00:01:34.386 --> 00:01:37.848
Ascension Island arose out of nothing.

00:01:39.182 --> 00:01:45.022
It was a volcanic eruption from the depths
of the sea bed, that formed and formed...

00:01:45.022 --> 00:01:50.068
and the magma went up, and eventually
it surfaced and produced this island.

00:01:54.197 --> 00:01:59.828
Not a large island, but an island with a
mountain: a volcanic structure on the top...

00:01:59.828 --> 00:02:04.708
Which continued erupting for a
while, and then settled down...

00:02:04.708 --> 00:02:10.547
And left this rocky hulk, sitting in
the middle of the South Atlantic...

00:02:10.547 --> 00:02:13.634
A thousnd miles
from anywhere.

00:02:20.474 --> 00:02:25.520
The winds that blew across the
island brought very little rain.

00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:31.485
What rain did fall, disappeared underground
very fast into the volcanic ash.

00:02:31.485 --> 00:02:38.325
There was no means of life there. There was no way that
plants could survive, no way that humans could survive.

00:02:38.325 --> 00:02:41.578
Because there was no water.

00:03:10.816 --> 00:03:17.155
There are a few reports over the centuries of
castaways landing on the island...

00:03:17.155 --> 00:03:20.909
Occassionally people being dumped
there by passing ships...

00:03:21.952 --> 00:03:25.747
These people didn’t survive. There was
no means for them to survive.

00:03:25.747 --> 00:03:30.168
There was no food, there was
no water. It was a desert.

00:03:42.139 --> 00:03:47.436
So the British, while establishing their
empire around the world...

00:03:47.436 --> 00:03:51.815
in tbe early 19th century, used
it as a stopping off point...

00:03:51.815 --> 00:03:59.823
a refuelling point, before they carried on
to Southern Africa or round into Asia.

00:03:59.823 --> 00:04:04.035
And they decided they wanted
to make it a bit more habitable.

00:04:38.695 --> 00:04:46.161
Once the British had decided to have a settlement there,
they needed to make it a place which could live on its own...

00:04:46.161 --> 00:04:51.082
Which wasn’t constantly relying on
supplies being brought in.

00:04:51.082 --> 00:04:55.587
So they tried to engineer the island
to a place which would produce...

00:04:55.587 --> 00:04:58.965
Which could sustain life.

00:05:19.277 --> 00:05:25.325
The island became a test case for the idea that we
could re-engineer the environment round the world...

00:05:25.325 --> 00:05:29.371
That we could make our environments
in the way that we wanted them.

00:05:29.371 --> 00:05:34.543
And Joseph Hooker, a young
botanist came to the island...

00:05:34.543 --> 00:05:42.425
And proposed the idea of planting trees on
the bare, volcanic wasteland of the mountain.

00:05:58.441 --> 00:06:04.990
Any kind of geo-engineering that we’re going to do
is going to reflect our own priorities, our own values...

00:06:04.990 --> 00:06:07.158
Our own sense of what we want.

00:06:12.872 --> 00:06:17.085
The Victorians had a very clear idea of
what they wanted to do on the island.

00:06:17.085 --> 00:06:22.090
They wanted to, in some ways, recreate
England in the South Atlantic.

00:06:22.090 --> 00:06:27.137
So they brought in British livestock. They
brought in sheep, they brought in cattle.

00:06:27.137 --> 00:06:33.310
They want to run an English farm. They wanted
to turn it into the South Downs, if you like.

00:07:26.821 --> 00:07:32.619
Terraforming is the idea that you
can create your own environment...

00:07:32.619 --> 00:07:36.873
That you can recreate the planet
in the form that you want it...

00:07:36.873 --> 00:07:43.088
That you don’t have to rely entirely on the
existing climate system, or existing ecology.

00:07:51.680 --> 00:07:58.269
They began to have the idea that they might be able
to modify the environment of the island itself…

00:07:58.269 --> 00:08:01.856
And in particular to
produce some rainfall.

00:08:06.778 --> 00:08:13.618
There was a theory around that if you planted
trees they would seed essentially the clouds…

00:08:13.618 --> 00:08:20.250
that would form over the mountain, and
encourage those clouds to produce rainfall.

00:08:23.253 --> 00:08:27.257
There was a mist on top of Green Mountain.
There was no mist anywhere else…

00:08:27.257 --> 00:08:33.930
But it had encouraged the moisture there.
And they did get extra rainfall on the mountain.

00:09:01.916 --> 00:09:06.254
This is not by any stretch of the
imagination a natural forest.

00:09:06.254 --> 00:09:09.841
It’s an extraordinary
assembly. And yet...

00:09:11.342 --> 00:09:13.636
It is an ecosystem.

00:09:18.349 --> 00:09:21.728
That forest, that
artificial forest...

00:09:21.728 --> 00:09:27.275
Is changing the climate on that
island, by encouraging rainfall...

00:09:27.275 --> 00:09:30.445
And it is cooling the island
as well, as trees do.

00:09:31.404 --> 00:09:35.950
So it was a geo-engineering activity
on this strange volcanic mountain

00:09:35.950 --> 00:09:37.786
in the middle of nowhere.

00:09:41.456 --> 00:09:46.336
A green splash, in a
very dark moonscape.

00:13:01.322 --> 00:13:06.369
Islands are, particularly in the
early parts of the Age of Discovery...

00:13:06.369 --> 00:13:10.832
Or the age of being discovered, depending
which end of the ship you’re looking at...

00:13:10.832 --> 00:13:13.668
Islands have this...

00:13:13.668 --> 00:13:17.130
Very special status
because they’re one-offs.

00:13:18.673 --> 00:13:24.595
They’re very good to play with in the imagination.
You can’t really make up whole continents...

00:13:24.595 --> 00:13:29.225
But the idea of an island as
sort of embodying an idea...

00:13:30.435 --> 00:13:36.941
Utopia is an island. Robinson Crusoe
recreates capitalism on an island...

00:13:36.941 --> 00:13:39.110
The Tempest takes
place on an island.

00:13:39.110 --> 00:13:45.700
This idea of places which are almost of the
imagination, gets projected onto real islands.

00:13:53.875 --> 00:14:00.548
Hooker and others have an idea that Ascension
can be made into a more habitable place.

00:14:00.548 --> 00:14:06.387
And they think that greenery is the way to
do that. They think that botany is the tool...

00:14:06.387 --> 00:14:12.393
For remaking the environment in a
way that makes it better for people.

00:14:14.687 --> 00:14:20.735
The idea that human influence on the Earth,
which is perceived as primarily benign...

00:14:20.735 --> 00:14:30.119
Can be intentionally increased, becomes a very
strong part of 19th century scientific thinking, but...

00:14:30.119 --> 00:14:35.708
Control is an extremely hard
thing to really imagine here.

00:14:39.796 --> 00:14:45.551
They wanted the top of the island to be
farmable, and that didn’t really work out.

00:14:45.551 --> 00:14:50.723
So they never got exactly what they wanted,
but they definitely got something.

00:15:05.863 --> 00:15:13.788
There was a debate in the late 80s, early 90s,
about the whole word ‘terraforming’.

00:15:15.498 --> 00:15:22.046
Some people chose to prefer the term
‘ecopoiesis’ - the making of an ecosystem...

00:15:22.046 --> 00:15:25.925
Or the forming of
an ecosystem.

00:15:25.925 --> 00:15:32.598
And I think what you’re seeing on Ascension is in fact,
more like ecopoiesis than it is like terraforming...

00:15:32.598 --> 00:15:37.145
It’s not turning into the thing it was
designed to be by Hooker...

00:15:37.145 --> 00:15:42.567
But there is some sense of life having
found a way that isn’t exactly the way...

00:15:42.567 --> 00:15:46.445
The people who wanted to
change the island wanted.

00:16:20.646 --> 00:16:26.944
The Earth has gone through its own ecopoiesis.
It’s gone through its own act of becoming.

00:16:30.281 --> 00:16:35.620
Humans are not just a part of it,
but a very important part of it.

00:16:35.620 --> 00:16:40.625
And one of the strange things about
what we’re doing to the planet is that...

00:16:40.625 --> 00:16:48.174
At the same time it seems more alienating from the planet...
and also to make us more a part of the planet than ever before.

00:17:00.895 --> 00:17:06.108
Very few people I think want to
engage in geo-engineering...

00:17:06.108 --> 00:17:11.364
But the ambition to reduce the
harm done by climate change...

00:17:11.364 --> 00:17:16.536
Drives people to think what about
what might be necessary in that regard.

00:17:19.413 --> 00:17:23.834
It feels like making the Earth
a machine for humans to live in...

00:17:23.834 --> 00:17:26.671
And that’s discomforting.

00:17:29.757 --> 00:17:35.680
The idea that there’s a nature that
humans shouldn’t tamper with...

00:17:35.680 --> 00:17:44.397
And I understand that, but I honestly
feel that it’s just, in some ways, too late...

00:20:01.075 --> 00:20:07.123
There... And then... Temple...

00:20:07.123 --> 00:20:10.167
Where can I do that?

00:20:11.585 --> 00:20:17.007
Twenty-nine, running low on wood.
And if we’re running low on wood...

00:20:18.134 --> 00:20:24.515
You little ladies will go and... mine.

00:20:57.756 --> 00:21:03.012
Sometimes we think that reality is one
thing, and we simply call it ‘reality’...

00:21:03.012 --> 00:21:05.139
The only one there is.

00:21:05.139 --> 00:21:10.102
But it’s useful to consider that reality
appears in many different shapes...

00:21:10.102 --> 00:21:13.898
According to different perspectives
that we adopt towards them.

00:21:18.360 --> 00:21:26.202
For this reason it might be useful to consider reality
not so much as ‘reality’, but as a ‘reality system’.

00:21:26.202 --> 00:21:32.791
Different people have different ways of entertaining these
ideas, and they create for themselves different realities...

00:21:32.791 --> 00:21:36.921
Which means, different ‘worlds’.

00:21:49.308 --> 00:21:55.397
Of course, it is inevitable that your current
beliefs about the world in which you are living...

00:21:55.397 --> 00:22:01.111
Go to affect the kind of world
that you re-create.

00:22:04.823 --> 00:22:10.246
If you think that the ideas about reality that are
entertained by your world are not just ideas...

00:22:10.246 --> 00:22:12.414
They’re the truth! it’s really like that.

00:22:12.414 --> 00:22:17.211
Then inevitably, whichever world you
go to create, will be the same.

00:22:21.257 --> 00:22:26.220
In a world that is only an interplay of force,
asserting your force...

00:22:26.220 --> 00:22:30.099
As was typical in the 19th
century, becomes the point.

00:22:30.099 --> 00:22:35.145
In a world that is increasingly material,
this goes to affect the idea of the good...

00:22:35.145 --> 00:22:39.942
It goes to affect the structure of society,
it goes to affect the political discourse.

00:22:43.529 --> 00:22:50.452
To re-imagine the world from scratch, from zero,
outside of the current idea about reality...

00:22:50.452 --> 00:22:55.082
Is very complicated, because it means
literally to die to your own world...

00:22:55.082 --> 00:22:57.626
And be re-born in another world.

00:22:57.626 --> 00:22:59.712
That is the real challenge, I think...

00:22:59.712 --> 00:23:04.466
At a moment at which we are on the
verge of re-projecting our world...

00:23:04.466 --> 00:23:09.138
And we are running the risk
of re-projecting the same.

00:23:59.104 --> 00:24:03.651
We could say, starting in the
seventeenth century... Eighteenth...

00:24:03.651 --> 00:24:09.114
We start having a different way of
understanding how reality is made.

00:24:09.114 --> 00:24:15.079
For example we move from a world that is
populated by creatures on many different dimensions...

00:24:15.079 --> 00:24:18.374
Animals, humans, angels, God...

00:24:18.374 --> 00:24:22.503
To a world that is populated by creatures
that all exist on the same dimension.

00:24:22.503 --> 00:24:25.756
We develop a scientific language.

00:24:40.896 --> 00:24:45.442
Scientific language is specific to a
certain way of looking at the world.

00:24:47.903 --> 00:24:52.241
Like all the other languages, and like
all the other views of the world...

00:24:52.241 --> 00:24:56.412
In itself it is not an accurate
picture of the truth.

00:24:56.412 --> 00:25:01.000
It is a certain way of understanding,
of fictionalising reality...

00:25:01.000 --> 00:25:05.838
And this world is authentic. It’s real,
to a certain extent, and it’s effective.

00:25:06.714 --> 00:25:09.091
But in certain moments in history...

00:25:09.091 --> 00:25:14.638
It becomes so opaque, that it becomes
impossible to see through it.

00:25:14.638 --> 00:25:18.976
So it’s no long remembered
that these are grids...

00:25:18.976 --> 00:25:25.024
That we use to make sense of a reality
that is behind it, that is beyond our grasp...

00:25:25.024 --> 00:25:29.194
But we start confusing
it for the truth.

00:25:29.194 --> 00:25:32.740
And it becomes so similar to the truth,
that we take it for nature.

00:26:10.110 --> 00:26:15.616
The fundamental purpose of creating
a system of classification...

00:26:15.616 --> 00:26:20.037
Is understanding the world
in which you life, I think...

00:26:20.037 --> 00:26:26.460
And any system of classification is a reflection
of how we look at the world around us...

00:26:26.460 --> 00:26:32.466
Because it will never reflect the way
the natural world really is.

00:26:39.264 --> 00:26:45.187
It’s almost a property of being human,
I would say. You put things into groups.

00:26:45.187 --> 00:26:51.401
How these groups are arranged differ,
depending to your culture and where you live. But...

00:26:53.487 --> 00:26:57.866
If you think about Western
taxonomy or classification...

00:26:57.866 --> 00:27:02.579
There’s an underlying economic
importance at play.

00:27:11.380 --> 00:27:18.095
Joseph Hooker was part of a network
of fellows of the Linnean Society.

00:27:18.095 --> 00:27:21.640
Botanists or naturalists
would have been employed

00:27:21.640 --> 00:27:28.689
By companies like the Dutch East India Company
or the British East India Company...

00:27:28.689 --> 00:27:34.653
And in that capacity they bring back
plants and animals as specimens.

00:27:35.863 --> 00:27:41.660
And revolutionise the way naturalists
at the time could communicate

00:27:41.660 --> 00:27:45.789
between each other about
specific species that they encountered.

00:27:54.381 --> 00:27:59.469
A lot of the drive behind
it is to try and find...

00:27:59.469 --> 00:28:03.557
Plant and animals species,
but particularly plants...

00:28:03.557 --> 00:28:13.775
That will enable European powers to overview,
and regulate, and domesticate the natural world.

00:28:13.775 --> 00:28:17.905
So there’s an element of curiosity,
just because they want to know...

00:28:17.905 --> 00:28:21.825
But there’s also an element that
they live in an expanding world...

00:28:21.825 --> 00:28:30.667
They live countries that want to
expand their own spheres of influence

00:28:30.667 --> 00:28:33.670
to other countries,
for economic purposes.

00:28:33.670 --> 00:28:36.965
And so the study of the natural world...

00:28:36.965 --> 00:28:41.803
Kind of underpins that desire for
expansion and colonialism as well.

00:29:34.982 --> 00:29:39.987
We could say terraforming
is an attempt to build, or change...

00:29:39.987 --> 00:29:42.614
Worlds.

00:29:42.614 --> 00:29:46.410
Well, what do you think a world is,
and what do you think a world is for?

00:29:46.410 --> 00:29:50.205
Because if you start asking that question you’re
going to get a million different kind of answers...

00:29:50.205 --> 00:29:51.915
Depending on who you ask.

00:30:17.190 --> 00:30:24.114
Terraforming has built into it the idea that what sort of
‘terra’ you want to form would be something Earthlike.

00:30:24.114 --> 00:30:26.950
And I think that’s worth
examining as well...

00:30:26.950 --> 00:30:30.746
Because Earth is so many different kinds of places,
so many different kinds of climates...

00:30:30.746 --> 00:30:34.041
So many different kinds of
human realities.

00:30:41.965 --> 00:30:44.634
We could look at a scientific
definition of an Earthlike planet...

00:30:44.634 --> 00:30:48.680
We could look at cultural definitions
of Earthlike relationships...

00:30:48.680 --> 00:30:51.224
Between humans and the planet Earth.

00:30:51.224 --> 00:30:54.436
We could look at removing humans
from the equation and saying...

00:30:54.436 --> 00:30:59.357
“What were, or should be, the ideal
climates here, or ideal ecosystems?”

00:30:59.357 --> 00:31:03.487
Those are all realities,
but we too often forget...

00:31:03.487 --> 00:31:07.908
That what we’re really designing
is who gets to be in the space.

00:31:16.416 --> 00:31:18.710
So we’ve gained these new tools...

00:31:18.710 --> 00:31:20.754
We’ve gained these new capabilities...

00:31:20.754 --> 00:31:26.426
And again, ‘we’ in the broadest sense
of the biological human subject...

00:31:26.426 --> 00:31:29.054
That can effect change on Earth.

00:31:29.054 --> 00:31:35.519
Has gained the capability to change
the weather, change the climate, to...

00:31:36.394 --> 00:31:43.068
Massively disrupt the geological systems,
and biological systems, and ecological systems

00:31:43.068 --> 00:31:48.740
In that fragile zone between the
edge of space and the edge of lava.

00:31:48.740 --> 00:31:51.952
Which is very, very thin.
But we can mess with it.

00:31:53.078 --> 00:31:55.163
And, you know, there is a forming.

00:31:55.163 --> 00:31:57.582
Whether it’s a terraforming or an anti-terraforming...

00:31:57.582 --> 00:32:03.672
There’s human agency that is changing
the planetary body of Earth - Terra...

00:32:03.672 --> 00:32:06.466
At the largest possible scales.

00:32:06.466 --> 00:32:11.972
And it begs questions of human capacity...

00:32:11.972 --> 00:32:17.936
To engage with really,
really complicated systems...

00:32:17.936 --> 00:32:22.065
That we maybe don’t admit often
enough that we don’t understand.

00:36:55.171 --> 00:37:00.260
From the moment when NASA is
tasked with going to the moon...

00:37:00.260 --> 00:37:05.056
Some of them realise that they have an
unparalleled communications problem.

00:37:08.017 --> 00:37:13.022
All the time the Apollo missions were up
they needed to have communications with them.

00:37:13.022 --> 00:37:17.610
You can’t have have communications with an
orbiting satellite from just one place on the Earth...

00:37:17.610 --> 00:37:20.447
Because you can’t always
see the satellite, and so...

00:37:20.447 --> 00:37:23.783
It was a reason why the
Americans had to develop...

00:37:23.783 --> 00:37:28.413
A global set of radio receivers
and radio transmitters...

00:37:28.413 --> 00:37:31.958
That were capable of keeping
in contact with the spacecraft.

00:37:34.502 --> 00:37:37.213
Ascension was one of those nodes.

00:38:54.165 --> 00:38:58.044
When planetary missions, when space
probes starting reaching Mars...

00:38:58.044 --> 00:39:01.464
And seeing how
un-earthlike it was...

00:39:01.464 --> 00:39:08.054
That fed para-scientific speculation about
how you would make it more earthlike.

00:39:08.054 --> 00:39:10.765
How you would terraform it,
how you would...

00:39:10.765 --> 00:39:14.394
Thicken its atmosphere, melt
its icecaps, warm its surface.

00:39:15.311 --> 00:39:18.147
And in the 1990s...

00:39:18.147 --> 00:39:22.443
A British ecologist, David Wilkinson, pointed
out that a very good analogy to this...

00:39:22.443 --> 00:39:25.196
Was what had happened
on Ascension Island.

00:39:25.196 --> 00:39:30.368
That the greening of Green Mountain
was effectively a piece of terraforming.

00:40:01.608 --> 00:40:04.277
Mars has been many
different kinds of place...

00:40:04.277 --> 00:40:08.615
Over the course of its four and a half
or five billion year lifespan.

00:40:08.615 --> 00:40:14.245
Mars was once, seemingly as wet
and atmospherically rich as Earth...

00:40:14.245 --> 00:40:17.957
But that lack of a magnetosphere
left it vulnerable to cosmic rays...

00:40:17.957 --> 00:40:22.086
Sort of plucking away the water
and the air, bit by bit.

00:40:26.382 --> 00:40:29.093
We could look at a place
like the Moon, or Mars...

00:40:29.093 --> 00:40:34.390
In the terms that Buzz Aldrin used when
he walked on the surface of the moon...

00:40:34.390 --> 00:40:37.393
I think he called it
“magnificent desolation”.

00:40:37.393 --> 00:40:40.563
That it’s an empty place.
That there is no nature here...

00:40:40.563 --> 00:40:45.193
In the way that humans usually
tend to understand that term.

00:40:46.194 --> 00:40:52.325
But I think by observing a place
like Mars, on its own terms...

00:40:52.325 --> 00:40:57.497
And letting fall our preconceived
notions about what a nature is...

00:40:57.497 --> 00:40:59.874
We might see a lot more
than desolation.

00:41:46.504 --> 00:41:49.048
I think the idea of Ascension...

00:41:49.048 --> 00:41:53.386
As a very barren place to
which life has been brought...

00:41:53.386 --> 00:41:57.932
Plays into ideas
of Mars, but...

00:41:57.932 --> 00:42:00.768
Mars is incredibly old.

00:42:00.768 --> 00:42:05.314
Even the new bits of the surface
are billions of years old.

00:42:05.314 --> 00:42:08.109
Ascension Island is incredibly
young, everything’s still rugged.

00:42:08.109 --> 00:42:12.739
It’s almost still warm with the heat
of the Earth that bore it, so...

00:42:12.739 --> 00:42:15.992
There’s an interesting moral
question there, about...

00:42:15.992 --> 00:42:20.413
Is it right to try and make it into
some ‘green and pleasant land’?

00:42:20.413 --> 00:42:27.754
Or is there a respect that’s actually due
to an emptiness? To a barrenness?

00:42:38.931 --> 00:42:44.479
Humans have a tendency to
equate the natural, and the living...

00:42:44.479 --> 00:42:48.483
It’s in the life of nature that
people find much of its value...

00:42:48.483 --> 00:42:52.487
And when people think about deserts.
it’s often their want of life...

00:42:52.487 --> 00:43:00.286
Or their potential for brief spurts of life after
a single shower, which motivates people...

00:43:00.286 --> 00:43:04.499
But nature doesn’t have to be alive.
Nature doesn’t have to be ecosystems.

00:43:04.499 --> 00:43:07.001
And if you look beyond
the Earth...

00:43:07.001 --> 00:43:09.003
You will find that that
which is natural...

00:43:09.003 --> 00:43:14.926
Is naturally, remarkably,
shockingly, inspiringly barren.

00:43:39.700 --> 00:43:44.038
This is sort of like the paradox
at the heart of terraforming.

00:43:44.038 --> 00:43:49.460
If you make something into something
utterly other from itself...

00:43:49.460 --> 00:43:51.629
At some level you’re
betraying its nature...

00:43:51.629 --> 00:43:55.132
But at the same time you are bringing
what we think of as ‘nature’ to it...

00:43:55.132 --> 00:43:59.345
You are making it green, you are
making it moist, you are making it lush...

00:43:59.345 --> 00:44:03.641
You are making it a place that
you can imagine yourself.

00:44:03.641 --> 00:44:06.310
And this comes back to Ascension...

00:44:06.310 --> 00:44:11.732
Nature is as socially constructed,
almost more socially constructed...

00:44:11.732 --> 00:44:18.823
Than any of the other big terms with which
we try to come to terms with the world. And so...

00:44:18.823 --> 00:44:23.536
If you want to change a climate in a way that,
in some sense, nature might prefer...

00:44:23.536 --> 00:44:28.875
You are always doing the
unnatural in service of nature.

00:44:30.418 --> 00:44:32.420
Sometimes the way to
conserve something...

00:44:32.420 --> 00:44:38.634
Is to maintain its lifelessness,
its difficulty, its desertness.

00:46:34.959 --> 00:46:39.964
If we’re going to be practitioners
of the design of world systems...

00:46:39.964 --> 00:46:43.467
We have to be students of world systems as well.

00:46:51.684 --> 00:46:53.853
There’s the kind of
Rousseauian...

00:46:53.853 --> 00:47:00.151
Concept of like, an original sin,
a fall from a state of nature...

00:47:00.151 --> 00:47:03.529
Into this state of exception
which is separate to nature.

00:47:03.529 --> 00:47:07.950
Partly because we seem to have this
ability to, for better or worse...

00:47:07.950 --> 00:47:11.245
Affect big-scale environments.

00:47:13.956 --> 00:47:17.835
Just the acknowledgement of an Anthropocene
is also an acknowledgement of...

00:47:17.835 --> 00:47:22.757
You know an idea of nature over here,
and an idea of humanity over here.

00:47:26.719 --> 00:47:29.013
But I think you
to go back in.

00:47:29.013 --> 00:47:33.934
Because there is that inextricability
that is impossible to get away from.

00:47:38.939 --> 00:47:44.236
As humans interact with different
environments than the environment that...

00:47:44.236 --> 00:47:47.782
Has deeply shaped us so far...

00:47:47.782 --> 00:47:50.659
All those environments, we
will attempt to change...

00:47:50.659 --> 00:47:53.996
We will attempt to ‘terraform’,
in different ways...

00:47:53.996 --> 00:47:55.998
Again, for better
or worse.

00:47:55.998 --> 00:47:59.543
But those environments
will ‘anthroform’.

00:47:59.543 --> 00:48:02.963
That interaction is going
to go two ways, and...

00:48:03.589 --> 00:48:06.217
We fail at any kind of terraforming
or any kind of world building...

00:48:06.217 --> 00:48:09.762
At the scale of the space suit
or at the scale of another planet...

00:48:09.762 --> 00:48:11.514
To the extent that...

00:48:11.514 --> 00:48:15.935
We forget that we depend on all
kinds of other things that are not like us.

00:48:17.061 --> 00:48:20.314
Because if there’s anything that we’ve
learned from the world system...

00:48:20.314 --> 00:48:22.483
That we’ve studied
for the longest...

00:48:22.483 --> 00:48:25.945
Is that that’s its
defining characteristic.

00:50:36.784 --> 00:50:42.831
Biophilia is the idea that
human beings have an innate...

00:50:42.831 --> 00:50:49.797
Instinctive connection to the
non-human natural world.

00:50:52.925 --> 00:50:59.974
That we do have this evolved
connection to non-human nature.

00:51:01.850 --> 00:51:07.314
And when we’re confronted
with artificial environments...

00:51:07.314 --> 00:51:10.067
Like Ascension Island...

00:51:10.067 --> 00:51:15.864
We’re unconsciously picking up on
something about those places which is not...

00:51:15.864 --> 00:51:18.867
Which doesn’t feel right,
maybe they don’t sound right.

00:51:18.867 --> 00:51:23.289
Or maybe there are types of plants
together, that shouldn’t be together...

00:51:23.289 --> 00:51:25.791
And we’re
registering that.

00:51:40.306 --> 00:51:45.853
If biophilia is part of
the human condition...

00:51:45.853 --> 00:51:50.357
Does that mean that we’re registering
places like Ascension Island...

00:51:50.357 --> 00:51:56.280
In a quite different way. And a way
that we’re not fully conscious of?

00:52:09.293 --> 00:52:14.423
I think many people think that,
or are moved by the thought that...

00:52:14.423 --> 00:52:21.972
Because non-human living things
have purposes of their own...

00:52:21.972 --> 00:52:30.272
That there is an ethics of how we
ought to treat non-human nature.

00:52:30.272 --> 00:52:33.692
And of course places
like Ascension Island...

00:52:33.692 --> 00:52:36.945
I mean very heavily
designed and engineered...

00:52:36.945 --> 00:52:40.908
And deliberately manipulated
to be a certain way...

00:52:40.908 --> 00:52:47.122
Humans beings have created this
place, and so actually there are no...

00:52:47.122 --> 00:52:51.919
We can do what we like,
we could actually uproot everything...

00:52:51.919 --> 00:52:57.383
And start again because
this is so artificial, in that sense.

00:53:12.690 --> 00:53:17.736
Nevertheless the ecosystems and
living things that are there...

00:53:17.736 --> 00:53:22.074
Have purposes in this
very broad sense.

00:53:22.074 --> 00:53:26.578
And so, human beings
have created this place...

00:53:26.578 --> 00:53:32.334
So humans beings perhaps have a
duty to maintain it, as such a place.

00:53:36.505 --> 00:53:38.799
Because we can’t turn
the clock back.

00:53:38.799 --> 00:53:41.510
Once you’ve lost a
pristine environment...

00:53:41.510 --> 00:53:46.140
And once you’ve created
a highly artificial environment...

00:53:46.140 --> 00:53:49.351
It’s then impossible to
turn the clock back.

00:55:13.977 --> 00:55:20.025
Humans matter on a planetary scale
in a way that they did not 500 years ago.

00:55:21.276 --> 00:55:27.533
You can’t really talk about
the planet while ignoring that.

00:55:27.533 --> 00:55:30.994
Of course in bulk terms humans
haven’t changed the planet all that much...

00:55:30.994 --> 00:55:35.833
But in terms of the way it works,
the way things flow around it, they have.

00:55:35.833 --> 00:55:40.879
And so you have to see the Earth
system as being, at least partially...

00:55:40.879 --> 00:55:44.174
Human derived.

00:55:44.174 --> 00:55:46.927
At that same time that always gets
you into the sense of whether...

00:55:46.927 --> 00:55:52.099
The Earth system is under human control.
And I think it’s fairly clear that it’s not.

00:55:52.099 --> 00:55:55.686
Humans have a lot of power
over the Earth system...

00:55:55.686 --> 00:55:57.854
But they don’t have
an ability to control it

00:55:57.854 --> 00:56:01.483
Because they don’t have an
ability to control themselves.

00:56:23.088 --> 00:56:25.549
Humans are deeply involved
in the Earth system.

00:56:25.549 --> 00:56:29.511
And I don’t think the response
to that is to try and...

00:56:29.511 --> 00:56:32.806
Completely disentangle humans
from the Earth system.

00:56:32.806 --> 00:56:38.228
I don’t think what we want is effectively
to live on Moon bases on Earth...

00:56:38.228 --> 00:56:41.940
Entirely sealed off from the
rest of the environment.

00:56:41.940 --> 00:56:47.112
And so there needs to be some sort of
new relationship between the natural...

00:56:47.112 --> 00:56:52.242
And the human, that isn’t very
well expressed at the moment.

00:56:56.330 --> 00:57:02.044
One of the constituents of that relationship
I think, is to understand things...

00:57:02.044 --> 00:57:07.424
In terms of process, in terms of flow,
rather than in terms of stock or substance.

00:57:07.424 --> 00:57:11.595
The natural is not the tree,
the natural is what the tree does.

00:57:11.595 --> 00:57:16.975
And a tree that happens to be
parked on a street in London...

00:57:16.975 --> 00:57:19.811
That tree is, in some
ways, not natural.

00:57:19.811 --> 00:57:23.190
Yet what it does, when it
takes in the air...

00:57:23.190 --> 00:57:26.985
When it takes up the water, and does
that wonderful, miraculous thing...

00:57:26.985 --> 00:57:32.282
Of photosynthesising... That’s still natural,
it’s just in an artificial setting.

00:59:07.294 --> 00:59:10.297
There’s a metaphor that
Bruno Latour used to talk about...

00:59:10.297 --> 00:59:12.966
Of Frankenstein’s Monster.

00:59:12.966 --> 00:59:16.970
Where the sin, in Frankenstein Monster
is not creating the monster...

00:59:16.970 --> 00:59:19.681
Or the creature, more properly...

00:59:19.681 --> 00:59:23.685
It’s abandoning it. It’s being so
sickened by the sight of it...

00:59:23.685 --> 00:59:27.522
As to leave it, and run away,
and not do anything with it.

00:59:27.522 --> 00:59:32.611
And I do think that that applies to the
industrialisation of the Earth system.

00:59:34.696 --> 00:59:39.075
It shocking. And to think that it’s
been done by ‘us’ in some way...

00:59:39.075 --> 00:59:43.538
Or by the capitalist system in
which we partake, or whatever...

00:59:43.538 --> 00:59:47.375
That is, in some ways,
a terrifying thought.

00:59:47.375 --> 00:59:50.837
But once you’re there,
once you’ve done it...

00:59:51.588 --> 00:59:56.384
Then you have a certain
obligation towards it.

00:59:56.384 --> 01:00:00.013
Not to try and undo it, not to kill it,
not go back to a world without it...

01:00:00.013 --> 01:00:03.016
Because the creature
is a wonderful thing.

01:00:03.016 --> 01:00:07.562
But also it is a monster, and
needs to be challenged.