New Yorker: Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert on the U.N. Extinction Report

[femmedem]

Betsy, I hate to be a competitive journalist, but when I read the report about “The Sixth Extinction” in the U.N. report, I said, The New Yorker had that ten years ago, when you published it, in 2009, the very same thing. What is the difference between 2009 and 2019 in terms of the extinction of hundreds of thousands of species on the planet Earth?

Kolbert: Well, I think that it’s one of those cases where, as I’m sure Bill would say, you don’t like to see the news bearing out what you said. But, in this case, you know, the only difference is more documented destruction, really. And a lot more studies piled on the ones that were available to us five, ten years ago. But the general trend lines—an accelerating trend line, I do want to say, of human impacts—but the general trend line of biodiversity loss, which has been recognized for quite some time now, it’s all just playing out according to plan, unfortunately. And what this report does, I think, it’s really trying to, (a), raise the alarm, but, (b), really pointing to, there seems to be this strange disconnect, once again, out there. And it’s true that global G.D.P. is larger than ever. And at the same time species loss and destruction of the natural environment, natural world, other species is also greater than ever. And those two things are very intimately linked, and if you only pay attention to the G.D.P. part, you might say, “Oh, everything’s fine.” But I think what the point that this report is really trying to make is, those lines are going to cross. People are still dependent on the natural world—all the oxygen we breathe, all the food we eat, all the water—you know, these are biological and geochemical systems that we’re still dependent on, for better or worse, and we are mucking with them in the most profound ways. I think that that is the message, the take-home message of that report.

In other words, this so-called soaring economy that we’re enjoying now is the worst kind of illusion.

Kolbert: Well, once again, it depends on how you measure it. If you measure it by stuff that we’re producing, I don’t want to say it’s an illusion. But if you look at the other side of that, the cost it’s taken on the natural world, everything from land use gobbling up habitat to plastic pollution in the oceans. The list goes on and on and on. And the question of, can you sustain that over time, we haven’t been at this project very long without really wreaking havoc with the systems that sustain us. I mean, there are two issues here. And I think they have to be separated to a certain extent, intellectually if not biologically. And one is, could humans go on like this for quite a long time, just letting the rest of the world decay around us? Is that O.K.? You know, for us as a species to just do in a million or more other species, just because we are enjoying a better and better standard of living, is that O.K.? That’s one question, and then the other question is, can that happen? You know, just physically, are we capable of sustaining this, with all of these other trends going around, or are we really threatening our own life-support systems? And I think this report is suggesting very significantly that we are threatening our own life-support systems. But I think that the other question of the ethical stance that we take toward this is also extremely important.

More: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert-on-the-un-extinction-report