“Recommended: Yes.This book outlines the history of extinction and critiques “solutions” to the problem from an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist stance, offering useful concepts for thinking about extinction in relation to environmental and social justice.”
To read more, visit Earth First!
A fan recently honored us with a book trailer for Extinction: A Radical History.
“Ashley Dawson, professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and author of the new book, Extinction, a Radical History, joins Democratic Perspective regulars Mike Cosentino, Gary LaMaster, and Steve Williamson, for a discussion of the toll human exploitation has taken on Earth’s biodiversity. What does it imply for our future that in the past fifty years alone, 40% of the planet’s species have disappeared? The inescapable answer: we have to change our perspective. Simply put, the ruthless exploitation of natural resources has limits. If we refuse to acknowledge them, we may wind up without a home.”
To hear more, visit Democratic Perspective
Transnational trade deals “erode environmental legislation… and force countries that have progressive legislation that protects the environment to open up or be sued.”
To hear more, visit Russia Today.
“This one though, human beings are largely responsible for.”
To read more, visit Majority Report.
What should we do in the face of the ongoing extinction crisis? What is rewilding, and how does it work? Is de-extinction, which involves the resurrection of extinct species, advisable? Ashley Dawson puts mass extinction and the various efforts to address it in a broader political-economic context.
To read more, visit KPFA.
“We are completely unprepared for an era in which editing DNA is as easy as editing a Word document. At present there are no legal controls over new technologies such as Crispr and gene drives, no government regulations on editing human DNA, no centralized risk-management inventory of labs where biohazards could be developed and released.”
To read more, visit Jacobin Magazine.
“We live in the midst of one of the greatest mass extinction events in the history of the planet. In its latest Living Planet report, the WWF states that global populations of vertebrate species have dropped by half since 1970. Today, halfway through the UN’s declared decade of biodiversity, the pace of extinction is picking up. Over the last decade, the planet lost 1.7 million sq kilometers of forest.”
To read more, visit Center for the Humanities.
“We can’t maintain biodiversity in a world in which there is unrestrained, hyper-capitalist exploitation based on ceaseless growth. It’s fairly obvious that a system based on ceaseless expansion, on a finite planet, is going to run up against natural limits. And the extinctions we’re seeing right now is one of the prime examples of that.”
To read more, visit This is Hell.
