Not your typical mass extinction

I’m reading Jensen’s Dreams.  Many of his claims border on hyperbole, some of his literary gimmicks seem contrived, and his stream of consciousness writing style is a bit too self-absorbed to be truly enjoyable. But his books are laced with kernels of insight, and some of his ideas are subtle and unexpected. For example, he suggests that it is wrong to equate the mass extinction event occurring now with the half dozen or so that have occurred in the distant past. Although that by itself is neither subtle, nor, given his particular radical environmentalist posture, unexpected, he takes it one step further and suggests that, not only is the equivalency between current and previous mass extinction events a false one, it is also potentially dangerous.

It is true that the present mass extinction event it is on track to exceed in size and scope the event that heralded the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And it may eventually eclipse the great Permian extinction which wiped out over two-thirds of the land animals and almost all marine life.

But, suggests Jensen, unlike the mass extinctions of the past, there is nothing natural about what is happening now. What is happening now is a direct result of global industrial civilization. And global industrial civilization is not a natural event. To call industrial civilization an extinction event, and to position it relative to the mass extinctions of the past, is a form of validation. To think of what industrial civilization is doing, destroying the biosphere in a calculated and intentional way, as just another example of what has happened before, creates a false sense of inevitability.

Jensen’s “dangerous line of thinking” concerns also apply to the recent addition of the Anthropocene to the list of geologic time periods. Let’s be clear about this: industrial civilization is not just another stage in the geological progression of the planet. It is not an inevitable side effect of human evolution. It is a historically contingent cultural artifact that can be eliminated permanently at any point in time without violating a single physical law or biological principle.

Author: Mark Seely

Mark Seely is an award-winning writer, social critic, professional educator, and cognitive psychologist. He is presently employed as full-time faculty in the psychology department at Edmonds College in Lynnwood, Washington. He was formerly Associate Professor and Chair of Psychology at Saint Joseph's College, Indiana, where for twenty years he taught statistics, a wide variety of psychology courses, and an interdisciplinary course on human biological and cultural evolution. Originally from Spokane, Dr. Seely now resides in Marysville.

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