The Biodiversity Crisis is Real and Must and Can be Fixed

It's surely not breaking news that we are ruining our lovely planet including air and water at an unprecedented rate. It can seem hopeless, but some people are offering a way out of what is called the Anthropocene—"the age of humanity"—that has morphed into what I call "the rage of inhumanity."

One such person is Dr. Kyle Harper who suggests a way to right the many wrongs in his highly-acclaimed new book The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction. In this important forward-looking book, Harper doesn't think the situation is necessarily a doom and gloom scenario; there is hope, but it going to take a lot of hard work. Putting the grand sweep of world history into geological perspective, Harper argues that the long view is essential to confronting the urgent challenges we face.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Last Animal?

Kyle Harper: Like anybody who spends years working on a project, I was motivated by a mix of personal and intellectual interests. The personal one comes from a concern about biodiversity. I grew up in Oklahoma and am now raising my kids here. But the animal world around them is notably different than the one I experienced as a child. The change is rapid and visible to the naked eye. To give one small example, I could (and did) catch Texas horned lizards with my grandfather at will. We saw them all the time. My kids have never seen one.

As a historian, I like to ask where things come from, and I wanted to deepen my understanding of how we got here. (And actually the story of these lizards is itself pretty incredible, once I started peeling back the layers of the onion). I think the biodiversity crisis is one of the most consequential and difficult challenges we face as a species, and I hope a deeper perspective can help us reckon with what we need to do to address it.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

KH: I am a historian by training, and my area of expertise is ancient Rome. But I love science and found a way to combine my interests, so I have spent a lot of time studying the history of climate change, human health and disease, etc. My overarching goal as a historian is to help us understand humanity’s place in the natural world. This project is inherently interdisciplinary, so I collaborate a lot with natural scientists in different fields.

Biodiversity is a subject that cries out for interdisciplinary work. Colleagues who come at the subject from the perspective of ecology or conservation biology are very interested in how history can contribute to our understanding, because they are well aware of the challenge of what is called “shifting baseline syndrome” - the difficulty of measuring human impact if we start counting e.g. extinctions or depletion in the relatively recent past. I came to feel that we really needed a book that moves across deep time, from our hunter-gatherer past to the high-tech present.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

KH: I tried to aim the book at anyone curious about humanity’s place in nature. That might be anyone who is simply concerned about the biodiversity crisis to experts in fields that touch on conservation issues.

MB: What are some of the topics you consider and what are some of your major messages?

KH: In the book I use the idea of the Sixth Extinction as a way to frame the conversation. The Sixth Extinction, as many already know, is the hypothesis that human-driven extinctions compare to the most destructive events known from the fossil record (most recently, the asteroid impact that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs).

I think the Sixth Extinction is a useful idea. Certainly, we have not yet caused anything like the number of extinctions that would qualify as a mass extinction event. Extinction rates are elevated relative to the historical baseline, which is hugely concerning, but it is tricky to measure and compare extinction rates. And yet, the value of the Sixth Extinction as an idea is to force us to take a very deep perspective.

I do think that the human impact will register as a major evolutionary turning point. In some ways, what is most telling is the contrast with the events in the fossil record. We are causing the first great homogenization in the history of animal evolution.

I also try to take a “systems” perspective. Species extinction is critically important, but it is important to remember that it is not the only kind of impact we care about. We can drive animals to ecological extinction without literal species extinction. Think of the bison: a herd of some 30 million animals roamed as the dominant herbivore on the Holocene grasslands, and these ecosystems are mostly gone. We need systems thinking to understand both past and present. I try to evoke some of the rich webs of life that existed in the recent past but that are now seriously damaged or endangered.

MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

KW: First is its deep perspective. The biologist Barry Commoner called the first law of ecology the fact that “everything is connected to everything else.” The extinctions that transpired thousands of years ago are still reverberating. We misunderstand our impact, and the nature of the challenge, if we only think on timescales of a few decades.

Second is the effort to integrate human history into the story. By this I mean the history of social and technological development, marked by some familiar milestones - the control of fire, the invention of projectile hunting weapons, the domestication of plants and animals, the rise of cities and trade, the tapping of fossil energy, and the rise of synthetic chemistry. I try to look at these developments ecologically.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about how humans had a significant effect on the lives of countless other animals they will reconsider how we are living now and what can be done to foster more peaceful coexistence with them?

KW:Absolutely. As a historian my responsibility is to faithfully reconstruct the past. There is no denying that this can be unpleasant to encounter. I think that an honest assessment of how we got here is fundamental to understanding where we want to go. Our eyes naturally adjust to the dimming light, and I think we can too easily come to accept an impoverished natural world as normal. I hope to open our eyes by evoking the brightness of past ecosystems, which is how we start to see clearly.

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