Ashley Dawson is a professor of English at CUNY, New York City. He is the author of People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, Mongrel Nation, and The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature, as well as a short story in the anthology Staten Island Noir.

Worse still, in 2018 a new report by the WWF revealed that 60 percent of mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles have been wiped out since 1970. But it is not just that quite unfathomably large numbers of specific species are at risk of annihilation. What these studies showed is that even when species are not threatened with extinction, their numbers are often dropping precipitously. What we’re losing, in other words, is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part as well. Even viewed in terms of sheer quantity, life on this planet is being liquidated at unprecedented rates. From the citizen scientists of Krefeld to the foremost academic experts, a grim alarm was being raised: the annihilation of wildlife is an emergency that now threatens human civilization.

But who or what is responsible for this crisis? One of the things that catalyzed me to write my book on extinction was the impression circulating in much public discourse at this time that human beings in general were responsible for the biodiversity crisis. Reading dominant news coverage of the biodiversity crisis as well as many scientific reports, one got the impression that human beings are like a plague of locusts, descending on pristine natural environments, stripping them bare, and then moving on, leaving nothing but barren earth in our wake. It seemed that there is something intrinsic to the human condition, perhaps as a result of our long evolutionary history as a species, that drives us to exploit the natural world in a completely unhinged manner. Or, in a more moralistic vein, that human beings are innately greedy and destructive. This analysis needed to be challenged, it seemed to me, since it was likely to induce political paralysis. After all, if human beings are inherently and immutably bent on plundering nature, why bother to fight against ecocide?

But beyond these questions of hope and political agency, dominant articulations of the biodiversity crisis also seem to me to be extremely racist and remarkably ahistorical. It is not humanity in general that is responsible for the crash of biodiversity: many Indigenous people, forest-dwelling peoples, and peasants around the world have existed for millennia in a remarkably balanced, even symbiotic, relationship with the natural world. In addition, historical analysis—including many of the studies I mentioned above—shows that extinction rates only really ticked up significantly during the period of European colonial expansion after the fifteenth century, increased markedly again following the Industrial Revolution, and then exploded during the so-called Great Acceleration after 1945. In other words, the biodiversity crash is a product of the intertwined forces of colonialism and capitalism. As I put it in my book, “by wrenching specific elements out of the complex ecosystems in which they are intertwined and turning them into commodities, capitalism remorselessly breaks down the natural world into impoverished but exchangeable forms, simultaneously discarding all those elements that don’t appear to have immediate exchange value.” The brutal contradictions of a capitalist system based on ceaseless, feckless expansion on a finite natural resource base are apparent in the woods, the streams, the trees, and the oceans as the planet and its precious, multitudinous life forms endure the Sixth Extinction.

Our understanding of the causes of this wave of global ecocide shapes the ways in which we think about resisting it. If it is the polluting behavior of a handful of powerful corporations and the unsustainable consumption patterns of certain people in specific parts of the world that are to blame for the biodiversity crisis, rather than humanity in general, then we may hope to stem and even reverse ecocide by calling out, reining in, and shutting down such unsustainable practices. If it is capitalism rather than human nature that is to blame, we must struggle to save the planet by putting an end to an economic system that encourages unfettered rapine. But where to start? While I do believe that environmental activists must embrace an anti-capitalist politics, I certainly do not intend my book to imply that we must wait for the overthrow of capitalism to challenge ecocide. There are many things that can be done here and now to address the biodiversity crisis. The members of the Entomological Society Krefeld model one possible reaction through their work as citizen-scientists. For the truth is that our knowledge of the natural world is still remarkably partial, and that longstanding prejudices still shape what kinds of life gets counted and valued. After all, there are plenty of studies of endangered charismatic mega-fauna like polar bears, but remarkably little scientific knowledge about the humble but absolutely essential earthworm or mycorrhizal fungi. Simply documenting these worlds under our feet and in the fields around us, as the members of the Entomological Society Krefeld did, can be a radical step, an initial salvo in a campaign against the handful of transnational agrochemical industries that are one of the main forces driving planetary ecocide.

• “It’s a simple demand: give the stolen land back” — EXTINCTION author Ashley Dawson writes for Resilience (6/8/2022)
• “Study Suggests a Supernova Exploded Near Earth About 2.5 Million Years Ago, Possibly Triggering an Extinction Event” — EXTINCTION recommended in Forbes (10/16/2020)
• “Human activity is causing the disappearance and deterioration of wildlife at a rate that could represent an existential threat to humanity within our lifetimes.” —Democracy Now during a segment featuring ASHLEY DAWSON, author of EXTINCTION (5/9/2019)
• EXTINCTION and LOVE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE are reviewed in Social Studies of Science (12/13/2017)
• “Expansion and exploitation are the threads of Dawson’s history.” EXTINCTION in PUBLIC BOOKS (3/13/2017)
• “A guaranteed income would remove the pressure to engage in poaching and other environmentally destructive practices.” EXTINCTION in BASIC INCOME (2/22/2017)
• “An elegant, controversial thesis” EXTINCTION in The Guardian (1/24/2017)
• “A scientific subject from a radical perspective.”: EXTINCTION in Low Impact (12/13/2016)
• “We are in a period of boom for the fossil fuel industry in the United States, and that’s why all these pipelines are being built.”: EXTINCTION in Vocativ (12/9/2016)
• “A short, useful and welcome introduction to the subject”: EXTINCTION reviewed in Socialist Review (11/17/2016)
• “Life Itself Is Being Patented, Privatized and Re-engineered” ASHLEY DAWSON interviewed in Truthout (8/23/2016)
• “The Climate Catastrophe Cannot Be Reversed Within the Capitalist Culture” ASHLEY DAWSON excerpted in Truthout (8/23/2016)
• “Review: Extinction: A Radical History” ASHLEY DAWSON reviewed in Earth First! Journal (8/8/2016)
• “Mass Extinction: The Early Years” ASHLEY DAWSON excerpted in Longreads (8/4/2016)
• EXTINCTION: A RADICAL HISTORY book trailer (7/15/2016)
• “Ashley Dawson Interview – Podcast July 4, 2016” ASHLEY DAWSON on Democratic Perspective (7/7/2016)
• “The need for capital to expand infinitely on a limited resource base is really at the bottom of the crisis we’re seeing.” ASHLEY DAWSON on Russia Today (6/13/2016)
• “We’re in the sixth great crisis in the history of the planet” ASHLEY DAWSON on Majority Report (5/26/2016)
• What should we do in the face of the ongoing extinction crisis? ASHLEY DAWSON interviewed on KPFA (5/3/2016)
• “We are completely unprepared for an era in which editing DNA is as easy as editing a Word document” ASHLEY DAWSON for Jacobin Magazine (4/27/2016)
• “We live in the midst of one of the greatest mass extinction events in the history of the planet.” ASHLEY DAWSON at Center for the Humanities (4/26/2016)
• “We can’t maintain biodiversity in a world in which there is unrestrained, hyper-capitalist exploitation based on ceaseless growth.” ASHLEY DAWSON on This is Hell (4/26/2016)
• “Dawson’s take is real, urgent, vital.” Biblioklept reflects on reading EXTINCTION (4/1/2016)
• “Forceful” The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews EXTINCTION (3/29/2016)
• ASHLEY DAWSON interviewed on Vice (3/10/2016)