Stories are a fundamental part of the human experience. We tell each other stories about our lives to build understanding and connection. Cultural knowledge is often passed down the generations through the telling of enduring stories. And powerful stories can bond disparate groups into cohesive wholes that become movements, cultures, and civilisations.
Today, we are in a period between stories. It isn’t a period without stories – in fact there is an abundance of them. There are the old stories of capitalism and cultural superiority, but these are losing power as more people realise their inadequacies. There are new stories about the fact that those ones are old, such as those about environmental destruction and the need for reparative justice. There are other new stories about the sensational possibilities of new technologies like AI and gene-editing, and even utopian visions of future people living in Virtual Worlds or on other planets. And these are only the stories from one part of the world – there are many more from other places and cultures, such as those of indigenous revitalisation and climate migrations.
Despite this panoply of stories, we are in fact living in a time between stories, because the dominant narrative remains the same: progressing within the modern paradigm is the best way to create and maintain a good quality of life, and the only way societies can do this is through Western-style industrial development, corporate capitalism, and representative democracy. While many people recognise that this narrative needs to be replaced, we haven’t yet found a new narrative that’s powerful enough to replace it.
This is partly because there is, and will continue to be, such a multiplicity of stories. But a powerful narrative doesn’t have to undermine a multiplicity of stories. Instead, it can enhance them, by showing how they are interconnected, and orienting them towards a common vision of a better future that contains them all. The real challenge in finding a new narrative is the scale of change we are about to go through. The impacts of modernity have become truly global. Almost everyone in the world relies on modern goods to some extent, and almost everyone in the world also feels the environmental breakdown the modern way of life is causing. The globalised striving to obtain and uphold modern lifestyles has resulted in the most complex and populated human world that’s ever existed. But we know for certain that it cannot last much longer. Either we transform our world, or environmental breakdown will transform it for us.
We need a new narrative to guide us through this epochal transformation. To find such a narrative, the recent past is a poor guide, because it is within the paradigm we are trying to transcend. So it is useful to instead zoom out, look at a bigger picture, on a longer timescale, and see if we can use this to find our way forward. This essay zooms out to one of the biggest stories there is. It aims to help us understand ourselves and our moment as part of the human story. This essay is about the story of our species.
Writing from and to the modern world
Aiming to write about the story of our species is clearly very ambitious, one might say hubristic. So I will begin with a qualification. I am writing this story from a particular time and place, and the story I am telling is limited by my cultural and experiential background. I was born into the modern world, and I have spent most of my life within it. I hope the overall idea of seeing ourselves as part of the human species will ring true for people in other cultures, and perhaps they might find this essay interesting and useful. But our cultural backgrounds frame our perspectives, and my perspective on the story of our species is just one among many that might all be equally valid.
I am also writing this essay with a specific goal in mind. I am aiming to help elucidate how we can move from modernity to a better future paradigm. To do so, I am trying to understand where the modern world, and individuals within it, might fit into the big story of our species. I hope that by recognising our kinship with all our fellow humans, past, present, and future, and viewing ourselves as being on an epic journey across the awe-inspiring expanses of deep time, we will be able to see more clearly the possibilities and dangers of our own moment. I hope this view will demonstrate that modernity’s role in the human story is both smaller and more important than many people today realise. And I dare to suppose it might help people live more meaningful lives, by feeling a sense of connection to the greater whole of the human species, and allowing this connection to guide their lives.
As the focus of this essay is thinking about modernity’s role in the human story, I will begin by describing the modern story, before developing how it fits into the much bigger story of humanity as a whole.
The story of modernity
You will all already know that technological revolutions over the last couple of centuries have changed the face of the world and the lives of billions of people. Those that spring to mind might be recent revolutions, such as the internet, smartphone and AI revolutions. But those are just the most recent in a long line of momentous developments. The first commercial lightbulbs were only invented 150 years ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only a few thousand cars existed in the entire world. By the 1960’s, transportation technology had progressed so much that people set foot on the moon, but computers were still in their infancy – so much so that it’s said that Apollo 11 had the computing capacity of a calculator. In the West, the twentieth century was a period of incredible technological development.
These technological revolutions built upon revolutions in our understanding of the world that had begun centuries before. Newton, who was alive in the 17th century, is known as a great mathematician and scientist for having discovered the universal laws of gravitation. Less well-known, however, is the fact that he also devoted large amounts of time to alchemy, and he used a close reading of the Bible to estimate the universe to be about 6,000 years old. In his day, alchemy, a literal reading of the Bible, and universal physical laws, were equally likely to be true.
The world would be an extraordinary place if the Bible was literally true, or if the esoteric formulations of the alchemists, who connected becoming virtuous with the transmutation of base metals into gold, had worked. But the nature of reality that was actually discovered over the next centuries is surely much more extraordinary.
We now know that the world has existed for billions of years, gradually being shaped and reshaped by tectonic forces that move over millenia. We have discovered miniature worlds of microscopic organisms that are incredibly numerous and diverse, and we have encountered the immensity of the universe – it is estimated that there are around a trillion galaxies, with an average of 100 million stars in each of them.
As well as perceiving the mind-blowing range of scales that exist across space and time, we have learned that there are many ways to view reality. Not only is the human experience just one among a huge range of perceptual and conscious experiences that exist in the psychosphere of sentient beings, but there is an underlying reality that’s completely different. All around you as you read this essay, billions of molecules are chaotically bouncing into each other as they move at hundreds of metres per second, while uncountable beams of light flash past in every direction. That light is moving so fast that from the perspective of a photon, time doesn’t exist. Underneath that level of reality, there is yet another that’s equally true – that the entire universe is a seething soup of quantum weirdness in which matter consists of probability waves rather than atoms, but the waves coalesce into particles as soon as you measure them.
We have discovered fundamental truths about the nature of reality. We have also gained unprecedented mastery over the physical world. We have learned to control beams of light with such precision that we can put enormous amounts of data into them and send them around the world, through cables under the oceans and via satellites orbiting the planet. Modern medicine has greatly increased life expectancy throughout the world, and in combination with intensive agriculture this has enabled a population explosion of global scale. We have achieved organisational complexity that enables the existence of cities of tens of millions of people, all of whom need to eat food grown outside the city every day. There are now a multitude of devices to minimise the amount of time needed to do chores that were the focus of many lives of drudgery in times past, while the intercultural mixing resulting from easy travel, and the sharing of ideas and techniques over the internet, is causing a flourishing of creativity and skill. For millions of people in societies at the heart of the modern world, in many respects life is unquestionably better than it had been for their ancestors for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, there is a ‘but’. And it’s a very big but indeed. All this development, all this intricate organisation and astonishing technological advance, all the comfort and wonders of modern life, come at a very high price – for other people, and for life on Earth.
Modernity grew out of the European colonial empires of past centuries. Those empires conquered most of the world, and they destroyed entire cultures in the process. More than 10 million Africans were enslaved, torn from their homelands, and transported across the Atlantic in horrific conditions, for them and their descendants to live lives of brutal servitude in a foreign land. As well as the horror the slaves themselves went through, the transatlantic slave trade had terrible effects in Africa. There was a massive depopulation of healthy young men and women, while warlords who captured and sold slaves gained power.
In the Americas themselves, the impact was even worse. More than 90% of the indigenous population of both continents were killed. While European diseases caused devastation, Europeans themselves did too with a litany of atrocities. They killed millions of bison to starve the indigenous people who depended upon them. They caused epidemics by giving people blankets poisoned with smallpox. And they committed cultural genocide with policies such as the residential schools in Canada, which continued through the twentieth century.
These may seem like horrors of the past, but they still have deep impacts on the descendants of survivors, and in the case of recent problems such as the residential schools, on the still-living survivors themselves.
While such blatant outrages have declined, modernity still imposes immense costs on millions of people. Western societies currently rely on vast amounts of raw materials. They are mined and grown in other parts of the world, causing environmental devastation and relying on labourers who are paid very little to work in terrible conditions. Ultimately, the modern civilisation of today relies on exploitation and inequality on a massive scale.
As extreme as the exploitation of people is, the impacts on the natural world are even more extreme. Global wildlife populations have decreased 70% since 1970, and scientists believe we may be causing the sixth mass extinction of life on our planet – defined as a period in which 75% of all species go extinct. The total mass of artificial materials now exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet, and most of those living things are domestic animals. Domestic dogs alone weigh as much as all wild land mammals. But this is dwarfed by the quantity of cows, chickens, and other animals raised to be eaten, most of which live in appalling conditions on factory farms.
Having caused so much destruction to others, the modern civilisation is now destabilising the climate through carbon emissions, which may destroy that very civilisation itself. Yet despite knowing for decades how dangerous climate change is, very little has been done to stop it. Global carbon emissions were at a record high in 2023.
Looking at these impacts of modernity, it seems unarguable that modernity is really a bad thing rather than a good one. But to try to judge the entirety of modernity as good or bad is the wrong approach. The reality is more complicated than such a binary. There are both good and bad aspects of the modern world.
An illustrative example is the fact that millions of people around the world do work long hours in poor conditions just to gain access to very basic modern goods. Modern goods are very useful for people everywhere, but severe inequality is structurally embedded in the current economic system. The fact that there is now more artificial material, by weight, than living things, shows that, at least in theory, we have enough stuff to ensure everyone can have a good material quality of life. To make this real, we must transcend the modern paradigm that causes so much destruction.
The core of the modern story is that we have gained deep knowledge of the physical world, and immense power over it. We have changed the face of the earth, invented technologies unimaginable to our ancestors, and learned to manipulate matter, energy, and information, with incredible precision. But in doing so, we have greatly diminished the world in other respects, because our societal systems, our cultural values, and our collective wisdom, are simply not good enough.
We have expanded the potential of humanity’s future, but we are at great risk of squandering it. We can achieve our potential if we mature into our power and learn how to use it for the good of all. If we feel the true fellowship we have with the whole of humanity, recognise that the breadth and depth of human experience is far greater than can be imagined from within the bounds of a single society, and reorient our lives and our societal systems towards enabling all people to truly flourish.
The fellowship of the human species
We now have incontrovertible evidence that humanity is truly a single biological species, we have been for many thousands of years, and this really does mean something. If a baby born today and a baby born 30,000 years ago were swapped at birth, they would each grow up as normal people in their new cultures. They would of course be growing up in utterly different contexts, with different environments, cultural norms, and belief systems, and probably a different familial approach to upbringing too. All of these would affect what they are like as adults, because part of being human is being very adaptable to the circumstances in which you live. But no one around them would realise they were people from another time, because they wouldn’t be: they would just be people.
There is strong evidence of this in both genetic and archaeological studies of ancient humans, and the personal experiences of people from diverse cultures around the world today. Many modern human populations have been shown to have been genetically separated for tens of thousands of years, but every member of those populations is manifestly human, intrinsically alike to you or I.
Of course, we are not all the same. There is a wide range of personalities, with enough variation and nuance that the saying that ‘everyone is unique’ appears to be true. But our personalities all come from the same multi-dimensional spectrum, and the distribution of the spread is the same across human populations. There are just as many intelligent, athletic, neurodiverse, lazy, comedic, and caring people in one population as in another.
I know this personally from having lived in various very different cultures around the world, and from having read books set in other cultures across space and time. I saw the same threads of personality among my indigenous friends in the Peruvian Amazon, my fisherman friends in Mozambique, and my school friends in England. War and Peace, the great novel written by Tolstoy in Russia in the middle of the 19th century, describes with extraordinary insight the inner workings of a vast range of characters. I felt like I could see myself and my friends, from twenty-first century England, among them – though in some cases our personality traits were spread through various of Tolstoy’s characters, for such is the variety of humanity.
Combining the fact that all people come from the same basic distribution of personalities with the reality of just how many people have been born, leads to an arresting realisation. It is a statistical certainty that people very similar to you and to each one of your friends and family lived in the deep past, are alive now in societies around the world, and will be born in the distant future. People intrinsically almost identical to you were among the European colonists, and among those they killed. There was a you on the African savannah before humans first peopled the world, and there will be a you in hundreds of years’ time, living in the world we bequeath our descendants.
However, each of those people so intrinsically similar to you might be very different to you in many respects in their actual lives, because our cultural and environmental surroundings have an enormous influence on who we become. This is true in both relatively superficial ways, such as our knowledge and skills, and in deeper ways, including aspects of our emotional make-up and our morality.
It's obvious that a hunter-gatherer living in Borneo thousands of years ago would have a completely different skillset to someone living in the flourishing trading city of Timbuktu in the 14th century, and that someone born near Stonehenge in the decades after it was first built would have a very different outlook on life to someone born in the same area 50 years ago.
Less obvious, but equally true, is the fact that people in different cultures have different relations to deeper emotions such as greed. This has been shown on an interpersonal level through scientific studies. These studies follow the Western methodology of repeating controlled experiments on different groups of people, which creates a somewhat artificial environment, but cross-cultural comparisons show it to be true in the real world too.
There are many examples of indigenous people being shocked by the Western attitude to wealth and inequality, and many societies have employed protocols and institutions to avoid major imbalances in wealth or power, such as circles of reciprocity. In strongly egalitarian societies such as the Hadza, people who are much more successful than others in particular areas are actually mocked and belittled about their success, in order to maintain equality across the group.
Another important factor is the issue of who gains the most power and influence in different societies. In capitalist societies, people who are naturally talented in, and inclined towards, amassing personal wealth and organisational control are those who gain economic power. But in other societies different types of people become more influential, and this includes cultures in which leadership is earned through personal respect and a strong orientation towards community.
This seemingly contradictory combination of our intrinsic similarities and our cultural differences allows us to think with much more ambition about the potential of humanity’s future. Our modern economic system is premised on the idea that people are above all selfish creatures, and it is by shepherding this selfishness that we can improve society. This has resulted in an assumption of selfishness being built into our society, and an attitude of selfishness often being encouraged or even enforced. Examples include the association of personal wealth with societal prestige, and the need for people to work in companies legally defined as acting purely in the interests of their owners – in effect, being selfish on their behalf.
This assumption of selfishness has led to selfishness and greed being accentuated in the modern world. People inclined to greed become influential, and we are all encouraged to act selfishly in our daily economic interactions. Because of this, from within Western society it often looks as if excessive greed is part of human nature. But it is in fact a culturally enhanced phenomenon, and as such it is something that can be changed, for example by creating systems that help us overcome our selfish impulses, rather than encouraging them.
Similar considerations can be seen in other areas of life, and this implies that by reshaping our societal systems and cultural norms, we should be able to build a world in which everyone can live fulfilling lives within the environmental constraints we are facing. Before we begin thinking about the future of our societies, however, let’s take a closer look at the past of our species.
The human story
The oldest known anatomically modern human fossils are around 300,000 years old. Some people argue our ancestors became truly human during a cognitive revolution sometime between 100,000 & 50,000 years ago, which is when the first evidence of abstract thought, including ornamentation, music and symbolic art, appears in the fossil record. Whether or not the human species began 300,000 years ago or 50,000 years ago, on human timescales, it was a very long time ago: thousands of generations.
The history of humanity is often split into the period of hunter-gathering and the period of agriculture, which began approximately 10,000 years ago. Sometimes people think societal organisation followed a fairly linear path, from simple bands through more extensive tribes and eventually to nation-states. But, as the excellent book The Dawn of Everything shows in encyclopaedic detail, this narrative is false. In fact, people have been experimenting with different modes of societal organisation throughout human history, and there have been an extraordinary panoply of societies and cultures around the world and across time.
The aboriginal Australian cultural complex, which includes culture groups with 10,000 year oral histories, provides a clear counterexample to this simplistic narrative. Rather than being pure hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists, prior to the arrival of Europeans, aboriginal Australians engaged in complex landscape management practices that increased the productive capacity of the environment. As such, they were effectively hunter-gatherers in terms of how they actually obtained their daily food supply, but they extensively modified the landscape, which is usually considered an agricultural practice.
They also provide a counterexample to the idea of development from tribes to nations. Across Australia, there were a huge number of individual cultures, with many different languages and their own customs, but they were interlinked into a single cultural complex. This included a system of songlines that enabled long-distance travel and a system of totemic moieties that ensured that however far someone travelled, there would always be people who considered them family. There are many cultures across the continent that both abide by such systems and have cultural memories proven to reach at least 7,000 – 10,000 years into the past. It’s likely that Australia had a continental-scale cultural complex long before the first known empires, let alone nation states.
Aboriginal Australia is far from the only counterexample to the simplistic and euro-centric narrative of progression from tribes to nations and hunter-gathering to agriculture. One form of landscape management seen in various parts of the world is forest gardening. The Kayapo, an indigenous people in Brazil, create productive ‘forest islands’ in grasslands. In British Columbia, indigenous forest gardens have been shown to remain more biodiverse and productive than the surrounding forest more than a century after being abandoned.
Within agriculture, industrial monocultures are by no means the only way of growing food. Polyculture agriculture, in which many different species are grown together, is generally more ecologically sustainable and can be more productive. In the book Kayapo Ethnoecology and Culture, Darrel Posey describes how he compared Kayapo polyculture fields with nearby industrial agriculture and found that the Kayapo methods produced more calories and nutrition per acre.
There have been an enormous range of approaches to political organisation too. Here are some examples described in The Dawn of Everything:
The Nambikwara are an indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon. In the 1940’s, they spent part of the year as farmers, and part as foragers. They were led by chiefs, but these leaders had very different roles in each season. In the foraging season, they ‘made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders’ and behaved in an ‘authoritarian manner’. In the farming season, they ‘employed only gentle persuasion and led by example… and never imposed anything on anyone’.
Tlaxcala, an indigenous city-state in Central America, was a democracy with a strongly egalitarian ethos. People appointed to their city council had to go through a gruelling initiation process aimed at instilling an attitude of self-deprecation and subordination to the will of the citizens they served.
The Minoan civilisation, which existed on the island of Crete over 3,000 years ago, appears to have been a female-led society, unlike the patriarchal societies around them. They built large palatial metropolises, but did not fortify them. An enormous amount of Minoan art has survived, and it ‘makes almost no reference to war [nor even politics], dwelling instead on scenes of play and attention to creature comforts’.
There have also been many ways in which societies have exchanged goods and maintained friendly relations with their neighbours. This includes barter networks and the use of particular objects as currencies to enable trading, but it also includes activities very unlike trade, as The Dawn of Everything explains.
In the Massim Islands in the Western Pacific, men partook in ‘kula chains’ of ocean adventures in outrigger canoes to exchange heirloom objects that would move around the islands, with histories of their former owners being passed on with them. In many North American societies, women in adjacent villages would often play games of chance, and many exotic ornaments would move hundreds of miles by being won and lost in gambling. And in some Amazonian societies, friendly relations were maintained between neighbouring tribes through regular festivals, in which tensions were released and friendships built in dances and feasts.
These are just some of the examples for which we have evidence, either because they were still occurring recently enough for anthropologists to have studied them, or because archaeological evidence of them has been found. The vast majority of human cultural experience is lost in the mists of time, or has left very little trace from which to imagine what might have happened. One intriguing trace of evidence from the deep past is that during the Upper Palaeolithic, around 30,000 years ago, people used very similar tools, played similar musical instruments, and had similar ornaments, figurines and funeral rites, right across Eurasia. There’s also evidence that individuals often travelled very long distances. Rather than small-scale tribal societies, in that era there might have been loose systems of regional organisation that spanned thousands of miles.
Combining our knowledge of the variety of social forms, environmental situations, and belief systems, that people have had in relatively recent times, with the fact that for tens of thousands of years humans have been just as intelligent and energetic as we are now, gives us a glimpse of the extraordinary span of experience encompassed by humanity so far.
Humanity evolved in Africa, but more than 50,000 years ago we began peopling the world. In the process, we must have encountered new ecozones – there will have been groups of people who were the first to enter a jungle, cross a mountain range or desert, or build a boat with which to sail over the horizon in search of new lands. In those ancient times, we co-existed with other homo species, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, and at times probably lived with them and fell in love with them. We interbred with them so much that it is visible in our DNA today.
On each continent outside Africa, within a few thousand years of people arriving, most of the local megafauna went extinct. But there were thousands of years when we did live alongside them, and it seems likely that, armed with projectile weapons the huge creatures had not evolved to be wary of, we killed and ate them. People may have had an easy life in which entire villages would feast on meat caught in a single exhilarating hunt. Who knows what coming-of-age rituals might have been instituted in such societies, and what people might have done with the time afforded them by sating their hunger so efficiently.
By experimenting with different ways of processing and using the plants around them, people found that some plants kill, some plants heal, and some seem to take you into strange visionary worlds. What was it like to be part of societies newly arrived in the Amazon, working out which of the thousands of plants you should rub in a wound, and which you should use on your arrow tips? What was it like to be the first person to drink ayahuasca? Someone must have been that person.
People have developed cultures, initiated kingships, and deposed tyrants. There have been civilisations deep in jungles, and trade routes across continents. Some people have followed still-living people they have truly believed to be saviours or avatars sent by God, and others have believed themselves to be those saviours or avatars. Many people must have had amazing experiences that they understood in the terms of belief systems exotic to modern minds. What was the actual experience of the ancient Australians who created the basis of their cultural complex, and spread it across the continent? What about the pioneers of Siberian shamanism?
And those are just examples of particularly exciting lives. There have also been untold billions of people who have lived more mundane lives of all kinds. There have been those who stayed in a single area all their lives, and knew and loved every inch of it. People who have gently taken part in the flow of their culture and society across the aeons, or lived with a quiet dedication to their family, their community or their religion. There have been so many lives, lived in so many ways, each with absolute importance to the individuals who lived them.
Unfortunately, there are also a great many people who have lived lives of suffering and hardship. Cities have been destroyed by earthquakes, famines have devastated civilisations, and plagues have ravaged continents. Some cultures have practiced human sacrifice, and others have instituted caste systems, subjecting sections of their population to centuries of servitude or penury. There have been murders, wars and rampages of raping and pillaging. And at many times and in many places, it has simply been very difficult to survive, and impossible to prevent disease.
In recent centuries, there has been an unusually large amount of cultural homogenisation, initiated by the colonising empires of Europeans and continued by the globalisation of capitalism. There have of course been many empires in the past – the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan’s empire, and the Incan Empire are three very different examples, each on a different continent. But this time the stakes are different, because our impacts are so colossal. To properly understand how to view this, we need to think about humanity’s position in the wider community of life on Earth.
Life on Earth
On the immense scale of cosmic time, life on our planet began relatively quickly. Planet Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and we have evidence that life existed at least 3.7 billion years ago. It was not until almost 3 billion years later, however, that animals evolved, around 800 million years ago. Along with plants, these gradually diversified through the slow process of evolution, to create the massive biodiversity of more recent times.
While evolution normally happens very gradually, the development of life has also been punctuated by more rapid changes. One example is the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and many other animals, in one of the five mass extinction events that have occurred. Another, less destructive, example of rapid change happened when North and South America became connected by the Isthmus of Panama. This allowed formerly separated land animals to migrate in both directions, while it separated the coastal and marine life on either side of the Isthmus. This intermixing and isolating of ecosystems resulted in a burst of evolutionary changes, including both extinctions and diversifications.
In amongst such developments, many species have come and gone – it is estimated that over 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. In the case of mammals, the average species exists for over a million years, and some survive for more than 10 million years.
Surviving for a long time is clearly one marker of success for a species, but there are others too. One is successfully spreading into multiple ecosystems and therefore becoming resilient to problems in any one of those ecosystems. Another is to become a keystone species in an ecosystem, which is a species that has an outsized effect on its environment relative to its abundance. The concept was introduced by Robert T. Paine in 1969, and his experiments provide a good explanation of the concept.
Paine studied marine invertebrates in the intertidal zone. In the area Paine conducted his experiments, there were many animals, such as limpets, snails, and barnacles, that lived in rockpools, and there were predatory ochre starfish that fed on them. There were also many species, such as sponges and anemones, that the ochre starfish didn’t eat. Paine removed the ochre starfish from the area and recorded what happened. Although the ochre starfish had eaten many species, they had preferentially eaten mussels. With the starfish removed, the mussels became dominant. Within ten years, the rockpools went from holding 15 rock-clinging species to being dominated by a single species – mussels. This shows that the ochre starfish was essential to enabling the biodiversity of the entire ecosystem – it was a keystone species.
The human species
So, what does humanity look like from the perspective life on Earth? What are our effects on the rest of life, and are we a successful species?
We have already seen that in modern times we have had some terrible effects on life on Earth, decreasing global wildlife populations by 70%, and that we might be in the process of causing a sixth mass extinction. On that basis alone, we are clearly having a horrific impact on life on this planet. But our impacts go much further than the destruction of much of nature. In fact, in some ways we are an ‘all of the above’ species.
Long ago, we succeeded in inhabiting every major landmass on the planet. More recently, we also have moved many other species around the world, effectively creating something akin to a distributed version of the joining of the Americas. We have destroyed many habitats, but we have created some too, such as farmlands and cities. We have taken hold of evolution itself, by domesticating plants and animals and breeding them into forms that would not exist without us, and in many cases cannot reproduce without us either. There are even instances of new species evolving in the wild due to human activity, and there is evidence we are accelerating evolution quite widely, by forcing other species to adapt to our impacts.
There’s no doubt that we are having very widespread impacts on ecosystems around the world, so we meet the definition of being a keystone species in many ecosystems. This has led some scientists to contend we are a ‘hyperkeystone’ species. However, this refers to our being a keystone species in a negative sense, because our outsized effect usually decreases biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, rather than increasing it.
Although we have spread around the world and had an enormous effect on the rest of life, we are a long way from success in terms of our longevity as a species. If we take our species to be all anatomically modern humans, as opposed to only those considered ‘behaviourally modern’ according to the cognitive revolution theory, we are still only 300,000 years old, and a million years is the average lifespan of mammal species.
So, from the perspective of life on Earth, we are at best a young species that’s been precociously successful but massively disruptive to the rest of life, and has disrupted evolution and diminished the diversity and abundance of life as a whole. At worst, we are becoming the first species to cause a mass extinction from which it would take life millions of years to recover. We have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves a responsible member of the community of species on this planet.
However, there is reason to believe we can become one. Although modernity is causing catastrophic environmental problems, many other cultures have had much less negative impact on their environments. Cultures skilled in landscape management have had positive environmental impact. It’s even argued that such cultures have acted as a keystone species in the positive sense, by playing a vital role in increasing and upholding the biodiversity of ecosystems.
To save ourselves from being no more than a brief but tragic chapter in the book of life on Earth, we need to stop causing more damage to the natural world, and actively work to repair the damage we have already done. Considering the impacts and attitudes of most people today, this sounds like an unrealistic pipedream. But we know that in many cultures, people and nature have flourished in harmony. We should aim to do so again.
An obvious objection to the suggestion that indigenous cultures show we can succeed in harmonising with nature is the fact that the global population is now much bigger than it was. This is of course true, and simply trying to replicate old cultures is no more sensible than trying to continue developing as we currently are despite the problems we are causing. Instead, we should find a new societal paradigm that combines the positive attributes of all of our past cultures in a way that’s suited to our new situation. One step towards doing this is to recognise that we are not just one more species like all the others. We are actually becoming a new kind of species – a planetary species.
Becoming a planetary species
Humanity has been a planetary species in one sense for a long time – we colonised almost every landmass on the planet thousands of years ago. We are now becoming a planetary species in another sense: we have planetary-scale impacts and agency.
I have already described some of the planetary-scale environmental impacts we are having, but there are many more. One example is that microplastics are now everywhere – they have been found from the top of Everest to the depths of the ocean.
We are planetary-scale in many other ways too: we have a truly global economic system – 11 billion tonnes of goods were shipped around the world in 2021; there are nuclear weapons that could potentially destroy almost all life, while every day we collectively use huge amounts of energy for less destructive purposes; the internet allows us to instantaneously communicate and share information globally; planes mean we can travel around the world very quickly too; and new technologies can now spread extremely rapidly – the first modern smartphone came out in 2007, and by 2020, just 13 years later, nearly 80% of the world’s population owned a smartphone.
At the moment, these developments have not reached everyone – there are still 775 million people without access to electricity – and it could be argued that just because we have a planetary scale of impact now, doesn’t mean we will do in the future. We might be using an enormous amount of energy, but to do so we are relying on fossil fuels. And of course, we desperately need to decrease our negative environmental impacts.
Our planetary impacts in the future will undoubtedly be different to those we are having now, but the truth is we cannot stop having planetary-scale environmental impacts of some kind. This is demonstrated by a single statistic: there are currently just 1.75 hectares of land per person, in the entire world. That’s all land, including deserts, forests, mountains, everything apart from icesheets.
1.75 hectares is about two and a half football pitches each. Of that, a quarter is taken up by barren land – deserts, salt flats, glaciers, and so on – and another 40% is forested – the vast boreal forests of the north alone cover 12 million km2. That leaves us little more than 0.6 hectares each, less than one football pitch, in which to have our homes, grow our food, manufacture our products, enjoy our pastimes, and leave space for nature. That’s not much space at all.
The fact of the matter is, the world is full of people. There are so many of us that we are now a planetary species, and we will continue to be one, for better or for worse, at least until the next century and probably much longer, unless there is an unthinkably terrible population collapse before the end of this century.
Recognising this, we can see that the challenge of our time is to become a successful planetary species. To do that, we must first understand what it means to be one.
Succeeding as a planetary species
A successful planetary species ensures all of its members can live fulfilling lives, while allowing life on its planet to fulfil its own nature of exuberant abundance. Recognising the reality of deep time, it understands itself, and judges its own success, on evolutionary timescales – not just tens of years, or hundreds of years, but tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years. It actively stewards and safeguards life on the planet into the indefinite future, in a collectively symbiotic relationship with the living world. And it understands the world at the planetary scale, and ensures planetary systems, such as the climate system, remain stable and support the thriving of life across the immensity of deep time.
To become such a species, we humans should find a durable balance between complementary and opposing forces – between independence and interdependence, unity and diversity, freedom and responsibility.
There is no one way of life that all people want to live, so we should enable individual and cultural freedom within the bounds of our responsibilities to each other and to our planetary home.
As a planetary population we impact almost all life on Earth, so we should integrate our systems and societies with the living world, and ensure all species can meet their needs in harmony.
And cultural, technological, and ecosystemic, developments sometimes take longer than a human lifetime, so we should play our parts in those great spans of time with humility and joy, and actively ensure future generations will be able to play their parts too.
It isn’t easy to see what the world will be like if we do become a successful planetary species, but it is easy to see that it will be very different from the world of today. This is what I meant when I said that modernity’s role in the human story is both smaller and more important than many people today realise. It is smaller because we should transcend the modern paradigm and transform the world as we enter the planetary era. From the perspective of the human story, the modern period will just be a sliver of time between much greater epochs. It is more important because modernity has given us this opportunity to become a planetary species, and its destructive power might take the opportunity away again for all time.
If we do not consciously and ambitiously redesign our systems and societies in the next decades, by the end of this century the modern world will probably have destabilised the biosphere and a mass extinction will be almost inevitable. If that happens, we will have lost our chance to succeed as a planetary species thriving into the deep future. Instead, our descendants will be left to cling to life in a hostile world, ruing our recklessness and irresponsibility for thousands of years. We cannot let this happen. It’s hard to imagine a greater betrayal of our descendants, a more consequential dereliction of duty. We are living at a crucial moment in the history of humanity. Let us accept the responsibility this places upon us, and dedicate ourselves to our planetary mission.
How
There are many areas in which we can work directly to improve things. We can restore ecosystems, dematerialise and de-energise our lives, localise our food systems, alleviate extreme poverty and save people in disaster zones, and help cultures recovering from centuries of oppression, and those still navigating their first century of interaction with the modern world. In all these areas, and many more, there is an enormous amount of work to be done, and donating money is often just as useful as doing work.
But simply rescuing those people, cultures, and ecosystems, that are being devastated by the globalised systems of the modern civilisation, is not enough. Those very systems that underpin modernity are now causing ever greater destruction. A root cause of our current inability to decarbonise and stop destabilising the climate is the fact that our global systems, including our fossil fuel-based energy system, our growth-dependent economic system, and our industrial agricultural system, are intrinsically dependent on the vast amount of energy provided by fossil fuels. One astonishing statistic that demonstrates this is the fact that the boom in renewables of recent years has only mitigated the continuing increase in energy demand, without decreasing the total amount of fossil fuels used.
We should build new systems suited to the planetary era we are entering, and they should be fundamentally different from the current ones. This becomes obvious when you think about what a better world might look like on the long-term time horizon of hundreds to thousands of years into the future. Almost everyone having to work full-time jobs that they wouldn’t do if they could afford not to is hardly an idyllic scenario. Nor is embedded inequality that ensures half of the global population is in poverty. Nor is the hegemony of the nation-state system – the borders of many post-colonial countries were drawn with little, or even negative, relation to actual cultural realities, so they cause and perpetuate societal tensions and deny cultures their autonomy.
Today’s global systems ought to be replaced to create a fairer world. The environmental crisis has simply turned such a replacement from an important goal into a critical task.
Fortunately, new systems suited to our planetary status are being developed by dedicated experts. Understanding how we can put these new systems together in a holistic way is a puzzle I have been working on, and in my opinion what we should aim for is this: a planetary pluriverse, inside the Doughnut, with a systemic basis of bioregional cosmolocalism.
That’s a rather exotic-sounding combination of long words, but it’s the straight technical description of the world I think we should create. To explain what it means and why I think we should aim for it, I will describe each component and how they go together.
A planetary pluriverse
The pluriverse is a fairly new concept. There are various definitions of it, but perhaps the one that best conjures a sense of it is the Zapatista phrase ‘a world in which many worlds fit’. The idea is that rather than aiming for or imposing a homogenous global society, we should embrace the diversity of humanity and create a world in which many different ways of life, cultures, and societies, can coexist peacefully and without any one of them claiming superiority over any other.
As we have seen, in the past there was an enormous variety of cultures and societies, and in this respect the world has been a pluriverse for most of the last few thousand years. In a true pluriverse, however, different societies see each other as equals rather than considering themselves superior, which has historically been less common. In a future pluriverse, modern technology would allow societies around the world to be interconnected, through trade, communications, and information-sharing, including instantaneously via the internet. This would create a world that is simultaneously culturally diverse and globally interconnected: a planetary pluriverse.
Rather than each society developing in any way they please, in a planetary pluriverse all societies should remain within the bounds of ethical responsibility, both to their own citizens and in relation to the rest of the world. A good planetary pluriverse is a world in which everyone is free from oppression, and there are no rogue societies destabilising the biosphere upon which we all depend. A key element in making this possible is having clearly defined bounds of acceptability at the societal level, and the Doughnut provides such bounds.
Inside the Doughnut
The Doughnut is a societal goal invented by Kate Raworth in 2011. It is summarised into a single sentence as aiming to ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’. To turn this into a clearly defined goal, Raworth combined two sets of indicators, one representing the basic things people need to be able to live a good life, the other representing the maximum impact we can have on key components of the environment without causing serious problems. The first set, the social foundation, was based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The second set, the ecological ceiling, consists of the planetary boundaries, as defined by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Raworth drew these two sets as concentric circles. Between them is the ‘safe and just space for humanity’, where everyone has enough and we do not risk environmental crisis. The image this creates looks like a doughnut, hence the name, with the goal being to ‘get inside the Doughnut’.
Right now, we are a long way outside the Doughnut, both at the global level and at the level of individual countries: not a single country is inside the Doughnut at the moment. As such, ‘getting inside the Doughnut’ is currently a goal. If we succeed with our systemic transformation and do get inside the Doughnut, however, it can become a bound within which societies develop. The social foundation and ecological ceiling can become guardrails that ensure we are indeed meeting the needs of all within the means of the living planet, and within those bounds each society can develop as they please.
A systemic basis of bioregional cosmolocalism
Bioregionalism is a paradigm in which societal systems, including political, economic and agricultural systems, are organised around bioregions, which Joe Brewer defines as ‘geographic areas defined by the intersection of ecosystem boundaries – typically things like watersheds, mountain ranges and so forth – with human systems that have a coherent cultural identity’. Bioregions are quite large areas – One Earth has mapped the entire world into 185 bioregions. There are smaller scale areas within the same paradigm, such as ecoregions and individual watersheds and ecosystems.
Organising society bioregionally enables us to align with the natural environment and so decrease our negative environmental impact and regenerate nature. For example, it helps us integrate our food systems into ecological cycles to create increased diversity, resilience, and abundance, of both agricultural production and local ecosystems.
Cosmolocalism is an economic system that’s equivalent to capitalism, because its structure creates a dynamic that drives forward development. Whereas capitalism has a competitive dynamic that drives economic growth, cosmolocalism has a collaborative dynamic and includes a set of features that means we can use it to integrate the other three key elements, the pluriverse, the Doughnut, and bioregionalism, to create a holistic world system.
The organisations at the heart of cosmolocalism are global networks that connect local nodes. The local nodes only serve their local area, for example their local bioregion, while the networks connect them with similar nodes in other areas. The global networks include information commons through which every member node can access the innovations and experience of every other node, while remaining free to choose how to apply it in order to serve their own local area. This creates a collaborative dynamic in which the accumulated knowledge of everyone in the network is available to everyone else. In a fully developed cosmolocal system, the information commons of each individual network can be combined into a global information commons that represents the accumulated technical knowledge of humanity.
The networks also have charters, which set out the ethos and rules of the network and by which member nodes must abide. The charters include a description of the goal of the network, but they can also include a set of guidelines that, in combination with suitable institutional infrastructure, can be used to steer the network’s development in a good direction.
This basic structure can be applied very widely, including to makerspaces, local-scale factories, community horticulture, food forests, permaculture, community hubs, bioregional learning centres & projects, and research & development labs. Two examples of successful cosmolocal networks are Fab Labs and Transition Network.
An integrated whole
The cosmolocal combination of global networks and local nodes enables local freedom within global bounds. This allows us to integrate the autonomy of the pluriverse, the justice of the Doughnut, and the wisdom of bioregionalism, into a holistic world system in service to the whole of humanity and the rest of life on Earth.
Networks can align themselves with the Doughnut goal by including a stipulation in their charters that nodes should aim to help ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’. With similar stipulations in their charters, combined with the institutional infrastructure to ensure they are enacted, networks can require their nodes to serve their local bioregions, have non-extractive ownership and democratic decision-making, give equal importance to the interests of each of their stakeholder groups, and strive for bioregional circularity.
The local scale of the nodes naturally aligns with the bioregional paradigm, and including a focus on bioregional circularity can create a dynamic of bioregional self-sufficiency. If the materials used in products cycle around the bioregion again and again (which is what bioregional circularity means), then once a factory is set up and enough raw materials are supplied to fill the materials cycle, few outside inputs are needed. There will be an ongoing need for energy and labour to keep the system running, but these can be provided locally. So long as the factory itself is kept in working condition and the materials continue to cycle around the economy, only small inputs of capital and materials should be necessary.
Bioregional self-sufficiency can greatly decrease environmental impact and in doing so help us get inside the Doughnut. Circularity means far less raw materials need to be mined or grown, and the local cycling of materials minimises the quantity of physical goods that need to be moved long distances. It also greatly increases resilience because it reduces reliance on complex global supply chains, decreasing the impact of supply chain problems. This will be particularly important as climate change intensifies and the likelihood of serious problems in global supply chains increases.
Another essential element of getting inside the Doughnut is made possible by the self-sufficiency created by bioregional circularity: global inclusivity. Even in an area that is currently extremely poor, once a factory is set up, the initial raw materials supplied, and the people taught how to run the system and access the cosmolocal network, they can quickly catch up to the level of development embodied in the globally shared knowledge database. They will have different needs to places in the West, but such variety is incorporated into the model. They can use the network to find others in similar situations and share their experiences with them to collectively discover the best ways forward.
Bioregional self-sufficiency also combines with the globally collaborative dynamic built into the network structure to create the basis for a planetary pluriverse. In a cosmolocal system, individual bioregions can choose which material technologies they want to use, and how they organise the work needed to manufacture them. This means that different bioregions can choose their own development paths independently of other bioregions, enabling new cultures to develop, and old cultures to be revitalised, around the world.
Underpinning all of these developments is the collaborative dynamic created by the information commons. Nodes can share their strategies for, and experiences of, creating bioregional circularity, getting inside the Doughnut, and organising their work, as well as sharing their techniques and innovations for their productive projects, whether they be factories or food forests. The network-wide information commons can be complemented and combined with a commons for all the networks in a single bioregion. This enables economy-wide local collaboration, as well as the network-specific global collaboration.
Building the new systems
Once fully-developed, such a new system would not include some of the major features of today’s world. To give two examples, it would not include profit-maximising businesses, and in many parts of the world, nor would it include nation-states. This doesn’t mean there would be no centralised corporations, or no nations. It’s possible that the manufacturing of some large and specialised pieces of infrastructure, for example, will need to be organised in a centralised way. And in some areas, the nation-state paradigm might continue to be a good framework for political organisation. But even those centralised corporations would have governance models compatible with the Doughnut, and in many parts of the world countries as we now know them would not exist.
Just because such fundamental changes may happen at some point during the transformation, however, doesn’t mean they need to happen before it begins. We can and should begin building parts of the new system while the old system is still functioning. Indeed, many people and organisations are already doing so.
There are already many pluriversal political projects in progress, including the Zapatista movement in Mexico, the development of digital democracy in Taiwan, and the creation of autonomous indigenous government in the Amazon. The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) is spearheading a movement to get humanity inside the Doughnut. The Design School for Regenerating Earth is spreading bioregionalism through its bioregional activation tours. Others are focusing on their local bioregions or designing bioregional funding facilities. There are also many organisations that are cosmolocally structured, although they often don’t explicitly describe themselves as such. DEAL itself has a cosmolocal structure, for example. The next step for cosmolocalism is to apply the organisational structure to commercial-scale manufacturing, which is something I am working on.
It’s important to recognise that the new systems will only have the positive attributes I describe if we actively work to ensure they do. A good example is global inclusivity. Simply designing a network with the potential to be globally inclusive, and hoping groups from around the world will connect and join the network, isn’t enough. There are many areas of the world that are unlikely to hear about such a network, and less likely to join it, unless they are directly invited. But this doesn’t preclude building global inclusivity into networks.
Fab Labs, a cosmolocal network of makerspaces with thousands of nodes, has set a good example. The first Fab Labs were set up by the network itself, and they included labs in rural India, northern Norway, and Ghana. Since then, almost all Fab Labs have been set up by local groups around the world, but the network has continued to focus on fostering global inclusivity and there are now Fab Labs in 120 countries. A recent development has been the creation of Super Fab Labs, which are Fab Labs with the equipment needed to build more Fab Labs. The network has once again aimed for globally inclusivity, setting up the first two Super Fab Labs in Kerala and Bhutan.
To create a truly inclusive system, there’s another fundamental change we will need to make: we will need to change our relationship with capital. If cosmolocal factories built in globally poor areas were financed based on capitalist expectations of return on investment, the financiers would effectively be extracting profits from poor areas in exchange for capital. This would perpetuate the global inequality that already exists, and preclude the possibility of eliminating the exploitation embedded in the current system. This is a complex issue, but ultimately the capitalist attitude to financial wealth is one of the cultural values we will have to change if we are to become a successful planetary species. I plan to develop how we can do so in a future essay.
We need to work towards such deep changes to cultural values with thoughtful and resolute determination. But there are also myriad practical actions we can do now. These aren’t solely about building the new systemic structures. It’s just as important we implement many smaller projects, and transform existing businesses and organisations to align them with the new paradigm. My earlier essays on the overall system and on cosmolocalism go into this in more detail, and my book, Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System, is full of real-world examples of how we can transform the economic system. There are also many other excellent books, podcasts, and websites, on practical aspects of systems change, and many organisations actually enacting it.
As this essay is about the broad sweep of the human story, however, I won’t go into those details here. Instead, I will skip forward to the second half of the century, to see what it might look like if we do create a planetary pluriverse.
The overall picture
As we enter the planetary era, there will probably be a ferment of cultural activity. Having emancipated themselves from the exploitation of the current global economy, people around the world will newly have the freedom and resources to choose their own ways of life. Indigenous peoples will be able to revitalise their cultures, while developing them by incorporating relevant modern technologies and adapting knowledge gained from other cultures.
Western societies will be leaving the modern era and learning to live well within environmental constraints. Sharing material goods, so as to need less of them, is an important part of this. Living in closer community is a natural step, as is a much stronger focus on participatory creativity, such as spending time making individual items that are durable and beautiful, rather than spending money on products that are soon replaced with new purchases.
For the many areas that are currently both in poverty and have largely lost their old cultures, the release from poverty enabled by a cosmolocal redistribution of production will provide the opportunity to flourish in a new way. In rural areas, the ability to build and use high-quality farm equipment will hugely decrease the burden on smallholder farmers, while in cities local-scale manufacturing and circular materials cycles will improve material quality of life. In all areas, the collaboration enabled by the information commons will allow a blooming of practical creativity.
If this sounds like an unrealistically positive view on how things might improve, here’s a single example of just how much more effectively we can provide for ourselves if we make relatively small changes. In the West, it’s currently normal for each household to own a washing machine that lasts about 10 years. But we don’t use washing machines all the time, so they can easily be shared; about 1 large machine per 10 households is enough, in my personal experience. The machines only last 10 years mainly due to planned obsolescence, rather than material necessity. 30 years is not an unrealistic lifetime for a machine made to be durable. If we were to share long-lasting machines, the savings in materials, energy and work would be immense. If we went from each household having one machine that lasts 10 years, to every 50 households sharing 5 large machines that each last 30 years, we would need 97% less washing machines. 97% less.
This is just one example. There are more in my earlier essay, and if we actively aim to dematerialise our lives, redistribute resources globally, and collaborate to share and improve on our best ideas, there will be many, many more.
Of course, there is one massive issue I haven’t mentioned in this description of a positive future: the environmental crisis. The climate crisis will undoubtedly get much worse than it is now, and it will continue until we can decrease atmospheric carbon sufficiently, which will probably take generations. As such, it will make life difficult, however we organise our societies. But this doesn’t mean we should shrink away from ambitious transformation – instead, it gives us all the more reason to embark on one. Moving to a system of bioregional cosmolocalism will help weather the storms, literal and metaphorical, that are now unavoidable, because its glocal structure increases resilience. Even more importantly, it’s a system that can genuinely form the basis of a human world in which everyone can live decent lives within the environmental constraints we are faced with.
Of course, it doesn’t solve all our problems. While collaborative development implies a degree of structural peace, to truly transcend war we will need deeper cultural and moral progress. Global health scourges like malaria and HIV are separate problems that need to be solved. And avoiding the dangers of the exponentially increasing power of AI is very important.
AI and Information Technology
It might seem strange that, in an essay about societal development, I have barely mentioned artificial intelligence, despite its increasingly widespread impact and its incredible potential. This isn’t because I don’t consider AI important. It is clearly a very important aspect of the modern world today, and it will undoubtedly have a big impact on the future. But looking at it from the perspective of the human story gives us a very different view of AI to the mainstream view at the moment, which is firmly embedded in the modern perspective.
For the majority of people working on AI today, developing more powerful AI capabilities and profitably applying them to the world as quickly as possible is an important goal. This is the modern paradigm: build things, scale them up, profit from them, and do it quickly. It has lots of positive effects, but it has lots of negative effects too.
From the perspective of the human story, on the other hand, AI is one of the extraordinary new technologies we have just begun to glimpse. It’s as if we have just summited a mountain and can now see a previously unknown vista before us. It’s an incredible sight, there’s no doubt about it, and running headlong into this new world can seem an alluring possibility. But if we centre our thinking in the perspective of our species as a whole, we can see that taking our time is a much better option.
When we recognise our fellowship with the whole of humanity, it’s still wonderful that people will be able to explore the opportunities and adventures that AI can provide. But it no longer matters whether we are the people who explore those opportunities. If major AI capabilities are not developed for another hundred years, it shouldn’t really matter. We won’t experience them, but our descendants will. On the other hand, if we do develop those capacities quickly and without thinking through the dangers inherent in such powerful technologies, we risk causing terrible problems that might mean our descendants no longer have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of such technologies themselves.
The truly important issue in relation to AI in the short term is working out how to limit the dangers of its development. More broadly, it’s crucial we learn how to responsibly steward the power inherent in many new technologies, including biotechnology and nanotechnology as well as AI.
Thinking about information technology in general from the perspective of becoming a successful planetary species reorients our priorities in relation to it significantly. In the planetary paradigm, the overriding priority of the twenty-first century is to bring humanity into alignment with the planet. Information technology has a critical role to play in this.
An important way in which information technology can help us harmonise with the environment is by helping us understand precisely what environmental impact we are having. To get inside the Doughnut, we need to know exactly how much impact each of our actions has on each of the planetary boundaries, so we can include this in our daily decision-making. This should be done with enough precision to tell us the environmental impact of individual products, not just general product types. We would be greatly empowered to make better choices as consumers if all products had impact boxes, equivalent to the ingredients boxes on food products, describing the environmental impact of the product.
In some areas, this is easy but not yet being done. For example, it would be a simple matter to ensure all fuel receipts, and all flights, included clear explanations of the exact carbon emissions of the fuel used and how much this was relative to a One Planet Living carbon footprint. In other areas, things get more complicated. For example, fresh water use is a critical factor in our environmental impact, but how critical depends on where the water is being used. Using water in an area with high annual rainfall is generally much less of an issue than using it in an arid area. Understanding how to apportion water use fairly to individual products is complex but clearly something that can and should be done.
Effectively measuring and publicising the environmental impact of all products and actions involves much more than the manipulation of bits of information. But information technology in this narrow sense can play a crucial role in helping us understand our environmental impact, and in ensuring we can all reach and use information that will help us live lives within the planetary boundaries. An important aspect of doing this successfully is ensuring that IT is used to help us achieve our goal of becoming a successful planetary species, rather than its use being a goal in itself.
One area in which IT is an essential tool is in the development of cosmolocalism. A good information commons is a key element of a good cosmolocal network. It should be designed to serve the members of the network. It’s important that it’s very easy for people to upload their information, such as their product designs and circular strategies, and to find relevant information that others have uploaded. People using the system will often not want to spend much time on it, as they will be busy doing the local work their node exists to do. And many members of the network may not have used such a system before nor be particularly computer literate. This is especially relevant to creating globally inclusive networks, as there are parts of the world where many people have little experience of computers. Designing high-quality information commons, that are user-friendly, balance enabling comparability across nodes with supporting their diversity, and deal with language barriers, will be challenging and important.
New technologies are also creating new possibilities for elements of a planetary pluriverse. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) massively increase options for how to share governance, rights, and responsibilities, in organisations and communities. This can help us widen our understanding of property and ownership, so that rather than individual owners having almost complete power over the things they own, properties can be governed by sets of agreements over who has what rights and responsibilities in relation to them. DAOs are quite a new technology, but they are already the basis of a Regenerative Finance movement that aims to use such technologies to help regenerate the living world. They are also being explored as the basis for a new kind of governance system known as a Coordi-nation.
There will undoubtedly be many other ways in which new technologies can help us become a successful planetary species. For example, Dark Matter Labs is exploring interesting avenues that combine Digital Twins, AI, and creative interfaces, to imagine fundamentally new ways we might understand and interact with the world.
One of their projects, FreeRiver, aims to unlock new ways of relating to a river. The idea is to input ecosystem data, taken from sensors, satellites, and surveys, into a bespoke AI that outputs through an ‘Interface for Care’. This interface will go far beyond purely analytical findings. The goal is to use expressive media to communicate the state of the river to local people in empathic and evolving ways. The river’s AI might write a poem to express the harm done to the river by pollution, or produce a thank-you card to someone who has helped clean it. It could of course provide numerical analyses of environmental conditions as well, and use these to suggest effective strategies for regenerating the river. But using AI to make such data more relatable can help foster a culture of care for the river that might be much more powerful than bureaucratic management.
FreeRiver is currently a very early-stage, speculative project, but that suits this part of the essay very well, because it’s time to think further into the future – what might the planetary era be like, once it has truly begun?
The planetary era
Let’s begin this imaginative exploration of possible futures by supposing the FreeRiver idea works and spreads. The general idea of having AI’s associated with elements of the natural environment could be extended beyond rivers. Forests, mountains, and other ecosystems could all be given associated AIs. It might become normal for each natural feature to have its own sensory apparatus and AI ‘mind’, with those minds potentially being interpenetrating – because rivers run through forests, for example. They could also be nested, from rivers, to bioregions, and maybe all the way up to a Gaia AI, that would receive the inputs from all the smaller Nature AI’s, and from the major global climate systems such as ocean currents.
If Nature AI’s are developed, it will be important to think carefully about how they are used. For example, my initial inclination would be that they should only be advisory, rather than being connected into systems that would allow them to act on the world. This would ensure there was always a layer of human judgement between analysis and action.
Thinking more widely about developments like this can lead us to a new conception of how our relationship to the living world might develop over the long term. Our original environment, thousands of years ago, was nature. It existed all around us without needing our input to keep going, but it was hard to survive in. We developed technologies to make survival easier, and they have now resulted in many people today living in almost entirely artificial environments. These have made life more comfortable and made survival easier, but they need continual work to keep them going, have currently left billions in poverty, and are greatly degrading nature.
In future, perhaps we could aim to reach a new kind of environment, that’s a hybrid of natural and artificial environments and in which we have the best of both worlds. It would be a living environment in which survival is easy and life is comfortable for all people, the environment is self-sustaining with few human inputs needed, and the living world itself flourishes once again. To do this, we might use technology to regenerate the living world, with forest gardens blended into ecosystems, integrated sensors combining with mindful immersion to give us intimate knowledge of the environment, and celebratory cultures of interbeing cultivating a joyful and active care for our environment. We might cultivate a nature-tech hybrid world in which humanity is a hyperkeystone species in a truly positive sense.
This is just one possibility in one area of our future. In a planetary pluriverse, cities around the world will be able to develop in myriad ways. There might be inter-bioregional festival exchanges, and solarpunk nomads roaming the globe. And this is only thinking about the relatively early part of the planetary era. As the future unfolds across tens and hundreds of millenia, who knows what incredible adventures our descendants might embark upon, as this little blue dot sails through space into an eternity of cosmic time.
It’s tempting to get carried away with whimsical imaginings of the distant future. But it’s important we keep these speculations bounded. There is a tendency to see these amazing possibilities and prioritise them incorrectly. Today, around the world, hundreds of millions of the globally poor are helplessly witnessing the implacable breakdown of the biosphere around them, a slow-motion catastrophe as the heat bears down with ever greater intensity, and life-destroying disasters become more frequent. And there are millions of people, perhaps including you, who are living in complacent complicity with societies that are knowingly causing a global degradation of the planetary life-systems. We need to implement a massive transformation of our global systems, our local cultures, and our individual lifestyles, for such positive futures to have any chance of coming to pass.
We have a daunting task ahead of us. But we know from the last hundred years, and from the history of humanity as a whole, that such massive transformations can and do happen. This time, we need to actively enact the transformation ourselves. If we do so, we will be laying the groundwork for humanity and the rest of life on Earth to flourish into the indefinite future. Seen in this light, our task is not so much daunting as exhilarating. We are alive at an incredibly important moment in the story of our species. If we are successful, this time will be remembered forever as the beginning of a wonderful new era for humanity: the planetary era.
To attain this success, we will need dedication. There are many individual tasks that must be completed to reach our collective goal, all of them as important as each other. There is the work to dematerialise and de-energise the lives of people in the West. The work to restore ecosystems and regenerate nature. The work to free people around the world from oppression and exploitation. The work of revitalising indigenous cultures, and that of developing new cultures of care and community. And so much more besides. An absolutely crucial element is to help more people recognise the importance of this moment in the human story, and dedicate themselves more fully and more effectively to helping us become a successful planetary species.
All of these tasks are equally important. Perhaps the single underlying task that unites them all is to find, and live with passionate determination, your own answer to one essential question: what role do you want to play in the human story?
Thank you for this beautifully visionary story of humanity. However the vision appears dependent on people of good will using information for the benefit of all. What I see missing is how to deal with historical and personal trauma that breed narcissism and psychopathic personalities that, without mechanisms for maintaining social harmony could disrupt and pervert the vision, recreating the pathologies of modernity. Indigenous cultures have taken mulkennia to develop dispute resolution mechanisms and systems for containing and isolating the psychopaths amongst them. Have you taken these aspects into consideration? I maybhave missed it.
Sounds like a new book is underway!