For thousands of years, humans have changed our environment to suit our needs. We have built cities, multiplied into the billions, wiped out predators, herded, farmed and created pesticides and GMOs. We make machines fly through air and space and have denuded huge swaths of the planet’s surface. We have created oral and written languages, mathematics, music, religion and medicine, and we have also thought up ever more ingenious and effective ways of killing each…