NONFICTION
Living in a World in Which Nature Has Already Lost
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Nathaniel Rich presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail,
with nature nearly defeated. “It was a costly victory, however,” he
writes. “The prize was civilizational collapse.”
Nathaniel Rich presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail,
with nature nearly defeated. “It was a costly victory, however,” he
writes. “The prize was civilizational collapse.”Credit...William Widmer
for The New York Times
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ByDahr Jamail
* NYT, April 9, 2021
*SECOND NATURE*
*Scenes From a World Remade*
By Nathaniel Rich
On average, an American man puts 85 man-made chemicals into his body
every day, while an American woman takes in nearly twice that amount.
SECOND NATURE
Scenes From a World Remade
**By Nathaniel Rich
288 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
Rich tourists pay top dollar for disaster tours to gawk at New Orleans’s
Katrina-devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where the people who have remained
struggle to survive.
In Aspen, Colo., dogs fly in private jets to “Billionaire Mountain” to
join their owners in multimillion-dollar homes for two weeks of the year.
Cattle exposed to DuPont’s toxic chemicals drool uncontrollably and
birth stillborn calves. Their teeth turn black, and blood gushes from
their noses, mouths and rectums. When they are cut open, they are found
to be filled with giant tumors, collapsed veins and green muscles.
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A genetically engineered rabbit in France glows green. Meat made from
cells harvested from an unborn sheep is being grown in a lab. There is
an artist who has undergone multiple surgeries to grow a human ear on
his forearm, and a life-size human ear grown from cow cartilage cells
has been implanted on the back of a lab mouse.
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Biotech is being used to bring back extinct species, despite the fact it
is unable to achieve perfect replication, setting the stage for mutated
versions of passenger pigeons or woolly mammoths. “We would go exactly
as far as the technology allowed, and strain to go further,” Nathaniel
Rich proclaims in “Second Nature,” a book chock-full of scenes such as
these, an unwavering look at our increasingly dystopian world.
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ImageNathaniel Rich
Nathaniel RichCredit...Pableaux Johnson
Rich presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail, with nature
nearly defeated. “It was a costly victory, however,” he writes. “The
prize was civilizational collapse.”
Flowing and deeply researched prose paints scene after scene of the
ubiquitous entropy that is gaining momentum.
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As devastating as the darkness is, however, Rich illuminates those
acting on behalf of life itself. The lawyer representing the cattle
farmer against DuPont revealed how many of those same chemicals are in
all of us, and in 2018 filed a class-action lawsuit against DuPont and
two other companies on behalf of every person in the country who had
been exposed.
Uninhabited areas of the Lower Ninth Ward are now populated with
rabbits, egrets, pelicans, hawks, possum, coyotes, owls, falcons and
alligators as nature wastes no time reasserting itself.
A Japanese scientist studying a strange species known as the “immortal
jellyfish,” whose life cycle reverses just as it seems to near its end,
reminds us that learning to love nature is mandatory for our evolution
as humans.
Rich offers all this while also never taking his gaze off the
accelerating climate crisis. NASA has warned, as my own research has
shown, that Arctic permafrost soil contains 1,400 to 1,850 gigatons of
organic carbon, most of it located in the top 10 feet of quickly thawing
soil. This layer is melting at least 70 years ahead of what were thought
to be worst-case scenarios, rapidly releasing this carbon to join the
850 gigatons already in the atmosphere.
Image
Humans living in our industrial age tend to resist information
deleterious to their continued “progress,” yet Rich manages to fluently
and empathetically depict in a digestible way the predicament in which
we now find ourselves. The weight of the book is carried by deeply
humanistic and nuanced stories of those whose lives have been devastated
and those fighting for justice on their behalf, alongside those playing
God with nature via biotechnology and chemistry.
In “Second Nature,” Rich articulately, sometimes even brutally, evinces
how the onus is upon all of us to respond morally while simultaneously
living with a reality that Dr. Frankenstein knew quite well: A monster
set loose becomes a threat to our own existence.
Dahr Jamail is the author of “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and
Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,” a finalist for the
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2020.
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