The Sixth Extinction as elegy, tragedy, comedy.
In Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying, edited by Bongani Kona. Jonathan Ball, 2021. Photograph by Tommaso Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler from Hemelliggaam or The Attempt to Be Here Now.
“What the world has lost, and what truly matters, is a part of what invents and maintains it as a world. The world dies from each absence; the world bursts from absence. For the universe, as the great and good philosophers have said, the entire universe thinks and feels itself, and each being matters in the fabric of its sensations. Every sensation of every being of the world is a mode through which the world lives and feels itself, and through which it exists. And every sensation of every being of the world causes all the beings of the world to feel and think themselves differently. When a being is no more, the world narrows all of a sudden, and a part of reality collapses. Each time an existence disappears, it is a piece of the universe of sensations that fades away. ”
1.
The first was caused, some say, by plants: primitive mosses and liverworts that moved from ocean to land, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and releasing phosphates from the soil and rocks they grew on. These previously locked-up elements washed into rivers and seas, fertilising vast algal blooms: red and green tides that rotted and sank, the bacteria turning the oceans hypoxic (too little oxygen) then anoxic (no oxygen). Marine animals died off and global CO2 levels dropped further, since there was no more O2 to bind with C in the water. Instead this singular element at the heart of all life was interred on the seabed as shale, in a process known as carbon burial. Half-a-billion-year-old black shales mark the End Ordovician, a 44 million-year cold snap now understood as the first of six mass extinctions in earth history.
You can say them like a litany: End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian – the third, the biggest of them all, sometimes called The Great Dying. 250 million years ago, colossal volcanic eruptions and lava flows form country-sized ‘flood basalts’ and ‘igneous provinces’: stepped mountain ranges now called the Siberian Traps (from the Swedish for steps: trappa). Pyroclastic explosions ignite coal beds and release vast sinks of methane into the atmosphere. It’s even worse in the oceans, where anaerobic bacteria take over, emitting hydrogen sulphide and even changing the planet’s colouration to a world of glassy, purple seas and pale green, sulphurous skies. The Permian-Triassic boundary is marked by a ‘coal gap’ and ‘reef gap’ of tens of millions of years in the geological record: not enough organic material for carbon burial, the oceans too acidic for corals. Some 96% of all marine species vanish; on land, the largest insects ever to have existed disappear – giant cockroaches, dragonflies the size of seagulls – as part of the Lilliput effect that great extinctions leave in their wake: surviving taxa shrink, fossils are suddenly smaller.
Ordovician-Silurian, Late Devonian, End Permian. End Triassic, the fourth, cause murky – but one of theory is the bombardment of Gaia, our living, self-adjusting planet, with ozone depleting, DNA-damaging gamma radiation from a nearby supernova. Then the Cretaceous-Palaeogene, or End Cretaceous: the fifth, the blockbuster. Its cause: asteroid. Its markers: shocked quartz and iridium, a metal from space that suddenly spikes in the geological record. Its victims: the dinosaurs. On the cover of Walter Alvarez’s T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, a short-armed tyrannosaurus looks at the fiery bolide streaking across the sky towards what will one day be the Mexican coastal town of Chicxulub, none too happy.
And now we, descendants of the mammals who took over ecological niches from the giant, feathered lizards, we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction: the End Holocene. And this time (so the story goes) we are the central protagonists – its cause and its witnesses, its instigators and archivists. The Anthropocene: an era when human action has taken on the parameters of a geological force.
So what kind of story is it? A tragedy, an elegy, an apocalyptic thriller? Something else, a comedy perhaps? Or some other genre that has yet to be invented.
2.
It is an astonishing fact that 99.999% of all species ever to have existed on earth are now extinct. Extinction, scientists will tell you, is a way of life: an engine of organic evolution and incontrovertible fact of the fossil record. And at certain moments in this record, the pace of species extinction spikes above the normal background rate. A mass extinction event can then be defined (in the measured language of two experts) as ‘the elimination of a significant proportion of the world’s biota in a geologically insignificant amount of time’.
So we are the 0.001%, at least for now. At least until we pass away, first as individuals, then as a species. We will go the way of other archaic humans who were once our earthly contemporaries – the Neanderthals and Denisovans: hominid siblings whose DNA some of us still carry; the diminutive, hobbit-like Homo floresiensis – but not before taking so many of our companion species with us into oblivion. Amphibians have long been the canaries in the coalmine: species extinction in frogs is now proceeding at 45 000 times above the normal background rate. Also coral reefs: these ecosystems which, wrote Charles Darwin, ‘rank high amongst the wonderful objects of the world’ will mostly bleach, dissolve and break into rubble by 2050. ‘Defaunation’ and ‘biological attrition’ are other terms used for these processes, but extinction is the final, less euphemistic word; it carries the difficulty of disentangling private, collective and biological dyings.
If mass extinction is a fact, it is an emotionally complicated, elusive fact, and one difficult to seize hold of in the imagination. What does it mean, actually? What can it mean within the span of a human life? Does it mean everything, or nothing? Is it profoundly (personally) significant or utterly (geologically) insignificant? And how does it feel? How does it feel to be living in the midst of the so-called Sixth Extinction, in which the very act of being alive makes you somehow complicit?
Alan Weisman’s 2017 book The World Without Us imagines what would happen to the natural and built environment if all humans disappeared overnight, as if in some kind of deep ecological vision of the Rapture. In the documentary based on this concept, one reviewer noted, there is strange sensation of watching a disaster movie that is also a feel-good. A similar kind of ambivalence hovers across those landscapes where military testing ranges double as wildlife preserves; or where radioactive exclusion zones become utopian experiments in rewilding (not to mention, in the case of Chernobyl, a mecca for dystopia fetishists and apocalypse kitsch).
The World Without Us is one of many recent books and films which not only imagine but (one has the sense) obscurely desire the world’s end. Whether delivered by flu, haemorrhagic virus, climate chaos, nuclear holocaust, tectonic upsurge, hurricane, tsunami, rising waters or some other eco-catastrophe, visions of the apocalypse and other ‘declensionist’ narratives saturate the culture – stories of decline, destruction and foreboding, the winding up of the human saga. So much so that the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI, in the lingo of bunker-building, food-hoarding, ammunition-stockpiling preppers) has become almost routine, and post-apocalyptic wastelands reassuringly familiar.
To open Netflix and see the menu of shiny, new, HD dystopias: sometimes I have the sense that it’s just (and how can it not be) the matter of our own, private dying writ large, refracted and amplified via the compound eye of the internet: a million screens telling us that the end is nigh. The end has always been nigh, of course, but now climate science offers a yardstick and guarantee of this at a different, post-religious, planetary scale: the remorseless climb of CO2 in the atmosphere, which makes for such a simple graph and such a wicked problem. It is a metric that exists outside of ideology, denial or the individual psyche, that sends you into the earth’s deep, non-human past in order to conceive of a future.
3.
In The Great Derangement, his set of meditations on climate change and the unthinkable, the novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders if it will ever be possible to ask: Where were you at 400 ppm? Or: where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up? He is thinking along the lines of questions like: Where were you on 9/11? Or, where were you when JFK died? – human disasters that so powerfully weld together global history and personal memory. But who knows where they were when atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide crossed the historic threshold of 400 parts per million?
It is one of his many thought experiments which reveal the difficulty of thinking human history and earth history at the same time: these utterly disparate timescales and lifespans which have now, in a strange, even uncanny sense, begun to ‘touch’ each other.
Since around 1800, certain human societies have been digging up and burning through what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘the capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings’: the fossil (i.e. buried) hydrocarbons that are the sedimentary record of prior dyings, extinctions and cataclysms. To give an idea of the concentration of energy we will be exhausting, writes Timothy Mitchell in his political history of carbon, consider that ‘a single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-five metric tonnes of marine life as precursor material.’
This is the kind of bizarre image that thinking human history and earth history at the same time summons: a vehicle speeding along a highway; the silent, million-year fall of sediments to the floor of an ancient ocean. Two centuries of burning and bingeing through lithic landscapes, through the unimaginable distillations and compressions of time that produced coal, oil and shale gas. As of today, the combustion engines, food systems and factories of the global economy are adding to the planet’s carbon dioxide concentration at a rate ten times faster than the Siberian Traps of the End Permian.
The question of when the Anthropocene age began has been debated across many platforms and disciplines. Since depending on where you place the start of the human epoch, you posit different ideas of blame and responsibility, and different ideas of the human. Is the start point the coal-burning industrial revolution of the late 18th century, as the coiner of the word, Paul Crutzen, first suggested? Or is it much later in the game, or earlier? Is it the megafauna extinction that began 50 000 before the present, or the Great Acceleration that started just a generation or two ago?
A 2015 article in Nature considered two possible beginnings for the Anthropocene: the ‘Orbis hypothesis’ (1611, related to the New-Old World collision and European colonisation) and the ‘Bomb spike’ (1964, related to nuclear and post-war American power). The findings were argued over, and the whole concept of the Anthropocene is regarded with scepticism by those who claim it posits a false universality, obscuring the fact that the vast majority of the carbon emitted in human history was released by the imperial powers of the global North: Great Britain, Europe, America, now China. Sub-Saharan Africa barely features, and yet is suffering more warming, more quickly.
But what really struck me in reading the Nature article was the way that every geological epoch needs to have a particular stratigraphic marker in the rock record; and that this must be accessible in a specific, politically stable, GPS-located site. The poetic dimension of the scientific paper – its compressed ‘image’, in Ezra Pound’s sense – came in this form: that the most truly planetary, sometimes cataclysmic stories must be bedded down in a particular place, brought into human focus, and so become truths that the hand can touch.
Want to see the iridium residue that saw off the dinosaurs? Its official marker is in a rock in the Atlas Mountains at El Kef, Tunisia, dated 66 million years. The 1964 Bomb spike, when a Cold War test ban treaty starts to bring down radionuclides in the atmosphere? It’s within the dated annual rings of a pine tree (Pinus sylvestris) from King Castle, Niepołomice, 25 kilometres east of Krakow, Poland. The 1611 dip in CO2 that resulted from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas? An ice core drilled from Law Dome in the Arctic.
A shocking, talismanic scientific fact: that the consequences of 1492 can be detected via gases frozen into a column of Arctic ice. What biologists call the Columbian exchange – the scrambling of biota, pathogens, human populations and technologies unleashed by the colonial contact – is on so unprecedented a scale, and leads to such mortality and suffering in Native American societies, that vast areas of previously cultivated land are reforested. The result is a global drawdown of carbon dioxide levels, a 1611 dip that can be read off an ice core. Human and earth history ‘touch’ again.
4.
Extinction is probably the first scientific concept that human beings (as dinosaur-obsessed children) are asked to reckon with – so writes Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Her book ranges across the world, taking up the story of a different species in each chapter: ‘frog hotels’ for Panamanian golden frogs decimated by fungal infections; fossil graptolites in Scotland and ammonites in Rome; a Sumatran rhino struggling to ovulate in a Cincinnati Zoo. Reading this account of a steadily diminishing, ever more lonely world, the psychic pain is offset a little by the morphine drip of scientific terminology, which so directly and effortlessly names what it needs to. I kept a list of terms as I went. To black shale and carbon burial, I could add fragmentologist and fern spike, not to mention The Hangenberg Event and The Catastrophists (extinction biology is a great source for indie band names or obscure album titles).
But Kolbert seldom pauses to think about the extinction on a cultural or philosophical plane, or to move much beyond the epigraph that she chooses from E. O. Wilson. He reflects on ‘the ultimate irony of organic evolution’: ‘that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations’. From 1970s sociobiology to the 21st-century manifestos of Extinction Rebellion, there is a faint absurdity hanging over the whole earth story: in that it can only be fully understood by its anti-heroes or villains. Or rather: it is a story which increasingly seems to have been told by an unreliable narrator, a blundering, over-confident figure only dimly unaware of the wider ironies and unintended consequences that might be read over their shoulder.
Nonetheless, in the sheer curiosity and ingenuity that Kolbert documents around the question of disappearing organisms, The Sixth Extinction does suggest how organic evolution and our own, unthinkable mortality are cross-wired in all kinds of ways. And so it must have been from the beginning of human expression, which is always ghosted by mythological beasts and animal familiars, or the reverently painted therianthropes – half human, half antelope – which dance over rock surfaces and cave art across the world. An intimate enmity, though: the spread of anatomically modern Homo sapiens across land bridges and oceans (a process that begins 50 000 years ago with glacial retreat and inaugurates the Holocene) is in an eerie lockstep with the disappearance of large, truly wondrous megafauna in every part of the world.
Moas, mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths, armadillos and marsupials – an entire bestiary of giants that evolved in conditions where large size and low birth rate was an advantage. But an advantage that became a weakness when human populations arrived, picking off the occasional large mammal (it wouldn’t have taken much, scientific models tell us) and unleashing ‘a geologically instantaneous catastrophe’, says paleobiologist John Alroy, ‘too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it’. On some islands that humans reached late, like New Zealand, the tail end of the 40 000-year megafauna extinction edges into modern human memory. The disappearance of the twelve-foot high flightless moa, writes Kolbert, happened between when Dante wrote The Divine Comedy and European ships arrived there in the early 1800s. Its passing is preserved in the Maori phrase: Kua ngaro i te ngaro o te moa: lost as the moa is lost.
Alroy goes on to remark that humans ‘are capable of driving any large mammal species extinct, even though they are capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not’. Today there remains something excessive, both magnificent and absurd, in the way that individual humans try to save the animals that humanity is busy extirpating. Current efforts at managing wildlife resemble ‘a surreal kind of performance art’, writes Jon Mooallem in Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America. He goes on: ‘We train condors not to perch on power lines. We slip plague vaccine to ferrets. We monitor pygmy rabbits with infrared cameras and military drones. We carry migrating salamanders across busy roads in our palms’.
The passage is quoted in Imagining Extinction by Ursula K. Heise, who begins her book by describing a seasonal gift for children sold by the Japanese retail chain Muji. It is a drawstring bag containing ten wooden toys, ten figurines of vanished animals from around the world, with a map showing their place of origin. Along with the Mauritian dodo (Raphus cucullatus) and the Maori moa (Dinormis maximus), I was weirdly reassured to recognise the outline of Equus quagga. The quagga was/is a striped southern African antelope – a horsey zebra, a zebra-like horse – which flickers at the edge of my city’s recorded history, and which animal biologists once tried to breed back into existence on the slopes of Table Mountain.
Quaggas, aurochs, passenger pigeons, great auks, Tasmanian tigers, woolly mammoths – all are organisms that could be classified, say some scientists, as bodily but not genetically, extinct. That is, their DNA could be recoverable from fossils and museum specimens, even up to 200 000 years old. And so these are candidates for de-extinction, a process of bringing the evolutionary dead back to life that we are just at the cusp of perfecting.
Today you can see the slightly altered zebras of The Quagga Project in the grounds of iThemba Labs at the edge of Cape Town: a scientific facility where accelerators produce radioisotopes for the treatment of cancers and other medical uses. The labs are close to the national highway and the airport, since some of the isotopes have such short half-lives. The zebra/quaggas can sometimes be spotted in the scrub of the road reserve, their hindquarters less stripy and more russet, as if someone has lightly smudged them with an eraser.
5.
‘Whoever saves one’, reads a beautiful Quranic verse, ‘It is as if he had saved the whole of human kind.’ The blasphemous inversion of this might be: the demise of the whole of human kind – not to mention the amphibians, corals, birds, fish, bees, three hundred elephants dead from algal blooms in Botswana, four hundred whales beached in Tasmania – does this mean only as much as the passing of a single human life? After all, what place other than the human mind, the bowl of single cranium, can this story and its meanings be held in, in all its fullness? And if extinction is inevitable – at both personal and evolutionary scales – isn’t it only natural to turn away from taking on the sadness of the whole organic world? I mean: isn’t there enough loss and pain to reckon with already, just in our own lives?
The problem with this kind of tragic or elegiac plot, many will point out, is its political fatalism: the risk that it dovetails with business (as usual) and normalises the on-going destruction of ecosystems for profit. That it naturalises the workings of unregulated, extractive capitalism – for want of a better word. But let’s define it as an attitude to the world, to nature, that has never been able to acknowledge and factor in the true costs of its operations; which has, in fact, always been premised on not doing so. In this sense, the end of the story (environmentally speaking) is also a ghost story, a return of the repressed. It is the ecological reappearance and reassertion of the so-called externalities of modern economics: the costs that can no longer be disguised, ignored or written off; the pollutions and pathogens that were once displaced into other places and other bodies but which are now all too present, moving indiscriminately across national borders and membranes and species boundaries.
Trying to be philosophical about mass extinction, trying to inhabit and find solace in deep time and the post-Anthropocene explosion of life that will surely come: it does carry these risks – that such a vision is complacent and fatalistic. That it is easily consumed by a death-driven politics that wants to portray our current trajectory as inevitable.
But still, one wants the time and space to think on it, to inhabit these vast, silent spaces at the edge of human cognition. To go beyond the threadbare salvation narratives that are built into so much environmentalism; to turn away from the human interest stories that dominate news feeds and 24-hour media cycles. To think about the vast planetary die-off that is mostly happening outside language: immeasurably sad, faintly absurd, inescapably ‘natural’ – though in this sense the word is no longer of any use, is semantically extinct.
Hundreds of millions of years of carbon burial followed by a millisecond of carbon burn-off. The Holocene-Anthropocene boundary will one day be only the width of a Rizla paper in the geological record, just another extinction event that the future geologists or alien anthropologists so popular in science fiction (and popular science) can point to. These speculative non-fictions and future hindcasts – where some know-all in the deep future decodes our world and its demise – can be strangely comforting places for the imagination to nest. In conjuring a kind of anticipatory memory, such thought experiments admit that the worst has already happened, and life goes on – in an organic sense anyway.
But for now, those of us alive have to live through it: the end of species story braided into our own story’s ending.
October - December 2020
What the world has lost: Vinciane Despret, trans. Matthew Chrulew. Rep. as ‘It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared’ in Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, ed. Deoborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
a significant proportion of the world’s biota: Anthony Hallam and P. B. Wignall, Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
rank high amongst the wonderful objects of the world: Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary: 1831-1836, ed. R. D. Keynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1988).
the capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings: Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1977).
a single litre of petrol used today: Timothy Mitchell, ‘Carbon Democracy’, Economy and Society, 38:3 (2009).
the ultimate irony of organic evolution: Edward O. Wilson, ‘The Environmental Ethic’, Hastings Environmental Law Journal 3:2 (1996).
a geologically instantaneous catastrophe: John Alroy, ‘A Multispecies Overkill Simulation of the End-Pleistocene Megafaunal Mass Extinction’, Science (June 2001).
anticipatory memory: Rob Nixon, ‘All Tomorrow’s Warnings’, Public Books (13 August 2020).
Quagga Foal, South African Museum
P. R. Anderson
1
Done to the life, this sleeping beauty
stands her ground, but her glazed stare
and our curiosities are coffined there.
2
The head is vast with project: how to be.
Massive cheek. Her mother’s somewhere.
Neither’s here nor now. We’re what’s left
3
to the telling of a former truth:
Of all my travils in Africa, yet
this was beautifullest to see –
hundreds of Quakers running in droves.
4
(A mission in the east at morning
two hundred years ago; where now
we drive past signs to Eseljag.)
5
The last, we heard, succumbed on concrete
in a German zoo. A botched job, too,
from the say-so: your panto donkey,
6
half-and-half, the wild ass aimed
at something tremendous, never
getting there. It fell between and there remains.
7
Antic creation that is our one end,
bestow on us our nucleic acids,
the family nose, our passage bones.
8
Bring us dugongs and ghost frogs, bats, black
widows, sea-grass and lilies, kissing
cousins, mates, milk teeth, the company
9
of congeners and a common blood
shed and resumed. Bless we this donkey.
It has found its majority now
10
in the species of the dead. We are
scarce alive, we are the smallest dust,
and though the stats are stacked in strata
11
all against us, as a reckoning:
what wilderness! O, the zero-point-
one per cent within us and abroad
12
so seeming certain, which can yet hear
this foal in its vitrine calling for
milk still fail. And the beetles come.