Where will mankind’s destructive impulses lead us?

There’s a sense of seismic shifting in so many arenas at the moment. The agonising wrench of great change, and what feels like a quickening into catastrophe.

We’re at a planetary juncture with nature, in terms of climate and extinction upheaval. Picture: Getty

Are humans a mere blip in the great arc of the history of this planet? Increasingly, I think so. There’s a sense of seismic shifting in so many arenas at the moment. The agonising wrench of great change, and what feels like a quickening into catastrophe. We’re at a planetary juncture with nature, in terms of climate and extinction upheaval; with our own species, in terms of fraught national politics and geopolitics; and with engineering advances, in terms of robotics and AI. What will the consequences be for the fragile, questing human species? I imagine future alien races looking back at all that we were and musing, “Those stupid apex predators, on that beautiful planet, who through greed and short-sightedness destroyed their habitat.”

Samantha Harvey pleads in her Booker-winning novel Orbital, “Can humans not find peace with one another? With the Earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand.” I wonder if that’s a particularly female cry of despair. So many of the catastrophic slippages on Earth, that bring us closer to oblivion, are man-made. Testosterone fuelled. From this despairing female perspective, the will to colonise, dominate and control feels so very male; women, generally, don’t have that conquering impulse. Harvey’s novel centres on the reflections of six astronauts in space: “This new domain ripe for the taking.” Meanwhile, the Antarctic Treaty is open to revision from 2048, which will have huge ramifications for that precious, vulnerable continent.

And if capitalism was the great hope of the modern world, its fault lines are brutally exposed by Donald Trump. The ugly underbelly of the economic model is laid bare by one single person wreaking havoc on the global economy; his greed, recklessness and ruthlessness writ large. What is ahead, for all of us? “The planet is shaped by the sheer amusing force of human want,” Harvey writes in Orbital, “which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rovers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and shaped by want.” It’s destruction mainlined by greed.

If capitalism was the great hope of the modern world, its fault lines are brutally exposed by Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

One frail, vengeful man takes a wrecking ball to the idea of America, then another, and another, ad infinitum. That’s the exhausting world we live in. It’s the idea of America that Trump is desecrating; he’s America’s gift to Putin. And as in The Wizard of Oz, the curtain is being ripped away to reveal the very small man behind it. A president who cannot deal with not winning, with not having the attention focused upon him. Meanwhile, this is not a creep into authoritarianism but a gallop.

Can we be trusted with this planet? Will the megalomania of greedy men bring us all down? “Who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful?” Harvey laments. “Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

But then the wonder of us, too. As two dire wolf-resembling creatures newly walk the Earth, the de-extinction company behind them announces it has its sights set on the thylacine, too. It’s a long, long way off, but imagine the emotional resonance of that, if those beautiful creatures are one day returned to Earth. Yet what world would we be re-birthing them into? Once, a man in America posted a picture of a deer with three antlers. The most common response? “Where is it so I can kill it.”

How embarrassing that we, as a species, are this. Yet we’re so remarkable too; so soaringly creative, audacious, innovative. Harvey writes of her space travellers: “Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny Earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness.” But are we too late? Are the forces of chaos unleashed, and unstoppable?