40. Climate Memo Mondays,
September 13, 2021
Extinction: A
Radical History by Ashley Dawson. OR
Books, 2012.
Publisher’s
Description
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
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