extends beyond epidemiology. But others hold back diseases, which are ready to saturate and overwhelm the fragile walls of antibiotics we’ve erected. Yes, some hold back rivers that strain against their embankments. A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FUTURE What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species By Rob Dunn
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