We can facil­i­tate the planet’s nat­ur­al apti­tude for renew­al and move for­ward with an atti­tude of repair.

Con­fronting the extra­or­di­nary quan­ti­ties of CO₂ in our atmos­phere will be some­what of a dual process. Accord­ing to NASA, it will ulti­mate­ly com­prise both mit­i­ga­tion and adap­ta­tion. Mit­i­ga­tion refers to the ways in which we must reduce our cur­rent out­put of green­house gas­es and poten­tial­ly remove some of what has already been pumped into the atmos­phere. But some amount of adap­ta­tion will also be nec­es­sary. Even if we changed our ways overnight, we’ve already ensured that the cli­mate is guar­an­teed to change to some extent. This means that we must take steps to reduce our vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to the cli­mate changes ahead, espe­cial­ly in the most high­ly threat­ened areas of the world (like coastal communities).

It’s com­mon knowl­edge that our car­bon out­put can be lim­it­ed through the elim­i­na­tion of fos­sil fuels. But, in tan­dem with this known strat­e­gy, we will have to find ways to cap­ture and store the car­bon that’s already been released into the atmos­phere. There are a num­ber of pro­pos­als to accom­plish this goal, and some even­tu­al com­bi­na­tion of them will like­ly be nec­es­sary. Large air-scrub­bing devices, essen­tial­ly enor­mous fil­ters to suck the gas the from the air, are already in devel­op­ment. There’s also the pos­si­bil­i­ty that we could cap­ture car­bon in our soil by over­haul­ing our agri­cul­tur­al prac­tices, elim­i­nat­ing the heavy till­ing of land, and plant­i­ng cov­er crops and rotat­ing them to avoid deplet­ing all the nutri­ents in the soil. Anoth­er solu­tion sug­gests a stop to over-log­ging, and replac­ing the forests and jun­gles we’ve lev­eled with new green­ery. Alter­na­tive­ly, ocean sur­faces could be fer­til­ized with iron, result­ing in algal blooms that can absorb car­bon diox­ide and ulti­mate­ly store it at the bot­tom of the ocean. How­ev­er, this par­tic­u­lar sug­ges­tion is not with­out a great deal of con­tro­ver­sy, and there is fear as to the poten­tial unknown harms such as the growth of poten­tial­ly tox­ic algae. This is why we must pro­ceed with cau­tion and not allow our over­con­fi­dence in our own spir­it of inven­tion to win out. How can we best sup­port nat­ur­al ecosys­tems to per­form their awe-inspir­ing self-cor­rec­tions with­out try­ing to over­ride them completely?

The con­ser­va­tion­al prac­tice of rewil­d­ing is based on a very hands-off men­tal­i­ty. Iden­ti­fied by envi­ron­men­tal­ist Dave Fore­man, its own name sum­ma­rizes it quite well: to return wild­ness to the places we have sub­ju­gat­ed and destroyed. It emerges from a recog­ni­tion of the pow­er of nat­ur­al process­es to restore and recov­er with­out too much human inter­ven­tion. One of our small roles in this prac­tice is to ensure that there is suf­fi­cient flo­ra to serve as food sources for the local species. Anoth­er way we may help rewil­d­ing efforts is to rein­tro­duce rel­e­vant key­stone species—those that have the most fun­da­men­tal impact on the entire ecosystem—back to their spec­i­fied areas. The mea­sure of a ful­ly suc­cess­ful rewil­d­ing project is one that even­tu­al­ly requires absolute­ly no human input to main­tain its effect. This is part of rewilding’s genius. It serves a dual pur­pose: not only is it a method to restore our bio­di­ver­si­ty, but it will also help to insu­late us from cli­mate change. Restor­ing large areas to their wild states will cre­ate more of the bio­mass we need to absorb much of the excess car­bon from the air.

Nico­las Hulot, envi­ron­men­tal­ist and for­mer French min­is­ter for Ecol­o­gy, pro­pos­es three key prin­ci­ples to serve as a frame­work for plan­ning future inter­ven­tion in ser­vice of sus­tain­able trans­for­ma­tion. The first is pre-vis­i­bil­i­ty. This means set­ting ambi­tious tar­gets for our envi­ron­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion as well as per­form­ing thor­ough risk assess­ments into the poten­tial long-term holis­tic impacts of the changes we pro­pose to make. The sec­ond is pro­gres­siv­i­ty. This prin­ci­ple entails set­ting clear step-by-step mile­stones and routes for evo­lu­tion and devel­op­ment. Irre­versibil­i­ty is the final point. This prin­ci­ple sets out the goal to reach a tip­ping point at which effect­ed pos­i­tive change becomes sta­ble and self-maintaining.

We believe that if we adopt these basic prin­ci­ples as a base­line to guide our efforts toward plan­e­tary repair, then we can great­ly aid our efforts to stave off dras­tic cli­mate-change-based cat­a­stro­phes. Restor­ing atmos­pher­ic equi­lib­ri­um means allow­ing nature to heal the way it already knows how. And in the process, inte­grat­ing that wis­dom into human endeavor.