Rob Dunn - Four Way Interview

Photo by Amanda Ward

Rob Dunn is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, focusing on the biodiversity of humans. He is a professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen. The author of several books, his latest is A Natural History of the Future.

Why Science?

I love science and I love art and I love them for the same reason. Both struggle to lay hold of deep truths about the world and the story of humans relative to those truths. I've been a scientist for a couple decades or more, depending on when you start counting, but the potential to work with other people to understand things no one has ever understood before remains as raw and thrilling as it has ever been. It is lightning. So too the feeling before the discovery that one might be on to something. 'What if,' the conversation in the laboratory begins. 'What if...'

Why this book?

If you watch the news, it is easy to become convinced that the future is purely technological. Either we will all live either live in bubbles on other planets (see for example the rate at which the rockets of billionaires are being flung upward) or we will live in a metaverse, connected via the Internet and disconnected from the worlds around us. As an ecologist, it is obvious that what is missing from this story is the living world.

If we go to space, we will still be subject to the rules of life. So too if we move permanently indoors. Yet, in discussions about the future, the story of the living world is quiet. An afterthought. A potted plant in a bubble. I wanted to tell the stories of the ways in which the rules of life will continue to influence humanity. But also, I wanted to make clear that we have overestimated our own power. The rugged processes of nature are far more powerful and lasting than is humanity itself. Long after we are gone those processes will continue. That seemed to me like a story that was missing, so I wanted to tell it in this book. 

What’s next? 

Bookwise, I'm not sure. I'm in the phase when I'm just reading a lot and thinking and talking and then reading some more. 

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I'm really excited about working with visual artists and fiction writers to think about new ways to imagine the future. The scenarios that scientists think about tend to be very focused on, say, climate or human population sizes. They tend to say very little about the ways in which humans live on a daily basis. Artists and writers have been more creative. So why don't we pull artists, writers and scientists (and other scholars) to think together about diverse kinds of planetary scenarios. I think creating these scenarios may well be very important.  It is very hard to work toward a future that you haven't yet envisioned.