Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, “We are not as gods. We’re not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything.” Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it…We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.” Kingsnorth

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The Devils Hole pupfish may well be the rarest fish in the world. In an effort to preserve it, a kind of fishy Westworld has been constructed—an exact replica of the actual pool, down to the ledge where the skinny-dipper’s feet were caught on tape. Meanwhile, a plume of radioactive water is creeping its way toward the cavern from the Nevada Test Si

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“As a geologist, I think about timescales,” he went on. “The timescale of the climate system is centuries to tens of thousands of years. If we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which, of course, is impossible, it’s still going to warm at least for centuries, because the ocean hasn’t equilibrated. That’s just basic physics. We’re not sure how much additi

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To get to zero, everyone would have to stop emitting—not only Americans and Europeans and Chinese, but also Indians and Africans and South Americans. But asking countries that have contributed almost nothing to the problem to swear off carbon because other countries have already produced way, way too much of it is grossly unfair. It’s also geopolit

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Much closer to realization is an effort to bring back the American chestnut tree. The tree, once common in the eastern United States, was all but wiped out by chestnut blight. (The blight, a fungal pathogen introduced in the early twentieth century, killed off nearly every chestnut in North America—an estimated four billion trees.) Researchers at t

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As power stations go, geothermal plants are “clean.” Instead of burning fossil fuels, they rely on steam or superheated water pumped from underground, which is why they tend to be sited in volcanically active areas. Still, as Aradóttir explained to me, they, too, produce emissions. With the superheated water inevitably come unwanted gases, like hyd

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The canal, which was planned in the closing years of the nineteenth century and opened at the start of the twentieth, flipped the river on its head. It compelled the Chicago to change its direction, so that instead of draining into Lake Michigan, the city’s ordure would flow away from it, into the Des Plaines River, and from there into the Illinois

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During the first few months of 2020, a vast, unsupervised experiment took place. As the coronavirus raged, billions of people were ordered to stay home. At the peak of the lockdown, in April, global CO2 emissions were down an estimated seventeen percent compared with the comparable period the previous year. This drop—the largest recorded ever—was i

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But it’s one thing to be able to pull carbon out of the air and quite another to be able to pull this off at scale. Burning fossil fuels generates energy. Capturing CO2 from the air requires energy. So long as this energy comes from burning fossil fuels, it will add to the carbon that has to be captured. A second major challenge is disposal. Once c

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