There is no nature anymore
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/22/1135440/editors-letter-may-2026/
Publish Date: 2026-04-22 06:00:00
Source Domain: www.technologyreview.com
These examples are mostly pollution—nuclear, carbon, chemical, light—but I raise them not to highlight the ways human industry and technology degrade the environment but to note how the things humans build change 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.
We’ve changed ourselves as well. Humans are especially adept at bending human nature. Everything about us is up for grabs—appearance, 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’re getting glimpses of technologies that will let us change who our children will become before they’re even born. Electrodes implanted in people’s 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-editing 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—at least by some—to build an intelligence greater than our own.
So what even is nature, or natural, in this context? Is it “environmentalist,” 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 “natural”?
Those questions led us to approach this Nature issue with humility. We try to grapple with them all the time—MIT Technology Review is, after all, a review of how people have altered and built upon nature.
And it’s a place to think about how we might repair it. Take solar geoengineering, for example—a subject we have covered with increasing frequency over the past few years. The…
