Book Review: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass ExtinctionBy Annalee NewitzDoubleday, 2013 Annalee Newitz, the smart and engaging editor-in-chief of the reliably, time-zappingly interesting website i09.com, has written as cheerful a book about the Apocalypse as you’re ever likely to read, and there’s not an angel or a raptured soul anywhere in it. Instead, Newitz deals with some decidedly secular versions of the end-of-all: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is about extinctions.Not ordinary extinctions, which have afflicted life on Earth as long as there’s been life on Earth, but mass extinctions, in which upwards of 75 percent of all life on the planet dies off in the relative geological deep breath of 2 million years. According to Newitz, Earth has experienced five of these mass extinctions, including “The Great Dying” 185 million years ago, in which very nearly all life was extinguished, and, more famously, the event 65 million years ago that wiped out almost all the dinosaurs and facilitated the rise of mammals.The overview Newitz presents is spryly readable, and she gives her familiar material a contemporary-feeling spin by making the case that these mass extinctions were all the result of climate change, regardless of the specific catastrophic events (meteor strikes, mega-volcanoes, and the like) that set them off. The planet’s biosphere is an intensely changeable thing in Newitz’s telling, constantly swinging between extremes:

Undeniably, our planet is undergoing potentially deadly environmental changes today. But it’s incorrect to say that this is the first or even the worst time it’s happened … Over the course of its history, Earth has always vacillated between a carbon-rich greenhouse and its opposite, the oxygen-rich icehouse where humanity is more comfortable. We’re simply the first species on Earth to figure out how this climate cycle works, and to realize that our survival depends on preventing the next environmental shift.

A good portion of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is given over to providing a lively popular account of those earlier catastrophes, but Newitz’s real subject is the calamitous present:

During the last million years of our evolution as a species, humans narrowly avoided extinction more than once. We lived though harsh conditions while another human group, the Neanderthals, did not. This isn’t just because we are lucky. It’s because as a species, we are extremely cunning when it comes to survival.

The subtle note of species triumphalism (not to say self-serving delusion) in that passage only grows stronger as the book progresses. The two times Homo sapiens has survived extinction in the last millions years, it’s done so by fleeing blindly and being lucky enough to fetch up out of catastrophe’s reach; there was nothing conscious, let alone cunning, about it. And with their far greater physical strength, lung capacity, chewing power, and bodily insulation, Neanderthals were easily more suited to surviving “harsh conditions” than were modern humans; they’re not here because Homo sapiens wiped them out, as Homo sapiens wiped out virtually every large mammalian species with which it ever had – or is presently having – contact. The mass extinction which paleontologist Richard Leakey estimated began 15,000 years ago darkly coincides with the rise of modern mankind, and it, like modern mankind, is ongoing.Newitz’s triumphalism is no less irritating for being so upbeat, alas. She roots for her species like the beloved old home team, and in order to do so, she’s occasionally forced to tell some eye-opening whoppers, as when she agrees with one of the experts she interviews that humans have “good survival characteristics,” including “being able to eat a lot of different things and live anywhere” – a statement that’s only saved from being preposterous if Newitz is equating “humans” with “humans and their 20^th century technology.” Otherwise, large chunks of the planet don’t fall under the heading of “anywhere” – and “a lot of different things” shrinks to a menu so small as to be laughable.And if Newitz is dubious on matters of gastronomy, she’s much worse on matters of grace:

Human beings may be experts at destroying life, including our own, but we are also tremendously talented at preserving it. For all the stories about human selfishness and bloodlust, there are just as many about people putting themselves in mortal danger to rescue strangers from burning houses or oppressive governments.

Even the brightest optimist should blush to write such nonsense. In the last 15,000 years, billions of humans have died at the hands of other humans. The number saved from burning houses hovers stubbornly around six.Newitz remains stubbornly hopeful. She rounds off her book with just the kind of fascinating future-extrapolations that make her website so much nerdy fun: there’s talk of giant space-elevators, and of terraforming other planets so that they can support human immigrants in large numbers. There’s also practical speculations on how to make present-day Earth living more adaptable to climate change and more resilient to catastrophe.It’s all meant as a shot of hope in alarming environmental times, and it’s well taken as such. But it can’t really compete with the morning news every day: species going extinct by the tens of thousands every single year, two very near-misses from passing asteroids, a supervolcano caldera growing in central North America by about a hand-span every year, a sudden increase in strong and unpredictable hurricanes and tornadoes all over the world caused by runaway global warming, and over 25 percent of the planet gripped in a drought that is no longer seasonal but permanent. The 21^st century is likely to see environmental changes from which mankind can no longer scatter, adapt, or remember, and you won’t exactly catch the Neanderthals weeping over it.