The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

I expected this to be a climate change eco-disaster book of despair, but it filled me - instead - with a strange Zen acceptance that it's not climate change that's the problem, it's humans from day 1 that are the problem.

That is, while human-caused climate change is almost certainly destroying our (current) ecosystems and accelerating a mass extinction (possibly non-linearly), Kolbert discusses the ample evidence that shows that this great, sixth, Anthropocene extinction began well before industrialization - i.e. well before the toxic changes we're making to the environment via carbon emissions and ubiquitous plastics. This was, at first, pretty Zen. Kolbert acknowledges that the Earth has been in a constant state of flux since it formed as a ball of goo, and that - if you were to zoom tens of millions years into the past - you would find a very inhospitable, unpleasant, and not-diverse place indeed. Change is constant. No one ever said this rock was supposed to look like this, and support us thinking apes, forever.

This made me think a lot about how conservation efforts are attempting to place a stake in the ground - deciding that the eco-diversity of the, say, 16th or 17th century (i.e. nostalgia trips) is the One True Ecosystem that we should always be working to preserve and protect. Save the dodo, etc.

Of course, this ignores that the ecosystem has always been changing - is, by definition (of natural selection), in a constant state of flux, and that that flux is not necessarily at some apotheosis of Most Excellent Ecosystem. Like, who cares if the dodo is dead forever? Existentially, it doesn't matter (we all survived well enough without it). Why do we consider it more of a tragedy than, say, the destruction of the woolly mammoth? I guess because we're so very guilty of killing it. But, as Kolbert writes, we tend to kill and drive to extinction EEVVVRRRRRYYYYOONNNNNNE (Gary Oldman voice) - and the myth of the noble savage (e.g. indigenous populations living in Harmony With Nature) is false. i.e. It's not just that we're killing the planet with cars; it's that cars are just the latest, most efficient and scalable manifestation of our ability/willingness/DNA-weirdness-thingie to kill the planet ANYWAY, ALL THE TIME. All this evidence points to giant charismatic megafauna quickly going extinct as soon as humans arrived on the scene - see, e.g., all the big animals of Australia (now all dead) and all the big animals of the Americas (also dead).

Anyway, this - at first - filled me with Zen fatalism, as I said. “Okay, thank God,” I thought. “The cataclysmic Second Dark Ages that are inevitably going to come once our current ecosystem crashes and we run out of fossil fuels - well, that is just inevitable, and not JUST the caused by the evils of modernity. Maybe this finally answers the Fermi Paradox?” i.e. It just feels like it's not modern American consumerism that's the eco-problem around here; it's that HUMANS are, by design, the problem. Kolbert very much emphasizes that there's SOMETHING SPECIAL (an evil gene!?) in our DNA that makes us particularly destructive, particular over-killers. We're basically a weed, and, like weeds, we homogenize the landscape and can bring fragile, diverse ecosystems crashing down.

But! BUTTTTT. This Zen fatalism quickly turned to a deeply unsettled feeling with Kolbert's penultimate chapter, on all our (now-extinct) hominid siblings: the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and homo floresiensis. All of these sibling species are now extinct and, interestingly, many of us carry some small percentage of Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA. One of the great mysteries is why they're extinct and we're not. And one of the unsettling answers is that, like every other creature we come across, we killed them until they were all dead. :/ Which is like, WHY?!

The book closes with this fundamental paradox: we, as humans, go to great lengths to save and conserve species. We wring our hands a lot about climate change (despite what American politics and Big Oil would have you believe). But, at the same time, there's some fundamental, parasitic quality to us that - even if you took away our fossil fuels - we would still basically drive everything to extinction. Including ourselves!