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.
These are not equally defensible. Extinction is dead-serious, and is unquestionably proceeding at rates not encountered since the last mass extinction 65 Myr ago. I doubt most of us would consider that to be “fine,” or non-threatening. We have zero evidence that such a dramatic (and rapid) development constitutes no cause for alarm. Ironically, the so-called “conservative” members of our society are the most likely to dismiss such threats in the least conservative (i.e., low-risk) approach imaginable. One ought not be surprised to get burned while playing fast-and-loose with fire.
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 UNDERWAY
I’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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'Modernity' is definitely to blame for a great deal. But humans were already responsible for extinctions of megafauna tens of thousands of years ago, when human population was about 8000 million times smaller than now, and we were hunter-gatherers armed with blunt stones. Expert Jens-Christian Svenning was writing in January this year: "The evidence for Homo sapiens playing the dominant role in the global megafauna extinctions constitutes one of the clearest, well-supported patterns in ecology. See our 2024 review" (Bluesky post: https://bsky.app/profile/jcsvenning.bsky.social/post/3leobvpc5fk2m; paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-prisms-extinction/article/latequaternary-megafauna-extinctions-patterns-causes-ecological-consequences-and-implications-for-ecosystem-management-in-the-anthropocene/E885D8C5C90424254C1C75A61DE9D087). Our taste for meat and other animal products has been a key driver of extinctions for a very long time. A paper published a few days ago confirms that red meat has by far the biggest 'extinction footrprint' of all foods (https://bsky.app/profile/unpopularscience.bsky.social/post/3lyskctolds2p and https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01224-w, and many studies have shown that for "Biodiversity conservation: the key is reducing meat consumption" https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969715303697. So I get increasingly frustrated when those highly concerned about collapse of human civilisations and ecosystems don't mention a simple action that would make a huge difference if more widespread, whilst costing less than typical omnivore diets, most likely improving health outcomes and reducing human impacts on pretty much all other 'planetary boundaries'. Forgive me if this comes across as a rant but I have a bad cold and the news are just too terrible…
I should have mentioned megafauna extinctions in this post, as I have a number of times in previous contexts. I want to be careful about false equivalency, because some (not you, per se) use the megafauna extinctions to excuse the current trends and absolve modernity: "see, we were always extinction machines."
Point one: Losing 70% of wild mammal mass over 100 years (modernity) vs. 25% over 50,000 years is three orders-of-magnitude more serious, paralleling the increase in overall extinction rate above background. Comparatively speaking, the megafauna extinctions are a footnote—not on equal footing (also, megafauna vastly outweighed humans during this period, which is very far from true today).
Point two: Where did megafauna largely survive? Africa: where humans co-evolved with large animals, who learned of the evolving danger and adapted along with it. Megafauna extinctions followed human migration to places where animals had no built-in fear of humans. Migrations happen throughout ecological history, and disruptions (extinctions) are part of that game. The fact that megafauna persisted in Africa indicates that humans are not irredeemable extinction machines, even when including meat in diets. Circumstances (migration) and culture (modernity) are apparently bigger factors disrupting the quasi-equilibrium that otherwise establishes itself.
That said, you are correct in that 8 billion people on the planet ought not be eating meat, and I have modified my diet accordingly. But 8 billion people can't be here anyway, for long, so I'm not too interested in the "right" way for 8 billion people to eat (there is no right way, but surely things are better if we cut out meat during this crisis period). At a population of 10 million humans, I have no problem with humans eating meat, any more than I have a problem with other omnivores doing so: part of an ecological arrangement that works long term.
The fact of megafauna extinctions has come up before. You rightly point out that such extinctions in Africa were far fewer than those in other regions, probably due to the co-evolution of humans and megafauna in the same ecosystem. Perturbing ecosystems (through migration, in the case of humans) is bound to result in some profound changes to those ecosystems. But is your hypothesis that the reduced extinctions in Africa means the humans are not irredeemable extinction machines doesn't appear sound, to me.
In order for humans to not act in that way, they would voluntarily have to not act in another way they do – migrate (for multiple reasons, probably). So humans, the species, would have to not have the migration behaviour, or tendency. If they didn't, would they be a different species? It's a feature of humans that they do migrate, so how can they be redeemed?
I guess the point to me is less a logic puzzle than a study of whether indigenized humans are able to establish "right relationship" to local fauna—as appears to have happened in Africa, and also in other places around the world once the initial migration shocks settled out. Now that no new continents are available for migration, that particular "failure mode" is spent. What's relevant now is if we are capable—in our DNA—of living in approximate balance. I would say that we have plenty of evidence that the answer is "yes." Thus: not irredeemable extinction monsters down to our core, no matter what. I would feel differently if we lacked evidence for long-term ecologically-respectful living arrangements once settled in a place.
I believe the important point to take away from this discussion is whether or not humans as a species are unique in causing massive biodiversity loss wherever we go regardless of the cultural context of the immigrants. As in every case of human exceptionalism, I would argue the answer is a hard 'no'.
If humans are extinction machines by our very nature, what about cats? The introduction of cats globally has led to the extinction of 60+ species. The same can be said of snakes having killed off 10+ birds species on Guam alone in a few decades.
But wait, aren't humans responsible for those extinctions since we introduced those species in the first place? I would argue we are only indirectly responsible since we didn't literally puppeteer every individual cat and snake into killing off all those species. However, if that's the objection, then consider the Great American Interchange event roughly 2.7 million years. North and South America became connected through the Central American land bridge for the first time which facilitated an exchange of animal and plant species. The end result was the disproportionate extinction of South American mammals; 38 genera went extinct at that time. Does that make North American mammals "extinction machines"? This number of extinctions is slightly higher than during the end-Pleistocene event. Also remember that the Pleistocene extinctions were exacerbated by significant rapid climate change unlike the NA-SA Interchange.
My main point is that other species and pre-civlization human cultures often cause extinctions when introduced into new ecosystems. However none of them do so as a matter of intentional policy (unless you think Paleo-Indian cultures and cats decided to intentionally exterminate their own food). Contrast that with agricultural and industrial cultures that intentionally set out to annihilate biodiversity in favor our chosen crops and livestock. Totalitarian agriculture necessitates killing off 99% of the biodiversity in an region and replacing it with one or two species. Multiply that effect globally and you have an extinction crisis cause not by humans but by humans from one culture motivated by supremacist mythologies.
My position is that humans are a species, no different from other species. However, humans have a much greater capability to harness resources and to deal with varying environmental conditions. So, yes, other species could be the primary cause of extinctions, though I'm not aware of any evidence for that. Other species tend to (eventually) live in climax ecosystems without seeking more, and move slowly if conditions deteriorate, partly because they aren't as equipped to deal with different conditions as humans are.
My point above was that, although humans could, technically, live without causing extinctions, I don't think there is any hope that they would because we know that they didn't and have no reason to think they can voluntarily alter that behaviour.
Obviously the harm done to nature, including extinctions, is infinitely worse now than when we were 1 million hunter-gatherers – but armed with basic tools (which other animals didn’t have, and are likely the most significant precursor to modernity), we were having a significant impact also on African wildlife.
See, for instance, from the report already cited: “Sub-Saharan Africa is often presented as having an intact megafauna, but actually lost a number of species in the late Quaternary, including an elephant species (Palaeoloxodon iolensis), a giant buffalo (Pelorovis antiquus), various antelopes (e.g., Rusingoryx atopocranion) and a giant warthog (Metridiochoerus compactus).(…) Northern Eurasia and North Africa also lost substantial numbers of megafauna during the Late Pleistocene and through the Holocene, for example, multiple species of elephant, rhinoceros (including the giant Elasmotherium sibiricum) and giant deer (e.g., Megaloceros giganteus), with the aurochs (B. primigenius primigenius) only surviving in domesticated form (B. p. taurus). (…) There is evidence that megafauna extinctions without replacement and with a tendency towards body-size downgrading started somewhat earlier than the Late Pleistocene in some regions, specifically Africa and Eurasia. The large carnivore guild in Sub-Saharan Africa underwent a drastic simplification including the loss of all machairodont cats already in the Early Pleistocene. Machairodont cats also went extinct or became rare (Homotherium latidens) in Eurasia from the early or middle Pleistocene onward. Megaherbivores declined in diversity in Africa from the Early Pleistocene onward. More generally, a variety of large herbivores also went extinct before the Late Pleistocene seemingly without replacement in both Africa and southern Asia”.
You write “8 billion people can't be here anyway, for long, so I'm not too interested in the ‘right’ way for 8 billion people to eat”. I agree with the first part. It seemed obvious to me when I married in 1972: there were “just” 3.8 billion of us then, but the trend was clear and I decided not to have kids. But I also decided to go vegetarian, then vegan some years later, because it was equally obvious that eating lower on the food chain would lessen my impacts whilst likely improving my own health. I’m interested in reducing harm, especially when it’s so easy, with so many cobenefits, and it’s so powerful.
If we all adopted a plant-based diet we would free over 75% of agricultural land – the size of the US, China, the EU and Australia combined! Rewilding this land would vastly boost biodiversity whilst removing around 8Gt of CO2 each year.
My own diet has saved some 16,000 lives – of farmed animals living short and usually terrible lives – avoided ~140,000 kg of CO2, saved plenty of forest and water, etc (compared to average, according to vegetarian and vegan calculators).
You are obviously 'a bit' interested in the right way to eat since you write that you have modified your diet. I feel we can’t, individually, do a great deal of tangible demolition of modernity, nor avoid the fact that earth is overpopulated by us, but diet is one area where we have direct agency – and it matters much for extinctions.
I am perfectly in line with your thinking. As far as I can see, homo sapiens is doomed. (Doomer, doomer, party…well, "pooper" doesn't really work, does it…)
But there is one aspect of the observable world that repeatedly baffles me (like, every time I look at it). Compare the total habitable surface area of the world with the total human habited area. Every time I look, I see great expanses of uninhabited surface, and, in the back of my mind is, "how can all this open space exist in the face of 8 billion people?"
Obviously, "human habited" is not the same as "human controlled." Much of that "open" space is, no doubt, directly or indirectly, affected by human activity.
Be nice to get a handle on just what the percentages are: habited, directly affected, indirectly affected (and by how much…whatever that might mean), unaffected.
There is a UN report somewhere showing that 97% of the planet's surface has been degraded by human activity in one form or other. So yes, there are patches of the earth that look fine, but the untrained observer only see what's there, not what is missing.
Indeed. For instance a 2021 study showed that only 2-3% of the planet could be considered ecologically intact – and the damage is accelerating! https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/04/study-shows-only-2-3-of-earth-s-land-is-ecologically-intact/
About 40% of the land area has scant biodiversity and populations (except for migratory animals).
Add to this other parts – managed pastures, arable land, exploitation forests, all of which also contain a reduced population of what could live there.
Previously, looking at the land in a park or just at a house in the city, I could see ants, long chains stretched either to a fallen candy or to a nearby tree, the anthill was not far away.
Today they simply disappeared. I realized with horror that I could not find ants, and if there are no ants, then there is no food for them. Flowering plants are empty, a couple of synanthropic species is not biodiversity.
Almost all insects dependent on the age of the trees have disappeared, many destructors have disappeared (now the corpses of animals dry up like mummies)
I understand your skepticism, but dive deeper into ecological connections and population biology.
I would say that even what is there is horrifying to the point of numbness
Great article. What makes things even worse is that nothing can be done. Modernity is too entrenched, and most people (as products of it themselves) have been conditioned to believe in it. It's like a planet-wide psychosis. You can see it everywhere you look – humans are obssessed with themselves and other humans (and artificial objects), to the exclusion of all else. Other life, plant or animal, is there for humans to use however they see fit (usually eating, wearing, clearing, processing or otherwise destroying). False comparisons are made: 'But we killed the megafauna millennia ago… [etc]'.
Everywhere it spreads, modernity destroys Nature. 6ME? Most people wouldn't care even *if* they understood.
Objecting to this pitiful state of affairs sees one labelled 'tree hugger', 'luddite' – or these days, even 'terrorist'. How did it come to this? Iain McGilchrist was right, the left hemisphere really did take over the world.
I myself am a prisoner of modernity. I loathe it but I'm trapped in it. Without large amounts of that odious invention, money, there is nowhere to escape – everywhere is owned by someone / some institution or corporation. The only solace is that, whether I live to see it or not, it will end, eventually.
It's not modernity. We're prisoners to the nightmare of full consciousness. (or full mortality salience)
And now, a few words from the most reality aware person on the planet, Thomas Ligotti:
“As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.”
“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”
It is modernity. As many have observed, humans lived for millions of years without sawing off the branch. Their culture valued and respected Nature. Modern culture (such as it is) sees only resources and commodities, to be extracted and traded. All space must be built over.
Not sure why "full consciousness" is a "nightmare?? Humans can be conscious that they are animals, just like other animals – so? No need for the melodrama of your 'expert' "hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones" lol get the violins out.
The thought experiment 'The World Without Us' by Alan Weisman was encouraging to me.
Also check out the fiction book from 1949 called Earth Abides. It's hokey in places, but also packs some powerful insight and carries the reader through a significant journey. It shares some overlap to The World Without Us. Incidentally, Alex Leff (of Human Nature Odyssey) just today recorded a conversation with me about Earth Abides. The World Without Us also came up briefly.
I really enjoyed Earth Abides when I read it.
The bit about losing the ability to read and write was a shock when I first read it. But now I think losing all modernities accumulated knowledge is no bad things.
Do you have a link to the conversation?
Yes: people can be happy, satisfied, healthy, and fit without written language—even more so, it can be argued: plenty of evidence if you care to look (without a modernity-biased lens).
The conversation won't be out for some weeks (I guess), but I'll update here (and elsewhere?) when available.
Tom again venturing where few are courageous enough to go, lets' talk.
My friend and colleague Professor Paul Ehrlich in conjunction with Geraldo Ceballos and Paul's wife Anne, wrote a masterpiece book titled, “The Annihilation of Nature,” I interviewed Paul on Nature Bats Last numerous times; he's a very knowledgeable dude and fun to hang out with. The book is worth buying, just for the imagery!
Back to Tom: "The question I have is: what possible reversal would accompany modernity’s continuation, given the overwhelming balance of loss and decline?"
I believe there is zero possibility of modernity stumbling on very much longer, the cracks widen by the day. People are skeptical of my and Professor Guy McPhersons assertions, predominantly due to our urgency. My professional knowledge in the electrical field has taught me how vulnerable complex systems can be. My 16 ocean passages on small yachts taught me the "Precautionary Principle." Plan for the worst, hope for the best, failing to plan, is planning to fail
It's impossible to keep the unsustainable, sustainable, that should be self-evident.
Thanks for asking the questions most avoid.
https://kevinhester.live/2018/06/07/professor-paul-ehrlich-the-annihilation-of-nature/
Yes. Good question. Tom offers much useful thinking but the framing is problematic. I have offered my own critique.
It would be hard to deny a 6ME with species going extinct at 1,000 times the background rate. There was a paper that suggested amphibians, when endangered species are counted, may be going extinct at 25,000 – 45,000 times the BGR. https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-herpetology/volume-41/issue-3/0022-1511_2007_41_483_ADOECD_2.0.CO_2/Amphibian-Decline-or-Extinction-Current-Declines-Dwarf-Background-Extinction-Rate/10.1670/0022-1511(2007)41%5B483:ADOECD%5D2.0.CO;2.short
A canary in the coal mine, no doubt. Currently 85% of corals are bleaching, and it's expected that 99% will die-off at 2C, which Hansen predicts will be reached by 2040. Corals are 25%-30% of ocean ecosystem, representing a big domino to fall, and not in the far future. Another is the Amazon shifting to savannah, probably before the end of the century the way things are looking.
I would be surprised if modernity lasted a century or two. Of course, it depends on how the boundaries are drawn, but there is a pretty good case that the unraveling is well underway. Seneca noted long ago that empires go down a lot faster than they go up. There's an interesting graphic that shows empires as pulses, the decline pattern sometimes looks like a cliff (Babylon), sometimes it eases off more gradually (Minoan). I'd argue that a relatively fast descent is plausible, decades instead of centuries. Though, modernity could prove tenacious, and some of the dynamics are different, global rather than regional, giant population, more technology. Interesting times.
Graphic in the first answer: http://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/quora-q&a.html#12
Seneca the Younger quote, 64AD:
"Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed by a single day. Nay, he who has said "a day" has granted too long a postponement to swift-coming misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires! It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works, if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."
There's also a case to be made that the complexity of a system increases its fragility and the velocity of its failure because the loss of critical dependencies can result in failure cascades.
Thanks for the post!
I would like to add that we lack "biology" in life. Which is reduced to "fighting with", or "benefiting for".
Most do not consistently, what complex chains, adaptations and interactions are formed when everything works as it should for a long time. They do not understand what enormous impacts populations once had on planetary systems, from bison and aurochs to elephants and aurochs, from iron bacteria and saprophytic fungi to springtails and benthos.
Distribution was encouraged, concentration was not desirable. If many corpses or excrement are scattered over the territory – this is good, when they are together – this is bad. No strategy of living organisms is aimed at the extermination of other organisms. even viruses. I think the appearance of smallpox, polio, outbreaks of major epidemics were already a bell about overpopulation, even for populations of less than 1 billion.
That's right, man must be a rare beast, culturally finely tuned to a world that is larger than man.
I forgot: as you correctly said, those peoples who succumbed to temptation and ignorance and exterminated (or did not have) large mammals, birds, reptiles. And these are many peoples of unfavorable territories of South America, Australia, Asia or inhabitants of tropical forests, they subtly understood the concept of "enough", sincerely loved, protected and respected the environment, because at the cultural level they sealed past actions and difficult times.
It remains only to believe that the future will be based on such experience, because it will be planetary…
I like the idea of keeping the biggest story at the top of the newspaper every day. Unfortunately, real journalists do the opposite:
https://dorkscratchings.blogspot.com/2025/09/is-scope-neglect-killing-climate.html
Fantastic analysis! The inversion of priority vs. people affected is particularly incredible. Our news apparatus (catering to human preferences) is badly broken.
One of the things that encouraged me to study existential threat in more detail was a Nick Bostrom lecture, of all things, which I watched probably a decade ago. I see Bostrom's perspective as somewhat techno-idolotrist, and disagree with him on that front. However, in the lecture, he pointed out how there was far more academic research on zinc oxalate, snow boarding, and dung beetles respectively than there was on human extinction. To mirror the inversion of priorities in the news, academia appears to follow a similar pattern.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Nf3TcMiHo
Frankly, most of the concepts involved in our existential predicament are not that difficult to comprehend and could probably be taught in primary school, yet we as a society don't. Better to create loyal worker drones than system questioners (economically).
Yes – there is no hyperbole. Indeed, addressing the subject particularly, it is clear that the extinction of humans is very likely, although we will likely take down some, or all, of the planet, with us.
Unfortunately, Tom Murphy's collective efforts to date, studiously ignore the contested political reality of collapse and its associated structural violence. For those who have been, and continue to, be subjected to this violence, Tom's dismissal of real-politik is a very familiar and very human kind of thinking – privileged, white, racist, classist, and misanthropic.
In Tom's imaginary, modern humans and 'modernity' are unnatural beings (how exactly is exhuberant natural expression unnatural?Have you consulted an ecologist?). According to the astro-physicist, stepping well outside of their expertise, modern human behavior apparently exists outside of natural expression and phenomenology.
With a capital N, Tom Murphy's "Nature" ironically provides the same justification for human space colonisation as the deluded eco-modernists he attempts to critique. If humans are no longer 'natural' we are surely 'exceptional'!
Yet again, people good at mathematical abstraction, believe their data-driven backgrounds, are somehow more valid than the complex, relational, social-science, which critiques it.
Sorry Tom.
Partial credit.
Tws.
I suspect you would have a very difficult time finding a place where this Tom Murphy has said modernity is not natural. It's not ecologically sustainable: not yet wrapped in the ecological/evolutionary feedback loop and thus operating in an open-ended experiment not yet vetted to be compatible. Indeed, a total nuclear annihilation would be part of the universe doing its thing, and thus completely natural. But it's not a feature to which life on Earth has evolved and adapted, in feedback. Likewise for the 100% natural Cicxulub impact. Nothing in the universe can be unnatural.
My effort, here, is not to drive some artificial wedge between natural and unnatural (pointless/wrong), but to highlight the consequences of modernity as being something I believe most of us would assign a very negative value: perpetrating a sixth mass extinction.
I know tmurphy can defend himself, but… racist? Come on.
Ok, he's 'white', but I doubt that was a choice.
As for "stepping well outside of their expertise" – does that mean only 'social scientists' (whatever they are) can have an opinion about the broad state of the world?
What is "social-science"? Physicists are generally more in touch with reality than 'social scientists'.
Realpolitik entails acting within the existing system. If said system is completely rotten then – what? Do deals with the slavers, destroyers and murderers?
Enough of accepting the corrupt, doomed shitshow that constitutes modernity. tmurphy calls it out, and rightly so.
Hi Tom, always enjoy the blog (although enjoy perhaps isn't the right word for topics as grim as this). You may have addressed this in another post, but is there anything we can do about all of this as individuals? I, like you, have lost faith in modernity, but it leaves me with a big gapping hole with what to do with myself. Science seems like a bit of a dead end, as do a lot of the other career paths that claim to be tackling this issue.
Hi Joshua,
There is no one answer to your question. And there is no instruction manual on how to proceed. I for one am taking some examples from history (“Just Enough” by Azby Brown) as one example and inch-by-inch changing my daily actions, food and small business practices to better reflect the values I have towards a sustainable future. It seems pointless at times, as the modern world races by, but it feels good to live my values and find ways to inspire others to do something similar in their own way. I don’t know what else to do.
Tom, thank your for yet again, another valuable challenging observation and offering for consideration.
I'm not a recognized scientist, but educated ( agriculture, biolopgy, public policy and law…) but I have followed our metacrisis for 20+ years (originally recognized it as "global warming", then climate change, and now recognize "metacrisis."… where will this end?). That said, your blog offering and corresponding remarks quickly took me to the Fermi Paradox concept of which I became aware about 10 years ago (I live in a rural area jjust 30 miles west of the FermiLab located in Batavia IL. ) I think the essence of the challenge is whether Homo sapiens even capable of figuring out how to not destroy ourselves? Is any "intelligent" life that evolves in the universe capable of the same?
> 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.
This is why population reduction is a biophysical necessity if we want to preserve what remains of the biosphere.
In addition to your list of self defeating factors I think you can include the crapification of the scientific method, if Sabines assertions are true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO5u3V6LJuM
I have listened to her for a number of years and she seems to know her stuff.
no question a solid portion of it is due to corporate capture and similar self interests
I have always admired the Amish among us. They've largely got it figured out and they walk the talk.
Although most of them acknowledge that they have adopted many 'English' creature comforts they are largely self sufficient and hard core from my point of view.
I take them as the best example we have about how we should be conducting ourselves.
Even though the Amish appear to be far lower impact than the average American (or anywhere else), they still live a version of modernity and it is unsustainable.
To answer your question "Would the Anthropocene Extinction Event still carry on if humans disappeared right now?" Yes, definitely. We can consider 3 different "triage" scenarios
1. Humans instantly vanished, leaving things as is: there would be on going sources of anthropic CO2 production both from automated processes, lasting upwards of a few years, and exploited resources, such as natural gas flares and soil erosion, lasting centuries to millennia. There are at least a dozen feedback cycles, like Antarctic ice sheet loss, ocean acidification and heating, permafrost thawing, that guarantee ongoing ecological destruction and amplification of heating.
2. Humans stop anthropic CO2 production before vanishing, essentially turning off the lights on the way out: So we freeze the total amount of anthropic CO2 produced. Guess what? The existing feedback cycles are still locked in. Extinction ahoy!
3. Humans attempt to sequester CO2 and restore lost habitat: sounds great, but were do we get the energy from? Don't say fossil fuels, because that is thermodynamically impossible. You cannot use fossil fuels to remove the CO2 in the atmosphere produced by burning fossil fuels. At best we can try to plant trillions of trees and stabilize soils and ecosystems. Those feedback cycles are still moving ahead, maybe slowed slightly.
Our last realistic off ramp was the Carter Administration. There was genuine momentum for sustainability after the shocks of the oil and gold crises. Reagan, Thatcher, and locally Mulroney, put an end to those ambitions.
All valid points, but we can't be sure that CO2-related effects are big enough to carry out (in full) a mass extinction wherein 75% or more of species perish. It will be a MAJOR evolutionary disruption (already is), and a gift that keeps on giving, for sure. But mass extinction (by the definition of the term)? Unclear. Still: maybe, and that's bad enough as it is.
My point was not to specifically to call out global heating but rather that we have triggered multiple catastrophic feedback cycles, such as extreme weather leading to top soil loss, leading to less H2O and CO2 buffering, leading to back to more extreme weather. The existence and continuity of these feedback cycles are scientifically well documented, with lots of evidence. For anyone honestly surveying the literature regarding our biosphere, the Anthropocene Extinction Event is a foregone conclusion.
To sustain the car analogy: our last off ramp was the late 1970s. Yet we are still arguing over whether we should take our foot off the class, let alone hit the brakes, as our car is crumpling into a pre-stressed steel reinforce concrete wall at hundreds of kilometers an hour.
The cascades we have triggered are now dramatically beyond our control. Anyone telling you otherwise is either selling you something or actively delusional.
Okay, we need to make sure we're describing the same event. I agree that we have triggered a tangled and interactive set of failures and feedbacks that together with direct destruction have resulted in an enormous uptick in extinctions. Maybe this is what you term the Anthropocene Extinction Event. Yes: that's very real.
What I'm saying is that we can't know yet whether this continues to cascade all the way to MASS extinction (more than 75% of species wiped). It's not a question of how bad it is now, but whether it spirals "all the way" without pressures easing and Life's resilience coming to bat. I contend that no one knows (and anyone who asserts otherwise…).
50% of all chemical potential biologically stored has been released to space. And even supposed re-wilding successes like Chernobyl only look so because the rest of the planet is so impoverished. The scale of ecological richness that existed even 2000 years ago is unfathomable. I mean the Romans hunted lions in Europe!
To say that life "could" avoid a mass extinction is an appeal to miracles.