Cloudscape

We'd all seen it coming for decades - seen what would happen to the world if we'd go on like this. And yet we still did. By the mid-twentieth century, biodiversity was decimated. And yet, this still wasn't enough. Many scientists endeavoured to diminish or even reverse our impact on environment, of course, but rarely did they receive very much support - at least, rarely did they receive the support they deserved, reckoning the magnitude of what was happening. Because it all came so gradually, it took a while before drastic measures were taken. This happened when the calamity finally became life-threatening not only to other species but also to man himself.
The biosphere is like a body and we are a single tissue dependent on it. If the rest of the body fails, we fail. We are not the disease, but the vector of the disease. Humankind was like a tumor destroying its host and so ultimately destroying itself. And all of the machinery they had by then thought up could not suffice to replace the complex machinery of the biosphere. What nature had created in billions of years, we could not recreate in a matter of years. It was then that the government of the world powers finally flinched and really became aware that what was happening to the biosphere was probably more important than all the futilities they were debating for years and years on end without getting anywhere. By then the global cataclysm that had been wrecking the world for over a century, and they'd known it all that time. But in their selfishness, only when the western world itself was threatened with famine, they took serious measures, rather than treating it as a low-priority matter which could wait for others. Much more could have been done about it. But they just postponed it.
Through the mouth of his famous character Prince Myshkin, "The Idiot," Dostoevsky famously said that "Beauty will save the world." Indeed, beauty is the seed of enlightenment, and enlightenment would be the salvation of the world. But now, beauty itself had to be saved. For as nature wasted away, her beauty dwindled. Humanity became so detached from beauty that they no longer knew of its existence. Decadence replaced the value of beauty, for in their consumption society it was all they had, all that could offer them refuge from the emptiness of their lives. The beauty of nature became something distant, something almost legendary. Many of the creatures that had one flourished on the Earth became myths, incredible, almost implausible in their fantasticality - the tiger, for instance, seemed to belong in fairy tales, and some of the most benighted even believe they actually were a mere concoction of human fancy. In truth, the tiger still lived in some reserves, but in such small numbers that almost none were allowed to see them with their own eyes, or even enter the reserves. Unfortunately, these did not last long either because of inbreeding.
But all the time that the ecosphere exponentially shrunk, the noosphere exponentially grew. And in the end, its beauty would save the world. The modern human from the Transition was fascinated by knowledge, the brilliance and resplendence of it. And although few people had witnessed the beauty of nature, they all knew it, albeit only through media. They knew it inside out, literally. Many were fascinated by its complexity - its diversity, its composition, its biochemistry… In the end, it was the beauty of this knowledge, or the knowledge of this beauty, that would save the world.
Yet halfway the twenty-first century, the majority of all species, plants and animals alike, were either extinct or threatened with extinction. The number of specimens remaining was more stable, with all the cattle and fowl and other domesticated animals, but those excluded, only a fraction remained. This was not the most dramatic result as most species could recover: in the Permian-Triassic extinction event almost all specimens died yet 25% of all species survived. Dramatically, the number of species killed wasn't very much lower than it was then, as most had perished since the early twentieth century.
Not quite, however. Though it took some time for civilization to turn its sluggish head around the notion of actually doing something to set its own actions straight, it eventually did. The first drastic measure taken to save the world and its flora and fauna was to suspend extinct species.
That is, their eggs were cryopreserved until the world would become hospitable enough to support them, a state known as (specific) hibernation. These eggs were stored in arks for many years before they were either hatched or grown. In the latter case, things got complicated as the specimen's embryogenesis required apparatuses known as arteruses or artificial uteruses. In vitro insemination was usually impossible because the species had long died and there was therefore no mother to carry the egg - although the gametes were also stored separately (before amphimixis) for this purpose.
Every five years, twins were grown from every egg, which then bred with other twins of other eggs. Because so many eggs could be cryopreserved, inbreeding was not an issue, although it would have been unavoidable over the course of hundreds of years. The specimens grew with the best medical care the world had to offer, but once they had were fully grown, it was impossible to cryopreserve them again.
Later in the twenty-first century, the DNA was stored not in eggs, but quite simply in a code. Of course, genetic codes had been deciphered since the 1990s, beginning with the human genome, but this was still far too expensive to apply to thousands and thousands of species. Only later on, in the 2010s, researchers started to preserve the DNA of species in code for this purpose, though they usually selected species which were both threatened with extinction and otherwise interesting from a genetic perspective. Geneticists got subsidies for doing so.
Unfortunately, these measures often came to late. Despite all these attempts, a few decades after the turn of the millennium mankind lived in a dreary world almost devoid of life. With the third world following in our footsteps, this was inevitable. Trees were replaced by carbon dioxide collectors, and (later) insects by entomopters.
Most species could not be saved because they became extinct before the belated drastic measures were taken, and almost never, tissue was found which was healthy enough to allow cloning (such tissue were sometimes priceless treasures, worth more than the average rough diamond). Samples of DNA of extinct species usually came either from hair or bone, but extracting the DNA was often a problem; as either the healthy genes had to be collected from different cells - which was feasible only later on with modern nanotechnology - or very many genomes had to be attempted - so that, with luck, some of them were more or less healthy.
Ineluctably, biodiversity was diminished, leaving behind only a fraction of nature's once great glory, along with belated regret on the side of the culprits. Thousands of species were inexorably lost along with all their beauty. Thanks to high-technological means of replacing them in their role in the biosphere, humanity, their domestication and what was left of the nature could be saved, but by then it had become homogenized. Nature had become bleak, like a shriveled tree - still having some green leaves in its withered crown, but having long lost its former appeal. Humanity lived in a world which, though in some respects utopic, was in this respect an utter dystopia - a nightmare, even. Most of nature lived on only in virtuality, and only there could men still admire her lost splendor. But this only magnified the stark contrast of what the world had been to what it was now. For many years the world remained in this state.
And then, about a decade later, man revived nature. All that time, humanity had been desperate to bring the world back to life - it was the aspiration of the whole of the scientific community, and all and sundry were working towards it. Only after many years, their research would begin to truly bear fruit, and rather than trying to console themselves with the mementos of the past, they now rebuilt it. All over the world, countless biologists, chemists and geologists began to recreate the life they had destroyed. And in this task, first and foremost were the genetic engineers.
They unleashed their creativity. In decades, hundreds of thousands of species of all sorts were designed by genetic engineers. Unfortunately, most of these species were junk, and the average number per species wasn't too high either until the colonization of other planets. Artificial lifeforms were often custom-made, and sometimes single specimens, usually home-made pets, had an entirely unique DNA. Yet, miraculously, a good many of these species were actually capable to flourish in nature and allowed to do so.
Of course, this happened not until their impact on the biosphere had been extensively researched. Species were to the biosphere what drugs were to the body, and to use untested drugs is downright rash!
It was considerably more complicated to test species than to test drugs. It was a considerable task to track an entire ecosystem, even a moderately small one, and this over the course of at least a full year. This is why these tests was often done instead in virtual simulations, doing so at a faster rate but at the cost of reliability.
Sometimes something actually did go wrong when the species were unleashed upon the world - this was almost unavoidable, much like failures in pharmacology like fenfluramine or rofecoxib. Medicines, however, could simply be withdrawn from the market, whereas artificial lifeforms were more like medicines already in the body. Either one hoped the body would get over it if the medicine appeared to be toxic, or one removed it from the body as quickly as possible. As one could not afford the risk of leaving the species to wreak havoc in the biosphere, it usually came to the latter, but even this had its risks: to do so, one had to design another parasite which would destroy the first, usually a virus killing specifically that species.
To ensure the virus would not spread any further once its task was complete, it was made to survive only in its chosen host, to the exclusion of all others. To do so required the host to have a unique property, like some protein it made and no other species made. This was something genetic engineers had long foreseen, and for this purpose they had also thought out a plan beforehand: every transgenic species, without exception, was given a genetic label, a gene which produced a special protein which the virus could recognize: a protein integral in the membrane, so that it could easily adhere to it - an antigen, of course!
Of course, there was also always the risk that the species would mutate and so lose the gene, especially if the species was a bacteria or virus. It didn't need it to survive, after all - did it? Actually, it did: this was why the genetic engineers made the gene regulate another which was necessary - indispensable - in the species' biochemistry. This made it almost perfectly safe to unleash a transgenic species, or transspecies, into the biosphere. (To return to the aforementioned analog with drugs, this is similar to using antidotes, such as flumazenil used against overdoses of benzodiazepines.)
Usually, these species were not entirely harmless, but quite nearly so: like medicines, they were not always tested for long-term effects. Transspecies usually put the stability of their habitat in a metastable rather than fully stable state, meaning that, in many millions of years, if their descendants would still survive then, they could, in principle, cause moderate to severe harm to the environment. After all, who could have guessed that all that was needed for apes to involve into a high-tech civilization was for them to get out of their safe niche in the rain forests?
In this way, the health of the planet was bit by bit restored. What's more, by thus increasing biodiversity, geneticists increased the world's beauty. Often the common man met this beauty in their daily lives: not just when traveling to some far-flung natural park, be it live or through media, but also just when walking through their own cities. Very many transgenic species lived along with humans, either as pets or like gulls, rats and so on - cleansing the cities from litter.
In the end, the creations of nature that had been undone were replaced by our own creations: while once detracting from the ecosystems, we now supplemented it. As if to atone for our trespasses towards nature and be pardoned from them, we gave nature back part of her former glory. Her wounds were patched up, even though she would always show the scars of what humanity had done to her.
Though geneticists were often eager to unleash their creativity, most of these creatures were of rather modest design. We didn't want to see all sorts of motley Frankenstein creatures around, did we? The transspecies were therefore designed to look as natural as possible. Sometimes, extinct species whose DNA was lost were recreated to the best of our ability based on empirical date. This was done, for instance, with the Thylacine.
Then and again, one of the more striking transspecies which would get the approbation of the scientific community would not be restricted to household use but unleashed in nature - an aspired honor for all designers. After all, even nature has many creatures one would think fit for fantasy and science fiction stories, like the thylacine or the angler fish. One condition in this case, however, was that the species was not too intelligent, as the chance was there, no matter how small, that in the long run they would otherwise form a community and become as harmful as humanity themselves, or even (in extreme cases) compete with them. This was not seen plausible in a matter of centuries, though, and this issue received excessive attention at the time, as did many other in technology (perhaps a good thing, as experience had already shown us that it's better to be too careful than too reckless).