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Ashley Dawson: The specific thing was reading The Sixth Extinction by the American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. It's an important book because it seems that the extinction crisis has dropped out of public awareness—it's been eclipsed a bit by the climate change crisis. For instance, in Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything, she only refers to extinction on one page. I mean, she's obviously talking around the subject, but she doesn't really discuss the disappearance of 50 percent of flora and faunae on the planet over the last 50 years and the implications for human populations.
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I write about the extinction of megafaunae that happened in the late Pleistocene era, which seems to have been the product of homo sapiens. So on some sort of level, humanity, as a species, is responsible. I acknowledge that by showing how ancient empires like Rome denuded large landscapes of northern Africa, but I also wanted to be very clear: It's industrial capitalism that is taking these events—which were in many ways local and affecting one part of the ecosystem—and making them global and pushing them to the point where we're decimating the vast majority of life on the planet.
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I'm sure you've heard about what's happening in Flint, Michigan, right now: A special authority was put in place to take over the city and destroy any kind of democratic governance [over the] water supply… [This] pushed Flint to switch from sourcing its public water supply from Detroit, which has relatively clean water, to the contaminated Flint River, the site of decades of toxic dumping by GM and other auto manufacturers. The toxic water from the Flint River corroded old lead pipes in Flint, leading to spiraling levels of lead poisoning among the city's children, as well as a host of other health problems.This is something that's happening throughout the United States and so-called advanced capitalist countries. So, yeah, I would say this neoliberal means of governance is very much an assault not just on class issues and institutions but on access to air, water—the most basic elements of the commons.You critique solutions that you see as bad or inadequate. One of these criticisms is of "re-wilding," where predators that were once thought of as a threat are reintroduced in order to benefit the whole ecosystem.
I think re-wilding offers people hope in a hopeless time. As global negotiations around climate change seem more and more deadlocked, something like re-wilding seems very exciting. I talk about the way it tries to wind time backwards, and there is something redemptive about that.
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There are people doing this out of good will: scientists and entrepreneurs like Stuart Brand, the person behind the "Revive & Restore" foundation in California. I think they mean well. But what I'm trying to do is situate these efforts within a broader political and economic moment. We're on the cusp of all these amazing new uses of genetic engineering that bring up really serious ethical and social justice questions, but, for me, the question is the way in which these genetic engineering processes get normalized.
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Last week, I was at Princeton, and I spoke to a scientist from MIT. He's one of a few people who is trying to use CRISPR technology to genetically engineer the extinction of the Anopheles mosquito, which is responsible for carrying malaria, Dengue fever, Zika, and lot of horrible viruses and diseases.I'm still trying to figure out where I stand on that. More than 700,000 people die every year of malaria, mostly in poor and vulnerable populations. So if you can do something to eradicate the disease, perhaps it's OK. But then what about the ecological niche the mosquito fills? What about how the use of these technologies could be proliferated?Some people think this technology, CRISPR, is so dangerous it should be treated like nuclear technology—that it shouldn't be widely available. The problem with scientists is they often don't look at the broader political-economic questions. The reason Zika has gotten so much traction in a place like Brazil is because as deforestation happens, you get human populations in closer proximity to wild species of various different kinds, some of which function as disease vectors. So the prevalence of the disease in certain areas is connected to resource extraction, which is, in turn, coming from corporations that the governments like the United States are supporting.Extinction: A Radical History is published by OR Books.Follow Yohann on Twitter.