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Why has half the planet’s wildlife disappeared over the last 40 years? Why are we losing approximately 100 species every day? The answer, Dawson argues, lies not in the proximate drivers of extinction (deforestation, habitat fragmentation, poaching, overfishing, and climate change) but in the nature of capitalism itself. Whereas recent popular works on extinction (such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History) and climate change (such as Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate) have shied away from calling for an explicitly anticapitalist environmental politics, Extinction makes a compelling case for its urgent necessity. It does so through an “etiology of the present catastrophe” that combines deft historical synthesis with a careful attention to economic and racial inequality and the legacies of imperialism. Because of its demand for ceaseless expansion and its emphasis on anthropocentric utility as the sole criterion of value, capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own material reproduction. In this light, the exploitative features of modern capitalism become “particularly starkly evident when seen through the lens of extinction.”
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