The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [2]
The Book of Genesis is full of instances of humans being punished for their attempts to become like God. After the woman and the serpent combine forces to taste the forbidden fruit from one tree, in Genesis 3:22 the Lord complains: “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” Man is banished from Eden to deny him this power of immortality, but Genesis 11:3 once again finds humanity trespassing on the power of the divine, this time with a great tower aimed at reaching heaven. God’s solution to the Tower of Babel was a smart one, achieved by dividing humans into mutually uncomprehending linguistic groups. Today, with the worldwide language of science, that problem has finally been overcome. Venter and his team have seemingly proved that all life is reducible to chemistry—there is nothing more to it than that. No essential life force, no soul, no afterlife.
With the primacy of science, there seems to be less and less room for the divine. God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers. On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things. Our collective power already threatens or overwhelms most of the major forces of nature, from the water cycle to the circulation of major elements like nitrogen and carbon through the entire Earth system. Our pollutants have subtly changed the color of the sky, while our release of half a trillion tonnes of carbon as the greenhouse gas CO2 into the air is heating up the atmosphere, land, and oceans. We have leveled forests, plowed up the great grasslands, and transformed the continents to serve our demands from sea to shining sea. Our detritus gets everywhere, from the highest mountains to the deepest oceans: Abandoned plastic bags drift ghostlike in the unfathomable depths, even kilometers beneath the floating Arctic ice cap. Wherever you look, this truth is there to behold: Pristine nature—Creation—has disappeared forever.
There is a name for this new geological era. The Holocene—the 10,000-year, climatically equable post–ice age era during which human civilization evolved and flourished—has slipped into history, to make way for the Anthropocene. For the first time since life began, a single animal is utterly dominant: the ape species Homo sapiens. Evolution has equipped us with huge brains, stunning adaptability, and brilliantly successful technical prowess. In less than half a million years we have gone from prodding anthills with sticks to constructing a worldwide digital communications network. Who can beat that? Like Venter’s bacteria, we have been extremely fruitful and multiplied prodigiously: Humans are now more numerous than any large land animal ever to walk the Earth, and the combined weight of our fleshy biomass outstrips that of most other larger animals put together, with the single exception of our own livestock. The productive capacity of a major part of the planet’s terrestrial surface is now dedicated to satisfying our demands for food, fuel, and fiber, while the oceans are trawled around the clock for the fishy fats and proteins our brains and bodies demand. In sum, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire planetary “net primary productivity” (everything produced by plants using the power of the sun) is today devoted to sustaining this one species—us.
With close to 7 billion specimens of Homo sapiens currently in existence, mostly enjoying rising (though