The Long Silence: From Megafauna Ghosts to the Sixth Extinction, and Our Search for Reciprocity

We are a species haunted by ghosts. They are the shadows of mammoths on the tundra, the echo of wings that once numbered in the billions, the silent, striped form of a predator pacing a cage in a long-gone zoo.

The story of extinction is the story of humanity’s accumulating power, a narrative of accelerating loss that began in the deep past and is culminating in the global crisis of our present. It is a story that begins with stone tools and ends with globalized supply chains.

But it is also a story of dawning comprehension. We are, perhaps for the first time, beginning to understand the profound, complex, and synergistic ways in which we—and the climate we are changing—have unraveled the web of life.

Now, we are faced with the ultimate question: If we are the cause, can we also be the cure? Can we reframe a relationship built on exploitation into one of “reciprocity,” as the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests?¹⁴³ The answer requires us to face our ghosts, understand their demise, and then fundamentally rewire our place in the world.

Audio overview of this article

The First Ghosts: Megafauna and the Pleistocene Riddle

The world we call “natural” is already an artifact of an ancient loss. When the first Homo sapiens arrived in the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene, they entered a land of giants. Thirty-eight genera of large mammals, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and camels, vanished in a geological instant.¹

For decades, the debate was a binary: Was it climate or was it us?

The geoscientist Paul S. Martin, in his “overkill hypothesis,” argued that human hunters, armed with Clovis spear points, swept through a continent of “naive” prey in a “prehistoric blitzkrieg” that left bones in its wake.⁶, ⁸, ¹¹ Evidence, including radiocarbon dating that shows a “north to south… decline” in megafauna matching human migration, supports this.⁹ One 2024 study even chemically analyzed the skull of a child from 12,800 years ago, finding isotopes that “most closely matched… the mammoth genus.”⁶

But the climate-change camp asks a powerful question: If it was just hunting, why did these giants survive previous glacial-interglacial transitions, only to vanish at this specific one?¹ The end of the Pleistocene was an “ecological upheaval,” a profound shift from a glacial to an interglacial world.¹

The consensus that has emerged is one of terrible synergy. It was not one or the other; it was both, acting in concert. The changing climate was already stressing and fragmenting megafauna populations.¹³, ¹ Then, a new and lethally efficient predator arrived on the scene. In Patagonia, studies show that megafaunal extinctions did not occur until “human presence and climate warming coincided.”¹⁴¹

The most profound realization is not that they died, but what happened after. These animals were “ecological engineers.”¹²⁴, ¹ When they were removed, the world they maintained vanished.

Without giant browsers to suppress woody growth and cycle nutrients, the “mammoth steppe” of the high latitudes was replaced by “unpalatable low-diversity wet mossy tundra” and forest.¹², ¹ In North America and Australia, the loss of mega-herbivores led to a “brown–green transition”—open, patchy woodlands became dense, uniform forests, which triggered an enhanced fire regime.¹²⁴, ¹

The forests we see today, the very landscapes we fight to preserve, are “ghost” landscapes, defined by an absence. We live in a biosphere “artially depleted of giants.”¹²⁴, ¹ This prehistoric “entanglement between humans and environmental change” was the opening chapter of the Anthropocene.¹³³

A Prelude in Three Acts

If the Pleistocene was a tragedy of first encounter, the centuries that followed were a refinement of the tools. The path to our current crisis is an acceleration of power, demonstrated in three iconic extinctions. Each is an archetype for the very forces now operating on a global scale.

Act I: The Dodo (The Accidental Extinction)

When Dutch sailors landed on Mauritius in 1598, they found a paradise engineered by isolation.⁶³ The dodo, a large, flightless relative of the pigeon, had “evolved to be supremely adapted to its island lifestyle” and had no fear of predators.⁶³, ⁶⁴

The sailors hunted them, but the dodo’s fate was sealed by what they brought ashore accidentally. It was the “rats, pigs, and monkeys that arrived with the sailors and pillaged the Dodo’s vulnerable ground nests” that truly doomed the species.⁶⁶, ²

Less than 80 years after its discovery, the dodo was gone.⁶⁴, ⁶⁷ It is the perfect, tragic archetype for one of the modern era’s “five horsemen”: Invasive Alien Species.

Act II: The Passenger Pigeon (The Industrial Extinction)

No extinction demonstrates the fallacy of “infinite” abundance like that of the passenger pigeon. In the 1800s, its population was estimated at 3 to 5 billion, perhaps the most abundant bird on Earth.⁴³ Flocks 1 mile wide and 300 miles long darkened the sky for days.

This abundance was its undoing. After the Civil War, two technologies—the railroad and the telegraph—turned a local resource into a continental commodity.³

Market hunters could now learn of a nesting site by wire, travel there by rail, and ship millions of birds back to cities in barrels.³ At one nesting site in Wisconsin in 1871, an estimated 136 million birds were targeted by thousands of hunters.³

The bird’s survival strategy, to overwinter in massive flocks, made it lethally vulnerable to “brute force” exploitation.³ By 1900, the last known wild bird was shot.⁴⁴ In 1914, Martha, the last of her kind, died alone in the Cincinnati Zoo.⁴⁵ This was the archetype of Direct Exploitation, scaled by industry.

Act III: The Thylacine (The Political Extinction)

If the dodo’s end was accidental and the pigeon’s industrial, the thylacine’s was political. The “Tasmanian tiger” was a magnificent carnivorous marsupial, the apex predator of its island.⁵¹, ⁵²

When European settlers arrived, they blamed the thylacine for livestock losses—losses more likely caused by feral dogs and mismanagement.⁴ The thylacine became a scapegoat, and its eradication became policy.

In 1888, the Tasmanian Parliament placed an official bounty on its head: £1 for an adult, 10 shillings for a juvenile.⁴⁹, ⁴ More than 2,180 bounties were paid before the program ended in 1909.⁴⁹ This “zealous hunting,” combined with habitat destruction, sealed its fate.⁴⁹, ⁵⁰

The last known wild thylacine was shot in 1930. The last captive individual, sometimes called “Benjamin,” died of exposure and neglect at a Hobart zoo on September 7, 1936.⁴⁹, ⁵⁰ The species had been granted “protected status” just 59 days earlier.⁴ This was the archetype of Habitat Loss and Persecution, driven by state-sponsored decree.

The Sixth Extinction: A Crisis of Industry

From accident to industry to policy, these preludes set the stage for the current moment. We have scaled these forces globally. We have entered what scientists call the “Holocene extinction,” a crisis “caused exclusively by human activities.”²¹

The Unprecedented Pace

The “Big Five” mass extinctions of Earth’s past were caused by asteroids or volcanism.⁴⁰ This one is us. And its defining feature is speed.

The normal “background rate” of extinction is estimated to be between 0.1 and 1 species per 10,000 species per 100 years.²³ Our current extinction rate is estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than that background rate.²¹, ³⁷, ³⁸, ⁴²

A landmark 2015 study put this in stark, harrowing perspective: The number of vertebrate species that have gone extinct in the last century alone would have taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear under normal conditions.³⁹, B⁴

The Five Horsemen

The 2019 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment Report, the most comprehensive in history, delivered the definitive verdict: “Approximately 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction,” many within decades.²⁶, ²⁹

The report identified the “five direct drivers” of this crisis, the five horsemen of our modern apocalypse, in descending order of impact:²⁶, ³¹

Changes in land and sea use (primarily agriculture)³³
Direct exploitation of organisms (overfishing, poaching)³⁵
Climate change
Pollution³⁶
Invasive alien species³⁴

This is not a crisis of encounter, as in the Pleistocene. It is a crisis of industry. It is driven by the “unsustainable use of land, water, and energy” that fuels our globalized economy.²² The demand for food, fuel, and commodities has “severely altered our natural world.”²⁹

Case Study: The Vaquita (Driver #2)

No story illustrates the tragic, industrial nature of modern extinction better than that of the vaquita. The world’s “most endangered cetacean,” this tiny porpoise exists only in the upper Gulf of California.⁵⁴, ⁵⁷ In 2018, fewer than 19 individuals were left; today, the number is likely fewer than 10.⁵⁶, B⁸

The vaquita is not hunted. It is “collateral damage.”B⁸ It is dying in illegal gillnets set for another endangered fish, the totoaba.⁵³, ⁵⁴ The totoaba’s swim bladder, or “maw,” is prized for its (unproven) medicinal properties and fetches “high prices on the black market in China.”⁵⁴, ⁵⁵

This is not a story of subsistence. It is a story of international organized crime and a globalized, illicit supply chain. Necropsies on vaquita carcases show they are in “good nutritional status” with “full stomachs.”⁵⁶ They are not starving. They are drowning, one by one, in nets set for a luxury product.

Case Study: The Sumatran Rhino (Drivers #1 and #2)

The Sumatran rhino is caught in a synergistic pincer movement. With as few as 30 mature individuals left, the species is “seriously imperiled.”⁵⁸, ⁶⁰

First comes Driver #1: Habitat Loss. The rhino’s rainforest habitat is being systematically destroyed by “logging, agricultural expansion, and land conversion,”⁵⁸, ⁵⁹ specifically the “expansion of palm oil plantations” for the global market.⁵⁸, B⁹ This “fragments and isolates” the remaining populations, making it “difficult for individuals to find suitable mates.”⁵⁸, B⁹

Then comes Driver #2: Exploitation. This fragmentation “increase[s] their vulnerability to poaching.”⁵⁸, B⁹ Poachers, driven by “demand in traditional Asian medicine” for the rhino’s horn, can more easily pick off the isolated survivors.⁵⁸, ⁵⁹, ⁶²

Looming over all of this is Driver #3: Climate Change. The IPBES report identifies it as “playing an increasingly important role”³³ and what the WWF calls the “dominant cause of biodiversity loss in the coming decades.”¹¹⁸ It is the great threat multiplier, “intensified” by habitat destruction and pollution.³⁴

As Sir Robert Watson, former chair of both the IPBES and the IPCC, puts it, climate change creates an “acceleration of the pressure on biodiversity.”⁸⁶ He concludes with a warning that should define our era: “We either solve both or we solve neither.”⁸⁴, ⁵

The Limb on Which We Perch

Why does this matter? Beyond the loss of ecological function, beyond the silenced forests and empty seas, what is it that we are truly losing?

In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert popularized the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s warning: “IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.”⁶⁸, ⁶⁹

Kolbert’s own insight is even more piercing. Our good intentions, our “caring,” may be irrelevant. “It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care,” she writes. “What matters is that people change the world.”⁶⁹, ⁷¹ Our unique “capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols” is indivisible from our “capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.”⁶⁹

This singular power, this “wholesale control over everything on earth,” lays upon us, in the words of Sir David Attenborough, “an awesome responsibility.”⁷³, ⁷⁵

Sir Robert Watson translates this responsibility into terms of justice. This is not just an “environmental issue,” he argues, but a “development, economic, social, security, equity and moral issue.”⁸⁴, ⁵ He points to the “power asymmetries and vested interests” that drive the crisis, noting that “poor people in poor countries are always adversely affected most.”⁸⁵

We are also losing the sheer, unbridled genius of creation. The writer Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, marveled at nature’s “profligate,” “extravagant” inventiveness.⁸⁹, ⁹¹ “The whole creation is one lunatic fringe,” she wrote.⁸⁹ To lose this is to lose “the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”⁷⁴

The late, great nature writer Barry Lopez, in Arctic Dreams, diagnosed the root of this destructive capacity. It is a “fundamental difference” in worldview, a philosophical break. Our culture, he wrote, has “irrevocably separated ourselves from the world that animals occupy. We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects.”¹⁴⁸

This is the core of the crisis. We have created a “separation” that enables “objectification.”⁸⁰, ⁵ This anthropocentrism “removes almost all moral standing from the nonhuman world, seeing it purely as a resource.”⁸⁰

The Great Reframing

How, then, do we “reframe our relationship”? If the problem is a worldview that turns living beings into “objects,” the solution must be a “Great Reframing” that restores their standing as subjects. This is not a menu of options; it is a nested hierarchy of paradigm shifts, from the global to the grammatical.

The Global Goal: From “Half-Earth” to “30×30”

First, we need a new, audacious goal. “To restore stability to our planet,” Sir David Attenborough urges, “we must restore its biodiversity… We must rewild the world!”⁷⁵

The scientific vision for this is E.O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” project: the proposal that we must set aside “roughly half of Earth’s land and seas for nature” to manage sufficient habitat and reverse the extinction crisis.⁹⁴, ⁹⁶, B¹¹

This grand vision has been translated into concrete global policy. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, is a plan for “transformative change.”¹¹⁵, ¹²⁰, ⁶ Its flagship target is “30×30″—a global commitment to protect at least 30% of the planet by 2030 through “well-managed and connected Protected Areas.”¹¹⁵, ¹¹⁷, ⁶

The Practical Engine: The Humility of “Rewilding”

How do we restore function to these protected lands? Through “rewilding.” The most celebrated success story is the 1995 reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park.¹⁰¹, B¹² The project became famous for its “trophic cascade”—wolves changed elk behavior, which allowed willows to recover, which in turn brought back beavers and songbirds.¹⁰¹

But this story, like the “pristine” landscapes of the past, is more complex. Recent scientific re-analysis of the data argues that the strength of this cascade was “overstated” and that the original, popular studies relied on “circular reasoning” and “sampling bias.”⁹⁹, B¹³ The true effects are “more modest” and “context-dependent.”⁹⁹, B¹³

This debate is not a failure; it is the most important lesson. It teaches us that ecosystems are “complex, dynamic” and “non-equilibrium” systems.⁹⁹, ¹⁰³ We cannot simply rewind the clock to a nostalgic past—a past that, as the Pleistocene ghosts show, was already altered.

Rewilding, therefore, is not about recreating a lost Eden. It is about “grounding project ambitions in tangible realities” and fostering “a wilder, more resilient future.”¹⁰⁰

The Legal Revolution: From Property to Personhood

How do we defend these rewilded places from the very industrial drivers that threaten them? By revolutionizing our legal framework.

The “Rights of Nature” movement directly challenges the “anthropocentric foundations” of Western law, which treat nature “purely as a resource.”⁸³, ¹¹⁰ Instead of nature being property to be exploited, this framework grants “legal personhood” to rivers, forests, and ecosystems, “placing them on the same legal footing as corporations.”¹¹⁰

This is not a theoretical abstraction. In 2008, Ecuador enshrined the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth) in its constitution. In 2017, New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, revered by the Māori people. Uganda’s 2019 National Environmental Act grants nature the right to “regenerate its vital cycles.”¹⁰⁹, B¹⁴

This legal shift is “rooted in Indigenous worldviews” that recognize the “interdependence of all natural entities, including humans.”¹¹⁰, B¹⁴

The Foundational Ethic: From “It” to “Who”

This legal revolution must be powered by the deepest reframing of all: an ethical one. This means moving beyond Western science alone and embracing Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).

TEK is not just a “body of knowledge”; it is a “lifeway.”¹⁰⁴, ¹⁰⁵ It is “rooted in spiritual health, culture, and language,” and based on the fundamental “Indigenous world view that humans are part of nature,” not separate from it.¹⁰⁴, B¹⁸

The core ethic of TEK, and the antidote to our crisis of separation, is “reciprocity.”¹⁴³, B¹⁸ Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that the “unique responsibility of humans is to show gratitude for the earth’s gifts.”¹⁴⁴ Our current crisis is a “Windigo” sickness, an illness of “taking too much and sharing too little.”¹⁴⁵

The ultimate reframing, Kimmerer teaches, is a change in our grammar. It is the restoration of personhood that Barry Lopez found missing.

“When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it,” she writes, “we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.”¹⁴⁶, ¹⁴⁷

This is the great work. It is to move from it to her, from resource to relative, from object to who. It is to remember, as Kimmerer writes of an old story, that “in the very beginning of time, all the rest of the Creation acted as a life raft for Human people. And now… we must be their life raft in reciprocity.”¹⁴³

Download The Long Silence: From Megafauna Ghosts to the Sixth Extinction, and Our Search for Reciprocity in .pdf with my compliments- Kevin Parker (remember, always check the facts to your own satisfaction!)

Resources Consulted

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014.
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat, 2019. https://ipbes.net/global-assessment.
Barnosky, Anthony D., Nicholas Matzke, Susumu Tomiya, Guinevere O. U. Wogan, Brian Swartz, Tiago B. Quental, Charles Marshall, et al. “Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?” Nature 471, no. 7336 (March 2, 2011): 51–57. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09678.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Wilson, Edward O. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016.
Monbiot, George. Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Endnotes