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.

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

Search This Blog