"Growing up in the Anthropocene"

Growing Up in the Anthropocene - my recommendations for Five Books

Ken Caldeira, who is mentioned in the piece, has this: How far can climate change go?

Subsidies: a paper from ODI says  that for 42 developing countries where data are available...the scale of fossil-fuel subsidies to consumers, at $396 billion in 2011, is 75 times higher than the average annual approved climate finance of $5 billion from 2010-2012

In this piece Christopher Shaw argues that the 2 degree "dangerous climate change" threshold I mention in the interview is a distraction.

Photo: Igor F. Petkovic

(P.S. As it happens, The Guardian has just published an interview with Jeremy Grantham, who stood beside Hansen and others at the Keystone XL protest. )

Galapagos

photo by Hara Woltz - Imaging Ecology

The creature from the black puddle

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

The eggs, nestled in a protective jelly stained golden by tannins that glistened in the light, might have looked like any other clutch of salamander eggs from a woodland pond. But they weren’t, and this was no pristine sylvan pool. It was a roadside puddle, and those eggs promised to contain something unsettling. If Brady was right, the toxic brew associated with road run-off had forced the spotted salamanders to evolve in the space of decades. In the time since Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon in 1969, these animals had been reinvented by nature to cope with life on the road.

--from Unnatural Selection by Emily Monosson, published by Aeon magazine.

Persistent sub-lethal exposure to toxic chemicals is enough to drive evolution in salamanders and other creatures. From this, other thoughts follow:

Is it possible that the genomes of vertebrate populations are not as recalcitrant to change as we once thought? What if they harbour subtle genetic variants, like ghosts from environmental challenges past, offering a degree of flexibility in the face of change? Perhaps...[the] salamanders are harbingers of discoveries to come. It might even be that rapid evolution in response to toxic chemicals is quite common. A further...question suggests itself. If life can adapt, why bother with expensive environmental cleanup? Why not let nature take its course?

The answer is "both intriguing and deeply troubling":

Industrial chemicals might have effects that are widespread and heritable, yet also maladaptive, not only in humans but in all life on earth...

We certainly have not escaped the chemical gauntlet. We might yet experience a far more insidious kind of rapid evolution through chemically induced epigenetic alterations. How these will influence the evolution of human populations is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they will be of little consequence...[or] perhaps humans in the not-so-distant future will become unwitting actors in a real-life science fiction, fending off hoards of fecund, rapidly evolving chemical-resistant pathogens and insects even as we are weakened through the accumulation of myriad changes of our own making.

Endless forms

We have moved beyond a world of natural history into an era of what Richard Pell calls “postnatural history.” His new museum, the Center for PostNatural History, opened in Pittsburgh [in July 2012]. With it he endeavours to create a curiosity cabinet from the Anthropocene period - the age of man.

The only criteria for inclusion in Pell’s Wunderkammer are that the organisms have been intentionally altered by humans in a way that would be passed on through generations. Intentionality is the important bit, Pell says; after all, a museum of creatures changed by pollution, nuclear radiation or climate change would be endless.

--  from A museum of creatures re-engineered by humans

(Image: Guatemalan worry dolls constructed from cultured tissue, Oron Catts and Lonat Zurr)

Zombie reefs

A heartfelt and sane contribution from Carl Safina to a discussion of whether it's time to give up on coral reefs:

I can’t remember who dragged me to see the movie “Jurassic Park,” but one resonant line in that movie was worth the price of admission, this unforgettable sentence: “Life finds a way.” It popped out at me because it so economically summed up a truth behind all of nature’s stunning diversity and the continuity of the living adventure of Life on Earth.

Yes, things die, lineages go extinct, and coral reefs are in a world of hurt. All true. Also true is there exist heat-tolerant corals, corals that are regularly exposed to (and routinely survive) the extreme stress of finding themselves out in the tropical air at low tide, and many ocean organisms that live through large swings in pH through tidal cycles.

Yes many coral reefs are degraded. Yes it doesn’t look good. But sometimes living diversity supplies marginal adaptations that suddenly fit perfectly into new conditions. Someone (not Darwin) called it “survival of the fittest.” That’s what the phrase means; not survival of the strongest but of the ones who find themselves in the right place at the right time as conditions change to suddenly suit them. Look around; it works.

Agreed, it is past due to raise the alarm that coral reefs in many areas have largely collapsed, and that their future looks bleak. As an anguished lover of reefs and living things generally, and as an ecologist by profession, I cannot picture what it will take for coral reef systems to survive and thrive. But I also cannot picture a world in which no reef corals adapt, persist, and flourish, simply because it’s true: Life finds a way.

Bradbury seems to suggest giving up and spending money on ways to replace the values (for example, fish) that coral reefs have provided. But what would giving up look like? Overfishing is old news, and plenty of people are, in fact, spending money trying to raise fish. Some are making money. Overpopulation: also old news and crucial to everything from water supplies to prospects for peace. One doesn’t need to certify future coral reef destruction to realize that overpopulation is bad for human health and dignity, not to mention a catastrophe for wild living systems. These problems have caused the losses to date and they continue. Warming and acidification are also building.

But to accept that reefs are doomed implies that the best response is to give up hope, thus give up effort. That means we give up on curbing overfishing and allowing rebuilding (yet these two goals are in fact are increasingly working in many places, specifically because people have not given up, and because letting fish recover can work). It means we give up on controlling pollution (in the U.S., the Clean Water Act brought great improvement to rivers so polluted that they actually caught fire multiple times; developing nations deserve to do no less for themselves). It means we give up on population, whose most effective solving strategy is to teach girls to read and write.

Giving up, while reefs still flourish in many places, means accepting what is unacceptable, and abandoning work on situations that can likely be improved. It means deciding to be hopeless. It means giving up on the reefs, the fishes, and the people, who need all the combined efforts of those who both know the science best—and who, while life exists, won’t give up.

The science is clear that reefs are in many places degraded and in serious trouble. But no science has, or likely can, determine that reefs and all their associated non-coral creatures are unequivocally, equally and everywhere, completely doomed to total non-existence. In fact, much science suggests they will persist in some lesser form. Bleak prospects have been part of many dramatic turnarounds, and, who knows, life may, as usual—with our best efforts—find a way.

'Rapid and unpredictable transformation'

When, in 2007, I started writing this blog and researching the book it supports, I discovered that many well-informed people had not heard of the Anthropocene. That has now changed. [1]

The nature and significance of the Anthropocene transformation is partly captured in this passage (in a paper from which Nature excludes non-subscribers but which David Roberts at Grist helpfully quoted a few days ago):

On the timescale most relevant to biological forecasting today, biotic effects observed in the shift from the last glacial to the present interglacial included many extinctions; drastic changes in species distributions, abundances and diversity; and the emergence of novel communities. New patterns of gene flow triggered new evolutionary trajectories, but the time since then has not been long enough for evolution to compensate for extinctions.

At a minimum, these kinds of effects would be expected from a global-scale state shift forced by present drivers, not only in human-dominated regions but also in remote regions not now heavily occupied by humans; indeed, such changes are already under way.

Given that it takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years for evolution to build diversity back up to pre-crash levels after major extinction episodes, increased rates of extinction are of particular concern, especially because global and regional diversity today is generally lower than it was 20,000 years ago as a result of the last planetary state shift. … Possible too are substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population. … Although the ultimate effects of changing biodiversity and species compositions are still unknown, if critical thresholds of diminishing returns in ecosystem services were reached over large areas and at the same time global demands increased … widespread social unrest, economic instability and loss of human life could result.

Note

[1] The word was probably coined in 2000 although the concept predates this. Notable articles bringing it to a large, non-specialist audience are much more recent.  Oliver Morton's cover story for The Economist, for example, was published in May 2011. (Added 21 June 2012) See Welcome to the Anthropocene by David Biello

Dosidicus gigas

To meet a [Humboldt] squid in the wild is one of life's great pleasures. They follow your movements with intelligent, saucer eyes. Their emotions are written on their skin in quick-fire colour changes that pulse and ripple in incandescent waves across their bodies. The Humboldt's uncertain temper adds a little frisson to any encounter. Divers have been roughed up by squid or had their masks or gear tugged. After the adrenalin rush has passed, most divers feel the animals were more curious than aggressive. If they had really wanted to hurt them, with their huge strength they could have done far worse.

-- Callum Roberts in Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing. [1]

Roberts notes that the Humboldt squid seems to have benefited from expansion of its low oxygen habitat and from the loss of big predatory sharks to overfishing. [2] According to Ron O'Dor, its range has expanded from South America all the way to Alaska as some 90% of large fish have been eliminated by Man. [3] So the species looks like a real beneficiary of the Anthropocene.

On the other hand Rui Rosa predicts the animal's metabolism will drop in future because there will be more carbon dioxide in the water."The squid will be more lethargic and so more vulnerable to their predators because they won't be able to escape them any more." [4] 

Could we, then, be witnessing a spectacular boom to be followed shortly by a spectacular bust in Humboldt squid numbers as a result of human impacts?  Is there a name for species such as this that ride the Anthropocene up and (perhaps) then crash? 

Notes

1. Reviewed in The Economist and the Financial Times. My interview with Roberts will be published in Mandarin and English by Chinadialogue
2. Invasive range expansion by the Humboldt squid
3. The incredible flying squid
4. Synergistic effects of climate-related variables suggest future physiological impairment in a top oceanic predator

Gomphotheres of the Rambunctious Garden

At an event titled Human Nature? Man and the Environment at Canning House in London yesterday, Yadvinder Malhi, one of the four excellent speakers, invited his listeners to consider human impacts on the Amazon basin over a longer time frame than many of us are accustomed to do. 

Malhi described the sense of sense of awe he felt at seeing this continent-sized forest on his first visit in 1995. Contemplating the huge trees, he experienced nature in the Amazon as essentially benign. The feeling has remained with him. You do have to watch out for the odd snake, but essentially there's nothing [natural] to worry about. Even the insects aren't too bad.

His more recent experience in the West African rainforest, by contrast, was a completely different. Walking with a guide in forest in Gabon for the first time, he learned to stop every few steps and listen for forest elephants: cow-sized animals which look cute but are extremely dangerous.

The contrast led him to ask himself, why were there no elephants in the South American rainforest?The answer is that, of course, there were. Gomphotheres were common across much of the continent until about 12 to 10,000 years ago when, along with some fifty other large mammals including the Stegomastodon, the Toxodon, the Giant Ground Sloth and the Glyptodont, they became extinct.

Few dispute that humans played an important role in many of these extinctions, as well those on other continents beyond Africa from about 60,000 to 10,000 years ago. Rapid climate change may also have played a part. Quite likely it was a combination of the two pressures that did it. (In Africa animals had co-evolved with humans, and learned to be wary of them much earlier [although see this].)

What impact did the South American extinctions have on the forest? Elephants and other large mammals have significant impact on African ecosystems, and there is every reason to suppose that the same was true for their counterparts in South America. In Africa, tree cover is often more patchy where elephants are present in large numbers. On the other hand, the large seeds of some tree species may need large animals such as elephants to spread them around, and the same would have been true in the New World.

In addition, it may be that (over a very long time) big animals played a major role in the transport of nutrients flowing down the rivers to the poor soils beyond. The animals would eat vegetation on the river banks and often pooh elsewhere. Other animals would later eat the vegetation so fertilized and carry nutrients further inland. The Amazon ecosystem could still be responding to the loss of these animals-as-nutrient-transport-systems 10,000 years later.

The Amazon, said Malhi, has only really become a part of the global social-economic system since around 1950, his favoured date for the start of the Anthropocene, or at least its startling acceleration. Malhi suggested four scenarios/ways of thinking about the future Amazon:

• 'Breadbasket' (made possible by huge inputs of fertilizers and fuel)
• (Inter)national conservation park
• Lungs of the world
• Rambunctious garden

The last scenario, from a phrase coined or popularized by Emma Marris, would, he suggested, represent compromise between the preceding visions -- one that recognizes that Amazonia was and is a human-altered system.

I wonder: what about a project to introduce and monitor the impact of a small herd of elephants on a designated and contained area of South America forest or savannah?

P.S. 26 April:  following the four speakers, some discussion focused on Brazil's land use law.

Lots of rats and pigeons

...aka 'disaster taxa' in the wake of our current mass exintinction:

Ultimately...life will recover: it always has. The mass extinctions of the past offer hints as to how the ecosystem will eventually bounce back, says Mike Benton at the University of Bristol, UK. The two that we know most about are the end-Permian extinction 252 million years ago, which wiped out 80 per cent of species, and the less severe end-Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, which famously took out the dinosaurs. The Permian extinction is more relevant because it was caused by massive global warming, but Benton cautions that the world was very different then, so today's mass extinction will not play out in quite the same way.

Recoveries usually have two stages. If ours pans out in the same way, the first 2 to 3 million years will be dominated by fast-reproducing, short-lived "disaster taxa". These will rapidly give rise to new species and bring the world's species count back up

-- from Will there be any Nature Left?, part of a package on the Deep Future. I'd say the future is likely to be less predictable, especially given the human tendency to meddle and manipulate.

The Matrix and the Rambunctious Garden

Matt Ridley has a vision of the future:

With much of the world’s meat grown, brain-free and legless, in factories, and much of its fruit and vegetables in multi-storey urban farms lit with cheap fusion power, there will again be vast steppes, savannahs, prairies and rain forests, teeming with herds of wild game. Perhaps even a few woolly mammoths among them.

To some, parts of this scenario may look more like a nightmare.  Even on the most optimistic reasonable view there are grounds for doubt. How do we know future 're-wilded' ecosystems will take the form we want them to if system interactions and changes are more complex than we can model and predict? The uncertainties are even greater if,  as the evidence indicates,  large scale  changes to the Earth system as a whole are also already underway?

Perhaps, in the event of relatively benign outcomes in which humans are still a major presence, the future will see not so much 'the revival of wild ecosystems' as the creation of new ones -- hard to predict combinations of old and new by human hand and accident.

See Emma Marris on the Rambunctious Garden and Garry Hamilton on Welcome Weeds: How alien invasion could save the Earth.

And on this blog Sperm to worm, womb to tomb and erection to resurrection.

A reminder

Biodiversity has essential social, economic, cultural, spiritual and scientific values and its protection is hugely important for human survival. The rapid loss of biodiversity, unprecedented in the last 65 million years, is jeopardising the provision of ecosystem services that underpin human well-being. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that 15 of the 24 ecosystem services evaluated were in decline, 4 were improving, and 5 were improving in some regions of the world and in decline in other regions. Measures to conserve biodiversity and make a sustainable society possible need to be greatly enhanced and integrated with social, political and economic concerns. There is a need to value biodiversity and ecosystem services and create markets that can appropriate the value for these services as a basis for a ‘green’ economy.

-- from Environmental and Development Challenges – The Imperative to Act by Blue Planet Laureates

Meanwhile, Canada says it "will not hesitate to defend its interests" (sic).

 David Graeber reminds us:

[Thomas Hobbes argued that] even if we are all rational enough to understand it's in our long-term interest to live in peace and security, our short-term interests are often such that killing and plundering are the most obviously profitable courses to take, and all it takes is a few to cast aside their scruples to create utter insecurity and chaos.

Mobile marine reserves

Instead of restricting areas by their location, mobile reserves would identify particular conditions that attract marine life "The stationary reserves do little to protect highly mobile animals, like most of the fish, turtles, sharks and seabirds," [says] Larry Crowder [of] Stanford University. "We think of protected areas as places that are locked down on a map. But places in oceans are not locked down, they move."

...One potential mobile marine reserve could protect the north Pacific convergence zone, a region where two giant currents meet head-on, bringing plankton, small fish, turtles and major predators together. The zone is always teeming with life, but it moves from season to season.

-- report

The fish in the sea

A study suggests that most fish in the oceans today are descended from freshwater species. One possible implication of this, notes a report is that:

it is possible that seas may be more prone to extinctions than land, rivers or lakes; while rivers and lakes form an "arc of survival" that can reseed the oceans when marine species are lost. 

"I don't think our results show that seas are strongly inhospitable, but they may become so at certain points in time," [says study co-author John Wiens]. Unfortunately, the strong ocean acidification that is predicted for the near future means we may be heading for one of those times now, he adds. 

Today, however, rivers and lakes may not be healthy enough to help re-supply the oceans...

Hyperwarming

Studies suggest that long-term climate models up to the year 2300 are missing key positive feedbacks that could send global temperatures towards levels high enough to melt the ice, if not over the entire Gamburtsevs, then at least large parts of even Antarctica for the first time in over 30 million years:

In particular, the release of methane from melting Arctic permafrost has not yet been factored in. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but remains in the atmosphere for only 10 years on average before it reacts with hydroxyl radicals in the air to form CO2. However, a large release of methane from melting permafrost could swamp the hydroxyl supply, allowing the methane to linger in the atmosphere for 15 years or more, further amplifying the warming. 

Some feedbacks never before considered might also come into play... In the future oceans may store less carbon. Normally some atmospheric carbon is lost at sea, buried in the carcasses of tiny marine animals. But sediment from the Eocene contains little carbon, suggesting that this process failed during the last hothouse...

Reversing this?

C.S.I.: Dog Dump

‘Globally endangered Egyptian vulture!’ shouted Çağan, slamming on the brakes. Glancing skyward, I caught a glimpse of something brown flapping away. The body of the Egyptian vulture is brown and off-white, but its face is bright yellow. ‘They get that colour from eating shit, which is full of yellow carotenoid pigments,’ Çağan explained. In males, the bright-yellow face is an indicator of fitness and virility, signaling a capacity to eat enormous quantities of shit without getting sick.

On behalf of the Egyptian vulture, as well as the region’s other vulture species Çağan had recently opened a ‘vulture restaurant’...which in its pilot phase had served mostly dead dog. Emrah, Çağan’s science coordinator, was charged with retrieving dog carcasses from the city dumps and depositing them in random locations around Aras, to see how the vultures reacted. The vultures reacted well. You bring the dead dog, and the vultures take care of the rest. The one problem was that a lot of dogs in the dumps had been poisoned as part of a stray-dog reduction program.

...Thus began a phase of Emrah’s life that might have been called “C.S.I.: Dog Dump”: did this dog die of natural causes, or was it poisoned? He started out bribing the staff at the dumps, a pack of cigarettes for every clean carcass. It was a good system, although Emrah inevitably began asking himself certain questions. Was it for this that he had completed his master’s in biology? Further, the workers at the dump clearly thought he was some kind of pervert. One of them once remarked that Emrah might not find that day’s dog suitable: “The thing is, this one is male.”

-- from Natural Histories: A journey in the shadow of Ararat by Elif Batuman

Future fish

The construct also contains a stretch of DNA from the promoter region of an ocean pout, an eel-like creature that lives in extremely cold environments (the promoter is a switch that controls the expression of a downstream gene). Normally, the eel uses this promoter to keep an antifreeze gene turned on constantly so it does not freeze. The promoter is therefore “constitutive,” meaning it is always active, and coupling it with a growth factor gene in an Atlantic salmon results in the salmon experiencing a continual growth spurt—since the growth factor is continually produced. Studies have shown that the genetically-altered Atlantic salmon’s appetite would make it constantly ravenous, meaning that it would eat everything around in sight.

-- FDA Decision Will Lead To First Ever Genetically-Modified Animal For Consumption

Weed world

What I’m really proposing is a shift in our value system. What we value and don’t value can change. "Weedy" is an interesting cultural concept -- in reality, weeds are successful plants. We should celebrate them, because they’re the plants we don’t have to worry about it. They’re gong to be fine. They’re the resilient part of nature.

-- Emma Marris.

In Solar, Ian McEwan's anti-hero Michael Beard tell his girlfriend that the humblest weed in a pavement crack contains a precious secret (the true nature of photosynthesis) that the world's top laboratories are only beginning to understand.

Jelly world

Hyperbole?

a future 'gelatinous' ocean reminiscent of the early Ediacaran if fishing and other anthropogenic stressors remain unchanged

-- from Faking Giants... Some jellyfish are increasing the amount of water in their bodies in order to increase their size and so collide with more prey.

Next to nature

Two points from Peter Kahn:

• Eventually there might be a new ontological category of beings, that are both alive and not alive at the same time.

• I've had many discussions with people who say that, yes, things are getting worse for us environmentally, but we're an adaptive species so we'll simply adapt. I argue, however, that just because we do adapt, it doesn't mean we're going to adapt well. If you put us in prison, we would adapt. We wouldn't die, but we wouldn't do well. I think that as we continue to degrade nature and distance ourselves from it, we are adapting, but I don't think we are necessarily thriving - we're like animals in a zoo.

I find Levi Bryant on Wilderness Ontology opaque, but will try to get to grips with it.

Oliver Morton may be right when he says that in the Anthropocene 'wilderness, for good or ill, is increasingly irrelevant. As the ecologist Simon Lewis argues, embracing the Anthropocene 'means treating humans not as insignificant observers of the natural world but as central to its workings, elemental in their force.'

Run slowly, night-horses

Half of vertebrate species may be gone by the end of this century. Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction? is good on, among other things, the frogs, the bats and some of the people who care for them. [1] At least one take-home point is familiar:

In the end, the most deadly aspect of human activity may simply be the pace of it.[2]

One of the consequences of frenetic human activity as currently organised is, of course, rapid climate change. [3] In Heatstroke: Nature in Age of Global Warming, Anthony Barnosky writes that, before Man, the typical species life span of a mammal was 1.7 to 2.5 million years [4]. For plants, reptiles or amphibians the likely span was somewhat longer. For birds and fish perhaps a little shorter. And, he says,

In order to have that long a life span a species must be able to withstand (or, in an evolutionary sense, adapt to) the broad, slow shifts in climate that are natural as tracked over many millions of years, and also the more rapid fluctuations in climate that are nested within individual million-year time slices.

On 'the lowest reasonable estimate', Barnosky continues, the global average temperature will rise will be 1.1 Centigrade by 2050, and the earth will be hotter than modern humans have ever seen it -- hotter than in at least 160,000 years. On a 'worst case scenario' the heating by 2100 will be 4 to 6 C; the Earth will be hotter than at any time in the last three million years, and:

Three million years ago, not one species of mammal or bird that lives on Earth was alive, as far as we know.

But Barnosky's worst case scenario may be actually be over-optimistic. A recent analysis at MIT calculates the odds as worse than previously thought: without effective policies a temperature rise of more than 7 C becomes a distinct possibility.

In all events, efforts at ecosystem protection are likely to continue, along with the kind of hedging Kolbert describes at EVACC, an amphibian conservation centre in Panama:

It might be thought of as a preserve, except that, instead of protecting the amphibians from their natural habitat, the center's aim is to isolate them from it.

...their former habitat being 'natural' no more. [5]

Another option -- one that may be more widely discussed before too long -- is whether and how some animals and other living entities can be engineered not for medical research but to withstand rapid change. [6]


Footnotes

[1] It also contains, among other things, a fairly good working sketch of the Anthropocene:

Most of the world's waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated -- in the United States, only two per cent of rivers run unimpeded -- and people now use half the world's readily accessible freshwater runoff. Chemical plants fix more atmospheric nitrogen than all natural processes combined, and fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the temperate coastl waters of the oceans. Through global trade and international travel, humans have transported countless species into ecosystems that are not prepared for them. We have pumped enough carbon dioxide into the air to alter the climate and to change the chemistry of the oceans.

[2] Kolbert asks Andrew Knoll to compare the current situation with past extinction events. He says he doesn't want to exaggerate recent losses, or to suggest that an extinction on the order of the end-Cretaceous or end-Permian is imminent. At the same time he notes, when an asteroid hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago,

it was one bad afternoon, but it was a short-term event, and then things started to get better. Today, it's not like you have a stress and the stress is relieved and recovery starts. [Instead,] it gets bad and then it keeps being bad, because the stress doesn't go away. Because the stress is us.

[3] One, but by no means the only one. Over-consumption is another. See, for example, 'turbo-evolution' of cod.

[4] Incidentally, the species life span of Erectus may lie within this range, or at least approach it. Perhaps Floresiensis lived longer.

[5] The world ocean itself ceases to be natural as its chemistry changes faster than at any time in more than fifty million years.

[6] A major extinction is a field day for fungi, pathogens, micro-organisms etc. In the long run (the next few millions to tens of millions of years), the current extinction event may, other things being equal, open up space for a new flowering of beings. Some of them could be as strange and marvelous as those of the cetacean radiation. Peter Ward argues that, looking to the even longer run (hundreds of millions of years), there is "only one chance for survival": planetary, not (just) genetic engineering. Humans [post-humans?] must, he says, "seize the controls of the various elemental cycles that determine the future of life on earth."

--

The title of this post is based on a line in Act 5, Scene 2 of The Tragical History Faustus, where Marlowe quotes Ovid

O lente, lente currite noctis equi!

but continues

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.