We sit on top of apocalypses. This is evident in the names of places: Mississippi, Ohio, Wisconsin, Connecticut. This is evidence in the names of things: Avocado, Barbecue, Chipmunk. These words come from entire civilizations wiped off the map by disease, with the survivors then ethnically cleansed.
This is true across the world: past civilizations full of artists, writers, poets, bureaucrats, farmers, and engineers collapsed into chaos until the survivors found ways to build anew from the wreckage. Rome is built on top of Roman ruins.
There is apocalypse within us: the genetic sequences of non-African humans are littered with the debris of Neanderthals and Denisovans (depending on where your ancestors lived). Whether or not the African colonists predominantly interbred, killed, or out-hunted their cousins is irrelevant to this fact: the world that these archaic people lived in for thousands of years was replaced with a new species quickly.
Apocalypse is frozen in the ice: mammoths and sabertooth tigers and a great many more megafauna were eliminated by humans in wave after wave of migration. Even the greatest, most terrifying land animals that are alive today were nothing compared to giant demons that our species condemned to death.
These apocalypses- of civilization, of archaic humans, of giant mammals and birds- are nothing compared to what has happened or what will come. Surely, they are fractal representations. They are scaled down, but the principles are consistent: complex, self-regulating systems are shocked by a series of unpredictable and unstoppable events that disintegrate the "network of being".
For civilizations, the network of being is a complex social hierarchy. Trade and specializations are impossible when all your farmers are dying from a never-before-seen disease (it doesn't help the survivors are being picked off by invaders). For archaic humans, the network of food, sex and broad society are interconnected and each one was wholly absorbed by the newer human species. For the decimated megafauna, all humans had to do what shake the food chain a little before it collapsed around their necks like a noose.
What Peter Brannen describes in The Ends of the World is how the biggest apocalypses occurred by disintegrating networks of being that lie at the core of the world. Indeed, the human network is embedded within an ecological network, itself embedded in it a geological network, which is again embedded within an astrological network: the stars may not determine life on earth, but the sun, moon, and asteroids sure do.
The geological network- the mountains, volcanoes, continents, water cycle and carbon cycle- is the star of the show. Mostly. Three (and a half) of the mass extinctions appear to be mostly volcano-related: volcanoes heat the atmosphere by spewing lava, wreaking havoc on food chains, and then those volcanoes start sucking out carbon, wreaking even more havoc on food chains. The worlds dominated by trilobites, crocodile cousins, and ancient mammals were all killed in this way.
Yet, the geological network is not the only driver: ecologically, the evolution of life on land in the form of plants impacted its nest network by driving down carbon dioxide. The emergence of a new lifeform was able to push back downwards, until the network that sustained it broke to pieces.
Huh. Volcanoes mess with the carbon cycle? Also, plants mess with the carbon cycle? What else messes with the carbon cycle?
Throughout the book, Peter reminds us constantly: Carbon is important, carbon is the star, carbon is the intermediary between the massive geological and biological networks. It is also the prime mover of industrial human civilization. It is also the prime destroyer of the biosphere.
You know this. If you’re looking at a review for a book about the biosphere's history, you already know that we’re warming the planet by pouring gigatons of carbon into the oceans and sky. The importance of this book is that it provides a rejoinder to Elon Musk’s, “[Carbon emissions is] the dumbest experiment in human history”:
The experiment has been run before. We’re standing on top of it.
