Book Reviews

Dead Creatures Walking A Book Review, by Tom Small, of Terry Glavin, The Sixth Extinction: Journeys among the Lost and Left Behind. St. Martin's Press, 2006.

The Sixth Extinction is a love story. Written by a lover of stories and of all creatures--whether they fly, swim, slither, creep, or walk; a lover of all the different ways of life embodied and stratified in memory, languages, and cultures. A lover of apples, cougars, spinach, scarlet macaws, whales, petroglyphs, of all things lost or saved.

It's a paean to all other lovers who, against the odds, save whatever they can of all that is vanishing, or left behind--the ghosts, the living dead, surviving forlornly in zoos, parks, and remnants.

It's a book truly about diversity--all kinds of diversity. It treats, lovingly, angrily, the full range of ongoing losses in this, our era, the time of the Sixth Great Extinction, the most catastrophic in 64 million years.

It's a celebration. An elegy. A jeremiad. A call to action.

Its author, a journalist and a professor at the University of British Columbia, would agree with the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, that "the essence of living is a sort of memory, the physical preservation of the past in the present." He bears witness to the degradation of that essence, our collective memory, "the bleeding away of differences in the living world," the "plague of sameness" descending on the plants and the cultures of the world.

The statistics are disheartening. By 2040, 70% to 95% of forest in Africa will be gone; in Southeast Asia, 75%. In the oceans, as many as half of fish species are threatened with extinction. In the U.S., 29% of plant species are in danger of extinction--even without taking global warming into consideration.

Among food crops, 90% of vegetable varieties are already gone; another goes extinct every six hours. All around us, a global pandemic spares nothing, objectifying, commodifying, wiping out the differences: over half the shrinking global seed reservoir is controlled by only ten companies. We all know the names: Monsanto, Dow, Novartis, Cargill, Dupont, Pioneer. The harvest has been stolen, and we are in the hands of a kleptocracy.
As globalization flattens the world, entire cultures vanish; another spoken language dies every two weeks. It's like, says Glavin, "libraries going up in flames." In our struggle for power, we are forfeiting "the right of people to live sustainably on the natural resources around them." Perhaps Richard Manning will yet be proved right: the green revolution, which brought us globalized industrial agriculture, is "the worst thing that ever happened on the planet."

But always, amid the lamentation, Glavin offers us hope. Conservation did not, he argues, begin with Rachel Carson. He cites the battle, in the late 1870s, in the Petoskey forests of Michigan, to save the passenger pigeon from extinction. He tells a compelling story of the Hawaiian botanists who lower themselves down a Kauai cliff face every year to pollinate by hand the surviving remnant of Na Pali alulas, because their only natural pollinator, a tiny moth, is now extinct.
He lauds the World Conservation Society, working to protect the last tracts of habitat for endangered species, patiently saving one creature, one species, one ecosystem, at a time. He admires the Seed Savers, seeking out old "heritage" seeds forgotten in attics, lost species surviving in abandoned orchards and fields

In Costa Rica, he celebrates "efforts to maintain the diversity of living things that the rest of the world was losing," made possible because "a constitutional prohibition on maintaining a standing army immunized Cost Rica from the U.S. government's usual method of bullying, corrupting, and brutalizing Central American societies."

It is there, in Costa Rica, after a long vigil, that he finally sees what love and painstaking patience had made possible: the sight of "two impossibly beautiful scarlet macaws," saved from the holocaust.

Glavin's litany of loss is also an index to growing recognition that our privileged view of the world has been much too narrow. Slowly, environmentalists recognize that there can be no hard-and-fast distinctions among human communities, domesticated species, and "the wild." Slowly, we expand our notion of rights to include creatures other than ourselves. Slowly, we recognize that our notions of survival, of freedom, of intelligence, of culture, of diversity--all that we supposedly value--are anthropomorphic and elitist. Slowly, peace activists recognize that the bleeding away of freedom and of life itself is more than a matter of military and terrorist violence. Too slowly? Time will tell--not much time. Finally, painfully, we begin to comprehend (or rediscover) that all action and all suffering are related and have consequences.

We live, says Glavin, among ghosts, in a "night of the living dead," doomed creatures and cultures and intelligences passing among us and around us, almost unnoticed. For Glavin, Jeremiah said it best: "The summer is past, the harvest is over, and we are not saved" (8:20).

But even if we are not to be saved, we can still be saviors. The good news is we still have choices. Choices, to be sure, that narrow every day, choices "every bit as stark and momentous as the choices we faced in the darkest moments of the twentieth century."

"Serious decisions require that we believe in things, and believe deeply." Glavin is a true believer. If I may paraphrase an ancient Zen saying, to believe, and not to do, is not to believe at all. "You join the epic battle," Glavin adjures, "with the demons that are devouring the world, and you do what you can. It's all anyone can expect of you. You do everything you can."
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Other books cited or drawn on in this review include the following:
J. M. Coetzee, THE LIVES OF ANIMALS (1999).
Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: PATTERNS OF LIFE AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANKIND (1995).
Richard Manning, AGAINST THE GRAIN: HOW AGRICULTURE HAS HIJACKED CIVILIZATION (2004).
Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, MICROCOSMOS: FOUR BILLION YEARS OF EVOLUTION FROM OUR MICROBIAL ANCESTORS (1986).
Vandana Shiva, STOLEN HARVEST: THE HIJACKING OF THE GLOBAL FOOD SUPPLY (2000)
Gary Snyder, THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD (1990).