Candide for Neoliberals

Last Monday Brad Plumer's "Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace" was published by The New York Times. Its opening two paragraph read:

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Times columnist Margaret Renkl contemplates this morning the immensity of this contemporary mass extinction in "Surviving Despair in the Great Extinction: One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth?"

That’s one million species. Every individual creature in a species — times one million. We can’t possibly conceive of such a thing. We can hold in mind, however uncomfortably, the image of a single animal who died a terrible death. Devastation on this scale is beyond the reach of imagination. How could we hold in mind a destruction so vast it would take not just one sea turtle but all that animal’s kind, as well as all the kind of 999,999 other species?

Whole expanses of the natural world are disappearing. It’s not just poster animals like polar bears, tigers and elephants; it’s life on earth as we know it.

I hear a truth like that and succumb to despair. I look around at all the ways I’ve tried to help — at the reusable grocery bags and the solar-field subscription, at the pollinator garden and the little meadow of wildflowers, at the lawn mower blades set high enough to harm no snakes or nesting cottontails, at the recycle bins and the worm composter, at the nest box for the bluebirds and the nest box for the house wrens and the nest box claimed this year by a red wasp — and it all strikes me as puny, laughable, at best a way to feel better about myself. How is any of this a solution? Or even the path to a solution?

Renkl concludes that seemingly meager, personally virtuous acts are better than nothing; that absent systemic change, it's better to compost and keep your backyard free from chemicals than succumbing to despair.

It reminds me of the end of Voltaire's Candide. "Tend your (organic) garden!"

What's interesting are all the comments readers have attached to Renkl's column. They're mostly very good; a common one is that Renkl's prescriptions for solitary commitment are no substitute for government action. There are even a few comments that mention capitalism as the culprit.

The sixth mass extinction underway requires a radical paradigm shift, and every indication is that the elite who govern the planet are fulsomely attached to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism needs to be cracked before we can even consider governments working together to address the extinction crisis.