I Would Sound Like A Crazy Person...

Let's finish off this brutal week on an entertaining note, shall we?

I will quote from a recent interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, whose book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History came out earlier this year. I love this shit.

Q: Is there any chance that evolution will save the day? That the world will adapt and adjust to us?

A: I think there are two time frames in which to answer that. The first is, if you have very elevated extinction rates, evolution is just not fast enough. You would not assume that because things are dying out faster than normal that they’re speciating faster than normal. We don’t have any evidence of that. Evolution has its own time scale, which is dependent on reproductive rates. If you’re an animal that reproduces only every 20 or 30 years, there’s a limit to how fast you can evolve. In the short term or the medium term, I don’t think there’s much chance of evolution keeping up.

In the very long term, when you look at the mass extinctions of the past, yes, eventually. Those empty ecological niches get filled and diversity ramps back up again. In the fossil record, that tends to take millions of years. We’re talking about a long time. A mass extinction is not something where we can just hope for the best. It doesn’t work that way.

Right, it doesn't work that way. Here's the entertainment.

Q: What can we do?

My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work.

Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don't do that.

I couldn't agree more — only a crazy person would propose that humans change their behavior to stop human-created catastrophes like the Sixth Extinction

I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing.

All of these things are very much tied up with the way we live today, with globalization and modernity and industrialization. The idea that we’re going to suddenly undo those things — unfortunately, I don’t think that’s in the cards. How this is going to play out is the question of our time, really.

Right, that's not in the cards. Check this out.

Q: So what do you say to people who deny this?

A: It’s an interesting thing. You have global warming deniers, but you don’t really have habitat fragmentation deniers, or invasive species deniers. You really don’t have extinction deniers. You can argue that that’s because people don’t really care about other species. They really don’t even get worked up about that. You don’t get a lot of pushback when you say that extinction rates are really high today. I don’t think that’s debatable.

Yes, that's precisely the argument I made in Adventures In Flatland — Part II. And the finale...

Q: Is there any happy note to end on?

A: People ask me why I wrote this book if I don’t lay out a prescription for what we should do. I make the point that I think it’s quite important that we realize what we’re doing, what’s going on. That’s the only way to even begin to think about how we might ameliorate this situation. I do want to say there are loads of things we could be doing. It’s just that there’s nothing we could do that would be easy. So, there are tons of things to do. The first thing we could do is very dramatically reduce our carbon emissions, which we could do, but we would have to choose to do that.

Ms. Kolbert has truly mastered the evasive non-answer to the "end on a happy note" question.

But here on DOTE we can end with a happy note. And here it is. Robert Glasper can do no wrong.

Have a nice weekend.

 

Comments

[Brian]

I wonder what it's like for Elizabeth Kolbert. I mean, she must be doing interviews almost constantly as she promotes her book, and the questions must be virtually identical to this drivel. Literally, she must hear the same ridiculous questions again and again....

Will _____________ save the day? (evolution, technology, adaptation, etc.)
What do you say to ____________? (deniers, economists, politicians, etc.)
How ______________? (can we fix this, end on a happy note, find a silver lining, etc.)

Seriously, she must have this incredible urge to just go OFF!

"Okay, how can I put this? Let's see... oh, yeah, okay, let's try this. We. Are. Fucked. F U C K E D ! ! ! Don't you get it? All this shit, ALL OF IT, is caused by humans being human. You want a happy ending? Are you fucking kidding me?! What? Do you figure humans are going to suddenly, magically evolve a fucking conscience after a million or so years?! Seriously, get a fucking clue! We are all on the shit train, it's accelerating and we're all getting liquored in the club car... there's nobody anywhere near the fucking steering wheel. There's your fucking happy ending. I'm outta here. Peace!"