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Many of the stark conclusions I offer on Do the Math and in conversations with others rest on the equally stark premise that we have initiated a sixth mass extinction (6ME). Other self-defeating factors also loom large in establishing modernity as a temporary stunt, including resource depletion, aquifer exhaustion, desertification and salination of agricultural fields, climate change, microplastics, waste streams, “forever” toxins, and plenty more. People do call it a poly-crisis, after all (I prefer meta-crisis as most symptoms trace to the same root mindset of separateness and conquest).
Yet, towering over these concerns is a sixth mass extinction. Mass extinctions are defined as brief periods during which over 75% of species go extinct. I take it as given that large, hungry, high-maintenance mammals like humans won’t be among the lucky survivors—who are more likely to hail from families like microbes, mollusks, arthropods, or otherwise small, scrappy critters. In any case, it’s bad…very bad.
Invocation of the 6ME serves as a final nail in the coffin…end of story…to be avoided at all costs. All the aspects we like about modernity lose appeal when held up against the 6ME as a direct consequence. Even though the other challenges listed above can carry the argument as well, they generally must do so as a set, and we’re not so talented at apprehending parallel concerns—imagining each to be surmountable in isolation (pointlessly; it’s whack-a-mole). The 6ME delivers a single, inarguable, fatal blow to modernity, which is why I have taken to invoking it as a heavy-handed “nuclear option” straight away. No point playing around. While it may seem extreme, extreme circumstances justify extreme responses.
But is the threat real, or rhetorical? Basing arguments against modernity largely—though not entirely—on the 6ME could amount to overblown doomerism. In this post, I challenge myself on the veracity of 6ME claims. Have I fallen into a false sense of the urgency of this moment? Do I really believe a 6ME is going to play out?
Evidence
Okay, we can’t truly know the future—yet some developments are reasonably certain: like continued expansion of the universe (apparently to a cold “heat death“); the sun entering red-giant senescence in 5 billion years; oceans evaporating in something like a billion years due to increasing solar intensity; our own deaths; continued cycles of years, seasons, days; rocks tumbling downhill rather than up, etc. Likewise, only a small fraction of the species alive today will evade extinction for 100 million years, even in the absence of a 6ME crisis. Climate will change as it always has—independent of the recent anthropogenic slap—and species will adapt, disappear, or emerge as a result. Aversion to a 6ME is not the same as assuming everything is otherwise static or perfect (which I am often assumed to imply, even though I don’t say/think anything as simplistic as that).
Current trends are rather clear, and ominous (see hockey stick and ecological nosedive posts, and this Guardian article). Extinction rates are up 100–1,000 times the background rate—and possibly higher; estimates err on the conservative side. Even at the low end, we are currently witnessing the highest extinction rate since the Chicxulub impact that took out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Serious stuff.
Relatedly, the count of living beings is falling fast. Annual population declines tend to be in the 1–2% range among mammals, birds, fish, and insects, accumulating to average declines of more than half in less than half-a-century. The road to extinction necessarily travels through population decline. Ecological interdependencies translate to collateral damage: insect loss means bird loss, for instance. At some point, the Web of Life crafted over many millions of years becomes too damaged to repair itself or hold its integrity, resulting in a cascade of failures at all trophic levels.
The Wikipedia page on the 6ME provides a thorough background and copious citations from the scientific literature that I won’t try to replicate here. I encourage reading or skimming the page, which among other things conveys an overwhelming consensus on the reality of the phenomenon. The exceedingly high extinction rate is not at all a fringe belief among those who have done the legwork. I would label the deniers as “fringe,” except they are essentially extinct themselves, among the professionals.
Causes
This one isn’t hard, and I won’t belabor the point. In a nutshell, it’s human activity and consumption. It’s 8 billion people, most of whom strive within the market system of modernity, placing back-breaking and unprecedented demands on Earth and on the Community of Life. The encroachment by and for agriculture, extraction, development, and disposal is a dominant phenomenon across the planet, leaving precious little wild space (especially contiguous) for biodiversity to remain intact. And what remains is shrinking fast—cut off and cut down.
This Nature article includes an informative graphic ordering and breaking down the ten largest contributors to extinction threats. Climate change is seventh on the list, following over-exploitation, agricultural activity, urban development, invasion/disease, pollution, and environmental modification.
What this means is that the push to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy (itself a conjectural fantasy) would do precious little to address the 6ME threat. In many ways, it makes the situation worse by increasing materials extraction (a very materials-heavy enterprise due to diffuse energy density), co-opting more land for energy capture, and most importantly keeping modernity’s pedal to the metal on the most substantial causes of species loss (e.g., the six items in front of climate change on the list referenced above). Full steam ahead, just without as much actual steam!
But is it Mass Extinction?
While extinction rates are through the roof, and wild population declines aim the barrel straight toward extinction of an enormous number of species, we certainly cannot claim to have carried out a sixth mass extinction…yet. By various estimates, we may have already lost something like 1–10% of species—predicted to climb up to 13–27% by 2100. While this (highly uncertain) estimate falls short of the 75% mass extinction level, three big points: 1) beware cascading failures (domino effect); 2) the year 2100 is not the end of time, as so many projections unintentionally imply, and just an instant from now on relevant timescales; and 3) these numbers are already tragically huge, when you think about what it means—millions of species, gone forever!
In any case, if one is to be accused of hyperbole, it is on these grounds: we have decidedly not yet carried out a 6ME. Two seconds into a jump off a skyscraper, some may object that it’s premature to talk about a sidewalk splat that hasn’t happened yet. It’s therefore unfair to say we’ve caused a mass extinction, even if we are certainly causing a phenomenon that has all the hallmarks of early-onset extinction. That said, splat-objectors had better propose a realistic prevention strategy—and fast—rather than simply pointing out that the splat hasn’t happened yet. Not bloody useful!
The question I have is: what possible reversal would accompany modernity’s continuation, given the overwhelming balance of loss and decline? It’s hard to look at the graph above and be glib about a sudden reversal of the nosedive—without a single credible plan or even much discussion at all about the decline itself, much less what it would take to effect such a reversal.
The stakes are too high to tolerate “what-about-ism,” pointing to isolated counterexamples of recovery. Nice try, but the totality of the matter is clear. One comprehensive study of over 70,000 vertebrate species finds that the “losers” outnumber the “winners” by 16 to 1. I mean, even mass extinctions have their winners, right? So, pointing them out accomplishes nothing other than addling our meat-brain simplification circuits—such an easy thing to do! When modernity’s root practices (agriculture, extraction, development) directly destroy habitats, one has to invoke magical thinking to believe that biodiversity could recover without a serious contraction of modernity’s scale and practices, which I assure you is not a seriously-entertained proposal on the table—putting us all at dire risk.
So: it is too soon to assert as proven fact that we are experiencing a mass extinction presently. But it’s not unreasonable to speak in such terms when extinction rates are orders-of-magnitude higher than normal—at their highest point since the last mass extinction—while the present and projected trajectory promises to accumulate more damage unless the situation changes radically.
Dismissals and Timescales
A common reaction to bad news that hasn’t yet fully developed to the point of being “clear-and-present” is to dismiss it—especially if operating at an incomprehensible scale (parodied well in the movie Don’t Look Up). The reflex is easy to understand: Earth is so inconceivably large that surely we can’t budge it, meaningfully. A casual glance (in select luckier places) reveals unimaginably large tracts of forest and an abundance of life. Whether about pollution, waste (plastics, for instance), climate change, or a 6ME, knee-jerk common sense says that such an immense substrate as Earth can tolerate anything we throw at it. Left out of this impulsive mental equation is 8 billion people advancing ever-expanding ecological challenges in every corner of the globe. Think again. It needn’t “compute” in our heads to still be true.
Part of the difficulty lies in timescales. A forest might look healthy to our naïve eyes: it’s got trees for god’s sake! What more could be relevant? But superficial appearances can be deceiving. Take the Elwha River, for example. About 100 years ago, dams were erected for hydroelectric power, cutting salmon off from the interior forest of the Olympic mountains. Gone was a counter-current conveyor belt of nutrients from the ocean that had been in place for countless millennia and that was vital to long-term health of flora and fauna. The damage won’t be apparent immediately, but gradually nutrients wash out and are not replaced, starving the forest of essential building blocks. Centuries later, the forest could be gone (which is why the S’Klallam people pushed—successfully—for the dams to be removed). Much like the skyscraper analog above, it’s like putting a plastic bag over someone’s head and commenting after 5 seconds that their oxygen levels are still fine, so what’s all the fuss about plastic bags? They’re not dangerous, see! Wait for it…
I had a similar realization on a lovely hike east of San Diego in 2023. It was a warm, sunny morning in early April and the ceanothus (California lilac) was in splendid bloom. A vast area was decked out in lavender-colored florets. Despite the lovely impression it formed on the retina, the eardrums revealed a more sinister story. It was dead silent. No bees. Given the ideal conditions, the buzz of bees should have been almost deafening: bumble bees in particular love ceanothus flowers. But pollinators—not just domesticated honeybees—are in serious trouble in the last decade or so. Without sufficient pollination, no new (or too few) seeds will form, and the next generation of ceanothus will fail to materialize. Come back in 50 years and this wild garden could be wiped clean of ceanothus, forever. What looks pretty today may be already effectively a form of walking-dead. It’s far too soon to have experienced the myriad rippling consequences of our recent fever-pitch assault on natural systems. The show is just getting started, and natural resilience can put on a brave face for a time. Life will struggle to do its thing right up until it no longer can, easily fooling our ignorant eyes.
Resilience?
Wait: is Life fragile, or robust? It’s both, of course, depending on context (a single logical label seldom suffices when complexity reigns). Anyone who has waged war on flora or fauna designated as weeds or pests will attest that Life fights back. It must be so, or Life would not have survived both chronic and acute hammerings over billions of years. Climate has changed many times; continents merged and separated; volcanoes and even asteroids took aim at life. Some species always go by the wayside in such events, to varying degrees, while others survive and expand.
As a thought experiment, if humans were suddenly removed from Earth, would the 6ME proceed on its own momentum, in reaction to the habitat destruction and “forever” toxins spread across the globe? We don’t know, of course. It might. I tend to doubt so, but can’t really defend that gut sense. I look at abandoned places like Chernobyl—where Life has sprung back to create a forested ruin full of wildlife—and think it can all be okay-ish. It may take millions of years to shed the severe perturbations of modernity, as we’ve essentially shaken the etch-a-sketch and distributed non-native species around the globe in a madcap game of forced reconciliation. Picture the cages of a zoo suddenly evaporating: the mayhem will continue for a while before settling down to a slowly-evolving quasi-equilibrium. On the other hand, ocean acidification from CO2 absorption might put an end to the foundation of life in the oceans, impoverishing the land as well. And climate change—while seventh on the list presently—may stomp entire regions and relegate much of the present biodiversity to the dust bin (e.g., tropical rainforests turned to deserts). So, it may very well be too late to stop a 6ME.
On the other extreme, what seems reasonably clear is that keeping the gas pedal engaged on modernity’s engine will continue to perpetuate population declines and extinctions until the job is complete and ecological collapse—thus our own—is effectively assured. So, let’s not do that. Let’s recognize modernity as a poison pill that is killing the planet, and begin shifting to a radically different way.
But, what about the middle case, where modernity self-terminates—as I believe it will—over the next century or two—possibly driven by demographic decline? Is the 6ME crisis averted? Because this scenario sits between the “disappearance” and “continuation” scenarios, my answer must also lie between, meaning that it could go either way, but has a lower chance of rebounding than in the “sudden disappearance” scenario. In fact, failure of institutions and global supply could make billions of humans desperate for food, in which case anything larger than a mouse may be in real trouble—further advancing the extinction drive. It’s even possible that modernity self-terminates because of ecological collapse as the 6ME gathers steam, becoming its own cascading contribution to the phenomenon. Have we already passed a tipping point? We don’t know. We’re in uncharted territory, which at least ought to make us sit up straight and question our ways.
Overreaction and Asymmetric Risk
Because we have no crystal ball, and can’t peer into the far future, we simply can’t know how serious the present extinction surge will turn out to be. Given the inherent resiliency of Life, am I overreacting by taking the alarming trends seriously? Might I just chill out?
Obviously, no one can say with any certainty. But let’s contrast two statements that can definitely be differentiated on the grounds of veracity.
- Everything is actually fine: no credible cause for alarm.
- Unprecedented alarm bells are going off, and could plausibly portend our doom.
The extreme downside for humans if the 6ME assessment is correct would appear to me to completely overwhelm the speculation that maybe somehow—against all current evidence—Earth’s Community of Life can tolerate this unprecedented shock. That’s classic asymmetric risk. The precautionary principle strongly suggests we not be dismissive of 6ME warnings.
Thus, I would not call talk of a 6ME hyperbole. It has a very real and serious basis, whose plausible consequences are rather severe for humans. Waving it off would seem to be the height of irresponsibility and hubris. If I owned and edited a newspaper, the 300-point font headline would read, every day:
SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION STILL UNDERWAYI’m not clear what other headline would possibly merit displacing this one. It’s a message that bears repeating—never deserving the label “old news.” Ironically, as long as there are newspapers, the headline will likely remain true.
Last Ditch Effort
Before letting it rest, let me take one final crack at the validity of invoking the 6ME. Whether it is appropriate to speak as if the 6ME is essentially baked-in depends—as so much does—on context.
The present context is that the vast majority of people in our culture assume that modernity continues. In that mental space, a 6ME is essentially guaranteed to play out, and therefore constitutes a fair tool to employ for dislodging ubiquitous faith in modernity.
Whether I personally believe the 6ME will play out to true mass-extinction levels in the fullness of time is essentially irrelevant, as my faith in modernity is already shattered, so that I can imagine (hope for) modernity’s disappearance well before the situation is irreversible. Still, it’s completely fair to point out that the price of prioritizing modernity (over humanity and the rest of Life) leads to colossal failure. To the extent that modernity remains “real,” so does a 6ME: they go together. Maybe, then, it’s modernity that’s hyperbole. It still rhymes.
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