A fine book on America’s “frontier thinking” is The Great Frontier, by Walter Prescott Webb, one of the most important books I’ve ever read. My copy is dated 1952, and in it you can read of the work of M. King Hubbert, and numerous other eerily prescient warnings. The sense of loss we feel as the 6th Extinction bites is echoed by our sense of loss of the Great Frontier as described by Webb: “Man… is like the individual trying to recapture the exciting and pleasurable experiences of his childhood. He may return to the scene of them only to find it radically changed: the old swimming hole muddy, the hills shrunken, and the valleys less green… Instead of emptiness he finds homes and people; instead of forests he finds farms or stumps or burnt-over land… he finds eroded gullies, denuded hillsides, and deserts on the march.”

Nearly 60 years after Webb wrote, we might feel fortunate if farms or stumps or burnt-over land were the worst of it. CAFOs and vast industrialized monocultures have replaced the family farms of Webb’s era. Even eroded gullies, denuded hills, and deserts might be preferable to sprawling malls, pavements, brownfields, and toxic waste dumps.

During my lifetime, I have witnessed the extinction pick up the pace. Fifty years ago, I was a child in a suburb of Chicago surrounded by open meadows and farms. Every spring, transient wet areas in the fields would magically fill with crayfish, frogs, and tiny minnows. Our yard was sprinkled with clover, and when we went barefoot, we did so carefully, as the flowers were always humming with honeybees. There were still healthy wild elms. The fields teemed with bobolinks, meadowlarks, field sparrows, and yellowthroats. Wildflowers were everywhere, nodding with butterflies: red admirals, tiger swallowtails, sulphers, and fritillaries with beautiful silver spangles. Webb’s words call up these memories for me; this area is now crammed wall-to-wall with houses, as far as the eye can see.

Two additional things to add to the list of vanishing life are birds and trees. On these topics I highly recommend the books Silence of the Songbirds, by Bridget Stutchbury, and The Dying of the Trees, by Charles E. Little. Little describes threats to many tree species all over the U.S. and comes to a conclusion similar to yours regarding the honeybee die-off: the issue is general environmental stress, rather than any single problem. Human industrial civilization, he says, is fatally harmful to trees.

And thanks for debunking Friedman’s particular brand of technological optimism. Here is Webb’s critique of the “technology will save us” argument: “If you could hold in your right hand the earth in miniature as it was in 1500 or 1600 and in your left hand the earth as it is now, which earth would you consider richer in resources? Or preferable as a desirable base of future operations? On the first earth you would have the Great Frontier, the natural forests, the clear streams, the virgin soils, and the precious metals intact. On the second earth you would have stumps, foul streams, eroded soils…[A]pplied science has done a bad job and has left the land in a worse state than it found it… What science and its servant, technology, did was to speed up the rate at which resources already in existence could by utilized. In short, it speeded up the rate of destruction…” I believe Matthew Simmons makes a similar point about advanced petroleum recovery technologies in Twilight in the Desert. Advances in technology usually advance, rather than postpone, the day of reckoning.

Last but not least, I appreciate your reference to Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.” Too often these days, this essay is cited only (by the right) to bolster spurious arguments in favor of privatizing everything, or (by the left) to vilify Hardin’s conception of the commons. I wonder if any of these critics have actually read “Tragedy.” It actually argues the necessity for compulsory birth control, so it is easy to imagine many of the critiques are willful misreadings and deliberate red herrings. The essay speaks directly to other central issues of our day, too. Interestingly, Hardin begins with a strong argument against technological optimism: “…the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called “no technical solution problems”… It is easy to show that the class is not a null class.” And his call for “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon” rings true not just for managing the population problem, but practically every other field of human activity. Democratically agreed-upon coercion in the form of regulation might have forestalled some of the current economic mess, for instance.

Please continue to write about the 6th Extinction. It is terribly painful to think about it and write about it, but it may be the most important topic of all. Raising even one additional warning voice is better than doing nothing.

With it looking like 9 billion of us scavenging for the scraps I can see the widespread destruction of the last forests and woods for fuel and killing any and every animal we can find to feed ourselves.

Unless we make an active effort to reduce our numbers, unlikely as even talking about population is a big no no, I fear that we will destroy the vast majority of other species before finally suffering a mass die-off.

As you stated we will likely survive but in much smaller numbers, either through choice or much more likely through destroying everything we rely on to survive.

But that’s too pessimistic and complicated message for the mass media, sound bite world and anyway where all too busy working and bustling around destroying the world to have any time left over to save it.

If we don’t take this discussion out of our heads, where the data must come from, and down into our feelings, then truly the opportunity that still exists - however unlikely and even inconsequential it may be - is lost. Because we are not thinking machines, or weeds. We’re people, connected to others by friendship (as I am to you) or by family or just by empathy. Feeling the grief and sadness and despair that this kind of data generates is the first step to being reminded about the web of connections to the people around us (and we will ALL live through this extinction, because it’s already in progress) and to all the life forms out there that have value in and of themselves, whether or not we depend on them for survival (which we ultimately do). Nobody who feels the pull of the strands of that web can do nothing, and doing something - whatever it is - is where it starts.

Thanks for writing this.