What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

by Scott Carney

Humanity has used its cerebral ingenuity to extract the stored energy of the planet for its own purposes. The collective action of our carbon-dioxide emissions, rampant pollution from the industrial revolution onward, and the mass extinction of animal life are just a few iconic ways that we’ve steered the environment toward our own, ultimately destructive, ends. The process has been mostly unconscious—no one planned the destruction of the planet—but the results are so massive that they almost seem calculated. In a way, you could say that humanity itself is now the world’s conscious nervous system. And, just as our own bodies have grown weaker as a result of clinging to comfort and using our gadgets to appease our inner drive for homeostasis, the alterations we’ve made to the planet through technology have undermined its fundamental equilibrium.