Why We’re Sleepwalking Into the Age of Extinction
Image Credit: Nature
The Signs Are Dire. Another Summer of Catastrophe Awaits. So Why Are We Doing…Not Much?
by umair haque
See that chart above? That’s ocean temperatures, soaring off the charts. Meanwhile, in the north, boreal forests are on fire — Canada’s Alberta is in flames. Those are both serious, severe indicators of “climate change.” Meanwhile, mega-hurricanes are gathering across the globe. Crops are failing. Harvests, down by double digits, leaving farmers in despair. How bad is this summer going to be?
By now, anyone can see: every summer is worse than the last one, in shocking, surreal, apocalyptic ways. We’re getting used, by now, to megafires the size of regions, to heatwaves that shatter records, to water and food shortages. But none of this is remotely normal. This is the decade that the mega-scale impacts of climate change arrived, with a vengeance. And those can be summed up in one word: extinction.
The Age of Extinction is here. Every summer is going to — already is — more Biblical than the last. Until…what? Until there’s little left that’s recognizable of our civilization. As the temperature heats up, economies stagnate. As economies stagnate, polities destabilize, and social bonds rupture, people plunging into anxiety, despair, rage, as a consequence of declining living standards. They turn to demagogues. How long is the list now? Trump, DeSantis, Putin, Modi. The entire, LOL, British government. Erdogan, Duterte, Poilievre, the “Sweden Democrats,” founded by an SS member. The list is so long I have to stop there, though I could keep going for another paragraph.
We are in a chain reaction of civilizational collapse, and it’s taken me just a couple of sentences to describe it’s literal causal chain to you. Economic stagnation breeds social destabilization leads to political fanaticism — bang. Game over. The entire world is falling into this trap now. Once, maybe, even societies like Canada and Europe might have thought they were immune — but by now, we can see, transparently, that they aren’t. And as the world falls into this trap…
You’ve heard, by now, of “tipping points,” in the climate, right? Let’s take the boreal forests as an example. They burn, and accelerate warming even further, because now, there’s little left to protect the permafrost, the land, the ecosystems. Forests store carbon, and boreal forests are some of the planet’s largest stores of carbon. If they die back, that storage system doesn’t exist anymore — bang, more carbon in the skies, more warming. Tipping point.
But there’s another kind of tipping point. Not an ecological one, but a socioeconomic one. I’ve described it to you above. The chain reaction of social collapse — of democracies imploding into various shades of authoritarianism, fascism, theocracy, dysfunction, ruin — is a tipping point, too. Why? Because when democratic societies implode this way, they don’t do much, if anything, about climate change. Think of Trump’s plans for it. The GOP’s. Think of any far right wing party’s. They don’t have any plans. They have the polar opposite of plans. They embrace the catastrophe. Hence, the “Sweden Democrats’” first move in office was to…abolish the Ministry of Environment. LOL. Acceleration. Tipping point.
That is why you can see something maddening, something that history will regard as nothing short of flatly insane, happening in the world. As the Age of Extinction dawns…we’re doing nothing about it.
I don’t mean to disparage the hard work of those who are trying. I’m just pointing out that extinction is accelerating. Carbon’s still rising, and it’s going to rise further as tipping points are hit. Ocean temperatures…LOL. Species dying off at faster and wider rates. Crop failures enlarging. More and more rivers running dry. Every summer’s worse than the last, and we all know, shrugging, that’s just how it’s going to be. In other words, we’re seemingly resigned to it. The acceleration of extinction.
That’s happening for a deeper reason itself.
The average person doesn’t understand extinction. They have no idea whatsoever how to even begin to think about a subject this huge, this scary, and this vast. Encompassing billions of years of biological history. And so we need to give the world a way to think about extinction.
What do I mean by that? Right about now, when I look at our civilization, what’s remarkable about it is that there’s no field called “Extinction Studies.” Don’t you think that’s striking? Extinction is going to be the single biggest event in human history. All 300,000 years of it. Nothing we’ve experienced so far as a species has even come close. How could it? This is the sixth of five previous mass extinctions in all of deep time. We are playing with biological, geological, ecological transformations that haven’t happened in the entire time the human species has existed.
You’d think a civilization confronting all that would desperately start a field called “Extinction Studies.” We need one, and we need it right now. What should the point of it be?