Too complicated for a garden

“In its neglect of the rest of life, exemptionalism fails definitively. To move ahead as though scientific and entrepreneurial genius will solve each crisis that arises implies that the declining biosphere can be similiarly manipulated. But the world is too complicated to be turned into a garden. Therre is no biological homeostat that can be worked by humanity; to believe otherwise is to risk reducing a large part of Earth to a wasteland.”

Edward O. Wilson, Every Species is a Masterpiece, from the Penguin Press Green Ideas series (2021), book 15. Exemptionalism is the belief that human technology and culture makes us “exempt” from the impact of environmental degredation.