The premise of Australian author and critic Richard King’s new book Brave New Wild is straightforward. It holds that, as King writes, “under pressure from the climate emergency, a more techno-solutionist, technocratic mindset is taking hold of the conversation about our relationship to non-human nature”. Similarly to how the drug soma in Huxley’s Brave New World eliminates suffering and unpredictability — a symptom of a society in which science is the governing ideology, and technology an existential salve to replace religion, art, and philosophy — King decries the idea that the Earth’s systems can simply be “hacked” to regulate the planet’s health in the age of global heating. Those who subscribe to such a view are “ecomodernists” (King is fond of a neologism) whose mindset is that human beings have so denuded the natural world that total intervention is not only justified but necessary. For every problem, a technology, policy, or dataset capable of solving it. No political or social analysis is required.

This is familiar terrain for King, whose Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (2023) also explored our relationship with technology through a technocritical and humanistic lens. Where Brave New Wild differs is in its focus on transformative, large-scale technologies — geoengineering especially, but also biotech, nanotech, AI, and nuclear — which are designed to “correct” the damage our species has wrought upon the ecosphere since industrialisation. King’s thesis suggests that ecomodernism is a recent, and even unprecedented, phenomenon.

This is an odd argument to make given that the book’s title suggests a literary precedent, and that the author traces our current predicament back to the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment. (Others, like the American Lewis Mumford, have argued that what he called the “Megamachine” dates to age of the Pyramids.)  Geoengineering itself is hardly a novel conceit. The Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti is generally credited with coining the term in the mid-1970s to describe the large-scale removal and sequestration of CO₂ in the oceans, and sustained public debate dates back at least fifteen years, with early book-length treatments such as Hack the Planet (2010) by Eli Kintisch and Earthmasters (2013) by Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton.

Where King discerns a paradigm shift, I see instead a deep continuity with what German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler called “the technical Will-to-Power”. Arguably, geoengineering represents not a rupture but an intensification of the ecomodernist project — the exponential growth of our ability to model, manipulate, and reconfigure Earth’s interlocking systems. The ambition to master the climate is less an aberration than the logical extension of almost three centuries of extractive and industrial intervention. If there is a threshold looming, it may entail the climate system itself — grievously destabilised by cumulative emissions and feedback loops — rather than the technologies now proposed by the ecomodernists to counteract it.

(To be fair, King seems, in part, to accept this; interleaved between each chapter are short, diaristic fragments, each one chronicling some new climate-related horror of which the author presumably became aware while writing.)

Despite offering informed sketches of ecomodernist technologies such as de-extinction — the deliberate human effort to engineer lifeforms identical to, or closely resembling, extinct species — King lacks a scientific background. This becomes apparent in the first half of the book where the arguments feel schematic and polemical rather than rigorous, privileging rhetorical momentum over methodological depth. From this picture emerge cartoon villains like Stewart Brand, co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and other such “uprooted individuals obsessed with progress” (to borrow Simone Weil’s phrase) who have long constituted the cultural elite.

King is on firmer ground when he observes that “technological innovation without social and political innovation is a human catastrophe in the making, on a par with the environmental crisis itself”. Elsewhere in the book, he convincingly critiques the abstractionism of the modern environmental movement, arguing that we require a localised rather than planetary solidarity rich in creativity and connectedness: “conviviality, not sustainability, is the key.”  

These are sharp formulations, and difficult to dispute. Yet the elaboration that follows feels curiously thin. We are told that remedies lie in a universal basic income, a shorter working week, nationalisation, heightened political consciousness, and the phasing out of fossil fuels — all socially progressive reforms one might find touted in the latest manifesto by Rutger Bregman or Yanis Varoufakis. Worthy though these proposals are, they remain at the level of programmatic politics.

What they do not confront are the metaphysical and existential anxieties King himself raises in the book’s second half: questions about human agency, technological mediation, and our species’ appetite for mastery. Nor are the prescriptions free from the very logic they seek to challenge. The phasing out of fossil fuels, for instance, depends upon its own technofix — the development, scaling, and global deployment of renewable energy infrastructures. Likewise, UBI and reduced working hours may ultimately hinge on the productivity gains delivered by AI and other labour-saving technologies. In this sense, King’s solutionism remains entangled with the technological paradigm he critiques, rather than decisively breaking from it.

King, as well as being a non-fiction writer, is a poet with an MA in Literary History and Cultural Discourse. That, combined with the book’s frequent literary allusions, made me wish he had chartered an ecopoetic rather than (quasi)scientific course through the territory of technoscience, channelling his anxieties to explore more profound questions of humanity’s place in the ecosphere. While he touches on the notion of ideological identity, he doesn’t take the idea nearly as far as he might have, and I found myself longing for the anti-scientistic approaches of writers like Timothy Morton and Paul Kingsnorth. The latter’s recent Against the Machine is a more historically informed and ultimately more radical dismantling of the ecomodernist mindset than King’s.     

In a 1946 foreword to Brave New World Revisited, Huxley imagined rewriting Brave New World so that “science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not… as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them”. If, as King wants to have it, Brave New World is to be read as a cautionary tale, then this is as plain a rendering of its warning as one could hope for.

Yet the response demanded of us in the twenty-first century, as techno-capitalism extends its annihilating reach across ecosystems and interior lives alike, must operate at the level of metaphysics as well as the material, addressing our underlying assumptions about the instrumentalisation of nature and what constitutes a meaningful life in the face of technology’s relentless advance. To neglect that deeper terrain is to concede, in advance, the very ground on which our resistance to the machine must stand.

A note from Overland: This article was supported through our partnership with Cooperative Power, Australia’s non-profit energy co-operative. Following Origin Energy’s acquisition of Energy Locals – Cooperative Power’s white-label energy provider – this sponsorship has come to an end for the time being. 

Thanks to this partnership, we published some really strong work that still resonates, such as articles on green colonialism and the fight against fracking, a heartfelt poem on climate devastation, and a sharp, visual exploration of the extraction economy that brought environmental issues to life in new ways, amongst many more you can discover via the CoPower tag. This is the kind of writing Overland believes in, and we’re thankful Cooperative Power helped make it possible.