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The Extinction Crisis
The ongoing, accelerating loss of biological diversity at rates 100 to 1,000 times the geological background — the crisis that drove Wilson's final decades and whose informational stakes the AI era dramatically raises.
Wilson spent the last three decades of his life documenting what he and most biologists regard as the sixth mass extinction — the ongoing, accelerating loss of biological species at rates between one hundred and one thousand times the background rate established by the geological record. The five previous mass extinctions were caused by asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, and atmospheric chemistry shifts. The sixth is caused by a single species — one that has, for the first time in the history of life, the capacity to understand what it is destroying and has, so far, chosen not to act on that understanding at the scale the crisis requires.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The crisis is structurally consilient. Its causes are economic (the conversion of wildlands to agriculture and industry), technological (industrial-scale extraction), political (governance failures at every scale), psychological (human incapacity to respond emotionally to slow-moving statistical catastrophes), and biological (evolutionary constraints on species' ability to