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The Unnatural¹ World is the title of a new book by former Scientific American environment editor David Biello. The subtitle²: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age. And that age has been dubbed³ the Anthropocene—in which humanity (anthro) has become, as the book puts it, a world-changing force of nature.

Biello talked about The Unnatural World recently at the BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn. He was asked who he met in his research who stood out as someone trying to take steps to address the issues of this age. 

“His name is Fan Changwei, and he is an environmental bureaucrat⁴ in a small coastal⁵ town (Rizhao) in China. And he has been tasked by his provincial⁶ government and his local government with trying to turn a city carbon neutral. So this means that would emit no more CO2 than they also kind of took in and destroyed, which is a beautiful sounding circular economy kind of concept—turns out to be incredibly difficult in practice, as Fan is finding out. And that struggle is the one that we’re all facing. And certainly it’s a struggle that, it’s more important that it happen in China than anywhere else. And maybe India right after it…

“You know, we have cleaner air, cleaner water, and that’ because we decided⁷ that we didn’t want killer⁸ smogs, and the Chinese people are deciding that right now, and perhaps the Indians will decide not to have killer smogs before they have them.”

More from David Biello about his book The Unnatural World in an upcoming episode of the Science Talk podcast.

—Steve Mirsky