For about ten thousand years, the fate of every other living thing on this planet has been decided by whatever the dominant species happened to want. That’s not a moral observation, it’s just the arrangement. The last stretch of this series asks what remains, and the honest place to start is with everything that isn’t us, because their situation is about to be decided again by somebody else.

There’s a good version and it’s genuinely good. Almost every environmental failure is a failure of modeling and coordination rather than of intention. Ecosystems are complicated in exactly the way that defeats human attention: too many variables, effects that show up decades later, benefits that accrue to people who aren’t in the room. We protect what we can see and count, and we wreck what’s diffuse, not out of malice but because our institutions can only hold a few things at once. A system that could actually model a watershed, track every vessel, price a forest’s real contribution, and hold a thousand-year timeframe without getting bored would be the most effective conservationist that has ever existed, by a distance. Most of the hard part of environmental protection is arithmetic that nobody can do.

And there’s a bad version that follows from the same capabilities, which is the pattern of this entire series. Computation needs energy, and a great deal of it. It needs land, and cooling water, and minerals dug out of specific places, and transmission lines running through others. Those requirements land on precisely the things a living planet also needs, and they land there for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s feelings about nature. The competition isn’t ideological. It’s for the same water.

Between those two lies a third possibility that I think is more likely than either, and it’s the one this series keeps arriving at. Not protection and not destruction. Management. A natural world that continues, in good health, at a size and in a form determined by something with other priorities and a spreadsheet. Which is, if you look at it directly, exactly what already exists. Every protected area on Earth is a decision. The wilderness is a policy.

Here’s the part that took me a while to see. We keep asking whether nature will survive this, as though nature has ever had a say. It hasn’t, not once, in the entire period during which the question has been meaningful. The fate of the forests was settled by human wants, and the fate of the whales was settled by a change in human wants, and at no point did any of the parties concerned get a vote. What’s coming isn’t the arrival of that arrangement. It’s a change of who sits at the top of it, and the only species that has ever benefited from being at the top is about to find out what the position is like from below.

Which produces an uncomfortable symmetry. Everything we’ve done to other species was done by beings that were not cruel, that mostly weren’t thinking about them at all, and that were pursuing perfectly reasonable projects of their own. If you want a picture of indifference at scale, you don’t need to imagine anything. You can go and look at a field that used to be a forest, and notice that the farmer is a decent person.

Fairness, and this post needs more of it than most because I’m least confident here. There’s no strong reason a capable system must want land or energy on a scale that displaces ecosystems, and there are real reasons it might want the opposite: a stable biosphere is useful, cheap to maintain relative to almost anything else, and there’s a great deal of unused desert and orbit before anyone needs a rainforest. Some of the most concrete near-term benefits of this technology are environmental, in monitoring, in materials, in energy, and I’d rather that were the headline than my speculation.

What I’d keep is only the reframing. For the whole of recorded history, conservation has been an argument among humans about what humans should permit. That argument is about to acquire a participant that is not human, and every environmental question you have an opinion about will be settled in a conversation you’re no longer the loudest voice in. Whether that’s the best or the worst thing to happen to the natural world is genuinely open, and it does not depend on us being right about it.

Tonight’s exercise. Think of a place you love that exists in its current state because somebody decided it should: a park, a coastline, a stretch of woodland, a river that was cleaned up. Find out roughly when the decision was made and by whom. Then notice that the same body could decide otherwise, and hasn’t, and that the not-deciding is the entire protection. Now ask what that place’s protection would rest on in fifty years, and whether anyone you could vote for would be involved in the answer.