Intellectually and emotional pursuing the future fate of fifteen bird species, a fate that must necessarily consider extinction, within the notion of the Anthropocene, a notion that encompasses human extinction, is terrifying. At its core might might be four questions. Will Cranes survive? So what? Will my grandchildren (or great grandchildren – what is the apt timeframe?) survive? So what do I do?
You think it easy to ponder extinction. Not so. Just asking those four questions clearly raises major ethical issues, for only in a perfect heaven can one guarantee everyone life forever.
Thomas Moynihan’s “The end of us,” published August 7 on Aeon, posits that only since the Enlightenment, perhaps the mid 18th century, have we humans even been able to consider species extinction (Moynihan deals with human extinction) and that this renders the extinction concept as one marking human maturity.
I was in a Nijmegen cafe, redrafting a chapter on 1950s reactors, when I turned to his well-written paper, and the leap from the former to the latter made me impatient. Surely the extinction “topic” first crescendo’d in the 60s/70s/80s, after Carson, Ehrlich, and cruise missiles? Surely any sense of philosophical “maturity” about extinction remains murky, in spite of damned fulsome knowledge, because some of us believe in obligations to future generations whilst most could not care less?
I’ve not treated Moynihan fairly, I know, but was and am asking a different extinction question to his. What that question is remains fuzzy.
(Image is from Aeon’s website article, just a screenshot)