In the Shadow of American Geopolitics, or Once Again on Greater Israel

Olga CHETVERIKOVA | 11.11.2013 | 00:00

Thirty years ago, American strategists introduced the idea of «The Greater Middle East», denoting the space from Maghreb to Bangladesh, and declared this vast territory to be a zone of US priority interests. In 2006, the programme of American domination in this region was renewed and defined more concretely: the then US State Secretary Condoleezza Rice introduced the term «The New Middle East», highlighting a plan to redraw the borders in the Middle East from Libya to Syria, Iraq, Iran and even Afghanistan. It was all referred to as a strategy of «constructive chaos»... In the same year, a map of «The New Middle East» compiled by Colonel Ralph Peters was published in the American magazine Armed Forces Journal that was circulated in government, political, military and wider circles, preparing public opinion for the impending changes in the Middle East (1). Since the start of the «Arab Spring», Americans have been moving towards a geopolitical restructuring of the region which, of course, has also raised the issue of the fate of Israel. Ever since then, the issue has remained on the agenda. And no matter what form the issue takes, it is only ever delivered in the same vein: Israel is invariably presented as the victim. Thus in the spring of 2011, at the height of the war against Libya when the Palestinian Authority raised the issue of its membership to the UN, western media quickly began to shout about Washington’s betrayal in «surrendering» the Jewish state to Islamists. Today, when the absurdity of such a statement is obvious to almost everybody, the emphasis is on the deadly threat to Israel from Iran, which is apparently developing in line with the deterioration of the situation in Syria.  In the process, the most important thing is either being overshadowed or is simply being hushed up: Israel’s profound interest in destabilising the situation in the Arab-Muslim countries surrounding it and in fuelling the war in Syria. Rabbi Avraam Shmulevich, meanwhile, one of the creators of the «hyperzionism» doctrine influential among the Israeli elite, talked openly about the reasons for this interest in an interview back in 2011. It is interesting that he saw the «Arab Spring» as a blessing for Israel. «The Muslim world», wrote Avraam Shmulevich, «is plunging into a state of chaos, and this will be a positive development for Jews. Chaos is the best time to take a situation under control and put the Jewish civilisation system into operation.  Right now, there is a battle going on for who will become the spiritual leader of mankind – Rome (the West) or Israel... Now is the time we should take complete control into our own hands... We will not just bathe the Arab elite, but feed and raise them with our own hands... A man who obtains freedom should, at the same time, receive guidance on how to use this freedom. And this guidance for mankind will be written by us, by Jews... Jewry will flourish in the blaze of Arab revolutions»(my emphasis – O. C.) (2).  While on the subject of Israel’s foreign-policy objectives, Shmulevich emphasised the need to keep «the natural borders along the Nile and the Euphrates established by the Torah», which must then be followed by the second phase of the offensive – expanding Israel’s hegemony to the entire region of the Middle East. Shmulevich was also extremely open about this: «A chain reaction of disintegration and reformation is beginning in the Middle East simultaneously. Assad, who is currently drowning the revolutionary processes in Syria in blood, will nevertheless not be able to hold out for more than a year or two. There is a revolution starting in Jordan. Even the Kurds and the Caucasus are emerging as an integral part of the Middle East... (my emphasis – O.C.). All of this must look like one continuous Iraq or Afghanistan. It might have been possible to class Shmulevich as being on the fringe, if not for the fact that he was repeating the fundamental principles of a strategic plan by Israeli leaders outlined back in 1982 known as the «Yinon plan». The plan focused on the Israeli government achieving regional superiority through destabilisation and «Balkanisation», so through the breakup of neighbouring Arab states, in other words, which is basically being reproduced in the «New Middle East» project outlined by Condoleezza Rice and Colonel Ralph Peters.  The plan refers to «A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s», a report prepared by Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist who was attached to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The report first appeared in Hebrew in the magazine «Kivunim» (Directions), published by the World Zionist Organisation’s Department of Information in February 1982. In the same year, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates published a translation of the text by the well-known Israeli publicist Israel Shahak, who accompanied the translation with his own comments (3). In March 2013, Israel Shahak’s article was published on Michel Chossudovsky’s website Global Research (4).  «The following document pertaining to the formation of ‘Greater Israel’», writes Chossudovsky in his foreword to the article, «constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government, the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment... When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East»(my emphasis – O.C) (5).  The plan is based on two fundamental principles determining the conditions of Israel’s survival in its Arab environment: 1) Israel must become a regional imperial power; and 2) Israel must divide up the whole of the surrounding area into small states through the dissolution of all existing Arab states. The size of these states will depend on their ethnic and religious composition. Moreover, the creation of new states on the basis of religion would be a source of moral legitimacy for the Israeli government.  It should be said that the idea of fragmenting the world’s Arab states is not a new one. It has long existed in Zionist strategic thinking (6), but Yinon’s report, as Israel Shahak pointed out back in 1982, represented an «accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime (of Sharon and Eitan) for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states».  Here, Shahak draws attention to two points:  1. The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking.  2. The strong connection with Neo-Conservative thought in the US, which includes the idea of «the defence of the West», is very prominent, but this link is purely lip service, while the author of the report’s real aim is to build an Israeli empire and turn it into a world power («In other words», Shahak comments, «the aim of Sharon is to deceive the Americans after he has deceived all the rest»).  The main point that Oded Yinin proceeds from is that the world is in the early stages of a new historical epoch, the essence of which is in «the rationalist, humanist outlook as the major cornerstone supporting the life and achievements of Western civilization since the Renaissance».  Yinon later sets forth the ideas of the «Rome Club» on the insufficient quantity of resources on Earth to meet the needs of mankind, its economic demands and demographics. «In a world in which there are four billion human beings and economic and energy resources which do not grow proportionally to meet the needs of mankind, it is unrealistic to expect to fulfil the main requirement of Western Society, i.e. the wish and aspiration for boundless consumption. The view that ethics plays no part in determining the direction Man takes, but rather his material needs do – that view is becoming prevalent today as we see a world in which nearly all values are disappearing. We are losing the ability to assess the simplest things, especially when they concern the simple question of what is Good and what is Evil   Part I The world is moving towards a global war for resources, and this primarily concerns the Persian Gulf. Assessing the situation in the Arab-Muslim world in relation to this, Oded Yinon writes: «In the long run, this world will be unable to exist within its present framework in the areas around us without having to go through genuine revolutionary changes.  The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners (France and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states, all made of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging»...  After painting a mixed picture of the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, Yinon concludes: «This national ethnic minority picture extending from Morocco to India and from Somalia to Turkey points to the absence of stability and a rapid degeneration in the entire region. When this picture is added to the economic one, we see how the entire region is built like a house of cards, unable to withstand its severe problems». At this point, Yinon even describes new «opportunities for transforming the situation» that Israel must do in the coming decade.  With regard to the Sinai Peninsula, this involves re-establishing control over Sinai as a strategic, economic and energy reserve for the long run. «Egypt, in its present domestic political picture, is already a corpse, all the more so if we take into account the growing Moslem-Christian rift.  Breaking Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions is the political aim of Israel in the Nineteen Eighties on its Western front». With regard to Israel’s Eastern front, which is more complicated than the Western front, Yinon writes: «Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track.  The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbour, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan».  «Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria... Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north».  «The entire Arabian peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitableespecially in Saudi Arabia, regardless of whether its economic might based on oil remains intact or whether it is diminished in the long run. The internal rifts and breakdowns are a clear and natural development in light of the present political structure. «Jordan constitutes an immediate strategic target in the short run but not in the long run, for it does not constitute a real threat in the long run after its dissolution, the termination of the lengthy rule of King Hussein and the transfer of power to the Palestinians in the short run.  There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time, and Israel’s policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority. Changing the regime east of the river will also cause the termination of the problem of the territories densely populated with Arabs west of the Jordan...  Genuine coexistence and peace will reign over the land only when the Arabs understand that without Jewish rule between the Jordan and the sea they will have neither existence nor security. A nation of their own and security will be theirs only in Jordan». Further on, Yinon sets forth Israel’s internal strategic objectives and the ways to achieve them, emphasising the need for serious changes in the world. «Dispersal of the population is therefore a domestic strategic aim of the highest order; otherwise, we shall cease to exist within any borders. Judea, Samaria and the Galilee are our sole guarantee for national existence... Realising our aims on the Eastern front depends first on the realisation of this internal strategic objective.  The transformation of the political and economic structure, so as to enable the realisation of these strategic aims, is the key to achieving the entire change. We need to change from a centralised economy in which the government is extensively involved, to an open and free market as well as to switch from depending upon the US taxpayer to developing, with our own hands, of a genuine productive economic infrastructure. If we are not able to make this change freely and voluntarily, we shall be forced into it by world developments, especially in the areas of economics, energy, and politics, and by our own growing isolation».  «Rapid changes in the world will also bring about a change in the condition of world Jewry to which Israel will become not only a last resort but the only existential option».  Evaluating the plan, it is possible to draw the following conclusions. Firstly, since it outlines Israel’s strategic objectives, it is designed for the long term and is particularly relevant today. Secondly, the possibility of realising the external strategy described involves serious changes both to the position of Israel itself and on a global scale. Which is exactly what started to happen in the mid-1980s.  With the transition of the global ruling class to a neo-liberal strategy, Israel experienced profound changes resulting in the country ending up under the control of 18 of the richest families. Israeli capital was actively invested abroad, while the Israeli market, in turn, proved to be wide open to foreign capital.  As a result of the country’s active «integration» in the global economic system, Israeli capital has become so entwined with transnational capital that the notion of a «national economy of Israel» has lost all meaning. In these conditions, Israel’s transition to active expansion even proved possible, although this manifested itself in intellectual and economic influence and infiltration, rather than military control and a forceful presence.  The most important thing is the involvement of the territory in general, at the centre of which is Israel. Shmulevich also referred to this when he pointed out that a fundamental concept of Judaism is «to be the force that guides human civilisation and sets the standards for human civilisation».  An example of such an Arab-Israeli union, for instance, is the creation of the investment fund Markets Credit Opportunity (EMCO) with 1 billion dollars from the Swiss banking group Credit Suisse AG and the involvement of three of the bank’s largest shareholders – Israel’s IDB Group, Qatar’s state investment fund Qatar Investment Authority, and Saudi private investment company Olayan Group.  Even more revealing is the fact that Saudi Arabia entrusted G4S, Israel’s oldest security company, with ensuring the security of pilgrims during their pilgrimage to Mecca (security perimeters – from the airport in Dubai to the Emirates and the Jeddah area). A Saudi branch of the company has secretly been in operation since 2010 and is able to collect personal information not just about pilgrims, but about passengers flying through Dubai as well.  As far as the planned «chaos in the Muslim world» is concerned, Israel is carrying this out by proxy, operating exclusively through intelligence agencies while maintaining the myth that it is «a victim of Islamism». On that score, Israel Shahak’s explanation as to why the publication of Israel’s strategic plan does not present any particular risk for Israel is still relevant.  Pointing out that this danger could only come from the Arab world and the US, he stressed: «The Arab World has shown itself so far quite incapable of a detailed and rational analysis of Israeli-Jewish society... In such a situation, even those who are shouting about the dangers of Israeli expansionism (which are real enough) are doing this not because of factual and detailed knowledge, but because of belief in myth... The Israeli specialists assume that, on the whole, the Arabs will pay no attention to their serious discussions of the future». There is a similar situation in America, where all the information about Israel comes from the liberal pro-Israeli press.  From this, Shahak comes to the following conclusion: «So long, therefore, as the situation exists in which Israel is really a «closed society» to the rest of the world, because the world wants to close its eyes, the publication and even the beginning of the realisation of such a plan is realistic and feasible».    (1) The map of «The New Middle East» // http://geopolitica.ru/Maps/2 (2) Will Greater Israel control the Middle East after the Arab Revolutions? //http://www.chechenews.com/world-news/worldwide/3555-1.html (3) Israel Shahak (1933-2001) was well-known for his criticism of Judaism and the racist views of Israeli politicians with regard to gentiles. As a professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he was president of the Israeli League for Human Rights and Civil Rights, and published numerous research papers, including «The Non-Jew in the Jewish State», «Israel’s Global Role: Weapons for Repression», and «Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years».  (4) http://www.globalresearch.ca/greater-israel-the-zionist-plan-for-the-middle-east (5) Ibid. (6) This is described in Livia Rokach’s book «Israel’s Scared Terrorism» (1980), published by the same Association. The book is based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, the first Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs in history and former prime minister, and describes the Zionist plan with regard to Libya and the process of its development in the middle of the 1950s. The first massive invasion of Libya in 1978 contributed to the development of this plan down to the smallest detail, while the invasion in June 1982 was aimed at implementing part of the plan, in accordance with which Syria and Jordan were to be broken up.

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EAJG

De afgelopen jaren zijn er verschillende kritisch-Joodse groepen opgericht, vele tijdens of na de Tweede Intifada, die zich bezig houden met het Israëlisch-Palestijnse conflict. Sommige zijn meer mainstream, met meningen die meer aansluiten bij wat in de Joodse gemeenschappen als meerderheidsopvatting geldt, zoals J Street (VS) en J Call (Europa). Andere nemen een wat kritischere houding aan, zoals Jewish Voice for Peace (VS) en Jews for Justice for Palestinians (Groot-Brittannië).

Een Ander Joods Geluid is in 2001 opgericht als kritisch Joodse stem in Nederland die zich richt op het Israëlisch-Palestijnse conflict. Een Ander Joods Geluid is lid van een Europees samenwerkingsverband van kritisch-Joodse organisaties, genaamd European Jews for a Just Peace (EJJP). Dit verband, opgericht in 2002, omvat in totaal elf groepen, waaronder groepen uit Groot-Brittannië, Zweden, Italië en Frankrijk.

De afgelopen jaren laten een duidelijke groei zien van kritisch-Joodse groepen, vooral in de Verenigde Staten. Tienduizenden ondersteunen daar groepen als J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace en American Jews for a Just Peace. Maar ook in Europa lijken de kritische groepen aan invloed te winnen. Zo kende het Britse Jews for Justice for Palestinians in de zomer van 2010 meer dan 1.600 Joodse ondersteuners.

De kritische stem in Israël daarentegen staat de afgelopen jaren steeds meer onder druk. Sinds de Tweede Intifada is het Israëlische vredeskamp in een diep dal beland. Gerenommeerde vredesgroepen als Vrede Nu(Peace Now) hebben veel aan invloed moeten inboeten. 

Desondanks zijn er nog veel organisaties en groepen binnen de Israëlische samenleving actief. Israël kent verschillende gerenommeerde mensenrechtenorganisaties die zich intensief bezighouden met het conflict, zoals B’Tselem, Gisha, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence enHaMoked. Vredesgroepen als Gush Shalom, Machsom Watch en Coalition of Women for Peace laten regelmatig hun stem horen. De protesten die in 2009 gestart zijn in Sheikh Jarrah in Oost-Jeruzalem en de groei van actiegroepen als Anarchists against the Wall en Ta’ayush, laten zien dat de vredesbeweging nog altijd bestaat en actief is. Daarbij zien vooral de kritischere groepen hun ledental de afgelopen tijd steeds meer stijgen.

Een Ander Joods Geluid wijst op het belang van deze kritische groepen. Zij strijden tegen de bezetting en voor de individuele en collectieve rechten van de Palestijnen, maar zijn tegelijkertijd ook kritisch over de weg die Israël bewandelt en de richting waarin de Israëlische samenleving zich beweegt. Het is belangrijk om te laten zien dat niet alle Joden en Israëli’s het Israëlische beleid aangaande de Palestijnen ondersteunen.

Verdere documentatie:

• ‘Top 14 Anti-Democratic Knesset Bills’, 12-03-2011, ACRI
• Introduction EJJP
• European Jews for a Just Peace (EJJP)
• Jewish Voice for Peace
• J Street
• J Call
• Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Norway pension fund bans Israeli occupation-profiteers after lies exposed

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Thu, 01/30/2014 - 20:01

gilo2_28_aug_2013_taayush.jpg

Construction site of Africa Israel housing project in the Gilo settlement, occupied east Jerusalem, 28 August 2013.

  (Ta'ayush)

The Norwegian government has once again excluded two Israeli occupation-profiteering firms from eligibility to be included in the portfolio of the Nordic nation’s state pension fund.

The decision is based in part on evidence published by The Electronic Intifada last year that the firms were lying about their activities.

Norway’s finance ministry announced today that it accepted a recommendation from the pension fund’s ethics council to “exclude the companies Africa Israel Investments and Danya Cebus from the Fund due to contribution to serious violations of individual rights in war or conflict through the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem.”

Lies exposed

The two companies were previously excluded from the pension fund between August 2010 and August 2013 for similar activities.

Last August, however, the Norwegian government ended the exclusion based on the companies’ assurances that they had ended their illegal activities.

However evidence – including videos, photos and documents – uncovered by Who Profits and Ta’ayush and published by The Electronic Intifada last August proved that Africa Israel was lying and was still involved in settlement construction.

Danya Cebus is a subsidiary of Africa Israel.

Electronic Intifada contributor Adri Nieuwhof communicated this evidence to the Norwegian pension fund’s ethics council, which assured her it would be reviewed.

It is based on this review that the council once again recommended that the Israeli firms be excluded and today the government acted.

In addition, the Israeli settlement builder Shikun & Binui, Ltd. has been excluded by the Norwegian pension fund since May 2012.

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/norway-pension-fund-bans-israeli-occupation-profiteers-after-lies-exposed?utm_source=EI+readers&utm_campaign=156e79c4c1-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e802a7602d-156e79c4c1-287031681

The Sixth Extinction: Earth is on the brink of another massive loss of animal species but this time the calamity isn't an asteroid or ice age...

There have been five mass extinction events in Earth’s history. In the worst, 250 million years ago, 96 per cent of marine species and 70 per cent of land species died off. It took millions of years to recover.

Nowadays, many scientists are predicting that we’re on pace for a sixth mass extinction. The world’s species are already vanishing at an unnaturally rapid rate. And humans are altering the Earth’s landscape in far-reaching ways: we’ve hunted animals such as the great auk to extinction; we’ve cleared away broad swaths of rainforest; we’ve transported species from their natural habitats to new continents; we’ve pumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and oceans, transforming the climate.

Those changes are pushing more species to the brink. A 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that 20 to 30 per cent of plant and animal species faced an increased risk of extinction this century if the planet keeps warming (though scientists are still debating these exact numbers, with some going far higher).

So what happens if the extinction rate speeds up? That’s one of the questions that Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker science writer, explores in her excellent new book, The Sixth Extinction, an in-depth look at the science of extinction and the ways we’re altering life on the planet. We spoke by phone this week about the topic.

Brad Plumer: Let’s start by walking through the history of science. In the 18th century, no one even knew that there were any extinct species. How did we get from there to realising there had been five of these mass extinction events in Earth’s history?

Elizabeth Kolbert: There is an interesting history there. Up until the early 1800s, the concept of extinction didn’t really exist. Even early in the 19th century, you had Thomas Jefferson hoping that when he sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the North-west, they would find mastodons roaming around. Mastodon bones had been unearthed – there was a very famous one unearthed in New York and displayed in Philadelphia – and people thought they must still exist somewhere.

But right around that time, a French naturalist named Georges Cuvier came to the realisation that if these animals were out there, we would have seen them by now. And that made sense of a lot of things. There were these bones that were very, very hard to explain. And more and more, as Europeans colonised the New World, they were getting bones shipped to them. It made sense of these weird nautical creatures that had been found.

So extinction actually predated the concept of evolution by about half a century – people knew that things went extinct, even though they didn’t really understand how species came into being. But there was still some debate. Cuvier thought that when extinctions happened, it must be because the Earth changed quickly and catastrophically. Why else would an animal that was perfectly suited to life on this planet go extinct? His theory became known as “catastrophism”. And Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin came along and said, “That’s ridiculous, the Earth changes slowly, we’ve never seen a catastrophe, that’s because they don’t exist.”

That paradigm persisted until the 1980s and 1990s. That was when Walter Alvarez and his father Luis came up with the theory that an asteroid impact had done in the dinosaurs. And that idea was actually resisted for the same reasons – the dominant view was that the Earth does not change quickly. But then it was proven.

And so now the prevailing view of change on planet Earth, as one palaeontologist put it, is that the history of life consists of long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic. It usually changes slowly, but sometimes it changes fast, and when it does, it’s very hard for organisms to keep up.

BP: Nowadays, scientists are aware of five mass extinction events in the past, starting with the End-Ordovician Extinction 450 million years ago and up to the End-Cretaceous Extinction that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago [see graphic, right]. Is there a lot we still don’t know about what caused these events?

EK: Yes, absolutely, although it depends. I think with the dinosaurs, [the asteroid theory] is quite widely accepted at this point. There was a big paper in Science on this subject last year, although there are still a couple of holdouts.

The worst mass extinction of all time came about 250 million years ago [the Permian-Triassic Extinction event]. There’s a pretty good consensus there that this was caused by a huge volcanic event that went on for a long time and released a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is pretty ominous considering that we are releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, and people increasingly are drawing parallels between the two events.

The very first extinction event seems to have been caused by some kind of sudden cold snap, but no one’s exactly sure how that happened. But then, with the other two, the causes of those are pretty murky and people have tried to come up with a unified theory for these extinctions, but that hasn’t worked at all. The causes seem to be pretty disparate.Zebra mussels

BP: At some point, scientists realised that modern-day extinction rates seem to be elevated – that species are now going extinct faster than the normal “background” rate. How did they realise this?

EK: I think a point that’s important to make is that, normally, you shouldn’t be able to see anything go extinct in the course of a human lifetime. The normal background rate of extinction is very slow, and speciation and extinction should more or less equal out. But that’s clearly not what is happening right now. Any naturalist out in the field has watched something go extinct or come perilously close. Even children can name things that have gone extinct.

So as soon as this concept of background vs mass extinction came into being in the 1980s, people realised that what we’re seeing today is not just background extinction. Now, whether you make the jump to say that a major mass extinction is going on or just an elevated extinction rate, that’s up for debate. But if you are looking at this in a rigorous way, you can see that something unusual is going on.

BP: One thing your book explores is that there’s no one factor causing modern-day extinctions. There’s hunting. There’s deforestation. There are changes in land use. There’s climate change and the acidification of the oceans. Which of these stands out as most significant?

EK: I think many scientists would say that what we’re doing to the chemistry of the oceans could end up being the most significant. One-third of the carbon dioxide that we pump into the air ends up in the oceans almost right away, and when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid – that’s just an unfortunate fact.

The chemistry of the oceans tends to be very stable, and to overwhelm those forces is really hard. But we are managing to do it. When people try to reconstruct the history of the ocean, the best estimate is that what we’re doing to the oceans, or have the potential to do, is a magnitude of change that hasn’t been seen in 300 million years. And changes of ocean chemistry are associated with some of the worst extinction crises in history.

BP: Are there lessons we can learn from past extinctions that provide clues for what the current changes hold?

EK: People are trying to tease out what survived previous extinctions and ask what are the characteristics of those that survived. It’s called the selectivity of extinction events. Why did some groups survive and others didn’t? It turns out to be, 65 million years after the fact, a very, very difficult question. But speaking broadly, the species that tend to survive mass extinction events tend to be widely distributed, or groups that have a lot of species. I’m not sure whom that’s going to help today, but that seems to be the pattern.

BP: You discuss global warming in your book. And the big concern here seems to be that a lot of species are adapted to particular climate ranges and, if those heat up, some species may not be able to move or relocate fast enough to more suitable climates. How much do we really know about these dynamics?

EK: What people are finding, what the scientists that I was out in the Peruvian cloud forest with are finding, is that things move at very different rates. People have calculated how fast species would have to move to keep up with rising temperatures, whether it’s moving up a mountain or moving to higher latitudes.

And some organisms can keep up with that fantastically high pace – for example, in Peru, there was this one genus of tree calledSchefflera, which is sometimes used as a house plant, and that genus is moving really fast up the mountain. But some of the other plants weren’t moving at all, and others were moving but not nearly fast enough. So the lesson is that all those complicated relationships, which in the tropics have been pretty stable for a long time, are going to break up. And we just don’t know what the fallout from that is going to be.

BP: So you end up with pretty wide estimates for how many species could go extinct if the planet heats up this much. Some studies suggest that 20 to 30 per cent of species are at risk of extinction if the planet warms 2°C. Other scientists think those estimates are flawed.

EK: There’s still a lot we don’t know. You often hear that what we’re doing is a planetary experiment – but we only have one planet, and we can only run this experiment once. So some modelling efforts get pretty complicated. Just because a species lives in a certain climate under certain  conditions, could it live under different conditions? Or is this just where it’s maximally competitive? What happens if some of your competitors are disadvantaged? We just don’t know. Life turns out to be incredibly complicated.

BP: Most of the people in your book who study these trends tend to think that they’re horrible news. Did you come across any researchers who had a more optimistic view?

EK: Even in moments of extremes, certain organisms do thrive. They’re sometimes called “disaster taxa”. After the End Permian extinction, which was the worst mass extinction of all time,Lystrosaurus, a pig-sized animal, did phenomenally well. It was the biggest animal on the planet; you find fossils everywhere. And the question of why did it do so well? We just don’t know. But some things will thrive. Some things will thrive in an acidified ocean because all of their competitors will drop out. So undoubtedly there will be surprises. But I have not met anyone who hasn’t said we’re going to be vastly simplifying the web of life.

BP: The spread of people across continents has transported all sorts of species to new habitats – and sometimes that’s had catastrophic results, like when the brown tree snake was introduced into Guam and wiped out the native birds. Is this sort of exchange speeding up, or are there efforts to slow it down?

EK: There are certain moments of time where you see a huge exchange of species. After Columbus arrived in the New World, there was this huge exchange. And as global travel becomes very rapid, that speeds up exchanges. Organisms that couldn’t survive on the Mayflower could survive in a modern supertanker or plane and get transported from one continent to another. So we’ve ratcheted things up a notch.

We don’t do as much purposeful moving of species as we used to – where we’ve decided we’d like to have this bird in a new place. We’ve done a lot to prevent that. You’re not supposed to just take a bird from South America and release it in Australia. But the unconscious transport of species, I think there’s no doubt that is increasing dramatically as the sheer amount of cargo increases. And it can still have devastating effects. Look at the Asian carp, working their way toward the Great Lakes. There’s the Asian longhorn beetle, a recent invader causing tremendous damage to forests in America. There’s the emerald ash borer, quite a recent one, which has led to signs in the North-east [of the US] telling people not to move firewood, to avoid moving these invaders around. There are zebra mussels, which recently moved into Massachusetts, taking over lakes there. The disease that’s killing off bats in the North-east and in the DC area, that’s an invasive pathogen that was brought in, it’s a fungus. We can name one thing after another. And I’m sure if we have this conversation a year from now, there will be new ones that we know about.The endangered maleo

BP: What about attempts to save species from extinction? What are some of the more interesting efforts you encountered?

EK: A lot of them involve zoos or conservation organisations. There are these really fascinating and pretty ugly animals called hellbenders – big salamanders that could feature in a horror movie. They are very endangered, and what people are trying to do is raise them to a certain size at the Bronx Zoo, and then repopulate streams in upstate New York. Also at the Bronx Zoo there’s an amazing project with this endangered bird [the maleo] from an island in the Pacific. It lays enormous eggs that have to be incubated in volcanic soil. They bury the egg and the egg is warmed by volcanic activity in the area, which is just amazing. So the zoo is trying to make an incubator that mimics these volcanic soils. Then they trick the birds, by taking away their eggs so that they lay another. And there are hundreds and hundreds of these efforts.

BP: Don’t these sorts of efforts tend to favour “charismatic” animals over things like tiny organisms in the ocean that could affect entire food webs?

EK: Yes. We only see what we see. And we don’t know where the link is that may turn out to be crucial, because we’re not participating in the food web at that level of specificity. The scary thing is when scientists find organisms at the bottom of the food chain that can’t survive under conditions that we predict will occur in the next century or so. That has happened. Then you can potentially get big knock-on effects on the food chain. If you talk to marine scientists, that’s what they’re worried about. You might be able to raise that pteropod in a tank, but it really doesn’t matter. Because we’re talking about things that exist on a massive scale. Too numerous to count. That’s what keeps the food chain going.

BP: What’s the big thing you took away after writing this book?

EK: It’s one very sobering thought: many of our best qualities as humans – our creativity, our cleverness, our cooperation, the fact that we can work in these huge societies, and pass knowledge on from generation to generation – those things can turn out to be damaging. It’s not just that we go out and poach things, although that’s a problem. We’re smart and inventive and we can change the planet by doing things that have no evil intent. For example, going on vacation and bringing a bat fungus from Europe completely unintentionally. So it’s not always clear how you would separate out what we do just by being human from what we do that has all of these unfortunate side effects. µ

© The Washington Post

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