17
Every generation has sought to document its alarm bells, disasters and lamentations, deferrals, regrets, altercations at all levels, mysteries and rituals, aesthetic
reveries, the senses and powers of the imagination, the pure pursuit of information,
wealth, immortality, games, sex, and beliefs… to help smother the pains and, on
occasion, by generosity, virtue, and sustained excellence to accomplish something
better than ourselves. Solutions, in other words, to systemic or altogether new problems facing humanity. Our very solace taken in, and reverence for, Nature would
always have seemed the right antidote for our sorrows, a key to our social and conceptual metamorphoses, and our durability as a species. All fine and well but for the
fact that never, as far as we know, has humankind been confronted by its own total
annihilation. Not even by the Toba Supervolcano of 74,000 years ago, thought until
recently to have exerted a nearly fatal genetic/population bottleneck on Homo sapiens; a catastrophe so severe that there might not have been time for allele frequencies or infrequencies, as the case may be, to experience species-level rebalancing
through genetic drift over a short time span of evolution, even a matter of generations. Contrary to the Toba suppositions, however, there is data which shows that
African populations were largely unaffected by that mega-eruption in, what is today,
Indonesia. If so, we need to look elsewhere for population bottlenecks. The twentyfirst century is unambiguous in that respect.
12
2.2 The Extinction Debates
But now, something has changed exponentially, as we come to view the very tragedy that is ourselves, and perhaps, or not, take heed of both warnings and manifestations. Whether we can actually do anything about it globally remains a mire of
theoretical suppositions, data (or as yet unknown data) sets, all those small steps
that translate into various positive conservation (by definition) countermeasures,
modest progress in hundreds of millions of consumer choices; forward-leaning economic and civic arenas of awareness and action. At the 2020 Davos Economic
Forum the key takeaway was “climate change,” the trending words—“positive” and
“impact”—as well as the Global Risks Report 2020 in which was highlighted
humanity’s interconnect vulnerabilities.
13
A much more reticent, overwhelmingly depressing and largely private but
increasing through-story is that uncomfortable sense of something akin to a blurry
Biblical Last Days-like intuition, the worst conceivable Rapture, foundering almost
12 “Ancient Humans Weathered the Toba Supervolcano Just Fine,” by Jason Daley, Smithsonianmag.
com, March 13, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-humans-weathered-toba-supervolcano-just-fine-180968479/Accessed February 20, 2020.
13 See “What’s everyone talking about at Davos 2020?” by Katie Clift, January 23, 2020, https://
www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/what-are-people-talking-about-at-davos/Accessed February
21, 2020; see also 15
th edition of the Forum’s The Global Risks Report 2020, https://www.weforum.org/global-risks/reports, Accessed March 3, 2020.
2.2 The Extinction Debates
Every generation has sought to document its alarm bells, disasters and lamentations, deferrals, regrets, altercations at all levels, mysteries and rituals, aesthetic
reveries, the senses and powers of the imagination, the pure pursuit of information,
wealth, immortality, games, sex, and beliefs… to help smother the pains and, on
occasion, by generosity, virtue, and sustained excellence to accomplish something
better than ourselves. Solutions, in other words, to systemic or altogether new problems facing humanity. Our very solace taken in, and reverence for, Nature would
always have seemed the right antidote for our sorrows, a key to our social and conceptual metamorphoses, and our durability as a species. All fine and well but for the
fact that never, as far as we know, has humankind been confronted by its own total
annihilation. Not even by the Toba Supervolcano of 74,000 years ago, thought until
recently to have exerted a nearly fatal genetic/population bottleneck on Homo sapiens; a catastrophe so severe that there might not have been time for allele frequencies or infrequencies, as the case may be, to experience species-level rebalancing
through genetic drift over a short time span of evolution, even a matter of generations. Contrary to the Toba suppositions, however, there is data which shows that
African populations were largely unaffected by that mega-eruption in, what is today,
Indonesia. If so, we need to look elsewhere for population bottlenecks. The twentyfirst century is unambiguous in that respect.
12
2.2 The Extinction Debates
But now, something has changed exponentially, as we come to view the very tragedy that is ourselves, and perhaps, or not, take heed of both warnings and manifestations. Whether we can actually do anything about it globally remains a mire of
theoretical suppositions, data (or as yet unknown data) sets, all those small steps
that translate into various positive conservation (by definition) countermeasures,
modest progress in hundreds of millions of consumer choices; forward-leaning economic and civic arenas of awareness and action. At the 2020 Davos Economic
Forum the key takeaway was “climate change,” the trending words—“positive” and
“impact”—as well as the Global Risks Report 2020 in which was highlighted
humanity’s interconnect vulnerabilities.
13
A much more reticent, overwhelmingly depressing and largely private but
increasing through-story is that uncomfortable sense of something akin to a blurry
Biblical Last Days-like intuition, the worst conceivable Rapture, foundering almost
12 “Ancient Humans Weathered the Toba Supervolcano Just Fine,” by Jason Daley, Smithsonianmag.
com, March 13, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-humans-weathered-toba-supervolcano-just-fine-180968479/Accessed February 20, 2020.
13 See “What’s everyone talking about at Davos 2020?” by Katie Clift, January 23, 2020, https://
www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/what-are-people-talking-about-at-davos/Accessed February
21, 2020; see also 15
th edition of the Forum’s The Global Risks Report 2020, https://www.weforum.org/global-risks/reports, Accessed March 3, 2020.
2.2 The Extinction Debates