NewPhilosopherthan 40 percentofthespecieshadex-
perienced severe population declines- bywhich wasmeantrangeshrink-
age ofover 80 per cent.Meanwhile,
42 per centofterrestrialinvertebrate
speciesand 25 percentofmarinein-
vertebratesontheIUCNRedListof
Threatened Species are regarded as
threatenedwithextinction.
Figureslikethesewereontheban-
nersand inthe pressreleases ofEx-
tinctionRebellion.Theydon’thaveas
mucheffectonmeas theyshould.This
is nodoubta failureofmyimagina-
tion.Theydon’tdoasmuchtomeas
thesilent,poisonedfield.
AsI stoodin thatfielda fewweeks
agoI triedtounderstandwhythesi-
lenceupset me.JohnDonne helped.
“Every man is a pieceof the conti-
nent,”he wrote,“Apartofthemain.
Ifa clodbewashedawaybythesea/
Europeis theless.../Anyman’sdeath
diminishesme,BecauseI aminvolved
inmankind...”
For ‘man’,read ‘beetle’, ‘shrew’,or
‘worm’– all closerelatives.Just a few
pagesbackin ourfamilyalbumsthere
arefurredandscalyfacesandantennae.
Thereare,I found,threebroadrea-
sonsformyupset:guilt,grief,andfear.
Theguiltis simpleenough.I amfrom
a raceofgenocidalpsychopaths.Any
alien visitor who had read Darwin
wouldreportbacktothemothership
that thedistinguishing characteristic
ofhumanswasthemarkofCain.And
it is notjustmygenesthatcondemn
me:it is myactualactionandinaction.
I buyfurnituremadefromthehomes
Our very own mass extinction
of rare non-human animals. I am a
comfortable, complacent, compliant
member of a society that rapes, burns
and plunders. When I go on a dem-
onstration against my government’s
complicity in ecocide, my main moti-
vation is the sanctimonious glow that
I get, rather than real outrage.
I’m getting better at grieving –
though I tend to see it as grief for
what my children will never have. The
background music of their lives will
be banal anthropogenic noise, signi-
fying only greed. And that echoing
silence. My childhood hummed like
my friend’s farm. My children will
be denied the possibility of billions
of relationships that they might have
had; of billions of wings they might
have seen glistening; of billions of
trilling notes on a winter morning on
the marsh; of billions of flutterings,
howlings, whoops and grunts; of see-
ing wondering consciousness in the
eyes of foxes and crows, and of the
self-knowledge that only contact with
other consciousnesses can give. There
is a torrential haemorrhage of pos-
sibility, of complexity, of variety. This
isn’t just an aesthetic worry – although
nobody sane prefers a monocultural
wheat plain with one species to an
ancient forest with a thousand. Nor is
it a regret about what we might have
learned about flight from an extinct
hoverfly, or the diseases we might have
cured with an extract from an Amazo-
nian plant that gave way to the share-
holders of a corned beef canning com-
pany. It’s a visceral, vertiginous worryabout what we’re becoming. Which
brings me to the fear.
Think of the Butterfly Effect –
Edward Lorenz’s idea that the beat of
a single butterfly’s wing might cause a
tornado at the other end of the world.
We don’t know exactly what, in terms
of chaos theory, the result of taking
out generations of actual butterfly
wings will be – although my intuition
insists that the results of mass killing
are unlikely to be better than the re-
sults of leaving well alone. But in oth-
er respects, we do have a fairly good
idea of how intimately and intricately
the natural world is geared. It has tak-
en about 3.4 billion years to get to this
point. You can’t just rip out one cog
and expect the whole machine to con-
tinue to run smoothly. We should take
no comfort in the ability of nature to
adapt and self-cure. Much more likely
is an accelerating spiral of carnage.
In a passage that was extraordinary
in a sedate scientific journal, Cebal-
los, Ehrlich, and Dirzo put it like
this: “Today’s planetary defaunation
of vertebrates will itself promote cas-
cading catastrophic effect on ecosys-
tems, worsening the annihilation of
nature... The biological annihilation
obviously will have serious ecological,
economic, and social consequences.
Humanity will eventually pay a very
high price for the decimation of the
only assemblage of life that we know
of in the universe.”
John Donne was spot on: “Nev-
er send to know for whom the bell
tolls; It tolls for thee.”