Nostalgia tugs hard at our narratives about nature. If we could just hold nature still, even for a human lifetime, then we could save it.

But we cannot. Long before humans emerged as a planetary force, we have had to negotiate and renegotiate our relationship with nature. At various times, it has been an evil presence to be beaten back, a resource to be mined, a treasure to be restored, a place of spiritual renewal, and a source for technological inspiration.

And now, here we are in the Anthropocene, face to face with an existential riddle. Oliver Morton captured it eloquently in The Planet Remade: “Humans have become so powerful that they have become a force of nature—and forces of nature are by definition those things beyond the power of humans to control.”

This is strange and difficult territory, just the sort of stuff that we created this magazine to cover. And in that spirit, we’ve assembled a cadre of premier writers to explore how our understanding of nature, and our connection to it, is shifting yet again—and how conservation might look very different in the twenty-first century than it did in the twentieth.

David Quammen starts us out with an epochal idea. What if evolution isn’t linear, as Charles Darwin proposed when he first sketched the tree of life? What if, instead of species’ passing their DNA to their offspring from one generation to the next, they are exchanging genes throughout their lifetimes? Quammen deftly explains the concept of horizontal gene transfer—and then muses on how it could upend current thinking about everything from antibiotic resistance to cancerous tumors.

Next, Wayt Gibbs explores how satellite surveillance technology is reframing our connection with nature in some of the same exhilarating and profoundly disturbing ways that social media reframed our connections with each other. Seeing the world’s 3 trillion trees in real time allows environmental watchdogs to catch criminals. But it also means that the data riches of big tech’s unblinking eyes will go to whoever can pay top dollar.

When scouting the future, the technology trail is always the easiest to follow. But it’s far from the only one. The economics of nature conservation are also changing in surprising ways. Forty years ago, a group of conservationists embarked on a bold experiment. They sought to integrate conservation and development by fostering new industries—from finding new miracle drugs in nature to ecotourism—that could generate revenue for the people living near protected areas. Economist David Simpson asks, “So how did that go?” His observations are both jarring and instructive. What if the key to saving wild biodiversity isn’t to show that it’s useful­—rather, it’s to make it “useless.”

As you peruse the issue, you may also notice the absence of some familiar nature themes. For example, habitat loss imperils more and more species, and we humans must rein in our voracious appetites for more resources. The urgency hasn’t gone away—but those sorts of warnings and admonitions alone seem increasingly insufficient in this new Human Age. The Anthropocene demands that all of us, conservationists included, loosen our grip on how we think the future will unfold—and get creative. Nostalgia serves a variety of purposes in our lives. But negotiating change and moving forward generally
aren’t among them.

—Kathryn Kohm
Editor-in-Chief