40. Climate Memo Mondays, September 13, 2021
Extinction:A Radical History by Ashley Dawson.OR Books, 2012.
Publisher’sDescription
Some thousands of years ago, the world was home to an immense variety of large mammals. From wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to giant ground sloths and armadillos the size of automobiles, these spectacular creatures roamed freely. Then human beings arrived. Devouring their way down the food chain as they spread across the planet, they began a process of voracious extinction that has continued to the present.
Headlines today are made by the existential threat confronting remaining large animals such as rhinos and pandas. But the devastation summoned by humans extends to humbler realms of creatures including beetles, bats and butterflies. Researchers generally agree that the current extinction rate is nothing short of catastrophic. Currently the earth is losing about a hundred species every day.
This relentless extinction, Ashley Dawson contends in a primer that combines vast scope with elegant precision, is the product of a global attack on the commons, the great trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as well as collectively created cultural forms such as language, that have been regarded traditionally as the inheritance of humanity as a whole.
This attack has its genesis in the need for capital to expand relentlessly into all spheres of life. Extinction, Dawson argues, cannot be understood in isolation from a critique of our economic system. To achieve this we need to transgress the boundaries between science, environmentalism and radical politics. Extinction: A Radical History performs this task with both brio and brilliance.
Publication July 2016 • 132 pages
Paperback ISBN 978-1-682190-40-1 • E-book 978-1-682190-41-8
Commentary
“Ashley Dawson’s slim and forceful book … makes a case for being the most accessible and politically engaged examination of the current mass extinction … a welcome contribution to the growing literature on this slow-motion calamity.” —Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Yale University, in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“Dawson's searing report on species loss will sober up anyone who has drunk the Kool-Aid of green capitalism. For a bonus, readers will learn a lot from his far-sighted, prehistoric survey of extinction.” —Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal
“Dawson has summed up the threat to our fellow species on Earth with clarity, urgency and the finest reasoning available within the environmental justice literature. He explains how capital's appropriation of nature cannot be 'offset,' nor solutions found in financialization. Fusing social and ecological challenges to power is the only way forward, and here is a long-awaited, elegant and comprehensive expression of why the time is right to make these links.” —Patrick Bond, Professor of Political Economy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and author of Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below
“A succinct and moving account of the co-evolution of capitalism, imperialism, and climate change. Dawson demonstrates not only how capitalism created climate change but also why the former must be challenged in order to halt the latter. Offering not only critique but also solutions, this rousing book is a great tool for anti-capitalists, climate change activists, and those still making sense of the intrinsic connections between the two.” —Jasbir Puar, Associate Professor, Graduate Program Director Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, author of Terrorist Assemblages
“Historically grounded, densely researched, fluidly written, Ashley Dawson’s book on extinction is a powerful and painful exploration of human civilization's environmental irrationalities. Yet Dawson does not see annihilation as inevitable and he even points towards an alternate path.” —Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
Dawson’s Extinction: a Reply to Kolbert
“…the capitalistic system that has come to dominate the world over the last five centuries is grounded in and thrives on dispossession. When viewed through the lens of extinction, it is an economic system and culture founded on a drive to annihilate everything in its path” (Extinction, 96).
Dawson traces this domination back a least to 1500, based upon the “massive decimation of global biodiversity” (9) caused by human development, chopping up habitats into “dwindling fragments,” overharvesting, and “anthropogenic climate change” since that time. Now, “the Earth is losing about hundred species a day.”
Elizabeth Kolbert’s magnificent The Sixth Extinction took us on a “terrifying tour” from the first great extinction to the sixth, from mountain tops to ocean depths throughout the planet, to depict “the worst catastrophe for life on Earth” since the asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs. By our nature, our very creativity, she argues, “human beings have been cursed with the capacity to destroy other species wholesale for many millennia” (97).
But, Dawson counters. her “sweeping indictment of an undifferentiated humanity is both historically inaccurate and politically disempowering.” Such a perspective “offers no understanding of the structural forces that generate exploitation and ecocide,” and it fails to acknowledge that “many human cultures have learned to live in relative harmony” with their flora and fauna. “Such a perspective is truly hopeless” (98-99).
Thus in addition to human nature, another factor must be added to explain the massive decimation of species. Not humanity as a whole, but its cultural and economic choices make the difference. “Everyone is not equally responsible. “ “”…capitalism has unleashed waves of enclosure, imperialism, warfare, and ecocide over the last five hundred years that have benefitted a very small segment of humanity while displacing, immiserating, enslaving, and destroying countless numbers of people, animals, and plants.”
“If capitalism is the ultimate cause and prime engine of the extinction [and climate] crisis,” we can hope to challenge it, in contrast to waiting for evolution or forcing human nature to change, neither of which options remain open. Capitalism is a “specific economic system,” and we can change it, and quickly, if we only will. Instead of being weighed down by “human nature,” anti-capitalism“can be liberating, triggering myriad constructive projects and emancipatory prospects.” These are the “radical transformations” we need and soon.
--Dick