Tag Archive for: extinction

Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse | Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson is passionate about insects. One of his earliest memories is finding a stripey yellow and black caterpillar feeding on weeds at the edge of the school playground. His passion turned into a career, and in Silent Earth, Goulson draws on a lifetime of study and the latest ground-breaking research. He reveals the shocking decline of insect populations with eye-watering statistics – ‘41% of insect species threatened with extinction’ – and details the potentially catastrophic consequences of their demise.

This thoughtful and enjoyable book is part love letter to the insect world, part elegy, part rousing manifesto for a greener planet, and while we may feel helpless in the face of ecological breakdown, Goulson shows us how we can all take simple steps to encourage insects and counter their destruction. – Sandy Winterbottom

Venomous Lumpsucker | Ned Beauman

 

A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism. In a near future in which tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year, a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, including biobanks housing DNA samples from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected. But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species.

Animal cognition scientist Karin Resaint is consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature, while extinction industry executive Mark Halyard comes from the dark side. But they are both concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. The further they go in their hunt for the lumpsucker, the deeper they are drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks.Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing? Virtuosic and profound, witty and despairing, Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best.

The Sixth Extinction | Elizabeth Kolbert

In her ground-breaking and scientifically rigorous exploration of ecological breakdown, Elizabeth Kolbert reveals how human activity has led to humankind the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, which is “likely to be more prolonged and severe than the previous five.” Highlighting the loss of charismatic species such as the golden frogs of Panama and the great auks, she emphasises the irreparable loss of biodiversity, the interconnectedness of living systems, and how the disappearance of one species can have cascading effects on the entire web of life. “There is no way to know, and no way to stop, what’s now underway,” she writes. “The only question is whether and how to intervene.”  The book is a poignant but essential read for anyone concerned about the future of the non-human world – and our increasingly precarious existence on Earth.

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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The European Eel | Steve Ely

‘These eels were born in a continent of ocean
​and their parents carried into that vastness
​on mindless, reliable, pot-luck currents
​from Iceland, Belgium, Tunisia, Spain.’

​The European Eel is a long poem that imagines the life cycle, ecological contexts and ​enigma of the charismatic and critically endangered fish of the poem’s title. Based on Ely’s in-depth engagement with the scientific literature, discussions with leading eel researchers and conservationists, and hands-on experience with the eel in river systems across the country and abroad, ​The European Eel is unique not only in its sustained birth-to-death focus on the eel, but in the vivid way the eel’s riverine and marine habitats are evoked and articulated—and in its portrayal of the daunting array of anthropogenic threats that are currently threatening this once common species with extinction. Although a poem first and foremost—an Expressionistic epic monology that transforms its natural history into a quasi-gnostic affirmation of the persistence of life in the context of the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction—the poem’s rootedness in research enables it to transcend its status as art to function as a credible piece of informed nature writing capable of shaping ecological debate. Seventeen pages of illustrations by the award-winning artist P.R. Ruby complement and interpret the text, and detailed notes provide context that further opens up the astonishing world of the European eel.

‘Steve’s research of the eel’s complex life history is reflected in this incredible long-form poem – anything shorter would not have done this fish justice.’  ~ Dr Matthew Gollock, Marine and Freshwater Senior Programme Manager, Zoological Society of London.

Source: London Review of Books

Rite of Passage | Dom Bury

Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage is an initiation into what it means to be alive on the planet in the midst of extinction, of climate, environmental and systematic collapse. It is a journey into the shadow of man’s distorted relationship with the earth. And yet in the utter darkness of this hour, these often provocative poems suggest that there is hope. That we have had to come to the edge of our own annihilation as a species to collectively shift how we live, that only in the dark glare of this crisis, can a new world from the ashes of the old one now be formed.

Terminarchy | Angela France

Angela France’s distinctive new collection of poems eloquently considers the troubling terms of existence in an age of climate catastrophe and technological change. How do we negotiate a world where capitalism and greed threaten a fragile earth, where technology seems to promise us connection but might also fuel isolation? Where even finding solace in nature reminds us that the seasons can no longer be trusted? How is human urge and want hastening us towards our own ‘endling’ – and what might it mean to be the ‘last’?

In reframing ecopoetics in her own instinctive, radical, lyrical form, France juxtaposes the accelerated, all-consuming speed of contemporary and future times with the ‘longtime’ and ancient, and considers whether, rather than collison-course, there might be a better way to coexist. Where extinction threatens, these wry, alert poems and their eloquent, earthy voices try to find a way through and look for hope.

 

Purchase Terminarchy from Nine Arches Press