Humans are brilliant at coming up with solutions. But often these bring new problems that require their own solutions — that bring their own problems. It’s like the old lady who swallowed a fly in the children’s rhyme.
Civilization, essentially, has been a project to control natural systems: a river that is in the wrong place for us; earth that is too wet, or not wet enough; forests that we replace with monocultures of food, and so on. But natural systems are not compliant, and the unintended consequences of our changes require further fixes. The result is a world dominated by human influence, the Anthropocene epoch. Our problems are global and so, too, are our fixes.
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