The Anthropocene is a term demarcating the current geological period, in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet (the root of the word, “athropo” means “mankind” in Ancient Greek). Humans have damned or diverted most major rivers, emit more carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels than volcanic eruptions release, outweigh wild mammals by a large factor, cause earthquakes, and impact the globe from the Antarctic to the deepest parts of the ocean.

Assisted evolution is the practice of accelerating the process of evolution, which usually takes millennia, to meet human timescales. In the book, we follow assisted evolution in the context of corals. Researchers are stress-testing corals to see which can survive harsh environments. Those that do are cross-bred with other resilient corals, and their offspring subjected to still more stress. The idea is to seed reefs with the resulting corals, which can hopefully withstand warmer and more acidic oceans.

If Asian carp were to reach the Great Lakes, they could have devastating effects on local ecosystems. To keep carp from reaching the Great Lakes, engineers have erected electric barriers on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. However, electrocution is not a fail-safe, so fishermen set out gillnets upriver to haul in huge quantities of carp through barrier defense.