Books
Richard King
Brave New Wild
Sun-dimming. Stratospheric aerosol injection. Submarine ice curtains. Marine cloud brightening. Asteroid mining. Is this how we will save ourselves from runaway climate change?
In Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet?, Western Australian author and critic Richard King continues his work examining humanity’s relationship with technology by turning his mind to emerging climate change “technofixes”, including the more familiar de-extinction, nuclear fission and fusion, and nanotechnology. “Some of [this] may strike you as utterly fantastical – the stuff of dystopian science fiction,” he writes.
The book’s title refers to Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, which King says depicts “a society in thrall to the values of science and technology”. He argues that a similar mindset exists in our climate change era: “a deep belief … that humanity can dig itself out of its mess through new technologies”.
While pointing out that some of the main boosters of climate technofixes are among the world’s major climate polluters – think Big Tech billionaires looking for a free pass to avoid reducing their direct emissions – King acknowledges that as dangerous climate tipping points are passed, public and political resistance to “more extreme, more exotic, more desperate” climate-altering technologies is likely to weaken: “we are entering a period in which [climate change] mitigation and adaptation are giving way to re-engineering.”
King’s focus in Brave New Wild is not so much the feasibility of the science as the cultural and ethical implications of the push for technoscientific responses to climate change, a movement he refers to as “ecomodernism”. “Those who think we can ‘hack’ Earth’s systems (or do so without significant risks) are the avatars of a new delusion,” he warns, arguing that deploying some of the proposed technofixes would radically alter humanity’s place within nature. On this point, King is likely to persuade many of his readers.
But his alternative vision of our relationship with the natural world as climate change is confronted and hopefully contained may not be as widely persuasive. Phasing out fossil fuels, carefully harnessing renewable energy, practising more mindful consumption and creating better connected communities sounds preferable to injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, but what King terms “ecohumanism” doesn’t have the slick websites, advertising spend and political lobbying power of the technofix contingent that is leveraging the worsening climate crisis.
“Can science and technology save the planet?” King asks. “Well, we can’t save the planet without them. But unless we combine technological innovation with a new and radical humanism, we will, like Huxley’s World Controllers, destroy the thing we claim to love.”
Monash University Publishing, 272pp, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 1, 2025 as "Brave New Wild".
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