Originally published 20 May 2003
Fourteen years ago, Bill McKibben jolted our environmental awareness with a splendid little book, The End of Nature, that cataloged the ways human economic activities are rending the fabric of nature. In particular, he drew our attention to changes in the atmosphere, and to the possibility of global warming.
The book was translated into 20 languages and may be the most effective call to environmental action since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.
Now McKibben is back with his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. This time it is the end of human nature he laments. He foresees a future, perhaps not so far away, when children have become consumer products, like genetically modified tomatoes or ears of corn.
Do you want a child who is smart, athletic, tall, male, blue-eyed? Well, put in your order; the genetic engineers will give you what you want.
Human germline genetic engineering — tinkering with genes that can be transmitted to successive generations — is illegal in this country and elsewhere. But such bans are fragile and easily nibbled away by eager genetic engineers. Stop now, says McKibben, before we lose the essence of our humanity.
He writes: “The first child whose genes come in part from some corporate lab, the first child who has been “enhanced” from what came before — that’s the first child who will glance back over his shoulder and see a gap between himself and human history.”
Is it realistic to suppose that children can be engineered with the same marketability as, say, dishwashing detergent? Absolutely. Is McKibben’s passionate call for caution necessary? You better believe it. This is a valuable book that should make us think long and hard about where we are going.
But I take issue with one of McKibben’s implicit premises. Like many other environmentalists, he identifies nature — and the good — with some supposedly more felicitous epoch in the planet’s past. His “enough” flies in the face of cosmic evolution, which is based on inevitable, unstoppable change.
Evolution on Earth has led inexorably, by natural selection, to ever more complex creatures with ever-bigger brains. It need not have been us who emerged as the planet’s dominant species, but sooner of later something like human consciousness and cunning were probably inevitable. With consciousness and cunning came science and technology, which — in the cosmic scheme of things — are as natural as respiration, sex, multicellularity, or backbones.
McKibben does not reject the possibility that some things might change for the better, only the ominous specter of germline genetic tinkering. But one gets the impression he might have been equally happy to have said “enough!” on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution.
All of these steps in human evolution have been fraught with ominous possibilities. But I suspect very few people today would vote to turn back the clock, and I suspect that a hundred years from now you could say the same.
Our proper agenda is not to stop the clock but to ensure that an ever-larger proportion of the human population enjoys the fruits of scientific and technological progress: good health, education, freedom from tyranny and superstition, and a healthy and diverse natural environment.
It may well be that we want to hold the line on germline genetic engineering, but decisions about appropriate uses of technology should be based on what is good for our collective future, not on what was “natural” in the past. Sometimes McKibben’s argument reminds me of the Roman Catholic Church’s contention that the use of condoms (even in AIDS-ridden Africa!) violates the “natural law” and is therefore wrong.
Like it or not, the future Earth is going to be a human artifact, and I suspect it will not be as grim a place as the doomsayers predict. In any case, there’s no going back to “the good old days,” which were never as good as we like to imagine. This much is certain: Whatever the future brings, it won’t be “the end of nature.” It will be entirely and inescapably “natural.”
