Anthony Barnosky’s father was a butcher, his grandfather an underground coal miner. He himself, fresh out of college, worked for ARCO to locate new coal deposits in Colorado and later he worked for the Alyeska pipeline company in Alaska.
“Fossil fuels have been very, very good to me and very, very good to all of us,” says Barnosky, a paleontologist and UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology.
The irony, not lost on Barnosky, is that he now urges a ban on coal, replacing oil and gas with sustainable fuels and eating less meat to address the threat of climate change and a world hotter than it’s been in 14 million years.
Those are just a few of the suggestions Barnosky offers in his new book, Dodging Extinction (UC Press), which takes a close look at how our choices — what we eat, how we generate our energy, how we make money — affect the world around us, and how we can change our habits to prevent the calamity of a sixth global extinction like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
“There are things we can do,” he says. “The sixth mass extinction is not a done deal. We have lost only one percent of the species that we have ridden the planet with for the last 12,000 years. We have thousands of species right now that are in pretty serious trouble, but every one of those can be turned around at this point in history — if we just do the right things. Laying out solutions, trying to get to the basics of what we need to do, is really why I wrote this book.”
Barnosky addresses some of these issues in a new documentary, Mass Extinction: Life at The Brink, airing Nov. 30 on the Smithsonian Channel. He appears with his wife, Stanford ecologist Elizabeth Hadly, and UC Berkeley’s Walter Alvarez, who with his late father, the physicist Luis Alvarez, first uncovered evidence that an asteroid impact caused the last mass extinction, the one that saw the demise of the dinosaurs.
Die-offs
In the four decades since Barnosky, with a B.A. in geology from Colorado College in Colorado Springs, first explored his home state for coal, he has seen dramatic changes resulting from global warming.
“I go back to these places where I was doing coal exploration geology — beautiful places in western Colorado — and now the trees are all dead, mostly from beetle kill because winters have warmed enough so that the beetles can reproduce twice in a season rather than once,” says Barnosky, now 62. “In my lifetime, I have seen it go from verdant forests to literally tens of thousands of acres of dead trees. And that’s not just in Colorado. There are literally millions of square miles of dead trees up and down the Rocky Mountain chain. All because of greenhouse gases warming the atmosphere.”
As a paleontologist, he knows that die-offs are common in Earth’s history, but the scale of today’s threat is potentially much larger than the planet has seen in millions of years, approaching that of five previous mass extinctions, which obliterated uncounted species now seen only in the fossil record.
Life experience as well as analysis of past extinctions have made him a vocal advocate for policy changes to slow greenhouse gas emissions and prevent a sixth mass extinction that could even include humans.
His 2009 book, Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming (Island Press), laid out the changes in store for Earth if climate change is not halted. Then, in 2012, he worked with a group of 22 prestigious scientists from around the world to publish a paper in Nature warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems and climate change may be driving Earth toward a planet-wide tipping point that would have disastrous and irreversible consequences.