In my corner of the world, the Great Salt Lake is drying up. Because its bed contains deposits of heavy metalloids, the winds that sweep that portion of the valley have begun to billow arsenic-laced dust. Local politicians have proposed a wide range of solutions, from “Let’s cut down all those water-hogging trees” to “Did you know Victorian women consumed daily arsenic wafers to bleach their skin lighter and show they didn’t work in the fields? It’s time to embrace the wisdom of our foremothers!”

I prefer my apocalyptic wastelands with a splash of eco-optimism. Crud, I’d take a wasteland that wasn’t in thrall to the alfalfa lobby. Until then, Ian Cooper and Jan Gonzalez’s Shapers of Gaia is about reseeding the desert after everybody’s arsenic consumption made them too pale to keep on living.

Then again, does it count as eco-optimism if it requires mega-robots and efficacious cloning?

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