Writing The Human Age, by Diane Ackerman

I was walking through a lakeside park one day, enjoying the pewter-grey waters and the handful of small boats catching the sun in their sails. Suddenly a long painted dragon-boat raced into view, 20 oars flying in unison, as a drummer pounded out its heartbeat. The annual International Dragon Boat Festival each summer begins with Buddhist monks ceremonially dotting pupils in the dragons’ eyes. I’ve never seen the dotting of the eyes, so I Googled the event on my iPhone and added it to my Cloud calendar.

A young woman in a college sweatshirt stopped talking on her iPhone and held it up quickly to photograph the scene. Then she pulled what looked like a collapsible magic wand from her backpack, attached it to her iPhone, extended it three feet, and took a selfie.

Those clever humans, I thought, as I often do these days. Need a longer arm? Make one. Rake, fire poker, yardstick, fruit picker, Space Shuttle’s robotic arm. Every week, it seems, brings new extensions to our senses, new ways of exploring, understanding and changing the world around us.

Mind you, we’ve been reinventing ourselves for a long time. Attacked by slashing bears, tigers, and other beasts with razory teeth and claws, our ancestors fought back by crafting teeth and claws of their own, ones they could detach and hurl from a distance. What a novel idea! Imagine a wolf flinging its teeth, one by one, at its prey. Stone axes were tools, but also prosthetic hands built stronger and bigger and sharper than a hominid’s own. The first clothing was also an artificial body part: skin. We’re now so far from the origins of our clothing that it’s become impersonal, and we don’t feel the powerful magic of being enrobed in another animal’s skin or a plant’s fibres.

We’ve been on the planet for 200,000 years, but nearly all the inventions we associate with everyday life, and our climate change woes, came about in just the past 200 years, many in the past 10-20 years alone, and the pace of change is accelerating at a mind-boggling speed because we’re swept up in many simultaneous revolutions. We’re in the midst of a majestic Information Age, but also an ingenious sustainability revolution, a 3D revolution in manufacturing, a spine-tingling revolution in thinking about the body (heavily bacterial, easily influenced by microbes and epigenetics), a scary mass extinction of animals, alarming signs of climate change, an uncanny nanotechnology revolution, a renewable fuel revolution (a promising newcomer uses graphene) – among so many others – and they’re all cross-mixing via the internet.

That inventive stew makes this both a very dangerous and a very exciting era to be alive in, and the pace of change can be dizzying. We’re inventing in all directions at jet speed, often in medically lifesaving ways. But some of our inventiveness (factory farms, fossil fuel use, transportation, plastics, disposable everything, etc.) have made a mess of the climate and oceans. Today, instead of adapting to the natural world, as our ancestors did, we’ve created a human culture in which we’re embedding nature. There’s no morsel of the environment that doesn’t reflect our handiwork.

But this is also the first time in all of human history that we can work together as one species on planetary problems. Some of the sustainability efforts unfolding worldwide focus on poverty, hunger, and hardship while also slowing climate change. Many large scale tree-planting campaigns fall into this category. In Kenya, for example, tens of thousands of trees being planted by children stabilize the soil, provide edible leaves, produce seed-oil to sell, and absorb carbon dioxide from the air. While climate change is real and urgent, we have the tenacity, talent, and technology to slow it down. Despite the depressing picture painted in the media, we can’t afford to wallow in denial, despair, or depression about our plight. Instead we need to face the challenges, be inspired by the extraordinary efforts of others all over the world, roll up our sleeves, and get busy.

To highlight our impact on the whole planet, and need to act, an international coalition of scientists is hoping to change the name of our geologic era, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the Human Age.

Apropos of that name-change, I thought it would be fascinating to explore how we’re changing every facet of nature – not just all around us, but inside of us, too. In the process, we’re altering the evolution of life on Earth, including our own evolution. What will the world be like in 50 years? Can we fix what we’ve done to the weather? What sort of stewards of the future planet will today’s digital children be? With all the medical changes to the human body – including carbon blade legs, bionic fingers, silicon retinas, computer screens worn over one eye with the ability to text by blinking, bionic suits that make it possible to lift colossal weights, and a wonderland of brain enhancers to improve focus, memory, or mood– will adolescents still be asking “Who am I?” or “What am I?” How will cities, wild animals, and our own biology have changed in 50 years?

To explore those tantalising mysteries and others, I began writing The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us.

Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen books, including, most recently, The Human Age (Headline, £20).