Look around whatever room you are in. Almost nothing you come in contact with is “natural”: the walls and the wiring, the water in the tap, the light overhead, the cooled or heated air, the paved road outside and the rail line beyond it, the planted trees. A modern human being interacts, from waking to sleep, not with the raw external world but with a world we have interposed between ourselves and it. We are in the habit of calling that world “artificial,” as if it were a fall away from nature. It is the reverse. It is the newest chapter of the oldest story there is.
Life advances, always, by the same move: it wins autonomy from the outside world by taking the outside world inside. The first cell drew a membrane and held within it a chemistry unlike the pond around it—the first inside, the first refusal simply to be at the mercy of the ambient. Every step since has deepened that refusal. Multicellular animals carry a private ocean in their tissues; our blood still echoes the sea in its balance of salts. The 19th-century physiologist Claude Bernard expressed it this way: “The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life.” Freedom is bought by internalizing what you would otherwise be at the mercy of.
Watch it at the great turning points. When the vertebrates left the sea for dry land, they did not leave the sea behind—they carried it with them. The amniotic egg is a private pond walled against the desert air, so that reproduction need never return to open water; the kidney is a machine for holding a marine salt-balance against a desiccating world; and in the mammals that watery cradle is taken all the way inside—the womb and its amniotic fluid, a private developmental pond that gave reproduction its own aquatic environment. Warm-bloodedness is the same victory won over temperature: the endotherm manufactures its own steady internal weather and, with it, buys the freedom to hunt by day or night, to survive the winter, to inhabit more of the planet than a narrow climate band. At each step the organism depends less on the world as found and commands more of the world as made.
Then, with no break in the logic, the story passes from biology into economy. Fire, clothing, and shelter are the controlled interior made portable and external. Agriculture is the deliberate manufacture of the environment a chosen plant or animal needs, in place of foraging whatever nature happened to leave lying about. The city—its water mains, power lines, and rails—is that made environment grown into the circulatory and nervous system of a civilization, which is precisely why you now meet infrastructure far more often than wilderness. The air conditioner is nothing more exotic than endothermy for the household. Bringing life beyond this planet is the culmination toward which the whole sequence points: carrying not a private pond or a warmed body but the entire terrestrial environment—air, water, soil, life—out into the cold of space.
This is not a metaphor laid over two unrelated processes. It is one process. Vladimir Vernadsky saw it whole: with the emergence of human reason the biosphere passes into the noösphere, and “man becomes a large-scale geological force”—the first living thing to reshape the planet knowingly, on purpose. He had already found the direction of that force written deep in the fossil record: following the geologist J.D. Dana, he traced across geological time the irreversible “cephalization” of life—the perfecting of the nervous system, culminating in mind—and held that “the brain, which has once achieved a certain level in the process of evolution, is not subject to retrogression, but only can progress further.” Vernadsky went further and named the destination “the autotrophy of humanity”: a mankind that frees itself even from dependence on other living matter for its food and energy, synthesizing its own sustenance directly, as no creature before it could. Lyndon LaRouche gave the same insight an economic edge—that human creativity is anti-entropic, measured by rising energy-flux density and by the growing potential relative population-density of our species, the one creature that does not merely occupy the biosphere but willfully raises its carrying capacity. The artificial, for man, is not the opposite of the natural. It is the most natural thing in the universe: the lawful continuation, by reason, of the very tendency that made a cell out of chemistry and a mammal out of a fish.
Which is what exposes the reigning “green” ideology at the root. Its commandment is to subordinate ourselves once more to the world as found—to burn less energy, command less of nature, leave the “off-the-shelf” environment untouched and cram a shrunken remainder of humanity into a Procrustean bed. Dressed as reverence for nature, it is in fact a demand to reverse the arrow that runs from the first membrane to the space station—to abandon autonomy. When Europe answers a heat wave that killed ten thousand of its elderly by scolding the air conditioner, it is abdicating the human vocation itself. The task before us is the opposite one, and it is the oldest task alive: to go on building the world we live in—with abundant power, with fusion, with the reach into space—so that the sea we have carried this far is carried further still.
And that arrow, it turns out, is not the physicists’ arrow at all—not a slide down some scalar like entropy, but the appearance, again and again, of processes that could not have existed before, and, in man, of the free, creative now in which they are chosen. Why the thermodynamic “arrow of time” cannot be superimposed upon the living or the human world is the subject of my article, “Vernadskian Time.”
