What with everything else going on, you might not have realized that Earth’s currently undergoing a mass loss of life – the so-called Sixth Extinction. The Fifth Extinction was the asteroid that collided with Earth some 66 million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs. This newest extinction is far less dramatic, at least in the fire-and-brimstone sort of way – which explains how it’s been happening right under our noses.

Nonetheless, by the end of this century, scientists believe, up to 20 to 50 percent of the plant and animal species on Earth could be gone forever. Only there will be no giant asteroid to blame for the loss. This time – in a ‘Twilight Zone”-worthy twist of fate – the giant asteroid is us.

Ever since we first began to migrate and multiply, we humans have been crowding out everything else living on Earth, leading for thousands of years a (largely) unintentional campaign against other species that, in more recent times, has gotten much, much worse.

‘Right now,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes, ‘we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, […]