For years, Paul Kingsnorth was one of the most visible members of the green movement. Then he walked away from it. Now he wants us to walk away from everything else. For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution marked the point of no return, the moment when we decided to play gods and turn our backs on the Earth. In 2014, Paul Kingsnorth was sunk in doubt. He was forty-one and had been on the green movement's front lines since the nineteen-nineties--working for Greenpeace and EarthAction, chaining himself to a bridge, getting tear-gassed outside a G-8 summit.

It is 8.30am and Britain's most eminent scientist is taking a windswept stroll through Dorset's rolling hills. It seems hard to believe that James Lovelock – sprightly despite a walking stick and bristling with a fierce, bright-eyed intelligence – will turn 100 this week. But the man known for proposing one of the most visionary scientific theories of the last century starts the day just as he always does, with a brisk walk from his coastguard's cottage by the shores of Chesil Beach with his beloved wife, Sandy. That Lovelock is conscious of his own mortality is to be expected. But that he is also musing on the future of the Earth he will never live to see – one which involves cyborgs, no less – is, perhaps, rather more surprising.

We present Expressive Real-time Intersection Scheduling (ERIS), a schedule-driven control strategy for adaptive intersection control to reduce traffic congestion. ERIS maintains separate estimates for each lane approaching a traffic intersection allowing it to more accurately estimate the effects of scheduling decisions than previous schedule-driven approaches. We present a detailed description of the search space and A* search heuristic employed by ERIS to make scheduling decisions in real-time (every second). As a result of its increased expressiveness, ERIS outperforms a less expressive schedule-driven approach and a fully-actuated control method in a variety of simulated traffic environments.