Overkill or Overstatement
The world faces its sixth great extinction event, driven mainly by humans. When did this commence? In the last 60,000 years a series of intermittent extinctions began occurring across the planet: on continents prior to the Holocene, on islands, and now as regional events resulting from environmental despoliation.
Pleistocene extinction events occurred at different localities and different times on all continents. Four major reasons have been postulated to explain why extinctions occurred: climate change, predation by humans, disease, and as an environmental response to habitat alteration and deterioration, exacerbated by climatic and geomorphologic change. Extinctions that occurred have been claimed by some to be solely due to impacts associated with intentional human activity, predation, fire and land clearing.
Pleistocene overkill assumes that humans will violently and quickly eliminate large animals. The basis for the concept lies upon a romantic social construction of ‘noble savages’ cutting a destructive swathe through an entire unwitting bestiary of incalculable size. It will be argued that the concept of overkill fails to give enough credence to the significance of past environments, climatic change, unintended human behaviour, or that human and nonhuman animals have lived together for many thousands of years.
What can the decline of species on the continents now provide? Extinctions can be used as a warning sign of the long term consequences of human actions, so much so that extinctions, such as those that have occurred on islands or more recently, can be sufficiently spectacular to militate against inaction. By acting now, to be more inclusive of nonhuman animal life, humanity may be able to avoid what has obviously been felt on islands. Catastrophic planet wide extinctions may therefore be averted. However, linking present human exclusionary practices with populist or romanticised social constructions of the past, serves neither science nor environmental concerns well.