{"id":21579,"date":"2026-04-22T10:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T10:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/22\/editors-letter-may-2026\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T10:11:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T10:11:08","slug":"editors-letter-may-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/22\/editors-letter-may-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"There is no nature anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

When people talk about \u201cnature,\u201d they\u2019re generally talking about things that aren\u2019t made by human beings. Rocks. Reefs. Red wolves. But while there is plenty of God\u2019s creation to go around, it is hard to think of anything on Earth that human hands haven\u2019t affected.<\/p>\n

\"Mat<\/figure>\n

In the Brazilian rainforest, scientists have found microplastics in the bellies of animals ranging from red howler monkeys to manatees. In remotest Yakutia, where much of the earth remains untrodden by human feet, the carbon in the sky above melts the permafrost below. In the Arctic Ocean, artificial light from ship traffic\u2014on the rise as the polar ice cap melts away\u2014now disrupts the nightly journey of zooplankton to the ocean surface, one of the largest animal migrations on the planet. The remote mountain lakes of the Alps are contaminated with all kinds of synthetic chemicals. Polar bears are full of flame retardants. Cesium-137, fallout from nuclear bomb explosions, lightly rimes the entire planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These examples are mostly pollution\u2014nuclear, carbon, chemical, light\u2014but I raise them not to highlight the ways human industry and technology degrade the environment but to note how the things humans build change<\/em> it. Nobody really knows what the exact effects of all that will be, but my point is that no part of the globe is free of human fingerprints. We have literally changed the world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve changed ourselves as well. Humans are especially adept at bending human nature. Everything about us is up for grabs\u2014appearance, health, our very thoughts. Pharmaceuticals, surgeries, vaccines, and hormones give us longer lives, take away our pain, ease our anxiety and depression, make us faster, stronger, more resilient. We\u2019re getting glimpses of technologies that will let us change who our children will become before they\u2019re even born. Electrodes implanted in people\u2019s brains let them control computers and translate thoughts into speech. Prosthetics and exoskeletons straight out of comic books restore and enhance physical abilities, while gene-\u00adediting technologies like CRISPR are rewriting our very DNA. And meanwhile, people have taken the sum total of all the information we have ever written down and poured it into vast calculating machines in an effort\u2014at least by some\u2014to build an intelligence greater than our own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So what even is nature, or natural, in this context? Is it \u201cenvironmentalist,\u201d in the conventional sense, to try to preserve what one could argue no longer exists? Should we employ technology to try to make the world more \u201cnatural\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those questions led us to approach this Nature issue with humility. We try to grapple with them all the time\u2014MIT Technology Review<\/em> is, after all, a review of how people have altered and built upon nature.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s a place to think about how we might repair it. Take solar geoengineering, for example\u2014a subject we have covered with increasing frequency over the past few years. The basic idea of geoengineering is to find a technological fix for a problem technology caused: Burning \u00adpetrochemicals to fuel the Industrial Revolution turned Earth\u2019s atmosphere into a heat sink, fundamentally breaking the climate. Some geoengineers think that releasing particulate matter into the stratosphere would reflect sunlight back into space, thus reducing global temperatures. After years of theoretical discussions, some companies have begun to actively experiment with such technologies. This might seem like a great way to restore the world to a more natural state. It\u2019s also fraught with controversy and peril. It could, for example, benefit some nations while harming others. It may give us license to continue burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases. The list goes on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nature isn\u2019t easy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In our May\/June issue, we have attempted to take a hard look at nature in our unnatural world. We have stories about birds that can\u2019t sing, wolves that aren\u2019t wolves, and grass that isn\u2019t grass. We look for the meaning of life under Arctic ice and within ourselves\u2014and in the far future, on a distant world, courtesy of new fiction by the renowned author Jeff VanderMeer. I don\u2019t know if any of that will answer the questions I\u2019ve been asking here\u2014but we can\u2019t help but try. It\u2019s in our nature.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When people talk about \u201cnature,\u201d they\u2019re generally talking about things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}