The Unnatural World:The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age
Interview with David Biello
January 3, 2017Sign Up to listen to full interview.
About David Biello
David Biello is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on the environment and energy since 1999. He is currently an editor at Scientific American, where he has been a contributor since 2005, and he also contributes frequently to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Yale e360, Nautilus, and Aeon. Biello has been a guest on radio shows, such as WNYC’s The Takeaway, NHPR’s Word of Mouth, and PRI’s The World. He hosts the ongoing duPont-Columbia award-winning documentary Beyond the Light Switch for PBS. The Unnatural World is his first book.
Interview Summary
Humans, undoubtedly the most invasive species to have inhabited the Earth, have been transforming the planet for thousands of years, not always by design. This transformative human force influences other co-existing living forms and long-term outcomes in ways that are often too hard to perceive.
In The Unnatural World, David Biello, a journalist and environment and energy editor at Scientific American, offers a balanced review of our ecological history, the effects of terraforming, and the challenges of the latest geological epoch, the Anthropocene.
Key Topics
- How humans have come to dominate the Earth and become a world-changing force?
- What kinds of marks are humans making and how deep and pervasive these marks are?
- Humanity’s new chapter in Earth’s history – in the rocks, chemistry of oceans, composition of air, and in the evolution of life.
- What is the Environmentalist’s paradox?
- Why are so many people benefiting in what seem to be the Earth’s most challenging times?
- Why do we have a collective social amnesia that allows a continual decline of the planet?
