I have taken a considerable amount of time to step back from my work and consider how to proceed. It has been a time of great reflection and also great personal challenge.
Perhaps the reason - I have taken this pause is because I feel acutely aware of the uniqueness of our time and the real threats which we face as a species and as a collective. I often reflect on the uniqueness of our time and how it feels as though we are at the edge of something and that if we steer blindly, or allow ourselves to be led by desires that are rooted in short-sighted values and ideas - we may not like the future that we create, and we may not be able to turn back.
Sometimes, I also question whether my assessment of our time is only a myopic vision, rooted in self-centeredness, and whether it is actually irrelevant for me to discuss these ideas or consider so carefully the trajectory of my work and question whether what we do truly matters. As I reconsider it many times over, I do always return to the place of thinking: Yes, we are in a unique time and it does matter.
While other moments in our history have led to great changes through technological developments, cultural changes or war - the scale at which we can impact the physical planet is absolutely unprecedented (as far as we know). This capacity to change the world at this scale means that our choices as a collective now have high levels of casual impact for the future. With the tools and technologies that are already developed, we are positioned in a such way that our actions, our technological developments, our investigations, and our understandings of those investigations - have the capacity to shift our collective trajectory in ways which will impact the continued habitability of our planet. These choices can change the habitability of ecosystems by physically destroying them, by poisoning them, and by altering biogeochemical cycles in ways which are deleterious. Such changes will impact to what extent health can be achieved at the species and ecosystem level, and in turn will determine to what extent the planet is habitable for humans, plants and animals. At no other time have humans possessed this tremendous capacity to alter the planetary ecosystems at this scale.
Great changes in landforms, climate, ecosystem composition and biogeochemical cycling - have previously been under the purview of Mother Nature. We, as a collective, have never possessed the capacity to alter our planet as much as we do now. That shift in our capacity to change things at this great scale must be at the forefront of our choices. It is not irrelevant what we do, it is not only about money, or creating new technologies, or our career paths, or prestige, or fame, or what our culture has told us matters most - it is about our collective impact - and understanding that if we do not carefully direct our collective impact - we will change things irreversibly - and in ways which may not support life on this planet. Great engineering interventions can be proposed and underground bunkers or off-planet bases may be made in time to preserve our species, but is that the future we want to cultivate?
I dream of clean rivers and oceans, of lands that are farmed consciously, and of people cooperating peacefully for our continued co-habitation of this beautiful planet.