In the face of environmental collapse, humanity may need to turn to artificial replacements for nature – how might we avoid the most dystopian of these futures? Researcher Lauren Holt makes the case for a broader form of "offsetting" to help balance technology with natural systems.

In the opening few minutes of the science-fiction film Blade Runner 2049, a police car flies over a landscape that has been transformed by synthetic farming. Concentrically-arranged mirrors for capturing solar energy point and tilt towards central towers like worshippers at Mecca, circle after circle stretching into the distance. Further on, a mosaic of plastic-covered indoor farms cover every inch of land, glinting in the dull sunlight like facets of cracked glaze. Inside one of these cells, a worker in a hazmat suit dredges a handful of squirming beetle larvae from a murky green pool. We learn these farming techniques saved humanity from famine caused by ecological collapse in the mid-2020s. The entire planet is ravaged, containing nothing but highly coveted relics of "real" organisms, and a dysfunctional climate characterised by dry dust. Even then, humans survive, and even prosper – there might be nothing wild left, but they can create perfectly engineered replicant animals to replace the real things. The metaphorical "umbilical cord" connecting human survival and the biosphere has been well and truly cut.

Throughout 2020 and 2021 as the world hunkered down for the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself reflecting on this bleak depiction, as part of my work at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in Cambridge, UK. I puzzled over what the future might look like once humanity had overcome Covid-19, and the climate-ecological crisis shimmered once again into view. If severe environmental degradation continues, a plausible path is one where humans will, through necessity, decouple from a biosphere that ceases to function. A quote kept going around my mind, by complex systems researcher Brad Werner at a major scientific conference in 2012. In a talk entitled "Is Earth F**ked?", he said that global capitalism, aided by technology, "has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that 'Earth-human systems' are becoming dangerously unstable in response".

What if, as Werner suggested, Earth really was in trouble and the planet's natural systems are fated to collapse and die off? Will we develop artificial back-ups to take their place, like in Blade Runner, and if so, what might that world look like? These questions led me to publish a paper exploring the consequences and dangers of severing the human-biosphere umbilical cord, and how this process may already have begun. Humanity is already on the path to decoupling from natural systems – so if we want to avoid the worst scenarios of this trajectory, what might we do about it?

Faced with a looming collapse of Earth's natural systems, talk of decoupling is no longer science fiction. In some cases, it manifests as ever more profound "fixes" to preserve our pursuit of the good life. For example, scientists have begun devising ways to synthesise "ecosystem services" – such as pollination or other natural processes that benefit human society. In food production, this involves attempting to grow crops under artificial light underground, culturing microalgae, mycoprotein and mealworm in bioreactors, and introducing modified genes to increase the resilience of agricultural species to environmental change.

At other times, the proposed decoupling is framed as a form of escapism. The newly touted "metaverse", for instance, promises a form of spatial, workplace and recreational departure from the "meatspace" of the physical world: why visit a polluted forest or lake when you can access a near-perfect digital simulation of a clean one from your home? Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, technologists and billionaires talk of the need to abandon a degraded Earth altogether, and are taking the tentative first steps to develop Mars-bound spaceships.

Even if we don't physically separate from nature to this extent, a technologically adapted future where the world is engineered and modified around our actions is seen by some as acceptable, if not necessary to meet the harsh conditions of the future. Indeed, the likely truth is that technology might be the only clear way out of future disasters given the terrifyingly short timescales involved. Even widespread reduction or restraint in human activity, such the recent global lockdowns, barely dents emissions and other destructive practices.

Some may believe that decoupling needn't be a concern. The threat of an exclusively human-technological world would not be a dystopia to many. Advocates of transhumanism, for example, imagine a future where humans have transcended their current state to combine with technology – in the most extreme cases, evolving into uploaded digital beings. This is not my own perspective, but in the past I have definitely been seduced by a vision of "green" transhumanism: an idea explored by the author and feminist Donna Haraway. This proposes that, rather than seeking to preserve natural systems, we might instead genetically integrate ourselves with the biosphere, such that both human and natural are transformed. I saw it as an attempt to preserve species threatened by extinction by acting as biological arks into the future, or as a form of beautiful annihilation into a future weird ecology.

However, a Blade Runner world that contains only humans and matter technologically arranged under their control, would be a machine wilderness rather than an organic one. In that future, green transhumanism would not even be possible. Either there wouldn't be anything left to get absorbed into, or the valuable bits of the biosphere would get wholly taken into us, assimilated and changed, appropriated, and the remainder would be gone.

Offsetting complexity

So, where do we go from here? Could there be alternatives to the most extreme forms of decoupling? There are no easy answers, but I would propose one idea.

Allow me to introduce you to a conceptual tool – a metaphor to explore this space. Imagine a gradient which represents all the material complexity in the world, with the extreme complexity of "self-organised" matter at one end and consciously "engineered" matter at the other. So, at that latter far end might be – for example – the most delicate and finely engineered human structure (AI or a supercomputer perhaps), and at the other end, the wildest and most diverse ecosystem. A midpoint might represent something alive but highly modified and controlled, like a monoculture of crops, or an ornamental garden.

This gradient acts as a conceptual tool for linking different parts of the spectrum of material existence. In modern times, there has been a rapid decline on the side of self-organised natural complexity and a substantial increase on side of human-engineered complexity. A forest is turned into a mine and then electronics. Trillions of organisms are utilised as food and broken down to fuel human bodies and invention. Skyscrapers rise, economies are created, land is razed or complex ecosystems replaced by simpler ones. As a result of this activity, 68% of biodiversity has been lost since 1970, and the amount of human-made material including concrete, plastic and bricks now outweighs the total mass of biological matter on the planet.

But what if the creator of each new "manmade" thing had an obligation towards creating its opposite on this gradient? For example, a form of biodiversity investment or rewilding instigated when something is added to the engineered side. There is a profound symmetry to the idea that whatever complexity is built or created on one side, must be equally replaced or protected on the other for the system to remain stable.

Offsetting is not a new idea, and I certainly wouldn't want to take any credit for it here. We are most used to encountering it in the context of air travel: you can pay for a company to plant CO2-guzzling trees. In terms of carbon offsetting, trees are a good contender for the polar opposite of air-travel pollution on the gradient outlined above, even if the practice currently has problems in terms of a time-lag in carbon sequestration and unhealthy monocultures of trees. However, while pollution or illegal environmental damage are sometimes fined or taxed, offsetting is rarely considered for processes other than carbon production, and direct withdrawals from nature by new human creations are not "priced-in".

Another well-established category of offset is reserving land for national parks, green belts to contain cities, or nature reserves to preserve valuable ecosystems. Here, though, these schemes are often undertaken by governments, and there is often less of a direct link between the builders of engineered objects such as a new housing block or factory, and areas of regeneration or rewilding. While national efforts can have impact, it would be inspiring to see the burden of restoration fall more significantly on those who are directly unbalancing the system. For example, the UK government recently introduced legislation of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) whereby all new developments need to deliver a 10% improvement in local biodiversity.

Elsewhere, experiments with broader offsets are also beginning to happen. To take one specific example: a recent study led by Katie Devenish of Bangor University and colleagues found that a mining operation in Madagascar had successfully offset the forest loss caused by its new mine by slowing deforestation elsewhere in the country.

There are also recent projects underpinned by so-called "nature positive" principles, which aim to build ecological resilience and reverse loss. Operation Wallacea, a biodiversity and climate research organisation, has devised biodiversity credits to trace the tangible improvements to biodiversity in any given area, and to develop an international biodiversity credit standard whichcould be traded in the same way as a carbon credit.

I am aware that offsetting is no panacea, and it can create moral quandaries too. The writer and environmentalist George Monbiot, for example, has compared offsetting to the sale of indulgences by the Catholic church in the 16th Century, when sinners could, in effect, pay to cancel out their bad deeds. It’s true the idea runs the risk of greenwashing or giving a green-light to damaging processes, but I would argue that any, and preferably equal, act of replacement is better than none.

A long-lived truth

As well as the practical benefits, I believe there could be deeper reasons to embrace an approach of balancing human complexity in this way, rooted in timeless human ideas. As I thought about the gradient metaphor, there was something about the two types of material complexity − extreme human engineering on one hand, and total organic wildness on the other − that reminded me of the concept of psychological wholeness; the balancing of the conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche. In stories and symbolism, the idea of balancing and combination of opposites has appeared continually over thousands of years – spanning mythologies, religions, and philosophies across the world. In the ancient principles of Daoism, out of the black and white of yin and yang the "10,000 things" are born: every species of animal, humans, all of life, matter, and every form of technology too. The Ancient Greeks conceptualised Dionisius and Apollo: the gods of pleasurable debauchery and enlightened decorum, respectively. It was not encouraged to live a life purely of one or the other, and as Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian modes of being are what creates the dramatic arcs or meanings in this world. The principle of opposites even underlies the philosophies and experiments of ancient alchemy, with the purification and combination of opposites seen as an ultimate goal.

In these examples, to say there are opposites does not mean one is bad and one is good. It is more that up cannot exist without down, matter without anti-matter, and life could not exist without death. If this wisdom keeps re-occurring across folklore, mythology and in a multitude of symbols because it reflects an important truth, then we might be wise to heed its message and be concerned with the continued existence of opposites and the dynamic play between them. That is to say, even if you were someone who wouldn't enjoy spending time in nature, and even if we found a way to not rely on it for survival − for example, by creating artificial systems that would sustain us in a decoupled state – the decision to foster a balance between technology and nature aligns with long-held human values across many societies.

Humans do not need to insert themselves into controlling life processes in every corner of the world, down to the very strands of DNA, to force the Earth system to absorb the shocks of our presence. Instead, a far better future might be to become something closer to "alchemists" of the Earth system, creating areas of "high-modernity" but countering their creation with their natural opposite, leaving relinquished areas to regenerate.

The sociobiologist E O Wilson suggested, or rather implored, for half the world to be rewilded. This was framed as being essential for human survival, but this 50:50 split appears to me to have a particular beauty and intuitive fairness, which is not just an aesthetic feeling, but a spiritual feeling, not just of harmony but of "justness". What would be more interesting, whole and complete, than both forms of existence in their fullest realisations?

It might still be possible to have a balance between the total material existence of humanity (AI, skyscrapers, automobiles, concrete, computing, the economy, art, intensive farming), and nature (ant hills, the Amazon, English forests, sand dunes, Tampa swamps, deserts, deep sea trenches and coral reefs), if the latter is increased in quality and quantity. Imagine walking from a technologically mature mega-city, but then out through the city boundaries to the lushest, most complex and wild biodiversity stretching into the distance: technological complexity balanced by the organic.

The truth is we may need an existence like Blade Runner 2049 in some portions of the planet, and we do need to decouple to some extent, as technology will be needed to liberate the land required for rewilding. But, watching the recent flurry of commercial space flights, I wondered about how much biodiversity had been lost to make that happen, what it cost the Earth system. If the Earth is not to be irreversibly degraded and unbalanced, we need some equal and opposite pull in the direction of replenishing natural complexity. Surely the best reward of a healthy planet is space exploration, not it being an escape from a dying planet. If the human-biosphere umbilical cord is to be cut, it should leave mother Earth in peak health, and in service to both parties.

 

BBC

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