Long before the death of last Northern White Rhino
in wild, there was the Dodo. A large flightless bird that roamed the coastal woods of Mauritius,
an island off of Madagascar. But in 1598, the Dodo faced a world ending threat: the arrival of white
Europeans, who were hungry for resources to fuel their emerging capitalist nations. With guns and
axes, Dutch sailors carved up the Dodo’s habitat, leaving few safe havens for the bird. Out in the
open, with no where left to hide, those birds that didn’t die from the destruction of their habitat,
were killed by the barrel of Dutch guns and cooked in Dutch kettles. By 1662, the last Dodo perished.
The Dutch colonizers had driven the species into extinction. And the beastly bird of Mauritius
soon faded into myth. Sadly, this is a common story. One that’s been unfolding and accelerating
over the last four centuries. Life on Earth as we know it is dying. A mass extinction event–the
likes of which this planet has only experienced five other times–is now occuring. Today, we’ll
explore the underlying forces driving this catastrophic die-off. We’ll journey from the
fur-trappers of the North American colonies, to the agro-industrial feedlots of Brazil, all the
way to the machines of industry. This is the story of the Sixth Extinction. A story of it’s dark
roots and the manifold ways we might reverse it. This video is sponsored by Brilliant A simmering catastrophe:
While Dutch sailors were hacking apart the Mauritian coastine for wood and Dodo meat, the
English and French were across the ocean sinking their claws into the lush landscapes stewarded by
the people of Turtle Island, which is now called North America. The violent colonization of North
American capitalists, who were eager to ship wood, minerals, and food back home to their growing
nations, was not only devastating for those who were already living there, but these extraction
regimes were also disastrous for the natural world that had grown abundant under the watchful
eye of the Indigenous farmers, fishers, hunters, and communities. The waters of the northern
Atlantic are a perfect example of this. In his book The Mortal Sea, environmental historian
Jeffery Bolster, explains that before European colonial presence, the coastal ecosystems of
North America teemed with gargantuan fish and lobsters. Journals of sea captains from the late
1500s like Charles Leigh, reported that they encountered “the greatest multitude of lobsters
we ever heard of.” While another report in 1602 from sailor John Bereton claimed that the boat's
crew had fished so much Cod in five or six hours “that [they] had pestered [their] ship so with Cod
fish, that [they] threw numbers of them ouer–boord again.” But, with the continued expansion of
white European settler-colonialists throughout the 1600s this all changed. Fish population and
size dwindled, and forest habitats were clear-cut and demolished. The colonists viewed the landscape
as an infinite resource to harvest, develop into monocropped farmland, fish up, and sell back to
European markets. As the flood of white bodies, axes, and guns permeated Turtle Island throughout
the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, European colonists violently replaced various forms of
Indigenous land stewardship with commodity-based, profit-oriented systems. One early European
invader, James Rosier, quite bluntly reveals this commoditizing worldview, when he refers to the
abundance of life in North America as the “profits and fruits that are naturally on these Ilands.”
And environmental historian William Cronon points out in his book Changes in the Land that “timber
products were among the earliest ‘merchantable commodities’ colonists sent back to Europe to
repay their debts to financial backers.” He goes on to write that “In 1621, when the Pilgrims
made their first shipment home…the ship’s hold was… ‘laden with good clapboard as full as she
could stow.’” As a result of this transformation from stewardship to commodification, the flora
and fauna of North America suffered catastrophic losses. Bisons were hunted to near extinction,
the passenger pigeon, which once darkened the sky with its numbers, ceased to exist by 1914,
and the Ivory Bill Woodpecker, which once found its home in the coastal woods of the American
South was logged out of existence. But no animal is more emblematic of this new relationship with
the land than the beaver. From the late 1600s to the early 1900s, the beaver population plummeted
from an estimated 60 million to just 100,000, all because back home in Europe, fur lined tophats
were the hottest fashion. Instead of understanding and recognizing the beaver as a crucial species in
many North American ecosystems, French, English, and Dutch fur traders developed a massive market
that only saw the animals as commodities. Beavers were just living pelts, waiting to be trapped,
skinned, and sold for a profit. But luckily for the beaver, the fur-lined top hat eventually
faded out of fashion, and populations were able to somewhat stabilize. But, unfortunately
for the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, as well as the North American flora and
fauna, the settler-colonial Europeans, with their extractivist and commodifying economies
were here to stay. This destruction at the hands of early settler colonial economies is just a
taste of what’s to come. Today we face something bigger. Today we’re on the precipice of one of
the largest extinction events in Earth’s history. What’s the Sixth Mass Extinction?
The reality of life on Earth is that all species will face extinction. From the earliest
single cell organisms of the Eoarchean era to the Stegasauras of the late Jurassic period, flora
and fauna fade into extinction as other life, more suited to the ecosystem’s niche takes its place.
Extinction and replacement are the consequences of evolution. But across the course of Earth’s
history, there have been punctuation points. Five moments in time that have been catastrophic
for life. Five mass extinction events where, over the course of roughly three million years,
the diversity of species dramatically declined, the most famous of which was the mass die-off of
dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And we are now living in the sixth one. For reasons we’ll dive
into soon, plants, animals and general life on earth are dying-off at rates far higher than
normal. With evidence pointing to extinction rates as high as 1,000 times the usual background
pace. Which means, as researcher Gerardo Ceballos, explains, “What we've lost in 100 years would
have been lost in 10,000 years in normal times.” Indeed, the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Living
Planet Index, which averages together the change in abundance of over 5,000 species worldwide,
found an average decline of 69% in population since 1970. While this number is pretty limited
in its scope, it still gives us a glimpse at the potential extinction event we’re now facing.
According to a 2019 U.N. report, over 1,000,000 species will be threatened with extinction over
the next few decades. And even if some species are able to thrive, the absence of just one keystone
animal, plant, or insect could send a chain reaction of extinction through a local ecosystem.
This interconnected reliance of local biomes is most famously exemplified by the gray wolf, which
was hunted out of Yellowstone National Park in the1930s. The absence of the wolf triggered a
cascade of consequences. Elk populations, free from their apex predator, exploded in numbers,
which meant that one of their primary food sources, willow trees, declined dramatically. The
lack of these trees, which are also a food source for beavers, meant fewer beavers and natural
dams along the banks of Yellowstone’s rivers, leading to a transformation in the very way
rivers flowed. This is called a trophic cascade and reveals both how interconnected an ecosystem
is and how vulnerable it can be to the loss of just one keystone species. So when the IPCC
reports that “3 to 14% of species…will likely face very high risk of extinction at global
warming levels of 1.5°C, increasing up to… 3 to 48% at 5°C,” this could have vast ripple effects
across Earth’s habitats. But mass extinction doesn’t just mean catastrophe for the millions of
species eradicated from their ecosystem, it also spells disaster for human economies and social
organization. Because after all, our systems of production–our economies– are built on the
foundation of thriving and biodiverse ecosystems. So, when those ecosystems collapse, whether
through the domino effect of the disappearance of a keystone species or through more general
extinction, we are greatly affected. The absence of pollinator insects means the absence of crops
in fields. The lack of kelp and mangroves along coastal waters means increased floods and fewer
fish, the absence of the wolf means more deer and more disease. And that’s just the tip of the
iceberg. We’ve built our world, our agriculture, our cities around a specific structure of the
natural world. So, when that structure begins to crumble. When species die-off, when ecosystems
unravel, our way of life suffers. So in order to keep things from unraveling even further, we
need to understand why this is all happening. Why is everything dying?
The legacy of European colonial resource extraction is alive and well in the Brazilian
Amazon. There, trees that are home to a diverse range of animals and insects are slashed and
burned to make room for industrial soy farms and ranches. This Amazonian deforestation is eerily
similar to what we witnessed in the colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. Land
dramatically changed from one of forest or wetland to one of a single crop or single animal. In
short, we are terraforming the Earth. There are multiple drivers of the growing extinction
rates we’re witnessing today and at the top of the list is land-use change. Or the transformation
of habitat into a vastly different shape, to the point where a species is not able to adapt to
their new environment. We can see here that land use has dramatically increased since the 1700s,
and always at the bleeding edge of the frontier is agriculture. According to the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization, agricultural land takes up almost half of all habitable land, and
is responsible for 90% of deforestation and 70% of the world’s freshwater use. And that sustained
transformation of ecosystems into landscapes more suitable for industrial agricultural systems
has spelled disaster for biodiversity. Species are being pushed to extinction because of land use
change, and the last decade of deforestation along the edges of the Amazon rainforest are a perfect
microcosm of this. As a result of habitat loss, over 10,000 species of plants and animals risk
extinction. But land use change is just of the drivers forcing extinction, climate change is
another, and could yet prove to be the most consequential if temperatures continue to rise
over the next century. Whether it was intense volcanic activity, rapid growth of plants, or
impact dust from an asteroid blocking out the sun, the last five mass extinctions were all
precipitated due to shifts in climate. But if those climatic shifts occurred over the
course of thousands, if not millions of years, our current emissions rate is accelerating that
climate transformation to the scale of hundreds of years. Changes in global temperatures that
quick can spell disaster for ecosystems. It forces animals out of their normal geographic zones,
causes weather events like droughts and floods in locations ill equipped to deal with that kind
of weather, and creates unadaptable conditions. As a recent IPCC report notes, climate change
is already having world-shaking consequences: “Approximately half of the species assessed
globally have shifted polewards or…to higher elevations (very high confidence). Hundreds
of local losses of species have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes (high
confidence), as well as mass mortality events on land and in the ocean (very high confidence) and
loss of kelp forests (high confidence).” In short, changing temperatures and climates will drive
species to extinction around the world if left unchecked. And those that are left alive after
habitat loss and the pressures of climate change must face the added threat of over extraction.
Much like the Dodos of Mauritius or the gray wolves of Yellowstone, species extinction can
be directly driven by the barrel of the gun or the snare of the net. Fish species around
the world, like Yellowfin Tuna, are threatened because of our insatiable appetite for extraction
of certain species. We’re seeing this everywhere from the trade of ivory decimating the Northern
White Rhino population, African Forest elephants on the brink of extinction for their tusks, or
Pangolins hunted for their scales in medicinal products. But at the heart of all of these factors
that are driving extinction isn’t human nature. It’s not our inherent hatred of other species
that is driving an increased extinction rate, but instead our economic system. Our mode of
production. Yes, that’s right, it’s capitalism. What’s really at the root of extinction? To uncover the root cause of the sixth mass
extinction we need to travel once again back to the fur trappers of North America. It’s here along
the banks of rivers dammed up by beavers, that fur trappers took part in an early instance of
capitalist commodification of the natural world, and in doing so the drove a species to the brink
of destruction. While there was certainly more at play, like shifting climates or the introduction
of new diseases, many roads lead to the emergence of the European market economy throughout
the North American landscape as a key driver of ecosystem change. Prior to the capitalist
commodification of natural resources– transforming the very trees and animals into goods to be
refined and sold for money– Indigenous communities employed a range of tactics and land interventions
that, while still impacting the landscape, did so in a way that minimized their footprint.
As the author of a recent paper on the impact of precolonial communities on North American
landscapes, Elizabeth Chilton, notes, “[Indigenous North Americans] thrived under changing forest
conditions not by intensively managing them but by adapting to them and the changing environment.”
It was only with the introduction of monocultures of European seed strains, animals, and industrial
logging that fed production across the Atlantic, that we began to see the decline of species on
a broader scale. As Cronon put it in Changes in the Land, “New England ecology was transformed
as the region became integrated into the emerging capitalist economy of the North Atlantic.
Capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand.” Because, under capitalism we face
an unresolvable contradiction. In order to live, we need the natural world, with all of its
wonderfully complex and life-giving ecosystems, but inside a mode of capitalist production, we
must also extract, subjugate, and destroy that natural world to make a living. One of the
foundational characteristics of a capitalist economy is the production of goods for exchange
value rather than use value. In other words, we’re producing materials not based on necessity
or how well they work, but primarily for how much the product can sell for on the market. As a
result, under capitalism we’re driven to extract, produce, and accumulate far above levels that
are needed to satiate the conditions to thrive, because it is profitable to do so. In the real
world, this looks like the global meat market that deforests vast swathes of the Amazon rainforest
because we’ve transformed animal agriculture into an industrial machine. In order to squeeze
maximum value out of a cow, animal agriculture, which used to look like a collection of small
ranchers and herders before capitalism, has now become mechanized, consolidated, and homogenous.
This means that as farmers and ranchers cut down the edges of the biodiverse Amazononian habitat,
they are replacing them with just a couple of species of soybean for animal feed and cattle for
meat. Meat-packing giants like JBS, who know that more product sold means more profits in their
pocket, push industrial ranching companies like AgroSB to gobble up millions of acres of land at
any cost. And often that cost is the destruction of ecosystem, which leads to habitat loss and
species extinction. In short, the endless cycle of accumulation under capitalism, wherein capitalists
make profits, plug those profits into even more labor and extraction to make even more profits,
is untenable for the natural world. The end result of this cycle of accumulation is climate
chaos and species extinction. A common response to this is that capitalism can’t possibly be at
the heart of the Sixth Mass Extinction because as long as humans have roamed the earth, we’ve been
driving animals extinct. While that is, indeed, partly correct, it’s a little bit like comparing
apples to oranges. It’s true that early humans in the Neolithic era did hunt megafauna like the
Mammoth and the ground sloth to extinction, but it’s important to note that these were much
smaller blips on graph of extinction. The rate and scale of extinction we’re facing today
is larger than the megafauna extinctions of the neolithic era. In addition, these extinctions
were not necessarily a case of eradication but of replacement. As conservation biologist Ian Rappel
notes, “In many cases…the ecological roles of these large animals were subsequently taken up by
human beings themselves as they pushed and pulled at local ecosystems to generate their own social
metabolism through the controlled use of fire, shifting agriculture and the proactive management
of woodlands, tundra and savannah.” Early humans, then, essentially became their own megafauna in
their ecosystems, becoming essential stewards to the land. What we are witnessing today is not
that. It is the mass eradication and displacement of habitat, the mass extraction of the natural
world driven by capitalism’s need to commodify and produce. Human nature did not drive ranchers
and soybean farmers to slash and burn the Amazon rainforest, the hunt for profits did. The guns of
poachers that drove the Northern White Rhino to extinction did so in pursuit of the riches those
tusks would bring. And the continued expansion, extraction, and burning of fossil fuels powering
the climate crisis pushing millions of species to the brink has been propelled by the pursuit
of padding the wallets of those in power. So, as plants and animals die, we must not blame
human nature. That’s both ahistorical and ignores the fact that there are countless ways to live
with, instead of against, the natural world. So, to reverse the sixth mass extinction we
must grapple with our mode of production. How To Reverse the Sixth Mass Extinction: If the stories of the peregrine falcon, the
bald eagle, or the Iberian Lynx can be anything, they should be a balm to the doom we’re facing.
All three of these species faced down the surety of annihilation, and were guided back to
from the brink. What gives me hope is that the Sixth Mass Extinction is not set in stone.
What we do right now, tomorrow, or a year down the line will have vast ramifications for
not only us humans and our descendants, but for millions of species of life on this
planet. But to do the work we must first figure out effective ways to avoid the biodiversity
collapse we’re beginning to witness today. One of the more pervasive capitalist “solutions”
to the sixth mass extinction and habitat loss more generally is the concept of “ecosystem
services.” Popularized by the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment published in 2005,
the idea of ecosystem services is to identify and often quantify the ways in which the natural world
benefits humans. Or in other words, calculing the goods and services that nature provides to humans.
The idea behind ecosystem services is that, in defining and putting monetary value on the
intangibles of ecosystems like disease control, water filtration, or oxygen production, capitalist
markets and decision makers will be much more likely to understand and protect biodiverse
habitats. Indeed, this is exactly what scholar activist Vandana Shiva did to block limestone
mining in India’s Mussoorie hills in 1982. She spent months researching the impact limestone had
on water security and found “that the mountains and the aquifers and the limestone did a better
job just being as they were then when they were mined.” Shiva submitted her findings and together
with pressure from activists successfully blocked limestone mining operations in the Mussoorie
hills. While successful, this is ultimately a stop-gap approach. A method of harm reduction
that might be effective in the very short term– but is susceptible to being overturned,
because it ultimately capitulates to the capitalist mode of commodifying nature. It still
envisions habitat and ecosystems as commodities that service a capitalist market, and if for some
reason the spreadsheets reveal its more profitable to extract than preserve, capitalists will do
just that. This means that while we are trying to reduce the harm of capitalism we also need to
envision ways that hack at the rotten roots of the Sixth Mass Extinction. And no, land and habitat
conservation is not enough. Indeed, the mindset of conservation–or the act of protecting ecosystems
from human intervention– is ahistorical. Humans as a species have long been integral parts
of the landscapes, using controlled burns, roving agriculture and spreading seeds through foraging.
Indeed those that still maintain a stewardship approach to the land, foster habitats containing
80% of the world’s current biodiversity. So, while we need conservation in the short term, we
also need to be working towards an anti-capitalist mode of production that seeks a co-thriving
of both the natural world and human economies in the long term. One blueprint for a long-term
approach comes from authors Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vetesse, who envision a Half-Earth Socialism
approach to the Sixth Mass Extinction. For them a planned economy that focuses on minimal impact on
the land, while also setting aside, rewilding and then stewarding 50% of the Earth for the natural
world to thrive, is the optimal path away from climate chaos and species extinction. Or there
are the imaginings of Solarpunk. Cities and towns were the way in which our technologies and our
livelihoods are completely enmeshed with nature, so that we don’t have to destroy a forest in
order to have reliable shelter and food on the table. These threads have two necessary
ingredients. First, the transformation of an economy from one of exchange to one of use–and
in doing so minimizing our collective impact on the world–and second, blending the line between
humans and nature, in a way that recognizes the role humanity has always played as a part of, and
not separate from, our sorroundings. But to build a future that fosters a harmonious relationship
with the natural world, we first need to end our system of global capitalism. A mission that the
many of the countries of the imperial periphery have recognized and enshrined into the words
of the Cochabamba Peoples Agreement in 2010. There they write “Humanity confronts a great
dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of
harmony with nature and respect for life.” So, to prevent the fate of the Dodo, the Northern
White Rhino, from infecting life around the world we must struggle for a world beyond capitalism.
A world rich not with profit but with life, a world that embraces the interconnectedness of
humans and nature. A world worth fighting for. A world that will certainly have a much
smaller animal agriculture industry. Because, the unfortunate fact is that animal agriculture
within capitalism not only is driving land use change, but also climate change.
Which is why next month’s video dives into the hard questions of animal agriculture, and asks
questions like whether we should all be vegans or not. And if you don’t want to wait a month,
you can watch that video right now if you’re a Nebula subscriber, because I put all my videos
up on Nebula a month before they go on YouTube. Meanwhile we need biologists and ecologists
researching developing solutions to the looming biodiversity crisis. People who are steeped in
practices of analytical and scientific thinking. Which is why I’ve always loved Brilliant.org.
Brilliant is a website and app that uses visual, hands-on approach to help build those next
generation of scientists that can help us better understand the crisis we’re facing.
Because with Brilliant you learn by doing. You can play around with interactive puzzles
and games that make difficult to understand concepts like quantum mechanics actually fun to
learn. Their courses are laid out like a story, and broken down into awesome visual pieces and
interactive puzzles so that you can tackle them a little bit at a time. Like Brilliant’s wonderful
course on scientific thinking. Understanding the foundations of the scientific method is essential
to forging a renewable future, and Brilliant has made grasping the concepts like intuitive and fun.
This little interactive bridge puzzle helps you understand the importance of experimentation while
you engineer the optimal structure across the gap. This type of interactivity is peppered all
throughout Brilliant’s thousands of lessons, and there’s something for everybody —
from foundational and advanced math to AI, data science, neural networks and more. So,
to get started for free– for a full 30 days–, visit to brilliant.org/OCC or click
on the link in the description, and the first 200 of you will get 20% off
Brilliant's annual premium subscription.
