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.

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.