Kaboom!

The​ kinds of catastrophe that loom largest in today’s collective imagination tend to be compact and spectacular: the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, with a 180-decibel boom heard more than three thousand kilometres away; the tsunamis of 2011 that reared up to a height of forty metres before inundating the Japanese coast; the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which claimed some 300,000 lives; and, most spectacular of all, the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula around 65 million years ago and wiped out about 75 per cent of all plant and animal life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. Disasters of this sort make for riveting news coverage and cinematic depictions. Accounts in books and onscreen compress beginning, middle and end into a single searing moment of devastation. What was once the paradigmatic catastrophe, the biblical flood, took forty days and forty nights; today’s exemplar is one big, blinding event: kaboom!

Vulcanologists, seismologists, geologists and palaeobiologists know better. The events that punctuate our imagined history of the Earth like exclamation marks are in fact phases in processes that unfold over a timescale of thousands or millions of years. This is particularly true of extinction. The greatest of all known mass extinction events, the Permian-Triassic (‘the Great Dying’) of about 250 million years ago, which is attributed to atmospheric changes caused by volcanic activity and is estimated to have wiped out 70 per cent of terrestrial vertebrate species and more than 80 per cent of marine species, took tens of thousands of years. Even the asteroid crash that doomed the dinosaurs and many other lifeforms will have taken thousands of years to do its work, as dust in the air lowered temperatures, deprived plants of sunlight and acidified the oceans. In geological time, this is the blink of an eye, and that’s why the spikes marking mass extinctions in the palaeobiologists’ graphs look so sudden and steep, like obelisks rising out of the sand in a desert. But this is an effect of scaling, which marks time in intervals of fifty million years. Extinction is a protracted, uneven process, and hard to square with our mental picture of abrupt catastrophe.

Sadiah Qureshi wants to change the way we imagine extinction by narrating the history of the idea and exposing the uses, mostly nefarious, to which it has been put. Although she includes material taken from the contemporary sciences of linguistics, genetics, ecology and palaeontology (including a vivid account of that asteroid smashing into the Yucatán), her main focus is on the histories of these sciences since the late 18th century and on the ways in which past scientific views on extinction were entangled in British and later North American imperial ventures. She hopscotches between centuries and continents, from the Beothuk people of Canada to the Whadjuk people of Australia, the Tasmanian thylacine to the North American passenger pigeon. What all these have in common is that they were at one point or another declared extinct (not always correctly, in Qureshi’s view), and that their fates were sealed by violence, greed, bigotry and, perhaps most dangerous of all, good intentions. Her account is nuanced but not neutral: she is on the side of the vanished. The ‘vanished’ in her title should be understood as an aggressively transitive verb, something someone does to someone or something else. As with the similarly repurposed verb ‘disappeared’ to describe what murderous regimes do to their political enemies, Qureshi argues that the grim business of vanishing people and species is a crime with culprits, not just a natural disaster with victims. She hopes that detailing the history of past crimes and errors will save us from making further fatal blunders in the midst of what many believe to be the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth.

Scientific views about extinction were implicated in many of the episodes Qureshi narrates. Her starting point is often a scene in a science museum, because that’s where the last available specimen, artefact or mortal remains have ended up. She visits the worse-for-wear dodo at the Oxford Museum of Natural History and a glass vial containing the ‘Hair of Extinct Tasmanian Aboriginal’ at the Wellcome Collection in London, and looks at VR images of extinct species such as Steller’s sea cow and the smilodon (a sabre-toothed feline predator from the Pleistocene) at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris. Qureshi’s main target isn’t the libido sciendi that turned naturalists into avid collectors of such trophies of once thriving lifeforms, or even the imperial brutality and arrogance that made the collections of the great museums of London and Paris possible, though this is a prominent theme. Her focus is the way in which the very definition of extinction advanced by biologists and anthropologists licensed those imperialist rampages.

European naturalists were slow to accept even the bare fact of extinction. The 18th-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, who took on the Herculean labour of cataloguing all the species of plants and animals on Earth, grudgingly admitted towards the end of his career that new species not called into being by God at Creation might occasionally result from the hybridisation of old species. But he never accepted the possibility that species might disappear, despite the fact that fossils of such gigantic creatures as the mastodon (a bigger version of the elephant, which seems to have become extinct around eleven thousand years ago) were being unearthed in the Americas during his lifetime. The reasons for resistance to the idea of extinction weren’t purely religious, though many pious sensibilities were offended by the suggestion that God’s handiwork could be not only supplemented but also destroyed by the work of man or nature. Linnaeus envisioned the whole of organic nature as what he called an ‘oeconomy’ (from the ancient Greek oikos, meaning ‘family’ or ‘household’): not a peaceable kingdom (which Linnaeus’s own family certainly wasn’t), but a tense balance of many organisms jostling for advantage. Long before Malthus, Linnaeus was well aware that if certain species were allowed to propagate unchecked, they would upset this precarious balance (he worried that a few uppity plants might drive out all the animals). To subtract species from the exquisitely calibrated system of organic checks and balances was to overturn the order of nature.

Linnaeus’s oeconomy of nature went on to have a glorious career as the science of ecology, but by the early 19th century the evidence that species like the mastodon and the megatherium (a gigantic South American sloth that flourished during the Pleistocene) had once existed but had long ago died out became too overwhelming to deny. Once the fact of extinction became widely accepted, speculation about its causes ran rampant and continues to this day. Every extinction has its own story, and it is usually a lot more complicated than vaporisation by an asteroid. But by the mid-19th century, battle lines had hardened between two broad camps. The catastrophists, led by the French zoologist Georges Cuvier, thought that the Earth underwent periodic convulsions – titanic volcanic eruptions, huge floods – that wiped out many species at once. The uniformitarians, led by the British lawyer and geologist Charles Lyell, insisted that all past changes in the Earth’s history were caused by the same forces still in evidence (erosion, subsidence and the like), operating incrementally over vast expanses of time to accumulate the massive alterations visible in the geological record.

Both Cuvier and Lyell acknowledged the extinction of organisms as an undeniable fact, Lyell tepidly, Cuvier emphatically, but both were also vehement anti-evolutionists. Like Linnaeus, Lyell worried that the disappearance of species, however gradual, might eventually disturb the balance of nature, but he left it to future generations to determine whether new species appeared to replenish what nature had lost, probably in the expectation that it would take hundreds of years to settle the question. In the event, it was one of his most ardent disciples, Charles Darwin, who proposed the solution just a quarter of a century later – in impeccably uniformitarian terms, but as a theory of evolution. The very title of his great work of 1859 trumpeted its answer to Lyell’s puzzle: On the Origin of Species. Darwin likened the struggle of each species to increase its numbers at the expense of all the others to ‘ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven … by incessant blows’ into the ‘yielding surface’ of Nature (‘Nature’, throughout On the Origin of Species, being not only capitalised but personified, invariably with feminine pronouns). The extinction of some species and the emergence of others was the inevitable outcome of the relentless competition to occupy every available niche in Nature’s oeconomy.

Darwin was tight-lipped in On the Origin of Species about the implications of his theory for humans but had shed his reticence by the time he published another pointedly titled book, The Descent of Man, in 1871. Drawing on reports from European explorers and colonists of peoples encountered on remote Pacific islands or in other places isolated by geography or climate, as well as his own personal experience with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, Darwin claimed that past peoples had been eradicated by the same kind of competition that had driven other species to extinction, just as ‘the present-day civilised nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations.’

As Qureshi emphasises, Darwin conceived of these struggles, both past and present, as conflicts between races. He was hardly the first to predict the extinction of the native inhabitants of colonised territories, but his immense scientific authority lent an aura of inevitability to the carnage and dispossession that had by that time been going on for centuries. Qureshi argues that this was tantamount to turning settler violence into a law of nature: one might lament the disappearance of the original peoples of the Americas and Australia and sympathise with their plight, but it made no more sense to blame the natural forces at work than to blame an earthquake for the harm inflicted on its victims. The identification of Neanderthal fossils as evidence of an extinct species of hominid, possibly supplanted (to repeat Darwin’s euphemism) by Homo sapiens, slotted neatly into a narrative in which the inhabitants of lands coveted by Europeans were conceived as living fossils from a distant past, doomed to disappearance. Social evolutionists could project human history onto a world map, with Europeans marking the present and almost everyone else various stages of the species’s past.

By no means everyone went along with what Qureshi describes as the strategic conflation of extermination and extinction, and both colonial violence towards native peoples and protests against it long preceded Darwin. The United States Indian Removal Act of 1830 sparked fiery protests that the forcible dispossession of peoples of their ancestral lands ran counter to the law of nations, and a report from 1837 of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes denounced as both atrocious and impious claims that the extinction of the original inhabitants of territories under British imperial rule was inevitable.

Qureshi documents extraordinary efforts to save and protect disappearing peoples, languages, animals and plants. A few years ago in Australia, firefighters put their lives on the line to save the last surviving ancient Wollemi pines, a species that may date back to before the continents of Australia and Antarctica separated; in Spain, the last known bucardo was cloned by scientists and an embryo with a carbon copy of its DNA implanted in a goat surrogate mother in an attempt to keep the species going. Efforts to save peoples and their languages are fewer and more ambiguous. Qureshi argues that Romantic conservationists such as the American artist George Catlin (1796-1872), who painted many portraits of members of the Pawnee, Cheyenne, Crow and other tribes, may have done more harm than good by campaigning for the creation of national parks to preserve wilderness and endangered species – at the cost of shrinking the lands of Indigenous peoples still further. She is similarly sceptical about the biologist E.O. Wilson’s plan to turn over half the Earth to the protection of wildlife, or the UN’s ‘30 by 30’ proposal to sequester 30 per cent of the planet by 2030 to slow the loss of biodiversity. She is alarmed by rising rates of extinction but thinks it all too likely that the territories commandeered for such good causes will once again be those of the world’s poor and powerless.

As a good historian, Qureshi is alert to the ambiguities that complicate the stories she tells. Thus she records the outcry against imperial violence at the heart of empire, even as British settlers massacred some ten thousand Tasmanians over the course of a hundred years. She acknowledges the contribution made by the Irish anthropologist Daisy Bates to the preservation of Indigenous Australian languages, her tenacity in the face of doubts and dismissals by male scientists, and her true grit in living for years among the peoples of the Australian desert, always clad in ladylike white gloves, long skirt and straw hat. But she also rebukes Bates’s presumptuousness in asserting that Indigenous Australians were better off under imperial rule, happier to be indentured than free, and were condemned to extinction, so that all that could be done to help them was to make ‘the passing easy’. Qureshi doesn’t dispute the utility of the international conservation organisations that publish Red Lists of endangered animal and plant species, but she also points out their bias towards mammals and birds (plants and insects get short shrift) and warns that a Red List evaluation as ‘rare’ or ‘endangered’ can drive up prices of rhino horns and elephant tusks and so perversely increase the threat to precisely those species the conservation organisations seek to protect.

Qureshi dismisses talk of ‘endings’, especially where human beings are involved, since it naturalises slaughter by calling it extinction, and enables museums to hold on to human remains on the grounds that there are no surviving relatives to claim them. She is impatient with legal definitions of genocide that count only the total annihilation of a people or its culture and thereby let imperialist culprits off the hook, and sides with representatives of allegedly extinct peoples who claim they still carry their ancestry ‘somewhere in our genes’. To pronounce a verdict of extinction on a people is, she writes, ‘a profound form of epistemic injustice’, which doesn’t recognise that extinction is usually a halting, spotty process. She highlights efforts at ‘de-extinction’, from rewilding to cloning, and cases of ‘Lazarus’ species presumed long extinct and then rediscovered, like the Wollemi pine. Who can say with certainty that a species or a people is ever really lost for good?

Yet when pursued to their conclusion, such arguments lead down paths that Qureshi is reluctant to follow, and with good reason. For example, many modern Europeans carry Neanderthal genes, but neither Qureshi nor anyone else would deny that Neanderthals are extinct and that people who happen to carry their genes today have no moral right to repossess Neanderthal fossils held in museums. Part of the muddle stems from the seductive analogy between peoples and species. Evolutionary theory undoes the notion that a species might remain fixed over the very long term, a point that Qureshi makes beautifully in her description of the evolution of the whale. But in the short to medium term – centuries, say, as opposed to aeons – species do seem fixed and well bounded. Some species can interbreed, as horses and donkeys do to produce (sterile) mules. But for the most part, evolution is propelled by natural selection acting on novelties produced by mutation, not by hybridisation. Peoples, by contrast, mingle all the time. Customs, languages, technologies and genes are regularly tossed together like a salad. Defining a genos was already a tricky business in the time of Herodotus, who was much less interested in the physical and linguistic differences between Greeks and Indians than he was in how they dealt with their dead.

A culture is not a species, not even if millennia of comparative geographical isolation have resulted in a few characteristic genetic markers (for example, the presence of an enzyme to digest lactose among the descendants of people who depended on the milk of domesticated cows). Human diversity has been parsed in many ways, including the languages spoken, the gods worshipped, and the rites of birth and death, as well as skin colour, eye shape or lactose intolerance. This is why ‘race’ as a shorthand to denote human varieties is so slippery: historically it has referred to all these things and more besides. As recently as the late 19th century, anthropologists could refer to Hessians and Bavarians as different races on the basis of cranial measurements, and mathematicians could remark that the ‘Latin races’ (the French and Italians) excelled at algebra while the Germanic ones (the German and the English) went in for geometry. Like genos, ‘race’ could refer to a lineage or a tribe or a nation, none of them anything like a biological species. Ethnos and its modern derivatives also conflate shared customs and shared ancestry. The difficulty can’t be evaded simply by accepting a group’s self-identification, which often incorporates similar analogies to natural kinds. Perhaps this is why Qureshi, who is well aware of the abuses of race terminology, vacillates between describing the humans facing extinction as ‘nations’, ‘native peoples’ and practitioners of ‘lifeways’. The problem isn’t Qureshi’s alone: we all urgently need a way of talking about human diversity that isn’t fraught with dubious associations and assumptions. But to treat the disappearance of cultures and species under the same rubric because both fell victim to imperial rapacity and violence tends to compound the ambiguities attending the idea of extinction.

Scientific​ ideas of extinction were doubly transformed in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1980s, the American palaeontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski revived catastrophism by building an inventory of fossil data and showing that mass extinctions seem to occur roughly every 26 million years – those spikes on the graph of numbers of taxa plotted as a function of time. Their statistical analysis revealed a total of five such extinctions, the most recent caused by the Yucatán asteroid. Each mass extinction was followed by a rise in species diversification which gradually eased to a plateau until the next mega-disaster scythed through the biosphere. Extinction also takes place on a gradualist Darwinian timescale and by means of Darwinian mechanisms of competition and natural selection, but these effects were dwarfed by those of periodic mass extinctions. Talk of survival of the fittest now rang hollow: a relatively swift change in the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere or a collision with an asteroid mowed down lifeforms indiscriminately. Talk of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, crystallises fears that we may now be in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, caused by climate change and other human impacts on the planet that penetrate the atmosphere, the biosphere and down into the lithosphere.

The other transformation was the adoption of a holistic conception of biodiversity. Scientific attention shifted from the preservation of individual species to the preservation of ecosystems, including the global ecosystem. Concretely, this meant that insects, fungi and bacteria were at least as valuable in safeguarding biodiversity as the pandas and tigers featured in wildlife documentaries and lists of endangered species. So far, the influence of the ecosystem concept on the conservation movement has been slight. While some activists advance ecological arguments on behalf of certain species – for example, re-introducing predators such as wolves to restore a balance with other species further down the food chain – the most politically visible advocates of biodiversity champion the cause of individual species like whales and elephants. Despite the urgings of biologists, public enthusiasm for saving mosquitoes and coronaviruses from extinction remains underwhelming.

Qureshi reports these changes in scientific views of extinction, but they don’t really register in her argument, which spotlights individual species and peoples. What unifies her beguiling case studies is the claim that extinction is ‘both a human idea and a political choice’, a matter of human agency – more specifically, human culpability. Even more specifically, imperialist culpability. She doesn’t address issues of the wider responsibility of carbon consumers everywhere for rising rates of extinction, except to insist that whatever measures are taken to meet the current emergency should not come at the expense of those who have contributed least to the problem and are likely to suffer most. Her perpetrators and victims are for the most part the familiar collective actors – nations, peoples and species – that inflict and suffer extinction: colonisers and the colonised; hunters and the hunted. This makes for morally compelling narratives; we know how to apportion blame and sympathy. But when it’s time to draw lessons from the history of extinction for our current quandaries about what to preserve and how and for whom, Qureshi can only exhort us to ‘choose wisely’ and be mindful of past injustices. In the end, she seems to abandon us to our emotional preferences; her own heartfelt plea is for the tiger.

Perhaps it is too much to expect that any history should deliver guidance for present policy, rather than just cautionary tales about past errors and excesses. Historians who address such topics as extinction, which straddle the history of humans and of the Earth, face the additional challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons. The challenges don’t end there. The images of catastrophe that currently occupy the collective imaginary are explosive, sometimes literally so. Anxiety about nuclear armageddon may no longer be uppermost in most people’s minds, but the emblematic world-destroying catastrophe is still the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb blast. We engage with slow-motion disasters like extinction, if we engage with them at all, as the dwindling and disappearance of favourite individual species, not as the incremental loss of biodiversity as a whole. Hardest of all to meet is the moral challenge of rethinking the meaning of agency, responsibility and blame on a global scale and over many generations. Moral categories originally conceived with individuals in mind begin to creak when stretched to cover nations or span generations, as vexed debates over reparations for past wrongs demonstrate. Historical narratives, even those of environmental history, are mostly about human beings, by human beings and for human beings. Still to be imagined are the plots, characters and judgments that will be needed to narrate the Anthropocene. It may be that understanding the epoch named after humans will require transcending the human.