Death, taxes, extinction

Civilization is not a given. Extinction is.

Take, for example, a tree called Glossopteris. Common in its day, it grew to nearly 20 feet in height, tapering like a subalpine fir. One book I have calls “Glossopteris and its kin” a “hardy flora.”

The late Permian period, 300 million years ago and prime time for Glossopteris, seems strange to me (with dragonflies as big as birds) but also familiar (with cockroaches scuttling about). In the seas were fish and sharks and kelp; on land the world was green, but a different green from what we see today, and quieter: no flowers, no birds, no bees, no mammals.

Then something happened -- the largest extinction event in the history of the planet, a holocaust of thorough proportions: 95% of all species, marine and terrestrial, were lost. Scientists continue to argue about its cause. Volcanism? Meteorite impact? Toxic gases released from a warming ocean?

Regardless, what came next -- the early Triassic -- was a miserable time dominated by dust, heat, erosion and choking fumes. Greg Retallack, a University of Oregon expert in ancient soils, estimates that carbon dioxide jumped from its Permian norm of 300 parts per billion to 8,000 parts per billion. Oxygen levels plummeted. Acid rain fell. The ozone layer may have been shredded. Retallack calls this cheery Earth a “postapocalyptic greenhouse.”

“Hardy” Glossopteris survived the holocaust -- no small thing -- but finally it too faded into extinction: the everyday, every-era kind. There was no one around to launch a “Save the Glossopteris” campaign. No one to climb the last tree and issue press releases. Without fanfare, the tree disappeared.

The enormity of extinctions past and present is overwhelming: 99.9% of all species that have ever evolved on this planet are gone forever.

Our current crisis, the Holocene extinction, is thought to be the sixth mass die-off in the planet’s history and the only one whose cause is due to the activity of conscious, rational, intelligent beings, activity that has driven the extinction rate to 1,000 times higher than the typical “background rate” in the fossil record.

That’s the case made by conservation biologists. Other scientists believe that such a claim misunderstands the fossil record.

“Any comparison of fossil extinction rates to current estimates is inherently flawed,” writes paleontologist Douglas Erwin. “With certain obvious exceptions (passenger pigeons, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers leap to mind), most of the species that humans have so thoughtlessly eliminated are local, often rare. It is far more appropriate to compare past mass extinctions to the number of species that have disappeared among common, widespread and durable species. . . . [That would] significantly lower the apparent similarity between past mass extinctions and the current situation.”

The upshot seems to be: If we are in a mass extinction, we are probably doomed. If we aren’t, then more can be preserved than we might think.

Confronted with so many assertions about the planet and its predicaments, I will occasionally retreat to my study. Sometimes I pick up a chunk of gray rock. It formed in the early Triassic ocean, then running low on oxygen. I collected the rock one night on a beach in New Zealand, where banded dotterels called and raced along the surf line. Sometimes I trace my finger along a bump in that small gray stone, a ridge that marks the passage of a Triassic worm -- that is, a worm whose species somehow survived the Permian blow-out. That bump, that trace, is a narrative of deep time, a marker of something that was that isn’t anymore.

No matter who wins arguments, everything dies.

Such are the consolations of extinction.

At the far end of Earth’s future, in 5 billion years, the sun will bloat to a red giant. Well before then, a billion years from now, the waters of Earth will have boiled off, the surface will have burned to a crisp. Eventually, the sun will cool off, becoming an Earth-sized white dwarf that dims into a black dwarf, a lump of carbon and oxygen, a dark, cold gem.

The solar system’s planets -- nine, no, eight, or, OK, maybe 12, count ‘em how you will -- they’re goners too. Stars, including all 400 billion in the Milky Way -- doomed. Galaxies, all of them, all 100-plus billion of them -- doomed. This universe -- one, perhaps, in an infinite multiverse -- will die in a darkness and cold beyond our imaginings.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not counseling indifference. I don’t muse on stellar eschatology in order to cultivate a sophisticated nihilism or to justify purchasing a 900-inch-wide plasma-screen television.

I counsel diligence, along with the knowledge that our Palm Pilots and Dayminders and Nature Conservancy calendars show not only year, month, date and day of the week but also geologic epoch. It’s a Tuesday in the Holocene, and we should do what we can. Too much grief about the state of the world means less energy to help it survive.

I try to do my part. When I’m not at the desk writing, I’m at the edge of a marsh counting white-faced ibises, the beginning of a local effort to get a wetland protected. I’m attending a meeting of concerned neighbors who are watchdogging development along our road. Today I’ll water some newly planted cottonwoods. I do it for the ibises and the cottonwoods -- and for myself. (I admit it: Selfishness is part of activism.)

But days go by when I don’t do anything for the Holocene Earth. Sometimes I set aside my soy patties to run my knife through a thick steak. Sometimes I let my grid-purchased, wind-generated electricity juice the NFL Network. I own, ahem, an SUV.

Just now, I’m leaning back in my hammock on the Blacksmith Fork River in Utah’s Cache Valley. The fluff from peachleaf willow catkins, a drowsy blizzard of seeds, falls into the water -- snow in summer. I set aside my science books and my fears simply to watch the catkins drift, to watch cloud shadows on the Bear River Range of Paelozoic sedimentary rock, to watch the river pass on, as it will, until it doesn’t.

I am comforted.

Lying back beneath willows does not flood away hope or duty or grief or guilt. It puts me deep into time, so those things come and go, as they must, seeds on water.

Christopher Cokinos teaches English at Utah State University. He is the author of “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds.” A longer version of this essay appeared in the May/June edition of Orion magazine (orionmagazine.org).