PVK lecture. ‘The Sixth Extinction’: The Induchoodan Memorial Lecture, 2019.
Note: Prof. K. K. Neelakantan or ‘Induchoodan’ (or KKN) the pen name by which he was widely known was an exceptional human being in every way. Profoundly learned, extremely intelligent, diligent and hard-working he embodied the best that ‘modernity’ in Kerala meant.
His first love was zoology and ornithology; his second psychology. He once remarked wryly that since he was good for neither he chose ‘English Language and Literature’, his third choice, and, he made it clear, not one for top-class minds.
For all my five years in the University College Trivandrum (1983 – 1978) he was my head of the department, inspiring respect, fear and its combination, awe. Not to mention fondness, for he had a soft and tender side too. I knew him rather well, his delightful son Kailas having been my friend during out school days and later at University College where he studied Physics while I did my BA in ‘Eng Lit’.
May I add a personal note? My two most favourite teachers at the University College were Prof. Hrydayakumari and Prof. Neelakantan. It is a matter of enormous pride to me that I had, after both had passed on, been invited to deliver lectures instituted in their names.
While the ‘Hrydayakumari Endowment Lecture’ (with which I launched my blog) was delivered at the Government College for Women Trivandrum at the cute Assembly Hall and rather well attended, the talk in memory of KKN was given in the safety of the ‘Kesari Memorial Hall’ near the General Post Office, just yards away from where KKN had stayed for years as a renter in a small house behind the GPO. I was invited to give the lecture by the exceptional birder and writer P. K. Uthaman.
Here, without further ado, is the lecture.
‘The Sixth Extinction: The Induchoodan Memorial Lecture, 2019’
We begin our understanding of life and of extinction events by acknowledging that behind all these discussions lie a particular vision of life, a vision first outlined by Charles Darwin. That is, life on earth and its evolution is understood as having been shaped by the laws of physics and chemistry and biology. All life forms have emerged from previously existing forms and have evolved and adapted to give rise to new life forms. Luck, accidents and chance are major players in this story. No supernatural agency is involved at any stage. In the recent past, though, Homo sapiens have played a decisive role.
The theory of evolution, of modification and adaptation and survival, has been described by a contemporary philosopher, Daniel Dennett, as a “universal acid”. A thought experiment is needed to understand the idea.
Imagine the creation of an acid so corrosive no container in the world can hold it. It would corrode through the material. Such an acid would, in due course, eat through everything in the world. In the realm of theories that try to explain anything or everything about life on earth, the theory of evolution is a universal acid. It can explain everything from, say, the nature of unicellular life forms to how the mind of the University Union Chairman works. No rival theory has its explanatory power and depth and reach. If it is to be displaced from its position of eminence as the commanding theory about life, it will have to be by another theory that is equally comprehensive and detailed and penetrative. [One understands that attempts are under way in some parts of the world, including Nagpur, to create a superior theory. But while its acidity seems to be a given, its explanatory power seems severely restricted.]
Geology provides information about life on earth in the remote past. Theories of extinction are posited as much on geology as they are on biology. It is the evidence provided by these sciences and all their sub-divisions and specializations and super-specializations that help us understand extinction events.
Life on earth is said to be some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest fossils of single celled organisms go back to 3.7 million years. Viruses were present about 3 billion years ago. The first evidence of photo synthesis goes back to 2.15 billion years. Cells with internal organs (Eukaryotic cells) are two billion years old. By about 1.5 billion years ago, these had divided into the ancestors of plants, fungi and animals and they began to evolve separately. So, for over a billion years, life on earth existed in primal forms.
Nine hundred million years ago, multi cellular organisms appeared. Around 540 million years ago a great number of species began to appear. This is known as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’. From then there have been, unevenly spaced, periods of boom and decline and relative stability. Over time biodiversity increased. All sorts of species appeared and every ecological niche available was taken. Over eons an astonishing diversity emerged and the biosphere – the fragile and rather thin crust where life was possible, from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the atmosphere – was teeming with life. About 50,000 years or so ago, a microscopically small sliver of time in the geological history of the earth, there was greater biodiversity than ever before on earth.
Through all these years, extinctions were a constant phenomenon. Species appear and thrive and then succumb, sometimes leaving a mark in the fossil record. These extinctions are called, in the literature, background extinctions. They happen at a steady rate and take place for a variety of natural causes. It is estimated that 99 % of all life forms to have existed have become extinct.
In ordinary times, that is during whole geological epochs, extinction is a rare event. It is, significantly, rarer than speciation events, which is when mutation and adaptation result in a new species coming into being. To put it crudely, through much of the life of Earth the labour ward was busier than the burial ground.
It is important to remember that there is a distinction between geological time and historical time and we are, when discussing mass extinctions, mostly talking about geological time. These are immense stretches of time, often many millions of years. Historical time is measured in years, centuries and millennia and, for some people, meaningfully exists only between general elections. Geologic time is based on the study of past geologic events through evaluating the evidence left behind in rock strata by such events and by the fossil record. The divisions are therefore unequal. Eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages are some of the broader divisions. Currently we are living in the Phanerozoic eon, which began about 590 million years ago, in the Cenozoic era, which began about 65 million years ago, in the Quaternary period, which covers the last two million years and the Holocene epoch, which is a mere 11,000 years old and (our Indian goose bumps can now go into overdrive) in the Meghalayan age, which extends from 4200 years BP to 1950 CE. Since 1950 the Holocene has given way to the Anthropocene; an age that is distinctively ours, marked as it is by signals of man’s activities, like radioactive deposits from nuclear tests, rising levels of greenhouse gases, deforestation, ocean acidification, plastic deposits all over the earth including the deepest oceans and, most significantly, the sixth extinction.
Species died all the time at a steady rate. Sophisticated statistics is required to come up with the background extinction rate. Whole databases of fossils have to be studied to arrive at correct figures. These rates are given per million species-years. For mammals it is .25 per million species-years. For a layman, this means that for the 5,500 mammal species living today one can expect one species to disappear every seven hundred years. For amphibians it has been calculated that the background extinction rate is even slower, about one in a 1000 years. [Background extinctions are rarely noticed, they go on in the background all the time; like lynchings in Pakistan or Afghanistan.]
Mass extinctions are on a very different scale. They are events that eliminate a significant proportion of the world’s biota in a geologically insignificant amount of time. Mass extinctions involve substantial biodiversity losses (at least up to 75 percent) and are global in nature.
There have been five mass extinctions. The first of these is the ‘End Ordovician Extinction’. This took place about 443.8 million years ago. 25 percent of marine families and 85 percent of marine species disappeared. The next mass extinction was the ‘Late Devonian Extinction’. This occurred between 407.6 million and 358.9 million years ago. About 80 percent of all animal species and between 15 and 20 percent of marine families perished. The third mass extinction was the deadliest of all. It is the ‘End-Permian Extinction’ that lasted from about 265.1 million to about 251.9 million years ago. 95 percent of marine species and about 70 percent of land species, including plants, insects and vertebrates disappeared. This extinction is often called ‘The Great Dying.’ The fourth mass extinction is the ‘Late Triassic Extinction’. It took place about 201.3 million years ago. In about 10,000 years it caused 76 percent of all extant species to die out. These deaths opened ecological niches into which the dinosaurs evolved. The End Cretaceous Extinction was the fifth great extinction. It is thought that a large asteroid striking the Earth in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico set it off. Some geologists believe that a series of volcanic explosions, particularly in India, altered the atmosphere to such an extent it triggered this event. (We Indians can take pride in the fact that we were generating a lot of hot air 66 million years ago.)
Whatever the cause of this mass extinction, it had a profound effect on life on earth. Eighty percent of all animals and a huge number of plants died out. A swathe of species including the giant reptiles were wiped out. The dinosaurs, along with all the ammonites, disappeared and the age of mammals was slowly ushered in. Mammals which had first appeared in the late Triassic, were able to take over a number of ecological niches that fell vacant with the great extinction and the disappearance of the largest of the terrestrial animals.
The ‘End Cretaceous Extinction’, though the third largest of the five extinction episodes, was followed by a frenzy of speciation and several small scale extinction events. These seem to have been triggered by changes in temperature. Global warming and cooling took its toll. The ‘Cenozoic’ or the age of mammals, in which we are living, is divided into seven epochs. The last of these, the ‘Holocene’, has been remarkably kind to Homo sapiens. It has been a “goldilocks period” providing just the right amount of stability, in terms of climate variation, that has enabled Homo sapiens to thrive.
The Cretaceous period, which followed the Jurassic, is important to us because it was the major period of oil formation. One dares say that if the mega deaths of trees had not taken place a 100.5 million years ago current debates about fossil fuels, and even the full face veil for females, may have been superfluous. The debate about the degree of holiness of the cow is of more recent provenance, only as old as the Holocene when the Bos taurus was, unfortunately, domesticated, eaten, then milked, then worshipped. This must be pointed out because geology and palaeontology are normally seen as dry and academic subjects, a somnambulist’s dream. One can make them attractive by pointing out that their riot-causing potential is immense and waiting to be exploited.
In spite of the massive kill-offs that devastated life from time to time, the Cenozoic era has been good for life. It proliferated in mind bogglingly fecund ways both in terms of sheer numbers of species and in the biodiversity available.
The last two and a half million years have also been good for Homo sapiens. They have provided the right conditions for him to diverge from his ancestral roots and take the steps that have led to his being today, in the words of E E Cummings, “this/fine specimen of hypermagical/ultraomnipotence.” Some of the steps that led to this position are worth recalling, because they explain, to a great deal, the cause of our current crisis.
Some of the landmarks are: emerging in Africa, in hominid form, between 8 and 5 million years ago. Between five and three million years ago, we were occasionally arboreal but habitually bipedal on the ground. About a million years later, we were using stone tools. Between two and one and a half million years ago, the hominid had turned into Homo and was using his increased dexterity related to tool manufacture and use to hunt animals far larger than him. By about 1.5 million years he had began to manipulate fire. Between a hundred thousand and thirty five thousand years ago, he began burying his dead and conducting rituals. (The first priest who, Voltaire opined, was the first rogue to meet the first fool, perhaps goes back to this period.) The first Homo sapiens only emerged around 35,000 years BP. But soon after emerging he wiped out Homo neanderthalenisis, but not before having sex with the species; sex often enough to leave its mark in the genetic record. All non-Africans carry between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. But Homo sapiens also went on to develop agriculture, civilizations and all that modern technology has made possible.
Including the sixth extinction.
The sixth extinction is different from the preceding five in that it is entirely man made. Like public holidays or five year plans they are entirely the work of man, with a little help, sometimes, from nature. But they are not always, as romantics imagine, the work of modern man. The sixth extinction could be said to have begun in the middle of the last ice age. The first event to mark it was the mega fauna extinction. Mega fauna are large animals. They once were found in plenty over most of the world and still populate comic books and movies. They had few natural predators and so, in spite of low birth rates and slow population growth rates, dominated most of the land masses. Except on small islands their average sizes kept increasing. But as man moved out of Africa and spread across the globe, the mega fauna disappeared. The pace of migration and the pulses of extinction seem a perfect match. It was as if man was using his new found ability to build tools and weapons and the social cooperation made possible by his mastery of language to drive most of the mega fauna to death. As a biologist working on body size remarked “Being a good predator is a general feature of our genus.” One thing has to be admitted though. Unlike in the case of the Neanderthals there is no evidence that men had sex with the megafauna before exterminating them.
Elizabeth Kolbert, in her book ‘The Sixth Extinction’ (2014) points out that one of the scientific projects currently being undertaken is one to decode the Neanderthal genome, like the earlier Human Genome Project. Neanderthals are not human; only a close relative. When the project is complete, she says with fascinated horror, we will be able to see what makes Sapiens different from Neanderthals. We will then see what mutations make us “the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.” [That’s a little like Kannur politics.]
The loss of megafauna had profound impacts on the ecology of the places they inhabited. Their regulatory role in maintaining certain types of ecosystems was altered forever. For example, as mammoths went extinct in the northern hemisphere, the grass-dominated worlds they helped maintain also went extinct.
Over hunting is only one of the minor factors responsible for the ongoing mass extinction. The passenger pigeon, the great auk, the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, the Quagga are the tip of the hunted-to-extinction iceberg. The Indian tiger and the Indian cheetah may soon join them. Millions of birds are hunted even today, sometimes for food, but mostly for pleasure. The worst places for birds appear to be, if Jonathan Franzen, novelist and bird lover and chronicler, is to be believed, southern and eastern Europe, northern Africa the middle east, most of China and the far east. The first Chinese museum of natural history had pictures and models of a number of animals. Only two pieces of information about the exhibits were provided – what their names were and which parts were the tastiest.
The real damage to biodiversity and contributor to the sixth mass extinction comes from other human directed activities. Some of them are:
Habitat destruction. This is one of the deadliest and most serious threats to biological diversity. Global warming is a major contributor to this. As developmental activities reshape the world, roads, dams and other constructions shred up eco systems and devastate life forms.
Invasive species. From rats that have wiped out rivals for food or space, to fungus that has devastated vulnerable species like frogs and other small animals, invasive species have wrecked havoc on biodiversity. E O Wilson has found that one in ten imported species escapes to the wild and one in ten of those spreads enough to become a pest. Inevitably some invasive becomes a mega pest and takes out some native species. As man colonised the Pacific islands, two thirds of the nonpasserine Pacific birds were extinguished. Thus some ten percent of the bird species on Earth were wiped out during a single episode of colonization by relatively small groups of people. (This was much before the white man reached Polynesia. He took alien species and guns to complete the job that the first wave of colonialists.)
Pollution. There are few places on earth not contaminated by pollutants. Rivers and fresh water ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to pollution and its damaging effects. As pollution spreads, eco systems change and species die out.
Population growth. Hardly anyone speaks about the environmental cost of the incredible number of people on earth today. When I left home it was around seven point seven billion. The problem is not just the numbers. It is the increasing consumption that people indulge in as they climb up the income ladder. Aspirational for most people does not mean striving for greater knowledge or understanding or peace or love or friendship. It just means consuming more. Not just consuming more, but consuming more than your neighbour and letting him know about it. (Think social media.)
Agriculture. Agriculture is a villain, particularly industrialized forms of agriculture. Soil degradation and destruction of the remaining wilderness are processes not easy to reverse. For example: the last of the tropical forests supporting the big apes is being cleared to cultivate oil palms. Along with the apes some of the most dense and rich and bio-diverse forests in the whole world are being destroyed forever. Intensive agriculture and the extensive use of pesticides is ravaging the insect and microbial world. According to one report insect populations are declining precipitously, threatening a catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems. The total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent a year and could vanish within a century. Ecosystems cannot function without insects, which are food for other species, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients. Microbes also play an equally important role and there is evidence that the microbiome within human beings has drastically shrunk recently, particularly during the Anthropocene.
The overharvesting of the oceans is another important factor that is responsible for the sixth extinction. The open seas are a common resource and all such sources are being overharvested. The oceans also suffer from acidification, pollution from toxins and a potentially deadly reduction in oxygen levels because of excess nutrient runoff. Coral reefs are like tropical forests and they are, worldwide, in decline.
All these problems can be subsumed under the title ‘growth and development.’ If there is one thing that is killing the planet it is our single minded pursuit of economic development. The engineer-economist-businessman-politician nexus appears to be unshakeable. The bulk of the public support them too.
Before concluding this session let us look at how we know that the sixth extinction is underway and at what rate species are being lost.
In this, as in many other things concerning life on Earth, I am relying on E O Wilson, the Harvard zoologist. In his view, based on the observations of scientists and analysis using mathematical tools he has helped develop, about two million species are known to science today. He thinks that another six million are waiting to be discovered. The irony is that most of these will be lost before they have been described by science.
His calculations about species loss are alarming. Minus the math this is what he says: “As a consequence of human activity… the current rate of extinction overall is between one hundred and one thousand times than it was originally, all due to human activity.” This surely is a doomsday scenario.
We know what has to be done. Globally we need to adopt a green protocol. We should keep all fossil fuels in the ground. This will also mean stopping the production of plastic. We have to eliminate atmospheric pollution and try and restore the balance of gases that existed in the atmosphere prior to the industrial revolution. Technologies that are harmful have to be replaced with more earth-friendly ones. Forests, oceans and other ecosystems should be restored. With this in mind the UN has already declared the next decade the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. [We will hold some meetings and light some lamps.]
Ambitious targets have been set. But there is little ground for optimism. Daniel Khaneman, the Noble winning behavioural scientist and an authority on human decision making, says that no progress can be expected on global warming and similar issues because all the evidence indicated that human beings will persist in irrational behaviour. George Marshall’s ‘Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change’ (2014) agrees.
Kerala proved both these gentlemen right recently. We have an excellent bunch of geologists and ecologists who understand the state and its problems with the intelligence of a Khaneman or an E O Wilson. We have scientists who warned us about landslides and flood damage before the mahapralayam of 2018. One would have imagined that a rational set of people would learn from this. Look at what eventually happened. Before two months were over, Kerala had forgotten the pralayam and the lessons to be learned from it. All discussions were on the mythical lust a stone idol would feel on seeing real women. And now we are back to schemes to pour cement and concrete on every square inch of Kerala.
What can be done about this? How would Prof KKN have reacted to the situation?
There are two broad solutions offered to the ongoing catastrophe. The first is to embrace the anthropocene. It is to deny climate change and the extinction crisis or to see them as the price to pay for development. Life can continue as usual. Science and technology, particularly as controlled by big corporations, will provide the products that will keep everyone happy. This will not just be collective suicide but suicide while completely drunk.
The alternative is outlined in E O Wilson’s 2016 book, ‘Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life’. It involves a variety of strategies. The most important is the accumulation of knowledge through research and study. Biology, particularly taxonomy, should be pursued with passion and purpose. This should be accompanied by a recognition of the value of the wilderness. This can be understood in terms of the ecosystem services rendered by all of nature. An ecosystemic approach would see each ecosystem, no matter what its size, as “a functional unit or complex of relations in which living organisms (plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms) interact with one another and their physical environment, forming a dynamic yet broadly stable system.”
Wilson wants half of the Earth to be kept apart for this. He shows how, if done without much delay and effectively, the sixth extinction can be halted and about eighty percent of life forms saved. There is no mission more important than this before mankind. We will move from the Anthropcene to the Ecocene.
The sixth extinction is a global problem. If KKN were around he would have, I believe, done two things. One, he would have done his best to understand the problem. This would be done through observation and study. The second would be to look for solutions at a local level. If we are losing species and degrading our environment, we should come up with solutions. About a third of the species of plants described by Van Reede in ‘Hortus Malabaricus’ (composed between 1978 and 1693) are endangered or already extinct. It is politically convenient and easy to blame colonialism for this. Induchoodan stayed clear of politics. But he would be working on the ground, lens, camera and notebook in hand, constantly on the lookout for solutions. And, through his conversations and writings, he would not only have passed on his understanding and insights to the public but also inspired a generation of younger naturalists and activists – of whom, I believe, Kerala has an excellent collection – to work for the cause. On Sabarimala, I feel that KKN would have endorsed the Sunderlal Bahuguna solution. Open the temples to locals throughout the year; stop pilgrims from other places visiting it. Ask them to pray, instead, at the temple closest to their homes. There is no shortage of temples in India and it would be one step towards a zero carbon mode of worship. If this was done, Bahuguna opioned, the spiritual needs of the tribals would be taken care, the spiritual needs of the pilgrims would be taken care of and the forests around Sabarimala would recover.
When we look back at Neelakantan sir’s life, we will be struck by how rich it was. In curiosity, knowledge, intelligence, compassion and the right intentions he was as rich as one could be. And when one remembers that such a rich man lived in the 20th century, the century of the smug consumer and the narcissistic and profligate squanderer of resources, one is astounded at how tiny a carbon footprint he left behind. Let us salute him, not by lighting a lamp in his memory, but by adopting his values, his thinking and his behaviour.
Let us halt the sixth extinction.
Thank you.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
profpvk@gmail.com
Thank you. Nandri. Namaskaram.
PVK 15/June/2026.
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