Yves here. Satyajit Das is better positioned than most generalists to comment on human destruction of natural habitats and the resulting species loss. He has sometimes e-mailed me before going on extended holidays, always to remote spots to see flora and fauna, and he has lamented about the declines he has seen. Even those of us who do not seek out wild places can see signs of the loss of biodiversity, such as the dramatic fall in insect spats on windshields over time, or fewer birds.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous technical works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011) and A Banquet of Consequences (2016 and 2021). His latest book, The Everything Bubble: A Guide to the New Age of Financial Speculation and Phantom Wealth, will be released in 2027. He has also written on ecotourism – In Search of the Pangolin (2006) (with Jade Novakovic) and Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals (2024). This piece is jointly published by Naked Capitalism and First South.
General non-fiction publishing increasingly favours catchy short titles: Tipping Point; Black Swan; Thinking, Fast and Slow etc. The hope is that the title is embraced widely and becomes a staple of popular culture. Even readers who haven’t read the book can artfully drop the term into discourse enhancing their intellectual standing.
The Sixth Extinction, or more accurately the Holocene Extinction, refers to the mass loss of biodiversity driven primarily by human activity. The term has become a glib summary of the ongoing environmental and existential disaster that will determine the fate of humanity. With Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction having prior claims to the title, Professor Kyle Harper’s The Last Animal – Human History And The Fate Of Life On Earth From The Ice Age To The Sixth Extinction (2026, Princeton University Press) attempts to expand the lexicon of dubious descriptors. Unfortunately, the vague and confusing title is unlikely to have the same cachet.
The Last Animal is about the impact of humanity on global animal biodiversity. It draws on natural science and human history to trace extinctions. The unoriginal thesis is that human impact has had a major impact on the number of extinctions and ecosystems. Professor Harper blames this on the need of humankind to feed itself and improve living standards, also not an entirely new idea. The book’s seven chapters move through evolutionary history, particularly discoveries and innovations to explain how homo sapiens came to dominate other species. It covers hunting weapons, the domestication of animals and plants, food and energy systems, metallurgy, transport, chemicals, and large-scale industry and agriculture.
Professor Harper does a satisfactory job in negotiating the events leading to the present. His prose and range of his reading, evidenced by a lengthy bibliography, is solid. The book’s coverage of the role of fire and energy is perhaps the best parts of The Last Animal. The author quotes W. G. Sebald’s pithy observation: “Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create.”
Unfortunately, the book has shortcomings. First, it’s organisation, whether at the author’s or editor’s behest, is puzzling. Key points seem to appear randomly, remain unfinished, and then resurface tens of pages or several chapters later. This dilutes the arguments. Stream of consciousness narratives may serve fiction well but is not the preferred approach to factual works.
Second, according to his biography, Professor Harper is a historian of liberty – a highly threatened sinecure given the current state of Western societies. Writing about natural history requires a deep understanding of the science which is noticeable absent. The author’s laudable aim is to stay close to the geological history, but his use of paleontological evidence is often difficult to follow. Richard Fortey’s The Earth: An Intimate History or Richard Cornfield’s Architects of Eternity: The New Science of Fossils provides a more credible and interesting general examination of the issues.
Journalist authors, like Elizabeth Kolbert, overcome their shaky domain knowledge, by basing their books around interviews of several active scientists or researchers. The author acts essentially as an amanuensis; a Boswell to Samuel Johnson. That has its limitations as the perspective depends on who cooperates and generally prevents a rounded incisive analysis of complex issues as the author may not know enough to critically assess arguments. Such books, while popular, are actually ‘faction’ (non-fiction as fiction) with dominant characters and ‘storylines’.
Third, for a topic of such importance, The Last Animal lacks passion – there is more engagement in supermarket checkouts, fast-food outlets, or selection of entertainment. Ramchandra Guha’s 2000 Environmentalism: A Global History or Alexander Humboldt’s 1819 analysis of de-forestation, neither of which has been improved, show that it is possible to inject enthusiasm into dry subject matter. As a result, the book reads like a literature review done in pursuit of a higher degree, acceptable in the halls of learning but not scintillating reading.
Perhaps, the problem is the lack of lived experience which enlivens compelling natural history writing. Early on, Professor Harper mentions the lack of wild turkeys, bobwhite quails or horned lizards, once common, on the American Southern Plains. There are few further mentions of actual field knowledge. This is probably related to the author’s expertise and familiar academic scorn for the non-scholarly. As Edward Abbey observed in his 1968 Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness: “it will be objected that the book deals too much with mere appearances, with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any. There are many people who say they have, I know, but they’ve luckier than I”
Finally, there is a timidity in taking positions, perhaps a now essential companion of political correctness and the need to avoid offending institutions and donors. Professor Harper, asserts early in the book: “The Sixth Extinction is more of a provocation than a settled fact.” This would be news to thousands of creatures that no longer have any place on earth as well as the countless others whose future hangs in the balance.
There is irritating pedantry: “To qualify as a mass extinction, the planet must have lost over 75 percent of all animal species living at the time. Of course, the tally depends on what you count and how you count it …” While there is understandable debate amongst biologists as to how many major episodes of extinction has occurred throughout the planet’s history due to problems of the surviving geological record, nit-picking on whether currently we are in the middle of a major die-off seems a strange premise of a work on the loss of biodiversity.
The book’s anthropomorphism is dispiriting. The author tells us: “Inevitably, our history confronts us with the paradox of human progress. We are innovators, good at solving problems in front of us. The solutions we contrive give us access to food and energy. But short-term benefits conceal long-term costs and carry unintended consequences. Each solution creates new problems to solve, new limits to transcend. A deep historical perspective helps us keep track of these otherwise invisible connections.” He refuses to “issue judgments or recriminations.”
The author casually summarises the inevitability of it all: “Species come and species go. Extinction is normal… happening all around us, all the time.” That, infuriatingly, ignores the real hypothesis underlying the Sixth Extinction and the evidence that The Last Animal itself presents. Unlike past episodes which were frequently due to planetary climate change, vulcanism or external factors, such as an asteroid strike, the current destruction of biodiversity is the result of one species – US!
The reality is simple. The loss of biodiversity is accelerating. Its primary causes are well documented. First, there is habit loss. Second, there is the growing fragmentation of ecological systems. Third, there is over-harvesting and over-exploitation of species. Fourth, there are problems of introduced species. Finally, there are the effects of climate change with a long-term temperature rise of 2.8C based on present policies likely.
The consequences are clear. These factors affect life on earth by changing eco-systems and the balance within them in ways we barely understand. The current major concern seems to be what this means for humans. Lack of insects, like bees, affect food production. Human intrusions into wilderness displace animals encouraging zoonosis of diseases like Ebola. But what really matters is major problems which will become obvious only when it is too late to do anything about it. Once biodiversity is lost, it is not recoverable with potentially disastrous consequences.
Most academics do not seem to understand that the basis of knowledge is to understand that there is much that is not known and we also don’t know what we don’t know! Eric Neumayer correctly identified this difficulty: “our knowledge about the extent and the likely consequences of large-scale biodiversity destruction resemble more a situation of ignorance than uncertainty.”
The Last Animal steadfastly refuses to confront the primary cause of the challenge – the size of the human population and the infrastructure required to sustain our expectations for continuously rising living standards. A 2020 report on biodiversity produced by the University of Cambridge’s Partha Dasgupta for the British government documented how human activity takes resources from nature and dumps waste back into it. Currently, demand from the world’s population, most of it from developed nations, requires 1.7 Earths. If developing countries attain the living standards of advanced nations, then three or more planets’ worth of resources will be needed. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, thought the Earth was suffering from disseminated primatemaia – a plague of people. Professor Harper, like many others, seems reluctant to raise the issue of population. It is easier to hide behind the argument that declining global fertility rates will solve the problem and that human ingenuity can stretch the carrying capacity of the Earth.
All life forms exist within boundaries set by the planet and laws of physics, chemistry and biology. Finite resources place limits on the growth of all living systems. If one species expands beyond the available resources, then it must monopolise what is there or prey on other species, reducing biodiversity. Overpopulation and damage to the ecosystem is corrected by the decline or extinction of the offending group. Rather than accommodate scarcity, humans have chosen a different path, growing steadily more populous, requiring additional resources, which multiplies environmental stresses. As with an invasion of a pathogen, there are four possible outcomes: destruction of the host, the eradication of the invading organism, chronic infection or development of a symbiotic relationship between host and invader. The last is the least likely.
Humans believe that they stand outside nature. Religion, science, dogma and now technology underlie our belief in unparalleled human control over the planet. This hubristic exceptionalism assumes superior rights to the Earth, ignoring other creatures’ prior prerogatives to its air, oceans and lands. We seek to monopolise resources, dismantle processes and practice violent tyranny over other animals for short-term economic wealth. Yet our existence depends on the health of those very elements.
Nature is impassive and indifferent, unconcerned with the wellbeing of individuals or of entire species. Its relentless logic only favours those fitted for and able to live within ecological constraints. Darwin argued that responsiveness to change, not strength or intelligence, is the key to survival. In If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity, psychologist and animal behaviouralist Justin Gregg recognised the remarkable feats of human intelligence but warned that these very same qualities are currently on track to produce the extinction of homo sapiens, which is how evolution rids the Earth of failed adaptations.
In his 2016 Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life; Edward O. Wilson asked: “What is man? … Lucky accident of primate evolution…yearning to be more master than steward of a declining planet…arrogant, reckless, lethally predisposed to favour self, tribe, and short-term futures. Obsequious to imagined higher beings, contemptuous towards lower forms of life.” There is nothing permanent about us.
September 2026
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