We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in the past century.

think we're still stuck in that agricultural mindset, where we imagine that we can shape the Earth. Sure, we can do that. But the Earth has the power to shape us much more powerfully. To survive climate change, we'll have to realize how dependent we are on our ecosystems for our own survival.

I don't know if most people have truly taken on board what this says about our place in the natural world. It doesn't mean that humans are dominating the Earth, ruling over all of nature. In fact, it is a reminder that we are only a tiny part of nature, at the mercy of a system whose operations predate us by billions of years, and will continue billions of years after we're gone.

We are headed to a radically new Earth, at least from our perspective. But from the planet's perspective, this is nothing new. As the geologist Peter Ward is fond of pointing out, we are actually heading back to a time kind of like the Miocene. The Miocene ended about 5.5 million years ago, and it was the last time that the planet had no icecaps.

We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in the past century.

One reason that we're so adaptable is that humans are excellent tool users and homebuilders. When our environment doesn't provide us with something that we need, we try to make it ourselves out of whatever is available, whether that's rock or wood or ore or DNA.

I disagree that we need to contemplate eliminating ourselves in order to move forward. Sure, I think a good dystopian story can serve to steer us on the right path toward a better world. But we also need stories that offer solutions to our problems that are realistic, and workable today.