Kyle Harper is the author of the new book The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction. His other books include The Fate of Rome. He is a professor at the University of Oklahoma.
Q: What inspired you to write The Last Animal?
A: An alignment of personal and intellectual motivations. I live in the same place I grew up (the great state of Oklahoma), and the natural world I knew as a kid is radically different than the ones that my own children are experiencing. As a historian, I want to know where things come from, and I felt like there wasn’t a good history of the biodiversity crisis.
I am an environmental historian and love writing big, global histories that try to capture the place of humans in nature. Our relationship with animals is integral to our story, and I was inspired to try to write a book that might help us see that.
Q: The book covers so much history--how did you research it, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: There are five primary drivers of biodiversity loss today: hunting or direct harvesting; land-use change; invasive species; pollution/biocides; climate change. The first three of these have been influential for thousands of years. So one strategy was to think about the origins of each of these drivers of biodiversity change.
I found many surprises along the way! How systemically humans have eliminated big animals. How long we have persecuted predators. How sweeping global land-use change is (such that we have an almost deluded account of what the Earth would look like without us).
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Well, I confess I like the title before I knew exactly what it meant. I wrestle throughout the book with the idea of the Sixth Extinction - the claim that humans are on pace to, or could, cause a mass extinction event on par with the worst catastrophes in the last 541 million years of life on our planet.
It is a contested claim, and I have mixed feelings about it personally, because we have driven nowhere near that many species to extinction.
In the end, though, I think it’s a powerful and valuable idea, because it forces us to ask what our legacy will be in the history of evolution, in the long-term fossil record. And there is no doubt that the human moment will register as a consequential turning point in evolutionary history - even if it is still up to us to decide exactly what our legacy is.
But someday, there will be a last animal on Earth, and we can be certain that our legacy will endure for that long, the choices that we make today will echo for eons. So, the “last animal” is a way of thinking about humanity’s place in evolutionary history and Earth history.
Q: The author Sean B. Carroll said of the book, “This is a history that we desperately need to grasp and begin to change.” What do you think of that assessment, and what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: On the one hand, it’s worse than we think. Ecologists use the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe our tendency to underestimate the changes that transpired in the deeper past.
My book argues that we vastly underestimate them. Many of these changes are irreversible. But we need to be honest about things - about how we got here - to know where we want to go.
I like to say there is plenty of gloom but not doom in the book. I hope it inspires a sense of wonder for the diversity of animal life that is gone forever but also for the diversity that is still all around us.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a couple of projects. One returns to my long interest in the history of health and disease, but with a new challenge: I’m writing a history of dementia. It’s a tragic and complicated and prevalent condition that is linked to aging, which is also fascinating and complex.
I also have a book project on the long-term history of humans and plants. It will complete a kind of trilogy on microbes, animals, and plants, all with Princeton University Press, that tries to give a historical perspective on how humans fit into the story of life.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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