I’ve been having a lot of thoughts recently about the power of stories, which is… uh, absolutely nothing new. It’s s subject that manages to inject itself into roughly 90% of everything I write, one of those themes my brain absolutely will not let go of. Stories shape the world. I mean, they really shape the world. They’re the mythologies governments tell their citizens to justify unjustifiable actions. They are wider narratives spun, by and large, by conquerors.
I just finished two books that on the surface have absolutely fuck all to do with one another thematically: David Gange’s The Frayed Atlantic Edge and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Quite by accident they managed to ring some of the same bells. I’m nothing if not a pattern-seeking animal.
Gange’s book is a beautifully-written account of a year spent kayaking the full length of Britain and Ireland’s Atlantic-facing coasts, from Shetland alllllll the way down to Cornwall (it’s a blend of natural history, social history, and personal anecdote you’ll be pretty well familiar with if you’ve ever picked up a book by Robert Macfarlane or Helen Macdonald or any number of really excellent British authors). A lot of the trip takes him through local coastal communities that have just about managed, by the skin of their teeth, to hold onto their native languages and ways of life as the dominating culture (read: capitalism) does its best impression of the Blob and tries to assimilate them bones and all. In some cases—see the Clearances—they skipped the whole assimilation thing and went straight to driving entire communities off the land by force. Once that was done, all that was left was to completely rewrite the narrative of the land itself, because ‘many people used to call this place home but we made them go away’ doesn’t sound as nice and pat as ‘the Highlands are a Wilderness best left to the stag, the eagle, and the poet’. Page 15 of the Colonizer’s Handbook, standard issue. A tried and true method used all over the globe for hundreds of years. The myth of Untouched Wilderness often skips arm-in-arm with genocide and any time you see it pop up you should be properly wary.
Which brings us to The Sixth Extinction. How much of a crock of bullshit is Untamed Wilderness, Touched Not By Man’s Hand? Less of a crock and more of a washtub, honestly. Maybe a water tower. A bullshit reservoir. For as long as we’ve been human we’ve been completely altering the landscape, and the past two hundred years have handed us the tools to speed that up in terrifying fashion. Kolbert goes through all the ways in which we’re hastening along a mass extinction event, from inadvertently spreading invasive lifeforms that wreak havoc on native life completely evolutionarily unprepared to tangle with it (white-nose fungus in bats, chytrid fungus in amphibians) to dumping tons of carbon dioxide in the planet’s oceans via our massively polluted atmosphere. The really interesting bit, though, is when she puts things in reverse to look at the mysterious die-offs of the world’s megafauna several thousand years ago. Why did all the mammoths and mastodons and glyptodons and cave bears vanish? Was it some random change in the environment that caused their sad extinction?
Nah. Turns out pretty much every continent’s megafauna vanished right around the same time that particular land mass caught a bad case of Homo sapiens. Big animals breed slowly, which is usually an evolutionary advantage if it means you grow up to weigh twenty tons with no natural predators. Unfortunately for them, humans had/have an absolute talent at making things dead no matter their size. They simply couldn’t keep up with us. We killed off all the mammoths and mastodons and glyptodons and cave bears and smilodons and now we’ve moved on to the survivors: tigers, elephants, rhinos, bears, whales. The Anthropocene, Kobert argues, didn’t start with the Industrial Revolution or the Atomic Age—it started precisely when we did, roughly 200,000 years ago. We’re a walking talking global disaster and we always have been, bad news bears for anything not human or marching in our agricultural parade.
I wonder what the narrative excuse for this final great extinctive push we’re calling down will be in another 400 years, when the climate is broken beyond repair and even the most familiar species are lost. I wonder who will be left to tell it, and how all the other stories we’ve told ourselves will have reshaped the landscape by then.
… Y’know, just cheerful Saturday morning thoughts.
Last year I taught a class focused on extinction and we read The Sixth Great Extinction and No Flight Without the Shatter (among other readings)--those two texts speak to each other in interesting ways. Some of my students wondered if you had read Kolbert's book, so it's interesting to see your thoughts on it.