As the 17th century English poet Robert Herrick reminded us: putrefaction is the end/of all that nature doth intend. So is extinction: 99.9 per cent of all species which have ever lived are now extinct. In other words, as many as five billion species have vanished forever. Yet, environmental groups are forever shrieking about the alleged fate of this or that obscure, marginal, species.
These screeching green Jeremiahs are also adamant that modern, industrialised humanity is a singular monster of extinction. These same loons hold up primitive tribespeople, on the other hand, as supposedly uniquely sensitive stewards of nature.
A view which it is only possible to hold if you’ve never read a single history book in your life.
Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. A prominent theory explaining the extinction of megafauna (large animals such as mastodons, sabertooth cats, mammoths, American lions, and the now topical dire wolves) is geoscientist Paul Martin’s overkill hypothesis, suggesting that humans rapidly hunted many big game animals to extinction.
In the Americas and Australia, where humans first arrived later than in Eurasia or Africa, human beings proved particularly deadly, as local species were unused to coexisting with homo sapiens and had not developed ways of surviving human interaction. As science writer Sharon Levy’s book on megafauna notes, the last 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 per cent of America’s largest species and over 90 per cent of Australia’s.
Even in the last few centuries, stone-age technology humans have proved dab hands at wiping entire species off the map. Just as the 10 species of moa and at least 15 other species of native birds, including the world’s largest eagle, who all vanished within 100 years of the arrival of the Māori.
Today, few people know that lions, hyenas, and leopards are all native to Europe but were eliminated from the continent by human activity in antiquity. As historian Richard Hoffmann notes in his book An Environmental History of Medieval Europe, lions, hyenas, and leopards had “vanished from Mediterranean Europe by the first century BCE, and bear populations in both the Balkans and the Apennines were much reduced.”
He notes that “elimination of all the now proverbially ‘African’ animals – lion, elephant, zebra, etc – from areas north of the Sahara was complete by the fourth century CE … These purposely targeted ‘trophy’ organisms [were] pursued on cultural grounds beyond all reasonable expenditure of energy.”
Countless species have been exterminated from large parts of their native habitats or were driven to extinction in the preindustrial era. Hoffmann further notes, “Such prized game as bear, wolf, and wild pig were extirpated from the British Isles by the end of the Middle Ages. The last individual specimen of the great native European wild ox, the aurochs, was killed by a known noble hunter in Poland in 1637.”
In Iceland, by the 12th and 13th centuries, the walruses that once lived on the southwest coast were gone. The examples of premodern species depletion go on and on.
Which puts into some perspective the unhinged claims of the likes of the perpetually wrong idiot Paul Ehrlich that the Earth is in the grip of a so-called ‘sixth mass extinction’, which is, it should surprise no one, a load of old alarmist hooey.
It’s not just the rate of contemporary extinctions that the green loons are wrong about. They’re as firmly convinced that modern, industrialised, societies are the unique culprits. In fact, the reverse is more true: primitive societies plunder their environments (hello, Māori!) because they can’t afford the luxury of environmentalism. When your tribe’s on the brink of starvation, a couple of ton of KFC walking by is far more convincing than listening to Wairangi-the-Bad-Hunter’s warnings about the moa’s imminent extinction.
In reality, for the past 50 years, species populations are no longer shrinking in wealthy countries, and in many cases, they are increasing. According to a 2023 investigation, poor countries’ populations have also stopped declining. “The extremely large number of species that are said to be continuously dying out comes from theoretical models of insects and even smaller organisms that are assumed to disappear,” the author notes.
Wild animals are coming back in rich areas of the world, with a resurgence of bison, boars, ibexes, seals, turtles, and more. European wolf conservation efforts have been such a success that many people now see the exploding wolf population as out of control, and Sweden is even seeking to cull 10 per cent of its wolves through hunts. Last year, thanks to the growth in their numbers, the Iberian lynx wildcat, the red-cockaded woodpecker, and the Apache trout all ceased to be endangered.
Not only that, there are concerted scientific efforts to ‘de-extinct’ some species. Sure, there are scientific and ethical arguments about that, but one thing is clear: modern humans are in fact highly dedicated to not extincting other species. No other animal, and certainly not the previous generations of ‘harmonious stewards of nature’, were capable of, let alone even interested in, such a thing.
As human beings have grown wealthier, they have also come to care about environmental stewardship and gained the resources to act upon their newfound compassion for wildlife. For most of history, animal welfare was not a concern. Hoffman relates that “late antique and early medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to … humankind.”
Today, in contrast, many people voluntarily exert enormous effort toward protecting species and even attempt to reengineer extinct creatures back into existence.
Advancing human prosperity isn’t just good for humanity. Dismantling the industrialised society that has made us rich enough to care about the environment isn’t likely to help nature at all. It’ll only make us all more miserable.
