Towards the Natural World or Artificial Nature?
I am travelling on an island surrounded by endemic forests. I sense the fresh and lush green, with peaks in the background. Walking, I enjoy the natural primavera scent of the ferns and cycads. I approach a narrow path.
I listen to the sounds emanating from them. It’s subtle sounds.
Are they communicating with each other? I ask myself.
As I continue the path, I hear more precise sounds, which feel like a synthesiser and alien language.
Are they natural? Is it an image reflected through halogen technology?
Or is it me with an implanted shield somewhere in my body?
I question myself.
I feel in the limbo of the natural world, artificial nature and its symbiotics.
The background is a draft of an explorative scenario for a future concept I recently started; however, I want to share it since it connects to speculative futures.
Forecasting the next while I wonder about the sheer magnitude of innovation across AI, synthetic biology, and possible futures with Humankind is challenging.
I have been fascinated by Sci-Fi scenarios, such as Dune and Blade Runner, since an early age.
It drives me to reflect on Utopian and Dystopian futures, as well as on the middle ground.
The enticement of the unknown, learning from the past, and how we can potentially create or amplify seeds of change happening in the present guides me in conceptualising experiences that nurture and care for our place on Earth.
All the above led me to join a one-week workshop a few years ago in Copenhagen at CIID, named Future Forecast, with other fellows interested in the field.
What science fiction can do is tell the human stories implied by scientific discoveries and venture from descriptions of what is to speculations about what ought to be (or what we ought to avoid).
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Sci-Fi Author.
Using the Present
We tend to distinguish between natural and artificial — what is untouched by human interference and what has been created or modified by humans.
Yet, the closer we look, the more unclear it becomes where the boundary between the two supposedly exists. The forests we call ‘nature’ have been planted, cultivated, or otherwise impacted by humans — yet we still consider a walk among the trees a connection with the wild. Roads dissect all but the wildest forests, plains and deserts, and human-made pollution is everywhere.
For a good reason, geologists have begun referring to our current geological era as the Anthropocene.
The difference between humans and other kinds of life — apart from the rapid speed with which we are effecting change — is that we have become aware of our influence and the consequences thereof. A coral reef will do what a coral reef does. On the other hand, we can change our direction and influence the world in a way that creates resource depletion or regeneration.
Nature 2100
To thrive on Earth, we’ll take on the task and figure out how to coexist and integrate, grow in planetary consciousness, and survive as a functional part of the Earth’s ecology.
Shifting towards regeneration, we will rewild our planet by replanting forests, restoring wildlife and returning the world to something resembling its pre-industrial state.
Not denying such solutions, other paths and approaches are also open to us. We could change the world in a more forward-looking manner by using the knowledge and technology we have developed over the years.
Genetic engineering or synthetic biology are not the only ways to create artificial nature. We may soon see pollinating robots that resemble more bees. Further, in the future, the bees could even be designed in a way allowing them to self-reproduce, building copies of themselves from dead organic material, including plastic waste.
Achieving a closer integration between society and the rest of the living world does not necessarily mean we have to revert to more primitive ways. On the contrary, such integration could result in the emergence of mind-bogglingly sophisticated and technologically advanced ecosystems that would revolutionise how we build, eat, think, and live.
Fortunately, we see signals of this emergent future already today. One example can be found in the work of inventor, designer and architect Neri Oxman, within what she has coined ‘material ecology’.
It is a discipline combining material science, fabrication technology, and biology attempting to develop a framework for interspecies collaboration allowing us all to flourish equally in our built/grown environments.
We seek a merger of the Natural and the Human worlds in recognition that we are part of a vast living whole.
Following this line of thinking, we can take this merger a step further and truly become one with the living world — not only in a spiritual sense but literally.
I want to explore the future of human-nature collaboration and co-existence.
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