What is terraforming and why should you care?

Guest blog by Tom Valovic | Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Terraforming isn’t a term that most people are familiar with or even hear about in the course of their day. It has a vaguely environmental or earth-friendly ring to it not unlike the term “permaculture”, and could easily be confused with something falling into that category. But terraforming is anything but.

I’d like to start with a story about what I consider to be a great turning point in the contemporary history of ideas and memes. I’m not a historian nor do I have pretensions to knowing how many times windows into new possibilities for our planetary existence have opened up over the last few hundred years. Maybe a lot, maybe not. But having lived through the fascinating consciousness expansion of the 60s and early 70’s, I can affirm that it was truly a magical time. A wide variety of human possibilities for positive change were being considered though a kind of spiritual and cultural kaleidoscope. These perspectives rejected many commonly held values of so-called establishment thinking and offered a plethora of new ideas for educational reform, urban living, natural health, living off the grid, alternative health, and many other areas.

Many of these ideas, especially those in education I would say, have been consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history and overcome by the cultural amnesia that information overload and our media saturation culture induces. The “movement”, as we called it back then, ended badly of course. In the patterning of the Zeitgeist that followed the 70’s and 80’s, we saw a kind of slamming down of this expanded way of thinking and living, as the inertia of conventional establishment norms re-asserted itself. Nevertheless, many important trends were set in motion even if other possibilities fell by the wayside. These newer trends included but are not limited to women’s rights and rights for people of color among other important social issues. But let me get to my story.

How Environmental Values Got Hijacked

In the early 70’s, a great existential betrayal took place. This is largely an untold story although Eric Utne has touched upon it. Back in the day, a large part of the 60’s transformation movement involved the Whole Earth Catalog initiative headed up by Stewart Brand.  This project was at the epicenter of 60’s expansion that took place in California’s Bay Area.  It was an exciting time. Originally Brand and his group of brilliant thinkers and activists were supportive of the “back to the land” movement, radical environmentalism, and Earth-centric mindsets such as the Gaia Hypothesis. Then came the Great Switcheroo: This “pied piper” steered many activists and alternative thinkers towards a different mindset altogether. (My second book “Digital Mythologies” explores this in detail.)

In the middle of the expansion of the new “Earth First” way of perceiving and thinking, Brand caught the imagination of a large number of consciousness movement followers and advised them that the real work that needed to be done was all about computers. Forget “back to the land” and environmentalism. Forget “natural living” and all that it entailed. One of his associates, John Perry Barlow, a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, bought into this false narrative and promoted it. He called it “The Great Work” and many were swept up into this false narrative.

What Brand and his cohorts did was a kind of existential bait and switch — a kind of Trojan Horse or  values inversion. Eventually Brand went on to associate himself with MIT’s Media Lab and worked for the CIA. Along with his hand-picked editor Kevin Kelly, Brand heavily promoted genetic engineering as the future salvation of our beleaguered planet. Sadly, many in the environment movement bought into the narrative of moving from natural living to living in the technosphere. Brand’s betrayal of the Earth First and environmental movement was that he fully endorsed genetic engineering and genetic modification of nature.

Let’s now fast forward to the present day and a biography of Brand called “Whole Earth” by New York Times technology journalist John Markoff. Last year Markoff was invited to participate in an online public discussion of his book conducted on The WELL, an online forum.  In that forum, as a participant, I took this opportunity to challenge Markoff to be more transparent about several issues he had written about. This included statements that he dodged in the forum about “terraforming the planet” which Brand strongly supported.

Big Tech and Genetic Engineering

At this point, let me explain what terraforming is and is not. Fundamentally genetic engineering is a way of hacking DNA life codes to alter biological life forms, growth, and patterning. It’s a core value of transhumanists such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley Big Tech overlords. In a vision of a future that they have unilaterally designed for the rest of us, genetic engineering will be used to modify all aspects of biological existence on Planet Earth including animals, insects, plants, and humans. Designer babies – something decades ago viewed with repugnance and moral horror — has now become a reality.

In 2023, for example, the New Yorker published an astonishing article called “The Future of Fertility.” It laid out how, in the future, corporations may have the opportunity to create and grow human eggs in the laboratory using a process called In-vitro gametogenesis, the next scientific development step after In-vitro fertilization or IVF. It discussed the possibility that human eggs could eventually be generated simply from a blood sample. Such a process would be done as a corporate endeavor and investor capital is already being poured into start-up companies. Speaking to the profit motive, the author casually noted that “analysts valued the global IVF market at more than twenty-three billion dollars.” The article hinted at artificial wombs as a possibility whereby humans would be grown in corporate settings for wealthy patrons who could afford such services.

Terraforming then refers to the biological aspect of the transhumanist movement and technocratic takeover. All biological life on our planet will be targeted for mass experimentation by an Oz-like coterie of elitists with unprecedented power and wealth. With AI, quantum computing, and other technology “magic”, this unprecedented level of control freakishness is deriving real-world power from government support and political involvement. The bottom line is that a handful of transhumanists with obscene levels of wealth and AI-reinforced power are planning to hijack biological life on the planet for purposes of both profit and control. This is something that has been planned and gradually implemented over many decades. For example, in the 60’s, there was research being conducted at MIT on integrating human minds with computers. And here we are.

But let me once again go back to my story. In The WELL’s forum, Brand’s biography was being discussed in a topic open to public comment. I had read in John Markoff’s book that Brand supported terraforming. And yet (curiously) any definition of terraforming was omitted. It was on this point that I wanted to press Markoff to be more transparent. Here’s the exchange:

On page 355, you write about Brand’s interest in terraforming. However, unless I missed it, there’s not a lot ofdiscussion in your book about exactly what his vision ofterraforming would entail other than the statement that we need to‘do it well.’ Can you expand on this a bit? 

Here is what Markoff replied:

On terraforming, I think that Stewart Brand has been pretty consistent on this all the way through. He realized early on thatAmerican Indians saw themselves as stewards of the land they livedon. He had taken the Outdoor Life Pledge and he addressesterraforming specifically in ‘Ecopragmatist Manifesto.’ On Page 19 heargues that we have been terraforming ‘inadvertently’ for tenmillennia, but that it has been unintentional. His ‘We Are As Gods’point is that we should get good at it. 

Notice that Markoff has suggested that wholesale biological interference with natural processes resembles something that has been going on for millennia, an apparent deflection. What is he trying to hide? Markoff also throws the reader off course by further deflecting the discussion of terraforming and conflating it with a vague and unexplained reference to indigenous peoples. This is, of course, absurd on its face. Wishing to press Markoff further on being elusive both in the book and in this public event I then asked him:

Would it be fair to say that Brand’s vision of terraforming includes large-scale genetic modification of plant and animal species?

Markoff replied:

He would probably quibble with the phrase ‘large scale,’perhaps ‘’targeted’ would be more appropriate. If you look at aspecies that is either extinct or endangered as is the case forRevive & Restore, I imagine you could make the case for ‘largeScale’ even when only a handful of creatures remain. 

Another deflection. Stewart Brand has advocated for using genetic engineering to bring back various species including the wooly mammoth, a real-life replay of the movie “Jurassic Park”.  He is famous for the clearly transhumanist motto of the Whole Earth Catalog which asserts “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Here I should probably mention that Brand’s protégé Kevin Kelly went on to become the first editor of Wired magazine, the very well-known publication for pushing and popularizing technocratic and transhumanist values. A subsequent editor of Wired magazine was Nicholas Thompson, who is now CEO of the Atlantic monthly organization and a key participant in the annual Davos event sponsored by the World Economic Forum. Funny how that works — a 360 degree pivot. Thanks to Brand, Kelly, and Wired magazine, many of the supposed rebels, activists, and free thinkers from the 60’s environmental movement have now become pillars of the corporate Big Tech establishment. And just as curiously, in the scheme of things, it didn’t take very long for that to happen.

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Tom Valovic is a writer, researcher, and futurist. He is the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social, cultural, and political issues associated with the advent of the Internet and technocracy.  Tom has been involved in EMF safety advocacy with a number of groups since 2015. He can be reached at jazzbird@outlook.com.