The Catastrophe No One Talks About

long before the death of the last Northern White Rhino in the wild there

was the DOTA a large flightless bird that roamed the coastal Woods of Mauritius

an island off the coast of Madagascar

the dodo thrived in its habitat but in 1598

the dodo faced a world-ending

threat the arrival of white Europeans

who were hungry for resources

to fuel their emerging capitalist

nations with guns and axes Dutch Sailors carved up the dodo's

habitat leaving few safe havens for the bird out

in the open with nowhere left to hide those birds that didn't die from

destruction of their habitat were killed by the barrel of Dutch guns and cooked

in Dutch kettles by

1662 the last Dodo

perished the Dutch colonizers

had driven the species into Extinction

and the beastly bird of Mauritius

soon faded into myth sadly

this is a common Story one

that's been unfolding and accelerating

over the last four

centuries life on Earth as we know it is dying

a mass extinction event the likes of which this planet has only experienced

five other times is

now occurring today we'll explore the underlying

forces driving this catastrophic

die off while Journey from the fur Trappers of North American colonies

to the agro-industrial feedlots

of Brazil all the way to the machines of Industry this

is the story of the sixth Extinction a story of its dark roots and

the many fold ways we might reverse it this video is sponsored by brilliant

while Dutch Sailors were hacking apart the mauritian coastline for wood and dodo meat

the English and French were across the ocean sinking

their claws into the Lush landscape

stewarded by the people of Turtle Island which

is now called North America the

violent colonization of North American capitalists

who were eager to ship wood minerals

and food back home to their growing Nations was not only devastating

for those who were already living there but these extraction regimes

were also disastrous for the natural world that had grown abundant

under the watchful eye of indigenous Farmers Fishers

hunters and communities the

Waters of the northern Atlantic

are a perfect example

of this abundance in

his book The Mortal sea environmental

historian Jeffrey bolster explains

that before the influx of European Colonial presence the coastal ecosystems

of North America teamed

with gargantuan fish and lobsters journals

of sea captains from the late 1500s

like Charles Lee reported

that they encountered the greatest multitude

of lobsters they ever heard

of while another report in 1602

from Sailor John barreton

claimed that the boat's crew had fished so much cod in five or six

hours that they had pestered their ship so with codfish

that they threw numbers of them overboard

again but with the continued expansion of white European settler colonialists

throughout the 1600s this

all changed fish population and

size dwindled and Forest habitats

were clear-cut and demolished

the colonists viewed the landscape as an infinite resource

to harvest develop into monocropped

Farmland fish up and sell back to European

markets as the flood of white bodies axes

and guns permeated Turtle Island throughout

the 17th 18th and 19th centuries European

colonists violently replaced various forms of indigenous

land stewardship with commodity-based

profit-oriented system one early European

Invader James Rozier quite

bluntly reveals this commoditizing

world view when he refers to the abundance of life in North America as

the prophets and fruits that are naturally on these islands

and environmental historian William Cronin

points out in his book changes

in the land that Timber Products were among the earliest merchantable

Commodities colonists sent back to Europe to repay their debts to financial backers

he goes on to write that in 1621

when the pilgrims made their first shipment home the ship's hold was Laden with

good clapboard as full as she could Stow as a result of this transformation

from stewardship to commodification

and extraction the Flora and Fauna

of North America suffered

catastrophic losses bison were hunted to near Extinction the passenger pigeon which once darkened

the sky with its numbers ceased

to Exist by 1914

and the ivory Bill woodpecker

which once found its home in the coastal Woods of the American South was

logged out of existence but

no animal is more emblematic

of this new relationship

with the land than

the Beaver from the late 1600s

to the early 1900s

Beaver populations plummeted from an estimated 60

million to just one hundred thousand all because back home in Europe furline

top hats were the hottest fashion

instead of understanding and recognizing the beaver As a crucial species

in many North American ecosystems

French English and Dutch fur Traders developed

a massive Market that only saw the animals as Commodities

beavers were just living pelts

waiting to be trapped skinned

and sold for profit but luckily for the beaver the fur line Top Hat

eventually faded out of fashion and populations were able to somewhat stabilize

but unfortunately for those indigenous

to Turtle Island as well as the North American flora

and fauna the settler Colonial Europeans

with their extractivists and commodifying

economies were here to stay this

destruction at the hands of early settler Colonial

economies is just a taste of what's to come today we're on the precipice

of one of the largest Extinction

events in Earth's history

the reality of life on Earth is that all species will face Extinction

from the earliest single cell organisms

of the aork and era to the stegosaurus

of the late Jurassic

Period flora and fauna Fade Into Extinction

as other life more suited to the ecosystem's

niche takes its place Extinction

and replacement are the consequences

of evolution but across the course of Earth's history there

have been punctuation points

five moments in time that have been catastrophic

For Life Five mass extinction

events where over the course of roughly three million years the diversity of species

dramatically declined the most famous of which was the mass die off of dinosaurs

65 million years ago and we are now living in the sixth one for

reasons we'll dive into soon plants

animals and general life on Earth are dying off at rates far higher than

normal with evidence pointing to Extinction rates as high as 1

000 times the usual background

pace which means as researcher Gerardo

ceballos explains what we've lost in 100 years would have been lost in 10

000 years in normal times indeed

the World Wildlife fund's

Global living planet index

which averages together the change in abundance of over 5

000 species worldwide found an average decline

of 69 in population since 1970.

while this number is pretty Limited in its scope it still gives us a

glimpse at the potential Extinction

event we're now facing according to a 2019

U.N report over 1

million species will be threatened with Extinction

over the next few decades and

even if some species are able to thrive the absence of just one Keystone

Animal Plant or insect could send a chain reaction

of Extinction through a local ecosystem

this interconnected Reliance of local biomes

is most famously exemplified

by the gray wolf which

was hunted out of Yellowstone National Park in the 1930s

the absence of the wolf triggered

a Cascade of consequences

elk populations free from their apex predator

exploded in numbers which meant that one of their primary food sources willow

trees declined dramatically the lack of these trees which were also a food source

for beavers meant fewer beavers

and natural dams along the banks of Yellowstone's

Rivers leading to a transformation in

the very way Rivers

flowed this is called a trophic Cascade

and reveals both how interconnected

an ecosystem is and

how vulnerable it can be to the loss of just one keystone species

so when the ipcc reports

that 3 to 14 percent of species will likely face high

risk of Extinction at global warming levels of 1.5 degrees Celsius and

that will increase up to 3 to 48 percent of species at 5 degrees

Celsius this could have vast

Ripple effects across the Earth's habitats

but mass extinction doesn't just mean catastrophe

for millions of species eradicated

from their ecosystem it

also spells disaster for human economies

and social organization because after after all are systems

of production our economies

are built on the foundation of thriving and biodiverse

ecosystems so when those ecosystems

collapse whether through the domino effect of The Disappearance

of a keystone species

or through more General Extinction

and extraction we are greatly affected

the absence of pollinator

insects means the absence of crops in fields the lack of kelp and mangroves

along Coastal Waters means increased floods and fewer fish the absence of the wolf

means more deer and more disease and

that is just the tip of the iceberg we've

built our world our

agriculture our cities around a specific structure

of nature so when that structure begins to crumble when the species die off

when ecosystems unravel or way of life suffers

so in order to keep things from unraveling

even further we need to understand why

this is all happening

the legacy of European Colonial resource

extraction is Alive and Well in the Brazilian Amazon they're

trees that are home to a diverse range of animals and insects are slashed

and burned to make room for industrial soy farms and ranches this

Amazonian deforestation is eerily

similar to what we witnessed in the colonies along the Atlantic coast of North

America land dramatically changed

from one of forest or Wetland to one of a single crop or a

single animal in short we terraformed

Earth there are multiple drivers

of the growing Extinction raids we're witnessing today and at the top of that

list is land use change or

the transformation of habitat into a vastly different shape to the point where a

species is not able to adapt to their new environment

we can see here that land use has dramatically

increased since the 1700s

and always at the bleeding edge of that Frontier is

agriculture according to the UN food and agriculture

Association agricultural land takes up almost half of all habitable

land and is responsible for 90 of

deforestation and 70 of

the world's freshwater use and

that sustained transformation of ecosystems

into Landscapes more suitable for industrial agricultural

systems has spelled disaster

for biodiversity species are being pushed to extinction because of land use change in

the last decade of deforestation

along the edges of the Amazon rainforest

are a perfect microcosm

of this as a result of habitat loss over 10

000 species of plants and animals risk

Extinction along the Amazon but

land use change is just one of the drivers forcing Extinction climate

change is another and could yet prove to be the most consequential

if temperatures continue to rise over the next Century whether

it was intense volcanic

activity rapid growth of plants or impact dust from an asteroid blocking out the

Sun the last five mass extinctions

were all precipitated due to shifts in climate but if those climate shifts occurred

over the course of thousands

of years if not millions of years our

current emissions rate is accelerating

that climate transformation to

the scale of hundreds

of years changes in global temperatures that

quick can spell disaster

for ecosystems it forces animals out of their normal Geographic

zones causes weather events like droughts and floods and locations

ill-equipped to deal with that kind of weather and creates unadaptable

conditions as a recent ipcc report notes climate

change is already having world

shaking consequences approximately half of the species assessed

globally have shifted pole Wards or

to higher elevations hundreds

of local losses of species have been driven by increases

in the magnitude of heat extremes

as well as mass mortality

events on land and in the ocean and

loss of kelp forests in short changing

temperatures and climates will drive species

to Extinction around the world if left unchecked

and those that are left alive after habitat

loss and pressures of climate change must

face the added threat of over extraction

much like the dodos of Mauritius

or the gray wolves of Yellowstone species

Extinction can be directly driven by the barrel of the gun or the snare

of the net fish species around the world like yellowfin

tuna are threatened because of our insatiable

appetite for extraction of certain fish and

on land we're seeing this everywhere from the trade of ivory decimating

the northern White Rhino population to

African Forest elephants on the brink of Extinction for their tusks or to Penguins

hunted for their scales to put in medicinal

products but at the heart of all these factors that are driving Extinction

isn't human nature it's not our inherent hatred

of other species that

is driving an increased Extinction rate but instead our economic

system our mode of production yes

that's right it's to

uncover the root cause of the sixth mass extinction we need to travel once

again back to the fur Trappers of North America it's

here along the banks of rivers dammed up by beavers

that fur Trappers took part in an early instance of capitalist commodification

of the natural world and

in doing so they drove a species to the brink of Destruction while

there was certainly more at play like shifting

climates or the introduction of new diseases many indicators

point to the emergence of the European market economy

throughout the North American landscape

as a key driver of ecosystems

change prior to the capitalist commodification

of Natural Resources transforming

the very trees and animals into Goods to be refined and sold for money

indigenous communities employed a range of tactics and land interventions

that while still impacting

the landscape did so in a way that minimized

their footprint as the author of a recent paper on the impact of pre-colonial

communities on the North American Landscapes

notes indigenous North Americans thrived

under changing Forest conditions not by intensively

managing them but by adapting to them and

the changing environment it was only with the introduction of monocultures

of European seed strains animals

and Industrial logging that fed production across the Atlantic that we began to see

the decline of species

on a broader scale as Cronin put it in changes of the land New

England ecology was transformed

as the region became integrated

with the emerging capitalist

economy of the North Atlantic

capitalism and environmental degradation

went hand in hand because under

capitalism we Face an unresolvable

contradiction in order to live we need the natural world with

all of its wonderfully complex and life-giving

ecosystems but inside a mode of capitalist production we

must also extract subjugate

and destroy that natural world to

make a living one

of the foundational characteristics

of a capitalist economy is the production of goods for exchange value rather

than use value in

other words we're producing

materials not based on necessity

or how well they work but primarily for how much the product can sell

for work on the market as a result under capitalism

were driven to extract produce

and accumulate far above levels that are needed to satiate the conditions to thrive

because it is profitable to do so in

the real world this looks like the global Meat Market that deforests

vast swaths of the Amazon rainforest

because we've transformed animal agriculture

into an industrial machine

in order to squeeze maximum

value out of a cow animal

agriculture which used to look like a collection of small ranchers

and herders before capitalism

has now become mechanized

Consolidated and homogeneous this means that as farmers and ranchers cut down the edges

of the biodiverse Amazonian

habitat they are replacing them with just a couple of species of soybean

for animal feed and

cattle for meat meat packing giants like JBS

who know that more products sold means

more profits in their pocket push industrial

ranching companies like aggro SB to gobble up millions of acres of land at

any cost to raise as many cows and produce as

much meat as possible and often that cost is the destruction of ecosystem which

leads to habitat loss and species Extinction

in short the endless cycle of accumulation

under capitalism wherein capitalists

make profits plug those profits into even more labor and extraction to make even

more profits is untenable

for the natural world the

end result of this cycle of accumulation

is climate chaos and species

Extinction now a common response

to this is that capitalism can't possibly be at the heart of the sixth

mass extinction because as long as humans have roamed the Earth we've been driving

animals extinct while that is indeed

partly correct it's a little bit like comparing

apples to oranges it is true that early humans in the pleistocene

did hunt make a fauna like mastodons

and the ground sloth to Extinction but it's important to note that these were

much smaller blips on the graph of Extinction the rate and scale of Extinction

we're facing today is

larger than the megaphone extinctions

of the pleistocene in addition these

extinctions were not necessarily

a case of eradication

but of replacement as

conservation biologist Ian repel notes in many cases the ecological

roles of these large animals were subsequently

taken up by human beings themselves

as they pushed and pulled at local ecosystems

to generate their own social metabolism

through the controlled use of fire shifting

Agriculture and the ProActive Management of

Woodlands Tundra and Savannah early

humans then essentially became their own megafauna

in their ecosystems becoming

crucial stewards to the land what we are witnessing

today is not that it is the mass eradication

and displacement of habitat

Mass extraction of the natural world driven by capitalism's

need to commodify and

produce human nature did not drive ranchers

and soybean Farmers to slash and burn the Amazon rainforest

the hunt for profits

did The Guns of poachers that drove the northern White Rhino to Extinction did

so in pursuit of the riches those tusks

would bring and the continued expansion

extraction and burning of fossil fuels powering

the climate crisis pushing

millions of species to the brink has been propelled by the pursuit of padding

the wallets of those in power so as plants and animals die we

must not blame human nature that's both a historical and ignores the fact that

there are countless ways to live with instead

of against the natural world so to reverse the sixth mass extinction

we must grapple with our mode of production we must grapple

with if the stories of the peregrine falcon the bald eagle or the Iberian

lynx can be anything they

should be a bomb to the Doom we're facing all three of these species

Face Down The Surety

of annihilation and were guided back from the brink what gives me hope is

that the sixth mass extinction

is not set in stone what we do right now tomorrow

or a year down the line will a vast ramifications

not only for us humans and our descendants but for millions of species

of Life on this planet but to do the work we must first figure

out effective ways to avoid the biodiversity

collapse we're beginning to witness today one of the more pervasive

capitalist solutions to the sixth mass extinction

and habitat loss more generally is

the concept of ecosystem

Services popularized by the United nations's

Millennium ecosystem assessment which was published in 2005.

the idea of ecosystem Services is

to identify and often quantify the ways in which the natural world benefits

humans or in other words calculating

the goods services that

nature provides to humanity

the idea behind ecosystem Services is

that in defining and putting monetary value on the intangibles

of ecosystems like Disease Control water

filtration or oxygen production capitalist

markets and decision makers will be much more likely to understand and

protect biodiverse habitats indeed

this is exactly what scholar activist Vandana Shiva

did to block Limestone

mining in India's Missouri Hills in 1982.

she spent months researching

the impact that Limestone mining

had on water security and

found that the mountains

and the equifas and

the Limestone did a better job just being as they were than when they

were mine Shiva submitted her findings and together with pressure from activists

successfully blocked Limestone mining

operations in the Missouri Hills

while successful this is ultimately a

stopgap approach a method of harm reduction that might be effective in the very

short term but is susceptible

to being overturned because it ultimately

capitulates to the capitalist mode of commodifying

nature it still envisions

habitat and ecosystems as Commodities

that service a capitalist market and

if for some reason the spreadsheets reveal that it's more profitable to extract than

preserve capitalists will do just that this means that while we are trying to

reduce the harm of capitalism

we also need to Envision ways

that hack at the rotten roots of the sixth mass extinction

and know land and habitat conservation

is not enough indeed

the mindset of conservation

or the act of protecting ecosystems

from Human intervention is

a historical humans have long been integral parts of the Landscapes

using controlled Burns roving Agriculture

and spreading seeds through foraging

indeed those that still maintain a stewardship approach to the land Foster

habitats containing 80 percent of the world's current biodiversity

so while we do need conservation

in the short term we also need to be working towards

an anti-capitalist mode of production that

seeks co-thriving of both the natural world and human economies

in the long term one

blueprint for a long-term approach comes from authors Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vitesse

who envisioned a half-earth

socialism approach to the sixth mass extinction

for them a planned economy that focuses on minimal impact on the land while

also setting aside rewilding

and then stewarding 50 of

the Earth for the natural world to thrive is the optimal path away from

climate chaos and species Extinction

or there are the imaginings

of solar pump cities

and towns where our Technologies

and our livelihoods are completely enmeshed

with nature so that we don't have to destroy a forest in order to

have reliable shelter and food on the table these

threads have two necessary

ingredients first the transformation of an economy from one of exchange to one of

use and in doing so minimizing

our Collective impact on the world and

second blending the line between humans

and nature in a way that recognizes

the role Humanity has always played as

a part of and

not separate from our

surroundings but to build a future that Fosters a harmonious relationship

with the natural world we

first need to end our system of global capitalism

a mission that many of the countries of the Imperial periphery have

already recognized and enshrined

in the words of the kojabama

people's agreement in 2010.

there they write Humanity

confronts a great Dilemma to continue on the path of capitalism

deportation and death or

to choose the path of harmony with

nature and respect for life so to prevent the fate of the dodo and

the northern White Rhino from eradicating

life around the world we

must struggle for a world Beyond

capitalism a world rich not with profit

but with life a

world that Embraces the interconnectedness

of humans and nature

a world worth fighting

for a world that will certainly have a much smaller animal agriculture

industry because the unfortunate fact is that animal agriculture

within capitalism not only is driving and use change but also climate

change which is why next month's video dives into the hard questions of animal

Agriculture and asks things like whether we should all be vegan or not and

if you don't want to wait a month you can watch that video right

now if you're a nebulous subscriber because I put all my videos up on

nebula a month before they go up on YouTube meanwhile

we need biologists ecologists

and much more researching

and developing solutions to the looming biodiversity

crisis people who are steeped in practices of analytical

and scientific thinking which is why I've always loved brilliant.org

brilliant is a website and app that uses a visual Hands-On

approach to help build those next generation

of scientists that can help us better understand the crisis we're now facing because

with brilliant you learn by doing you can play around with interactive

puzzles and games that make difficult to understand Concepts

like quantum mechanics actually fun

to learn their courses are laid out like a story and broken down into

awesome visual pieces and interactive puzzles so that you can tackle them a little

bit at a time like for example brilliant's

wonderful course on scientific thinking understanding

the foundations of the scientific method is essential to forging a renewable and biodiversed

future and Brilliant has made grasping The Core Concepts

of the scientific method intuitive

and fun this little interactive

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while you engineered the optimal structure

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everyone from foundational and advanced math to AI to data science to neural networks

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visit brilliant.org OCC or

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