Writer and professor, Ashley Dawson, argues in his new book that capitalism is behind our current mass extinction crisis. But installing universal guaranteed income in biodiversity hotspots may be one remedy.

Human nature isn’t driving mass extinction – as some have argued – but our acceptance of capitalism is, according to English Professor Ashley Dawson with the City University of New York.

In his recent, slim, eye-opening book, Extinction: A Radical History, Dawson lays out the case that our current global economic system is pushing the Earth ever closer to a mass extinction event – one not seen since a rogue comet ended the reign of the dinosaurs. But he also argues there are potential solutions, including giving a universal guaranteed income to populations living in or near biodiversity hotspots to counter poaching, deforestation, and other harmful activities.

Capitalism as species-eater



Around five hundred years ago, Europeans brought about the invention of modern day capitalism, a system that was rooted in colonialism, slavery and environmental destruction, according to Dawson.

“Capitalism is an economic system founded on ceaseless expansion,” Dawson, who specializes in Postcolonial studies, said. “It must grow at a compound rate or it will experience convulsive economic and social crises. The contradictions of this system are patently self-evident: an economic system based on infinite expansion must inevitably crash into the natural limits of finite ecosystems.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Toughie, the last of the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrogs, died last September. The species is now believed to be extinct, one of more than 150 amphibians that have been lost in the last few decades. Photograph: Atlanta Botanical Garden

Although capitalism has spread over the world in the last half millennium, Dawson argues it didn’t have to be this way.

“The global expansion of capitalism was not a deepening of some inherent human drive to environmental destruction, but a complete transformation in the foundation of human societies, the substitution of an ecocidal and genocidal system for the relatively sustainable social forms that preceded it.”

With capitalism came an increasing exploitation and degradation of the environment – and an onset of our current biodiversity crisis.

When species are viewed as resources under capitalism, they are relentlessly targeted until the resource – i.e. animal population – collapses. In the book, Dawson points to several examples of this, including the beaver pelt trade in pre-colonial America, whaling in the 19th Century, and the decimation of bison during the American Indian Wars (as Dawson writes of this particularly grim chapter: “a conscious strategy of imperialism, generating what might be termed ecological warfare”).

Contemporary examples are readily available as well: the bottoming out of pangolin populations, the near-extinction of several freshwater turtle species in Asia, the vanishing of the Earth’s great apes, the collapse of numerous fisheries worldwide and the near-extinction of Bluefin tuna. And the list goes on. And every year new species are added – African elephants, rhinos, lions, and many many more. As populations vanish, new sources are sought: pangolins are now being hunted in Africa for consumption in China while freshwater turtles are being stolen from Latin America to feed Asian consumers.



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At the same time habitat destruction – the biggest threat to the world’s wildlife – is pushing ever further into the world’s wildernesses.

“Environmental destruction is primarily driven by large corporate interests, most often with economic ties to banks and markets in the global North,” said Dawson, adding that “capitalism’s omnivorous appetite was perhaps less apparent in the past, when only certain nations were thoroughly animated by its all-consuming spirit, but today capitalism is a global system.”

According to Dawson, overpopulation (human population now stands at 7.4 billion) is not responsible for our ecological crises.

“It is a red herring to blame extinction on increasing population. While there are of course theoretically limits to the number of people that a particular ecosystem can support, the key point is that capitalism is an economic system based on exploiting ecosystems as much as possible – and on ‘externalizing’ the costs of this exploitation,” he said, dubbing the overpopulation argument as one with “highly racist implications.”

Humans can be sustainable

In the book, Dawson argues that recent extinctions are different from human-caused extinctions in the Pleistocene.

“In most instances those [earlier] extinctions were either relatively localized, had other contributory factors, and in most cases were succeeded by a period of stability,” he said.

Every continent but Africa saw most of its megafauna obliterated tens-of-thousands of years ago, but scientists are still debating the cause: human hunting, climate change or some combination of the two. In recent years the accumulated evidence increasingly points to overzealous humans as the primary factor in the megafauna extinction– including everything from giant kangaroos in Australia to mega-orangutans in Asia to elephant-like behemoths in North America – but Dawson said that doesn’t mean mass extinction today is inevitable.

“The archeological record clearly suggests that Native Americans lived in relative harmony with their environments for thousands of years subsequently.”

We do not lack alternatives to capitalism today. What we lack is the political power to overcome capitalism domination. Ashley Dawson

Today, Dawson points to what Indian historian, Ramachandra Guha, calls “ecosystem people” as examples of sustainable, non-capitalistic living. These include many of the world’s indigenous groups or small-scale farmers using sustainable practices and living close to nature.

“It is these groups of ecosystem people that are often at the forefront of contemporary environmental struggles,” he said. “Think, for instance, of the role of indigenous activists in fighting extreme extraction and fossil capitalism today, from Standing Rock in North Dakota to the struggle of the Sarayaku in the Ecuadoran rainforest.”

For Dawson, such groups are emblems of what’s possible in the future.



“Human societies throughout history have demonstrated great ingenuity in making ecosystems more productive, and, where this productivity is shared equally, have been characterized by significant civilization longevity.”

One remedy: pay that biodiversity debt?

If we accept Dawson’s argument, what do we do? We could start by supporting – with money – the human populations living in or near biodiversity hotspots. Such hotspots represent only 1.4 percent of land on Earth, but harbor almost 60 percent of known species.



Many less-developed states have argued that they are owed a climate debt – i.e. money paid for the damage caused by climate change – from wealthier countries, like the US, the UK and Australia, who are primarily responsible for climate change. In the same way, Dawson argues, wealthy countries owe less-developed states a biodiversity debt. This could be paid, he contends, through a universal income.

“Focusing such guaranteed income on the relatively limited number of biodiversity hotspots would remove the prime economic motive people living in such areas have for destroying their local environment: poverty.”

Such an income could also allow these people, who are often marginalized and sidelined, to fight back more effectively against corporate or government projects that threaten their hotspots, according to Dawson.



The income could come from a tax on financial transactions that have enriched the world’s wealthiest people and have been partially responsible for moving funds from developing countries to already-wealthy ones.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A burning forest at dusk in Brazil. Sixty-seventy percent of deforestation in the Amazon results from cattle ranches and soyabeans cultivation while the rest mostly results from small-scale subsistence agriculture. Photograph: Brasil2/Getty Images

In his book, Dawson writes that the concept wouldn’t need to come at expense of traditional conservation programmes, but would compliment them.

Such a radical idea would likely attract much resistance – just as climate debt has.



And it leads to many questions. How many people would receive these funds? How much would payouts be? Would recipients have to promise greater conservation efforts in order to secure them? And would giving universal income to certain areas lead to a send influx of immigrants leading to more stress on the environment?

Dawson’s book doesn’t untangle all these details, but his tome isn’t a policy report. It’s an elegant, controversial thesis about how we got here and why.



“We do not lack alternatives to capitalism today,” Dawson said. “What we lack is the political power to overcome capitalism domination and exploitation.”

