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444 Rosalind Williamsexponentially greater labor productivity, is still an article of faith for manyelites (who do not hesitate to exploit the deep hope it inspires) and, moreimportant, for people around the world (who cling to this hope).Second, technology has rebuilt the world – the relatively durable, objective,shared world of things, produced by work, which houses individual lives andwhich “is meant to outlast and transcend them all” (Arendt, 1998: 7). InArendt’s analysis, work is not the same as labor. While labor arises from thebody, in never-ending life cycles of production and consumption, the world isconstructed by humans through fabrication from what nature gives us(Arendt, 1998: 136). The world is therefore always to some degree “artificial,”but what has changed in the past two centuries is the dominance of the humanbuiltworld in relation to the natural or given one. The world is now a hybridenvironment – part nature, part technology, with no one able any longer to tellwhere one ends and the other begins. 3The challenge of managing this environment is even more complicatedthan that of controlling nature. Its scale, scope, complexity, and pace of changeare all unprecedented, as well as the consequences of mismanagement. Thetransformation of the world from one that is primarily given to one that isprimarily human-constructed is, like the increase in labor productivity, adramatic and concretely measurable transformation of the human condition.Many of the measures are provided in the study of twentieth-century environmentalhistory by J. R. McNeil (2000), the title of which succinctly summarizesthe evidence: “something new under the sun.”Third, more difficult to measure, but arguably most important of all, is thetransformation of action because of technological change, or in this case moreproperly because of techno-scientific change. Like the productivity of laborand the dominance of the human-made world, the fueling of human actions bynatural forces is “something new under the sun.” Arendt begins her analysisby reminding her reader that processes of change are now being inserted intothe world, formerly the site of durability and stability:we no longer use material as nature yields it to us, killing natural processes or interruptingand imitating them . . . Today we have begun to “create,” as it were, that is,to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened withoutus, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses againstnature’s elementary forces, keeping them as far as possible outside the man-madeworld, we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into theworld itself. (Arendt, 1998: 148–9)Writing in the late 1950s, Arendt used automated manufacturing, scientificresearch in general, and atomic energy in particular as examples of humanitychanneling natural forces into the world. We would now add two even more