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Indeed the melancholy dynamic strongly recalls BP’s “vessels of opportunity” program launched in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For months, virtually the entire Louisiana fishing fleet was docked, unable to make a living for fear that the seafood was unsafe. That’s when BP offered to convert any fishing vessel into a cleanup boat, providing it with booms to (rather uselessly) mop up some oil. It was tremendously difficult for local shrimpers and oystermen to take work from the company that had just robbed them of their livelihood—but what choice did they have? No one else was offering to help pay the bills. This is the way the oil and gas industry holds on to power: by tossing temporary life rafts to the people it is drowning.

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (622%)

... some of the most marginalized people in my country - many of them, like all the senior members of the Lameman clan, survivors of the intergenerational trauma of abusive residential schools - are taking on some of the wealthiest and most powerful forces on the planet. Their heroic battles are not just their people’s best chance of a healthy future; if court challenges like Beaver Lake’s can succeed in halting tar sands expansion, they could very well be the best chance for the rest of us to continue enjoying a climate that is hospitable to human life. That is a huge burden to bear and that these communities are bearing it with shockingly little support from the rest of us is an unspeakable social injustice.

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (68%)

And while the lawyers argue the intricacies of land title in court, buzzing chainsaws proceed to topple trees that are four times as old as our countries ...

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (68%)

... Canada did not deserve such a high [credit] rating because it was failing to report a very important liability: a massive unpaid debt that takes the form of all the wealth that had been extracted from unceded Indigenous land, without consent - since 1846. ... [S&P] did not dispute any of the facts. But [its representative] explained as nicely as he possibly could that the agency had come to the conclusion that Canada's First Nations did not have the power to enforce their rights and therefore to collect on their enormous debts. Which meant, from S&P's perspective, that those debts shouldn't affect Canada's stellar credit rating.

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (66%)

“Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,” he wrote me in an email.

“I am not claiming that humans haven’t done great damage to marine and terrestrial extinctions, nor that many extinctions have not occurred and more will certainly occur in the near future. But I do think that as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons.”

I had a chance to sit down with Erwin after his talk at the annual geology conference. My first question—about a rumor I had heard from one of his colleagues that Erwin had served as a sort of mass extinction consultant to Cormac McCarthy while the notoriously secretive author was constructing the post-apocalyptic world of The Road—Erwin coyly evaded.

But on the speculative sixth mass extinction,he was more forthcoming.

“If we’re really in a mass extinction—if we’re in the [End- Permian]—go get a case of scotch,” he said.

If his power grid analogy is correct, then trying to stop a mass extinction after it’s started would be a little like calling for a building’s preservation while it’s imploding.

“People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument,” he said. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action, when in fact, if it’s actually true we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology.”

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (60%)

But there’s no reason to think that the megafauna of North America would have gone extinct without the introduction of humans - the ultimate invasive species. It’s also nearly impossible to appeal to climate change to explain why nocturnal animals tended to fare better in the extinctions. The same can be said for plants, few of which went extinct.

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (57%)

But the menagerie lives on in evolutionary ghosts. In North America, the fleet-footed pronghorns of the American West run laughably faster than any of their existing predators. But then, their speed isn’t meant for existing predators. It might be a vestige of their need to escape constant, harrowing pursuits by American cheetahs - until a geological moment ago. The absence was palpable to me as I rode a train past New Mexico’s Kiowa National Grassland,an American Serengeti, windswept and empty except for a lone wandering pronghorn still running from ghosts.

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (56%)

North America also lost its many camels, which originated and evolved on the continent, only later spreading out into Asia and Africa. When camels were experimentally employed in military convoys across the Southwest in the 1850s, Lieutenant Edward Beale - unaware of the animals’ ancestral connection to the land—was pleasantly surprised by their uncommon effectiveness. Happily marching across their evolutionary homeland, they ate “the otherwise worthless weeds and other plants shunned by livestock, including creosote bush growing along the right of way in New Mexico.” North America lost its American zebras as well as its horses.

The story of horses in North America is a curious one. Horses evolved on the continent over millions of years, then suddenly went extinct around 12,000 years ago, only to be reintroduced a few thousand years later by Spanish colonists. If they persist on the continent for millions of years from now, geologists of the far future probably won’t detect this strange millennia-long absence.

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (Page 56)

If you compare a map demarcating the outline of the 66- million-year-old impact crater to a map of Mayan ruins in the Yucatán, an unusual pattern jumps out. Sites like the last Mayan capital, Mayapán, are built exactly on the rim of this ghostly ring. And even stranger than the overlap of these two epochal sites—marking the final moments of Mayan civilization and the final moments of the age of dinosaurs— is that it’s not a coincidence. Like any civilization, the Mayans depended on reliable access to freshwater. In the Yucatán, freshwater is provided by picturesque sinkholes in the limestone known as cenotes,which appear as surprising, precipitous oases in the jungle. They form when whole sections of the limestone collapse,providing access to the underground rivers of freshwater that percolate through the chalky sea-rock of the Yucatán. The cenotes made Mayan civilization possible. When plotted on a map, the strange distribution of cenotes in the Yucatán reflects a much more profound disturbance in the rocks far below that is responsible for the limestone collapses in the region. Researchers surveying the archaeological sites that inevitably sprang up among these freshwater sinkholes made a remarkable discovery: Mayan society in the Yucatán traced an improbable 100-mile arc. UNESCO calls it the Ring of Cenotes. Walter Alvarez called it the Crater of Doom.

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (49%)

Melosh was originally concerned that the survival of some lineages, like birds, falsified the theory. Modern birds spend their time out in the open, where they would have been incinerated, unlike the surviving mammals that could have burrowed to avoid the inferno.

“But it turns out, all modern birds are descended from an order of water birds, whose modern relatives nest in holes in the bank,” he said. “So they were probably able to survive that way. They had burrows that they could hide in. The impact happened in June to July, so they were probably nesting at the time.”

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (48%)

Over the next few unimaginable seconds, the earth behaved like the surface of a pond after a rock has been thrown in: complex peaks and ripples resonated throughout the Yucatán before being frozen in place as crazy, ready-made mountain ranges that would have loomed over the crater floor as high as the Himalayas.

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (47%)

Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatán it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond—all within a second or two of impact. “So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon?” I asked. “Yeah, probably.”

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen

Dinosaurs are the protagonists so far in the history of animal life on land — not some peculiar preamble to our own story. Throughout the epochs they inhabited every niche — predator and prey, herbivore and carnivore — and spanned every size, from the pigeonlike anchiornis to the hangarsized argentinosaurus. Sauropods like these were so monumental that their methane farts might have been partly responsible for making the Mesozoic so warm.

— Ends of the World by Peter Brannen (43%)