Our Crying Planet: An Approach to the Problem of Climate Change Denial

All they had to do was pick off a mammoth or a giant ground sloth every so often … and keep this up for several centuries. This would have been enough to drive the populations of slow-reproducing species first into decline and then all the way down to zero …. For the people involved in it, the decline of the megafauna would have been so slow as to be imperceptible. The megafauna extinction was a geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it …. Humans are capable of driving any large mammal species instinct, even though they are also capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not.

Life on our planet possesses intrinsic capacities for adaptation. Those adaptations depend on a relatively constant physical and chemical environment. Humans have now radically disrupted that environment, placing the adaptive capacities of life on the planet under severe strain. We are surrounded by evidence of that strain: extinctions—those just past and those pending—give dramatic and brutal expression to the increasingly precarious baseline status of much of the planet's life forms. The measurably