Unbounding the Future:
the Nanotechnology Revolution
Chapter 9
Restoring the Environment
The 1970s saw a revolution in Western attitudes
toward the natural environment. Concern with pollution,
deforestation, and species extinction exploded. With the rise of
these concerns came an ambivalent attitude toward technology and
the wealth it was producing: some said that human beings are
destructive to the environment in direct proportion to their
power. This immediately suggested that technology and higher
living standards were bad, being inherently destructive.
"Wealth" came to imply environmental destruction.
The revolution in attitudes toward the
environment has changed the idea of wealth. Our national
statistics may not reflect it—not every last citizen or
politician may agree—but the concept that genuine wealth
includes not just houses and refrigerators, factories and
machines, cars and roads, but also fields and forests, owls and
wolves, clean air, clean water, and wilderness has taken deep
root in minds and in politics. "The wealth of nature"
has come to include nature as a value in itself, not merely as
potential lumber, ore, and farmland.
As a consequence, greater wealth has begun to
mean cleaner wealth, greener wealth. Richer countries can afford
more expensive, more efficient equipment—scrubbers on
smokestacks, catalytic converters on cars—and so they can
produce goods with less environmental impact. This trend gives at
best a hint of the future.
Lester Milbrath, director of the Research Program
in Environment and Society at the State University of New York at
Buffalo, observes, "Nanotechnologies have the potential to
produce plentiful consumer goods with much lower throughput of
materials and much less production of waste, thus reducing carbon
dioxide buildup and reducing global warming. They also have the
potential to reduce waste, especially hazardous waste, converting
it to natural materials which do not threaten life." James
Lovelock states that "The future could be good if we regain
a sense of purpose and embrace the new industries based on
information and nanotechnology.
These add enormous value to molecular-sized pieces of matter, and
need not be a threat to the environment as were the heavy
polluting industries of the past."
Making It Easier to Be
Clean
Should we boast of high technology while industry
still can't produce without polluting? Pollution is a sign of low
technology, of inadequate control of how matter is handled.
Inferior goods and hazardous wastes are two sides of one problem.
With processes based on molecular
manufacturing, industries will produce superior goods, and by
virtue of the same advance in control, will have no need of
burning, oiling, washing with solvents and acids, and flushing
noxious chemicals down their drains. Molecular-manufacturing
processes will rearrange atoms
in controlled ways, and can neatly package any unwanted atoms for
recycling or return to their source. This intrinsic cleanliness
inspired environmentalist Terence McKenna, writing in the Whole
Earth Review, to call nanotechnology "the most radical
of the green visions."
This green vision will not be fulfilled
automatically, but only with effort. Any powerful technology can
be used for good or ill, and nanotechnology is no exception.
Today, we see scattered progress in environmental cleanup and
restoration, some slowing of ecological destruction, because of
organized political pressure buoyed by a groundswell of public
concern. Yet for all its force, this pressure is spread
desperately thin, fighting enormous resistance rooted in economic
forces.
But if these economic forces vanish, the
opposition will crumble. Often, the key to success in battle is
to give one's opponents an attractive alternative to fighting.
The most powerful cry of the antigreen opposition has been that
clearing and polluting the land offer the only path to wealth,
the only escape from poverty. Now we can see a clean, efficient,
and unobtrusive alternative: green wealth, compatible with
natural wealth.
Ending Chemical Pollution,
Cutting Resource Consumption
We've already seen how molecular manufacturing
can provide clean solar energy without paving over desert
ecosystems, and how clean energy and common materials can be
turned into abundant, efficient goods, also cleanly. With care,
sources of chemical pollution—even of excess carbon
dioxide—can, step by step, be eliminated. This includes the
pollutants responsible for acid rain, as well as ozone-destroying
gases, greenhouse gases, oil spills, and toxic wastes.
In each case, the story is about the same. Acid
rain mostly results from burning dirty fuels containing sulfur,
and from burning cleaner fuels in a dirty way, producing nitrogen
oxides. We've seen how molecular manufacturing can make solar
cells cheap enough and rugged enough to use as road surfaces.
With green wealth, we can make clean fuels from solar energy,
air, and water; consuming these fuels in clean nanomechanical
systems would just return to the air exactly the materials taken
from it, along with a little water vapor. Fuels are made, fuels
are consumed, and the cycle produces no net pollution. With cheap
solar fuels, coal and petroleum can be replaced, ignored, left in
the ground. When petroleum is obsolete, oil spills will vanish.
The greenhouse gas of greatest concern is carbon
dioxide, and its main source is the burning of fossil fuels. The
above steps would end this. The release of other gases, such as
the chlorofluorocarbons(CFCs) used in foaming plastics, is often
a side effect of primitive manufacturing processes: foaming
plastic will hardly be a popular activity in an era of
molecular manufacturing. These materials can be replaced or
controlled—and they include the gases most responsible for
ozone depletion.
The chief threats to the ozone layer are those
same CFCs, used as refrigerants and solvents. Molecular
manufacturing will use solvents sparingly (mostly water), and can
recycle them without dumping any. CFC refrigerants can be
replaced even with current technology, at a cost; with
nanotechnology, that cost will be negligible.
Toxic wastes generally consist of harmless atoms
arranged into noxious molecules;
the same is true of sewage. With inexpensive energy and equipment
able to work at the molecular level, these wastes can be
converted into harmless forms. Many need never be produced in the
first place. Other toxic wastes contain toxic elements, such as
lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium. These elements come from the
ground, and are best returned to the location and condition in
which they were found. With nanotechnology, moreover, there will
be little reason to dig them up in the first place.
Nanotechnology will be able to break materials down to simple
molecules and build them back up again. Need it be said that this
will permit complete recycling?
It is fair to say that eliminating these sources
of pollution would be a major improvement. There doesn't seem to
be much more to say, aside from the usual caveats: "Not
immediately," "Not all at once," and "Not on
a predictable schedule." No one wants to make and dump
wastes; they want something else, and get wastes as by-products.
With a better way to get what people want, dumping wastes can be
stopped.
People will also be able to get what they want
while reducing their resource consumption. As materials grow
stronger, they can be used more sparingly. As machines grow more
perfect—in their motors, bearings, insulation,
computers—they will grow more efficient. Materials will be
needed to make things, and energy will be needed to run them, but
in smaller amounts. What is more, nanotechnology will be the
ultimate recycling technology. Objects can be made extremely
durable, decreasing the need for recycling; alternatively,
objects can be made genuinely biodegradable, designed at the
molecular level to decompose after use, leaving humus and mineral
grit; alternatively, they can be made of microscopic
snap-together pieces, making objects as recyclable as structures
built and rebuilt out of a child's blocks; finally, even objects
not designed for recycling can be taken apart into simple
molecules and recycled regardless. Each approach has different
advantages and costs, and each makes current garbage problems go
away.
Cleaning Up the Twentieth
Century Mess
Still, even after twentieth-century industry is
history, its toxic residues will remain. Cleaning up waste dumps
with today's technology has proved so expensive and ineffective
that many in the field have all but given up hope of really
solving the problem. What can be done with post-breakthrough
technologies?
Cleansing Soil and Water
Nanotechnology can help with the cleanup of these
pollutants. Living organisms clean the environment, when they
can, by using molecular
machinery to break down toxic materials. Systems built with
nanotechnology will be able to do likewise, and to deal with
compounds that aren't biodegradable.
Alan Liss is director of research for Ecological
Engineering Associates, a company that uses knowledge of how
natural ecosystems function to address environmental problems
such as wastewater treatment. He explains how cleanup could work:
"The more we learn about the ecosystem, the more we find
that functions are managed by particular organisms or groups of
organisms. Nanotech 'managers' might be able to step in when the
natural managers are not available, thereby having a particular
ecological activity occur that otherwise wouldn't have happened.
A nanotech manager might be used for remediation in a situation
where toxicants have destroyed some key members of a particular
ecosystem—some managerial microbes, for example. Once the
needed activities are reinitiated, the living survivors of the
stressed ecosystem can jump in and continue the ecosystem
recovery effort."
FIGURE 10: ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANUP
By changing the way materials and products are made,
molecular manufacturing will free up land formerly used for
industrial plants. Toxic materials could be removed from
contaminated soil using solar power as the energy source, and
the cleanup device and any collected residues could later be
carted away.
To see how nanomachines
could be used to clean up pollution, imagine a device made of smart materials
and roughly resembling a tree, once it has been delivered and
unfolded. Above ground are solar-collecting panels; below ground,
a branching system of rootlike tubes reaches a certain distance
into the soil. By extending into a toxic waste dump, these
rootlike structures could soak up toxic chemicals, using energy
from the solar collectors to convert them into harmless
compounds. Rootlike structures extending down into the water
table could do the same cleanup job in polluted aquifers.
Cleansing the Atmosphere
Most atmospheric pollutants are quickly washed
out by rain (turning them into soil- and water-pollution
problems), but some air pollutants are longer lasting. Among
these are the chlorine compounds attacking the ozone layer that
protects the Earth from excessive ultraviolet radiation. Since
1975, observers have recorded growing holes in the ozone layer:
at the South Pole, the hole can reach as far as the tips of South
America, Africa, and Australia. Loss of this protection subjects
people to an increased risk of skin cancer and has unknown
effects on ecosystems. The new technology base will be able to
stop the increase in ozone-destroying compounds, but the effects
would linger for years. How might this problem be reversed more
rapidly?
Thus far, we've talked about nanotechnology in
the laboratory, in manufacturing plants, and in products for
direct human use. Molecular manufacturing can also make products
that will perform some useful temporary function when tossed out
into the environment. Getting rid of ozone-destroying pollutants
high in the stratosphere is one example. There may be simpler
approaches, without the sophistication of nanotechnology, but
here is one that would work to cleanse the stratosphere of
chlorine: Make huge numbers of balloons, each the size of a grain
of pollen and light enough to float up into the ozone layer. In
each, place a small solar-power plant, a molecular-processing
plant, and a microscopic grain of sodium. The processing plant
collects chlorine-containing compounds and separates out the
chlorine. Combining this with the sodium makes sodium
chloride-ordinary salt. When the sodium is gone, the balloon
collapses and falls. Eventually, a grain of salt and a
biodegradable speck fall to Earth, usually at sea. The
stratosphere is soon clean.
A larger problem (with a ground-based solution)
is climatic change caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO2)
levels. Global warming, expected by most climatologists and
probably under way today, is caused by changes in the composition
of Earth's atmosphere. The sun shines on the Earth, warming it.
The Earth radiates heat back into space, cooling. The rate at
which it cools depends on how transparent the atmosphere is to
the radiation of heat. The tendency of the atmosphere to hold
heat, to block thermal radiation from escaping into space, causes
what is called the "greenhouse effect." Several gases
contribute to this, but CO2 presents the most massive
problem. Fossil fuels and deforestation both contribute. Before
the new technology base arrives, something like 300 billion tons
of excess CO2 will likely have been added to the
atmosphere.
Small greenhouses can help reverse the global
greenhouse effect. By permitting more efficient agriculture,
molecular manufacturing can free land for reforestation, helping
to repair the devastation wrought by hungry people. Growing
forests absorb CO2.
If reforestation is not fast enough, inexpensive
solar energy can be applied to remove CO2 directly,
producing oxygen and glossy graphite pebbles. Painting the
world's roads with solar cells would yield about four trillion
watts of power, enough to remove CO2 at a rate of 10
billion tons per year. Temporarily planting one-tenth of U.S.
farm acreage with a solar cell "crop" would provide
enough energy to remove 300 billion tons in five years; winds
would distribute the benefits worldwide. The twentieth century
insult to Earth's atmosphere can be reversed by less than a
decade of twenty-first century repair work. Ecosystems damaged in
the meantime are another matter.
Orbital Waste
The space near Earth is being polluted with small
orbiting projectiles, some as small as a pin. Most of the debris
is floating fragments of discarded rocket stages, but it also
includes gloves and cameras dropped by astronauts. This is not a
problem for life on Earth, but it is a problem as life begins its
historic spread beyond Earth—the first great expansion since
the greening of the continents, long ago.
Orbiting objects travel much faster than rifle
bullets, and energy increases as the square of speed. Small
fragments of debris in space can do tremendous damage to a
spacecraft, and worse—their impact on an spacecraft can
blast loose yet more debris. Each fragment is potentially deadly
to a spacefaring human crossing its path. Today, the tiny
fraction of space that is near Earth is increasingly cluttered.
This litter needs to be picked up. With molecular
manufacturing, it will be possible to build small spacecraft able
to maneuver from orbit to orbit in space, picking up one piece of
debris after another. Small spacecraft are needed, since it makes
no sense to send a shuttle after a scrap of metal the size of a
postage stamp. With these devices, we can clean the skies and
keep them hospitable to life.
Nuclear Waste
We've spoken of waste that just needs molecular
changes to make it harmless, and toxic elements that came from
the ground, but nuclear technology has created a third kind of
waste. It has converted the slow, mild radioactivity of uranium
into the fast, intense radioactivity of newly created nuclei, the
products of fission and neutron bombardment. No molecular change
can make them harmless, and these materials did not come from the
ground. The products of molecular manufacturing could help with
conventional approaches to dealing with nuclear waste, helping to
store it in the most stable, reliable forms possible—but
there is a more radical solution.
Even before the era of the nuclear reactor and
the nuclear bomb, experimenters made artificially radioactive
elements by accelerating particles and slamming them into
nonradioactive targets. These particles traveled fast enough to
penetrate the interior of an atom and reach the nucleus, joining
it or breaking it apart.
The entire Earth is made of fallout from nuclear
reactions in ancient stars. Its radioactivity is low because so
much time has passed—many half-lives, for most radioactive
nuclei. "Kicking" these stable nuclei changes them,
often into a radioactive state. But kicking a radioactive nucleus
has a certain chance of turning it into a stable one, destroying
the radioactivity. By kicking, sorting, and kicking again, an
atom-smashing machine could take in electrical power and
radioactive waste, and output nothing but stable, nonradioactive
elements, identical to those common in nature. Don't recommend
this to your congressman—it would be far too expensive,
today—but it will some day be practical to destroy the
radioactivity of the twentieth-century's leftover nuclear waste.
Nanotechnology cannot do this directly, because
molecular machines work with molecules, not nuclei. But indirectly,
by making energy and equipment inexpensive, molecular
manufacturing can give us the means for a clean, permanent
solution to the problem of wastes left over from the nuclear era.
A Wealth of Garbage
Shortages often spur environmental damage. Faced
with a food shortage, herdsmen can graze grasslands down to bare
dirt. Faced with an energy shortage, industrial countries can
approve destructive projects. The growth of population and the
consumption of resources by twentieth-century industry have
placed growing pressures on Earth's ability to support us in the
manner to which we have become accustomed.
The resource problem will look quite different in
the twenty-first century, with a new technology base. Today, we
cut trees and mine iron for our structures. We pump oil and mine
coal for our energy. Even cement is born in the flames of burning
fossil fuels. Almost everything we build, almost every move we
make, consumes something ripped from the Earth. This need not
continue.
Our civilization uses materials for many things,
but mainly to make things with a certain size, shape, and
strength. These structural uses include everything from fibers in
clothing to paving in roads, and most of the mass of furniture,
walls, cars, spacecraft, computers—indeed, most of the mass
of almost every product we build and use. The best structural
materials use carbon, in forms like diamond and graphite. With
elements from air and water, carbon makes up the polymers of wool
and polyester, and of wood and nylon. A twenty-first-century
civilization could mine the atmosphere for carbon, extracting
over 300 billion tons before lowering the CO2
concentration back to its natural, pre-industrial level. For a
population of 10 billion, this would be enough to give every
family a large house with lightweight but steel-strong walls,
with 95 percent left over. Atmospheric garbage is an ample source
of structural materials, with no need to cut trees or dig iron
ore.
Plants show that carbon can be used to build
solar collectors. Laboratory work shows that carbon compounds can
be better conductors than copper. A whole power system could be
built without even touching the rich resources of metal buried in
garbage dumps.
Carbon can make windows, of plastic or diamond.
Carbon can make things colorful with organic dyes. Carbon can be
used to build nanocomputers,
and will be the chief component of high-performance nanomachines
of all kinds. The other components in all these materials are
hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, all found in air and water. Other
elements are useful, but seldom necessary. Traces would often be
ample.
With a new technology base making recycling easy,
there need be no steady depletion of Earth's resources, just to
keep a civilization running. The sketch just made shows that
recycling just one form of garbage—excess atmospheric CO2—can
provide most needs. Even 10 billion wealthy people would not need
to strip the Earth of resources. They could make do with what
we've already dug up and thrown away, and they wouldn't even need
all of that.
In short, a twenty-first-century civilization
with a population of 10 billion could maintain a high standard of
living using nothing but waste from twentieth-century industry,
supplemented with modest amounts of air, water, and sunlight.
This won't necessarily happen, yet the very fact that it is
possible gives a better sense of what the new technology base can
mean for the relationship between humanity, resources, and the
Earth.
Green Products
In The Green Consumer, Elkington, Hailes,
and Makower define a green product as one that:
• Is not dangerous to the health of people
or animals
• Does not cause damage to the environment
during manufacture, use, or disposal
• Does not consume a disproportionate amount
of energy and other resources during manufacture, use, or
disposal
• Does not cause unnecessary waste, due
either to excessive packaging or to a short useful life
• Does not involve the unnecessary use of or
cruelty to animals
• Does not use materials derived from
threatened species or environments
• Ideally, does not trade price, quality,
nutrition, or convenience for environmental quality
With its ability to make almost anything at low
cost—including products designed for extreme safety,
durability, efficiency—without mining, logging, harming
animals or environments, or producing toxic wastes, molecular
manufacturing will make possible greener products than any yet
seen in a store. Nanotechnology can replace dirty wealth with
green wealth.
Environmental Restoration
A central problem in environmental restoration is
reversing environmental encroachment. We tend to see land as
being gobbled up by housing, because the land where we live
generally is. Farming, though, consumes more land, and the
variant of farming called "forestry" consumes still
more. By rolling back our requirement for farmland, and for wood
and paper, nanotechnology can change the balance of forces behind
environmental encroachment. This should make it more practical,
politically and economically, for people to move toward
environmental restoration.
Restoring the environment means returning land to
what it was—removing what has been added and, where
possible, replacing what has been lost. We've seen how this can
be done, in part, by removing pollutants and some of the
pressures for ploughing and paving. A more difficult problem,
though, is restoring the ecological balance where the changes
have been biological. Much of Earth's biological diversity has
been a result of biological isolation, of islands, seas,
mountains, and continents. This isolation has been breached, and
reversing the resulting problems is one of the greatest
challenges in healing the biosphere.
Imported Species
Human meddling with life in the biosphere has
caused enormous ecological disruptions. This hasn't involved
genetic engineering—by twisting organisms to better serve
human purposes, genetic engineering usually leaves them less able
to serve their own purposes, less able to survive and reproduce
in the wild. The great disruptions have come from a different
source: from globe-traveling human beings taking aggressive,
well-adapted species from one part of the planet to another,
landing them on a distant island or continent to invade an
ecosystem with no evolved defenses. This has happened again and
again.
Australia is a classic case. It had been isolated
long enough to evolve its own peculiar species quite unfamiliar
elsewhere: kangaroos, koalas, duck-billed platypuses. When humans
arrived, they brought new species. Whoever brought the first
rabbits could not have guessed that they, of all creatures, would
be so destructive. They soon overran the continent, destroying
crops and grazing lands, unchecked by natural competitors or
predators. They were joined by invaders from the plant kingdom:
the prickly pear, and others.
The Americas have suffered invasions, too:
tumbleweed, a bane of the rancher and farmer, is a relatively
recent import from Central Asia. Since 1956, Africanized bees
have been spreading from Brazil and moving north—but what
they displace, in America, are European bees. Africa, in turn, is
being invaded by the American screw-worm fly, an insect with
larvae that enter an animal's wounds, including the umbilical
wound of a newborn, and eat it alive. The story goes on and on.
People have sometimes tried, with a measure of
success, to fight fire with fire: to bring in parasitic species
and diseases to attack the imported species and keep its growth
within some reasonable bounds. Australia's problem with prickly
pear was tackled using an insect from Argentina; the rabbits were
cut back—with mixed results—using a viral disease
called myxomatosis: "rabbit pox."
Ecosystem Protectors
In many parts of the world, native species have
been driven to extinction by rats, pigs, and other imported
species, and others are endangered and fighting for their lives.
Biological controls—fighting fire with fire—have
advantages: organisms are small, selective, and inexpensive.
These advantages will eventually be shared by devices made using
molecular manufacturing, which avoid the disadvantages of
importing and releasing yet more uncontrollable, breeding,
spreading species. Alan Liss spoke of using nanotechnological
devices to help restore ecosystems at a chemical level. A similar
idea can be applied at a biological level.
The challenge—and it is huge—would be
to develop insect-size or even microbe-size devices that could
serve as selective, mobile, mechanical flyswatters or weed
pullers. These could do what biological controls do, but would be
unable to replicate and spread. Let's call devices of this sort
"ecosystem
protectors." They could keep aggressive imported species
out, saving native species from extinction.
To a human being or an ordinary organism, an
ecosystem protector would seem like just one more of the many
billions of different kinds of bugs and microbes in the
ecosystem—small things going about their own business, with
no tendency to bite. They might be detectable, but only if you
sorted through a lot of dirt and looked at it through a
microscope, because they wouldn't be very common. They would have
just one purpose: to notice when they bumped into a member of an
imported species on the "not welcome here" list, and
then either to eliminate it or to ensure, at least, that it
couldn't reproduce.
Natural organisms are often very finicky about
which species they attack. These ecosystem protectors could be
equally finicky about which species they approach, and then,
before attacking, could do a DNA
analysis to be sure. It would be simplest (especially in the
beginning while we're still learning) to limit each kind of
defender to monitoring only one imported species.
Each unit of a particular kind of
ecosystem-defender device would be identical, built with
precision by a special-purpose molecular-manufacturing setup.
Each would last for a certain time, then break down. Each kind
can be tested in a terrarium, then a greenhouse, then a trial
outdoors ecosystem, keeping an eye on their effects at each stage
until one gains the confidence for larger scale use. "Larger
scale" could still be quite limited, if they aren't designed
to travel very far. This built-in obsolescence limits both how
long each device can operate and how far it can move: getting
control of the structure of matter includes making nanomachines
work where they're wanted and not work elsewhere.
The agricultural industry today manufactures and
distributes many thousands of tons of poisonous chemicals to be
sprayed on the land, typically in an attempt to eliminate one or
a few species of insect. Ecosystem protectors could also be used
to protect these agricultural monocultures, field by field, with
far less harm to the environment than today's methods. They could
likewise be used in the special ecosystems of intensive
greenhouse agriculture.
Unlike chemicals sprayed into the environment,
these ecosystem protectors would be precisely limited in time,
space, and effect. They neither contaminate the groundwater nor
poison bees and ladybugs. In order to weed out imported organisms
and bring an ecosystem back to its natural balance, ecosystem
protectors would not have to be very common—only common
enough for a typical imported organism to encounter one once in a
lifetime, before reproducing.
Even so, as the ecosystem protectors wear out and
stop working, they would present a small-scale problem of
solid-waste disposal. With the exercise of some clever design,
all the machinery of ecosystem protectors might be made of
reasonably durable yet biodegradable materials or (at worst)
materials no more harmful than bits of grit and humus in the
soil. So their remains would be like the shells of diatoms, or
bits of lignin from wood, or like peculiar particles of clay or
sand.
Alternatively, we might develop other mobile
nanomachines to find and collect or break down their remains.
This strategy starts to look like setting up a parallel ecosystem
of mobile machines, a process that could be extended to
supplement the natural cleansing processes of nature in many
ways. Each step in this direction will require caution, but not
paranoia: there need be no toxic chemicals here, no new creatures
to spread and run wild. Missteps will have the great virtue of
being reversible. If we decide that we don't like the effects of
some particular variety of ecosystem protector or cleanup
machine, we could simply stop manufacturing that kind. We could
even retrieve those that had already been made and dispersed in
the environment, since their exact number is known, along with
which patch of ground each is patrolling.
If the making and monitoring of ecosystem
protectors seems a lot of trouble to go to just to weed out
nonnative species, consider this example of the environmental
destruction such species can cause. Sometime before World War II,
a South African species of fire ant was accidentally imported
into the United States. Today, infested areas can have up to five
hundred of these ants per square foot. The National Audubon
Society—a strong opponent of irresponsible use of
pesticides—had to resort to spraying its refuge islands near
Corpus Christi when they found these ants destroying over half
the hatchlings of the brown pelican, an endangered species.
In Texas, it's been shown that the new ants are
killing off native ant species—reducing biodiversity. The
USDA's Sanford Porter states that due to them, "Texas may be
in the midst of a genuine biological revolution." The ants
are heading west, and have established a beachhead in California.
Without ecosystem protectors or something much like them,
ecologies around the world will continue to be threatened by
unnatural invasions. Our species opened the new invasion routes,
and it's our responsibility to protect native species made newly
vulnerable by them.
Mending the land
Today, most people are far from the land, tied up
in turning the wheels of 20th century industry. In the years to
come, those wheels will be replaced by molecular systems that do
most of their turning by themselves. The pressure to destroy the
land will be less. Time available to help heal the land will be
greater. Surely more energy will flow in this direction.
To mend ruined landscapes will require skill and
effort. Ecosystem defenders can do flyswatting and weedpulling
jobs no humans ever could, but there will also be jobs of
shaping, planting, and nurturing. The land has been torn by
machines guided by hasty hands, almost overnight. It can
gradually be restored by patient hands, whether bare, gloved, or
guiding machines able to reshape a ravaged mountain without
turning the soil.
The green wealth that can be brought by
nanotechnology has raised high hopes among some
environmentalists. Again writing in Whole Earth Review,
Terence McKenna suggests it "would tend to promote . . . a
sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human
position within that dynamic and evolving balance." Perhaps
people will learn to value nature more deeply when they can see
it more clearly, with eyes unclouded by grief and guilt.
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