Sixth Extinction

The human race faces many global to local challenges in the near future. Among these are massive biodiversity losses. The 2012 IUCN/SSC Red List reported evaluations of *56 % of all vertebrates. This included 97 % of amphibians, mammals, birds, cartilaginous fishes, and hagfishes. It also contained evaluations of *50 % of lampreys, *38 % of reptiles, and *29 % of bony fishes. A cursory examination of extinction magnitudes does not immediately reveal the severity of current biodiversity losses because the extinctions we see today have happened in such a short time compared to earlier events in the fossil record. So, we still must ask how current losses of species compare to losses in mass extinctions from the geological past. The most recent and best understood mass extinction is the Cretaceous terminal extinction which ends at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) border, 65 MYA. This event had massive losses of biodiversity (*17 % of families, [50 % of genera, and [70 % of species) and exterminated the dinosaurs. Extinction estimates for non-dinosaurian vertebrates at the K–Pg boundary range from 36 to 43 %. However, there remains much uncertainty regarding the completeness, preservation rates, and extinction magnitudes of the different classes of vertebrates. Fuzzy arithmetic was used to compare recent vertebrate extinction reported in the 2012 IUCN/SSC Red List with biodiversity losses at the end of K–Pg. Comparisons followed 16 different approaches to data compilation and 288 separate calculations. I tabulated the number of extant and extinct species (extinct ? extinct in the wild), extant island endemics, data deficient species, and so-called impaired species [species with IUCN/SSC Red List designations from vulnerable (VU) to critically endangered (CR)]. Species that went extinct since 1500 and since 1980 were tabulated. Vertebrate extinction moved forward 24–85 times faster since 1500 than during the Cretaceous mass extinction. The magnitude of extinction has exploded since 1980, with losses about 71–297 times larger than during the K–Pg event. If species identified by the IUCN/SSC as critically endangered through vulnerable, and those that are data deficient are assumed extinct by geological standards, then vertebrate extinction approaches 8900–18,500 times the magnitude during that mass extinction. These extreme values and the great speed with which vertebrate biodiversity is being decimated are comparable to the devastation of previous extinction events. If recent levels of extinction were to continue, the magnitude is sufficient to drive these groups extinct in less than a century.

The Anthropocene has emerged as the dominant conception of the contemporary moment, centering the human individual as both responsible for and bearing the responsibility to counteract its numerous interrelated socioeconomic, political, and environmental issues including the staggering loss of biodiversity across the globe and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This constitutes a significant psychological impasse that disempowers and disenfranchises humans living in this epoch, discouraging any substantive individual effort. Drawing on the posthuman feminist philosophy of theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Stacy Alaimo together with a reflection of the power of science fiction as a literature of cognitive estrangement highlighting social issues, this paper reads “The Boston Hearth Project” by T.X. Watson as a short story demonstrative of an ethos of community and hope that resists the negative affects and oppressive social structures of the Anthropocene. I argue in the course of this paper that theorists and activists alike must turn to alternative narratives, such as those modelled in the emergent science fiction genre of solarpunk, in order to reject essentializing and individualizing forces and think multiply in order to realize meaningful resistance in a time of increasing fragmentation in society and destruction of the more-than-human world.

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/2

The anthropogenic Sixth Extinction is an existential threat to much of life on Earth, including the human species.  In this essay, I critically examine the renowned entomologist, naturalist, and conservationist E. O. Wilson’s proposal in his recent book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life(2016), to stop and reverse it.  In section I, I will outline what is meant by biodiversity and why it matters, and provide the basic facts about the Sixth Extinction and its salient causes.  In section II, I will outline Wilson’s proposal identifying tensions in his arguments for its efficacy.  In particular, I will show the tension between Wilson’s love for the natural world and his knowledge of biology and ecology on one hand and his inadequate understanding of human history, in particular, the capitalist civilization, which results in wishful thinking.  The Half-Earth proposal is necessary but not sufficient for stopping and reversing the Sixth Extinction. Finally, I conclude with a brief outline of what I consider to be necessary in order to make Wilson’s proposal effective.

As Kirsten Guest explains in the introduction to Eating Their Words, cannibalism has often been used as a limiting factor in colonial discourse, providing a method of delineating the civilized “us” from the savage “them,” as well as an excuse for devastating native or marginalized populations. The practice of anthropophagy meant savagery, which in turn meant being closer to the animal than to the human. But what happens in a world where there are no non-human animals? How do we define the self? And, perhaps more pressingly, what do we eat?

Don LePan’s Animals and Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT are both speculative fiction novels set after great extinctions, and each features a society that goes to great lengths to refashion cannibalism as an ‘ethical’ foodway. In each novel, colonial discourse is flipped; the un-human ‘Other’ is no longer the cannibal, but rather that which the cannibal eats. MEAT creates this ‘Other’ by elevating a class of people, know as the Chosen, to sacred status, requiring the consumption of their flesh for religious reasons. Animals adopts an ableist agenda, restricting the definition of ‘human’ to exclude the disabled, known as “mongrels”, who become pets or meat.

This chapter will examine the sociopolitical and economic framework mobilized in each novel to support a narrative of ‘ethical’ cannibalism. It will interrogate the methods of social control used in these novels, looking specifically at the influence of faith, pop science, and the capitalistic drive in the creation and maintenance of foodways that in contemporary society would likely be considered unethical.

This chapter will argue that there are two layers of critique coexisting in each novel. The first is a more surface critique of meat eating and the factory farm industry. By portraying humans who are created into ‘Others’ and then eaten, the novels each paradoxically highlight the vitality and potential personhood of food animals, and thereby the inhumanity of current farming practices. The second is a deeper critique of the dangers of the capitalist drive for profit and expansion. This chapter will argue that these novels make explicit that it is our own bodies on the line in the confrontation between the planet and capitalism that Naomi Klein defines as the crux of the climate crisis. By depicting societies that recreate the problems of overproduction, overconsumption and the like, these speculative novels demonstrate that the ultimate consumer is not the townsfolk who eat the Chosen or the neurotypical people who eat “mongrels”; the ultimate consumer is capitalism.

Dans "Surface Horizon" (Lafayette Anticipations, 17 juin – 5 septembre 2021), l’artiste Marguerite Humeau nous invite à nous tourner vers ces autres vivants que sont les plantes. La manière dont elle les met en présence peut contribuer à cultiver notre attention à elles, nous apprendre à les voir, au sens où l’entend l’historienne de l’art Estelle Zhong Mengual. Son dernier livre "Apprendre à voir. Le point de vue du vivant" fournit des outils théoriques et méthodologiques dont on peut se saisir pour penser l’expérience de cette exposition.

When Earth is viewed from space, the glow of the electrified cites is a stunning sight, showing how global media spans the planet. From inside cities, space is largely non-existent, with but a few stars visible in the night sky. Inside our cities is a carnival of events, consumption, and entertainment—a pre-Copernican existence with humanity at the center of everything. Meanwhile, outside the electric glow a sixth extinction event is underway. This paper explores the paradoxical effects of global cities and a planetary civilization, at once beautiful and horrible.

In Buddhism, faith is understood not just in cognitive terms, as belief without evidence, but as also involving affective and conative aspects. Faith is cultivated by increasing one's feelings of love and devotion until one's heart 'leaps' into action. It is not at all a matter of developing strong beliefs. In fact, the object of faith, the Buddha, is not held to exist absolutely or even independently, but rather, like everything else, is understood to exist conventionally and/or relative to other things. Having faith in such an object is analogous to the way we have faith in money, which also has value only relatively and conventionally. In fact, in Buddhism, faith can be seen as currency to be invested in a moral market. Buddhists believe that by making offerings with faith, one can even improve circumstances in this lifetime. If this hypothesis is true, then such an understanding could be useful to environmentalists for achieving their purposes.