The disappearance of the golden toad worksheet answers

Articles/Literary Journalism Worksheet.pdf
• Literary journalism “is a form of nonfiction writing that adheres to all of the reportorial and truth-telling covenants of conventional journalism, while employing rhetorical and storytelling techniques more commonly associated with fiction. In short, it is journalism as literature.”1

• “Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism, voice, a focus on ordinary people…and accuracy. Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered.”2

i. Immersion reporting

ii. Complicated structures

iii. Symbolism

iv. Character development

v. Voice

vi. Accuracy

1 Joshua Roiland, “By Any Other Name: The Case for Literary Journalism,” Literary Journalism Studies Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall

2015 (http://ialjs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/LJS-v7i2-60-89-Roiland_HYPERLINKED-1.pdf?6b8609) 2 Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

Articles/Kunkel, Inventing Climate-Change Literature _ The New Yorker.pdf
11/19/2018 Inventing Climate-Change Literature | The New Yorker

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How to write about what we’re doing to the planet? In what genre, what form? I grew up outside of a small town in northwestern Colorado, and in recent years spruce and pine beetles have devastated forests throughout the Rockies, turning evergreen slopes a dead maroon. Beetles have always attacked and killed the trees there, just as the Atlantic Ocean has always bred hurricanes and have scoured California. The difference—which we give the bland name climate change—lies in the new frequency and intensity of these events. A 2013 study from the University of Colorado found that drought and warmer sea-surface temperatures best explain the trees’ increased

Cultural Comment

Inventing Climate-Change Literature By Benjamin Kunkel October 24, 2014

Photograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty

droughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughts

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susceptibility to the beetles, and warmer and drier conditions are almost certainly what the coming decades have in store for the American West. Meanwhile, on a drive through the mountains, great bristling stands of living green- and blue-needled trees alternate with brittle dead zones, and the mind slips among memory, evidence, and anticipation: landscape I saw as a kid, landscape I now see, landscape that I foresee. The experience itself is a bit like hesitating between literary genres. There’s the novel of memory (and couldn’t “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” be translated, if you didn’t know better, as “In Search of Lost Weather?”); there’s the satire of contemporary life, complete with hand-wringing ruminations on the environment from the driver’s seat of a non-electric car; and there’s the work of science—or climate-science— ction, set in the not-too-distant future, in which the coniferous forests of the West are no more.

Climate change has occasioned a lot of good journalism, but it poses as tremendous problems for imaginative literature as it does for electoral politics, and for many of the same reasons. The worst effects aren’t yet here, and even when global warming is the suspected culprit behind a hurricane or a drought, its ngerprints are never to be found on the scene of any particular disaster. Fictional characters, like esh-and-blood citizens, have more urgent concerns than the state of the climate twenty years hence. Nor is it easy for people, real or imaginary, to feel any special moral relationship to the problem. Oil-company executives may be especially guilty, and environmental activists especially virtuous. The rest of us, in the rich countries, are culpable to such a similar degree that we might as well be equally innocent. So it is that a crisis at the center of our collective life exists for us at the margins of individual consciousness, as a whisper of dread or a rustle of personal implication. The main event of contemporary civilization is never, on any given day, the main event. It cannot be imagined as a punctual occurrence, like the “airborne toxic event” that hangs over DeLillo’s “White Noise” or the nuclear war, remembered as “a sudden shear of light and then a series of low concussions,” in the background to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”

Perhaps this is why climate change hasn’t yet left a literary footprint commensurate with its historical weight. Ecological anxiety, to be sure, belongs to the atmosphere of plenty of realist ction, and warmer, crazier weather darkly adorns many futuristic novels whose primary catastrophe has been unleashed by genetic engineering, peak oil, viral plague, or class warfare. Novelists not generally regarded as sci- authors have

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even set a in the drowned world of tomorrow. But few imaginative writers have dealt with the present-day experience of global warming in a direct and concentrated way.

The strongest work of climate-change lit, to call it that, that I’ve read is Ben Lerner’s recent novel “10:04,” in which the signi cance of daily life—the books people write, the personal relationships they try to sustain—threatens to dissolve in the face of what is, for the narrator, “a future I increasingly imagined as underwater.” By the end of the novel, the underwater future has materialized, for a time anyway, in the shape of Hurricane Sandy, which in the fall of 2012 battered New York City and submerged its lower-lying districts. Even so, Lerner’s narrator, whose neighborhood and apartment are spared, feels that this future doesn’t quite include him. “Another historic storm had failed to arrive,” he says, then adds:

Except it had arrived, just not for

us. Subway and traffic tunnels in

lower Manhattan had lled with

water, drowning who knows how

many rats; I couldn’t help

imagining their screams. Power

and water were knocked out below

Thirty-Ninth Street and in Red

Hook, Coney Island, the

Rockaways, much of Staten Island.

Hospitals were being evacuated

after backup generators failed;

newborn babies and patients

recovering from heart surgery were

carried gingerly down ights of

stairs and placed in ambulances

that rushed them uptown, where

the storm had never happened.

The passage is the exception proving the rule that the contemporary experience of climate change has so far eluded the grasp of literature. Lerner can write a novel, set in the present, that deals with the subject head-on, but only by becoming essayistic,

handful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of works

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journalistic (the narrator is aggregating news stories in his head; he is neither evacuating a hospital nor being evacuated himself ), and, even then, only amid the heaviest weather yet visited on New York City this century. If climate change has, to date, proved hard to write about, that’s because it exists for most of us, to date, as something that afflicts different neighborhoods, distant cities, or future times.

A number of Octobers ago, I spent a few weeks in a cabin in Colorado that was also hosting an abundance of black ies. (The cabin was built, it so happens, from beetle-kill spruce, a form of lumber that is more available these days than before the beetles knocked off so many trees.) The buzzing of the ies persisted throughout my stay, in spite of energetic y-swatting campaigns, and some time after leaving the cabin I had the thought that the noise of the ies, in my ears all day without often becoming the main thing on my mind, wasn’t altogether unlike my daily awareness of climate change. A sense of what we’re doing to the planet accompanies me all the time, but mostly as a distraction, a morbid static in the air. You try not to listen; sometimes, you can’t help it. Or so I found myself thinking, coming up with the idea for a play. It may say something about the difficulties involved in writing about climate change that I could

gure out no way to face them other than by deploying the disreputable technique of allegory and the outmoded medium of the theatre.

An urban couple lives in an apartment thronging with ies. As the play opens, they’ve hired exterminators to rid their home of these bugs, these irritants. That was the explicit premise; the implicit part, gradually to become clear to the audience, was that

ies have infested not only this particular dwelling but the world at large, and that their presence is a symptom of climate change. The couple’s effort at pest control fails, and the ies return. The couple resume their old routine, sometimes swatting at and sometimes trying to ignore the minor presence in their lives of what is arguably the world’s major problem. I liked the idea that, because this was a play, there would be no

ies onstage. The reality that they intimated would thus be, in another sense,_ unreal._ Because we are aware of climate change and, also, we are not.

It’s somewhat embarrassing, in the twenty- rst century, to produce an allegory on any subject; the technique strikes us as both antique and naïve. I was able to keep writing and, above all, revising, because it seemed to me that climate change was such a vast

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development, with so many of its consequences available only to the imagination, that I had to deal with it allegorically or not at all. And I told myself that it had to be a play for the stage, instead of a novel or a screenplay, because the theatre, being con ned to the use of a few actors and a handful of props, is a natural medium for allegory: the inherent poverty of its technical means allows for symbols and ideas to remain the abstractions that they are, even as the theatre grants them a certain invisible concreteness. The lmmaker or novelist, on the other hand, will be tempted to visually portray or physically describe just those things whose very nature is to exceed our capacity to depict them.

But was my play, which I ended up calling “Buzz,” really a climate-change allegory? In writing it, I often forgot about my troupe of invisible ies, much as the characters do. At other times, I felt like they were more suggestive of perennial human problems like aging, disappointment, or decay. There was something intermittent about the meaning of my rather heavy-duty symbolism, and about whether the ies signi ed anything at all. But this, too, I thought, could work in the play’s favor. Objectively, almost everything we do is connected to climate change; subjectively, almost nothing. Except that from time to time the objective situation becomes a subjective truth.

In the end, I found that what I was writing had to be a comedy even more than an allegory. The scale of our planetary crisis dwarfs us as individuals and has so far defeated us as citizens, which meant that the efforts of any single household to confront the problem could only be joked about. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell says to Nagg in Beckett’s “Endgame.” Helplessness is a species of unhappiness, and my unhappy play about our deteriorating climate has at least had the merit of making me laugh more than anything else I’ve written. It’s sometimes suggested that peoples with especially calamitous histories—the Jews, the Irish—have especially comic sensibilities. If so, climate change may afford writers of all nations the chance to become comedians, even as they do not lack for tragic material.

Benjamin Kunkel ’s play “Buzz” is being in Brooklyn until November 22nd. It was published in earlier this year.

performedperformedperformedperformedperformedperformedperformedperformedperformedperformedperformed book formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook form

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Benjamin Kunkel, a founding editor of n+1, is the author of the novel “Indecision” and the essay collection “Utopia or Bust.” Read more »

Articles/Kolbert, _A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change_.pdf
10/14/2018 A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change | The New Yorker

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T he Ranch Fire broke out sometime on the morning of Friday, July 27th, east ofUkiah, California, in Mendocino County. Extreme heat and windy weather made the blaze difficult to ght; by early Sunday, it had spread to thirteen thousand acres, and by the end of the following week it had burned a hundred and fteen thousand acres. That weekend, it jumped four streams, a major road, and a re line that had been cut by a bulldozer, and in the process it spread to another hundred thousand acres. By August 12th, it had become the largest wild re in California’s history, and by the time it was mostly contained, last week, it had charred more than six hundred square miles, an area twice the size of New York City.

A blaze that consumes more than a hundred thousand acres is known as a mega re. It used to be rare for res to reach this threshold. Now it’s routine. “We seem to have multiple mega res each year,” the Web site Wild re Today noted recently. While the Ranch Fire raged, three other hundred-thousand-acre-plus res were “active” in the United States: the Carr Fire, also in Northern California; the South Sugarloaf Fire, in northern Nevada; and the Spring Creek Fire, in southern Colorado. Meanwhile, in Canada, the province of British Columbia declared a state of emergency in response to more than ve hundred active blazes. As smoke from these and other con agrations drifted across the Paci c Northwest, the air quality in Seattle declined to a level considered “unhealthy for all,” and the city’s mayor urged residents to stay indoors.

It was against this infernal backdrop that the Trump Administration recently unveiled its plan to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. The

res, according to Donald Trump, had nothing to do with global warming, and instead were the result of “bad environmental laws,” which, he claimed, were preventing “readily

Comment September 10, 2018 Issue

A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change

Against an infernal backdrop of widespread wild res, the Administration announced its plan

to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

10/14/2018 A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change | The New Yorker

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available water” from being used to ght the blazes. Under the headline “ ,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board dismissed

the President’s theory as “wingnut drivel.” Somewhat less colorfully, Newsweek observed that it had “little basis in fact.”

The power-plant rules that Trump wants to scrap have a long and delay- lled history. All the way back in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide quali es as a pollutant that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Instead of complying with that ruling, George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency ran out the clock. When Barack Obama took office, he, too, dawdled; it wasn’t until his second term that the E.P.A. nally proposed the so-called Clean Power Plan. The plan, which was supposed to reduce CO emissions from generating stations by roughly a third, was

nalized in 2015, but it never went into effect. In early 2016, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, took the extraordinary step of blocking its implementation, pending the outcome of a lawsuit brought by two dozen states—almost all of them led by Republicans—along with a host of coal and utility companies. (The states accused the E.P.A. of exceeding its authority.) Two and a half years later, there is still no decision in that suit, because, under President Trump, the E.P.A. has been asking for, and receiving, postponements.

Finally, in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit indicated that it was tired of the Administration’s stalling. Then, late last month, the E.P.A. published what it calls the Affordable Clean Energy rules, or . The new rules, which would replace the Clean Power Plan, are rules in name only. They’d allow states to set their own standards; these, in many cases, would amount to a carte blanche for utility companies. Compared with the Clean Power Plan, could, over the next few decades, allow hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon emissions. Meanwhile, by the E.P.A.’s own admission, the new “rules” could result in as many as fourteen hundred premature deaths annually, owing to the increased pollution from coal plants. The non-rule rules still have to be nalized, and then they, too, doubtless will be challenged in court. By the time that challenge is heard, there may be a new Administration in the White House—at least, so it is devoutly to be wished.

As it happens, a few days after the E.P.A.’s announcement of the rules a group of state agencies in Sacramento released a report detailing how climate change will affect

2

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California. If emissions are not reined in, by the end of the century maximum daily temperatures could rise by a horri c 8.8 degrees. Two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches could be lost to sea-level rise, and the area burned by wild res could nearly triple.

The California report points up the essential hazard of delay. Many pollutants dissipate or break down over time. Carbon dioxide hangs around and accumulates. What our power plants put into the air today will still be contributing to warming and melting,

res and oods, more than a hundred years from now. And what’s added tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) will make the situation that much worse.

This ery summer has given us a glimpse of what climate change will look like. In addition to the blazes in the West, forest res raged in Sweden above the Arctic Circle. More than ninety people were killed by wild res that broke out during an extreme heat wave in Greece. In Japan, a heat wave resulted in at least eighty deaths, and in South Korea record-breaking temperatures were blamed for twenty-nine deaths. (Last month, during South Korea’s heat wave, the Prime Minister ordered all work on public construction sites halted during daytime hours.)

But perhaps what’s most scary about this scorching summer is how little concerned Americans seem to be. So far, climate change has barely registered as an issue in the midterm elections, and, where it has, the optics couldn’t be worse: “Trump Digs Coal” was a slogan that appeared on placards at a West Virginia rally with the President, staged on the day that the new power-plant rules were published. As a country, we remain committed to denial and delay, even as the world, in an ever more literal sense, goes up in ames. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the September 10, 2018, issue, with the headline

“Fire Alarm.”

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Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015

Pulitzer Prize for general non ction for “

.” Read more »

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Articles/Kolbert, _What Is Donald Trump’s Response to the ...Dire Climate Report_ .pdf
10/14/2018 What Is Donald Trump’s Response to the U.N.’s Dire Climate Report? | The New Yorker

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T hree years ago, when world leaders met in Paris to negotiate a treaty on climatechange, one of the sticking points was where to set what might be called the Doomsday Thermometer. For reasons that had to do mostly with politics, rather than with geophysics, industrialized nations wanted to de ne “dangerous” warming as an average global-temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). But island states, such as the Maldives and Mauritius, along with developing countries like Ethiopia and Cambodia, were resistant. Well before the world warmed by two degrees, their countries would be devastated—some of them underwater. Why should they endorse what amounted to a death sentence?

“We will not sign off on any agreement that represents a certain extinction of our people,” a delegate to the talks from Barbados told Politico. Together with a group of nearly fty “climate vulnerable” countries, the island nations pressed for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The compromise reached—more Monty Hall than Solomon—was to endorse both gures. The Paris agreement calls for “holding” warming below two degrees, while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

Last week, the United Nations’ scienti c advisory board delivered its assessment of those numbers. The ndings of the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were almost universally—and justi ably—described as “dire.” Even 1.5 degrees’ worth of warming, the I.P.C.C. warned, is likely to be disastrous, with consequences that include, but are not limited to, the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs, the displacement of millions of people by sea-level rise, and a decline in global crop yields. Meanwhile, at the current rate of emissions, the world will have run through the so- called carbon budget for 1.5 degrees within the next decade or so. “It’s like a deafening,

Comment October 22, 2018 Issue

What Is Donald Trump’s Response to the U.N.’s Dire Climate Report?

The U.N.’s scienti c advisory board sounds a piercing alarm on climate change, but the President doesn’t seem to hear it.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

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piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” Erik Solheim, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told the Washington Post.

But, if a smoke alarm rings in the kitchen and everyone’s watching “Fox & Friends” in the den, does it make a sound? Asked about the report last week, Donald Trump said, “I want to look at who drew it—you know, which group drew it.” The answer seemed to indicate that the President had never heard of the I.P.C.C., a level of cluelessness that, while hardly a surprise, was nevertheless dismaying. The next day, as a devastating hurricane hit Florida—one made that much more destructive by the warming that’s already occurred—the President ew to Pennsylvania to campaign for Lou Barletta, a climate-change-denying Republican congressman running for the Senate.

Though the Administration often seems incapable of systematic action, it has spent the past eighteen months systematically targeting rules aimed at curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. One of these rules, which required greater fuel efficiency for cars and trucks, would have reduced CO emissions by an estimated six billion tons over the lifetime of

the affected vehicles. In a recent ling intended to justify the rollback, the Administration predicted that, by the end of this century, global temperatures will have risen by almost four degrees Celsius (nearly seven degrees Fahrenheit). In this context, the Administration argued, why would anyone care about a mere six billion tons? Come the apocalypse, it seems, we’ll all want to be driving S.U.V.s.

The Supreme Court, for its part, appears unlikely to challenge the Administration’s baleful reasoning. Last week, it declined to hear an appeal to a lower-court ruling on hydro uorocarbons, chemicals that are among the most potent greenhouse gases known. The lower court had struck down an Obama-era rule phasing out HFCs, which are used mostly as refrigerants. The author of the lower-court decision was, by the dystopian logic of our times, Brett Kavanaugh.

Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes needed to prevent it, the group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity is generated and distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be needed in transportation, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would have to be accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To have a reasonable chance

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of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO emissions, now

running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough. All the scenarios that the I.P.C.C. could come up with to limit warming to 1.5 degrees rely on some kind of “carbon-dioxide removal”: essentially, technologies to suck CO out of the air. Such

technologies exist, but so far only in the sense that ying cars exist—as expensive-to- produce prototypes. A leaked draft of the report noted that there was a “very high risk” of exceeding 1.5 degrees; although that phrase was removed from the nal report, the message is clear.

Thus, it is tempting, following the Trump Administration’s lead, to simply give up. But, as Edgar puts it in “King Lear,” the “worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ” Perhaps the most important takeaway from the report is that every extra half a degree is world-altering. According to the I.P.C.C., between 1.5 degrees and two degrees of warming, the rate of crop loss doubles. So does the decline in marine

sheries, while exposure to extreme heat waves almost triples. As always, it’s the poor who are apt to suffer most. Friederike Otto, the acting director of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, recently told the Web site Carbon Brief that “half a degree of additional warming makes a huge difference. For people who are already marginalised, this can be an existential difference.”

Meanwhile, two and a half degrees, three degrees, or even, per the Trump Administration, four degrees of warming are all realistic possibilities. Indeed, based on recent trends, the last gure seems the most likely. Globally, emissions rose last year, and they’re expected to rise still further this year. This disaster is going to be as bad—as very, very bad—as we make it. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the October 22, 2018, issue, with the headline “Global Warning.”

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reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that

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Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non ction for “

.” Read more »

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Articles/Schulz, _The Really Big One (Print)_.pdf
Articles/Richardson, _Ballard of the Sad Climatologist_ (Print).pdf
Articles/Kolbert, _The Fate of Earth_.pdf
10/14/2018 The Fate of Earth | The New Yorker

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W

Yesterday evening, at Manhattan’s New School, the New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert delivered the second annual Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture on the Fate of the

Earth, an event established by the Nation Institute in honor of the late Jonathan Schell, a

longtime New Yorker staff writer, and named for “The Fate of the Earth,” a series of articles that Schell wrote for the magazine in 1982 and later published as a book. Kolbert’s remarks

have been edited for length.

hen I was asked to deliver this lecture, the prompt I was given was to address the fate of Earth. At rst, I thought of focussing on the threat of nuclear

annihilation, which Jonathan Schell for The New Yorker in the nineteen-eighties, and which now, , seems nearer than ever before. Another possible topic was, of course, climate change, which my colleague Bill McKibben . Bill’s work, like Schell’s, possesses a erce moral energy and a remarkable prescience. Whether it is or droughts or ooding or wild res, like the sort raging right now in Northern California, we’re already seeing the destabilizing effects of global warming that he foretold in “

,” published in The New Yorker in 1989. Just this week, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, signed an order to

, which was central to the United States’ commitment to the Paris climate accord, which the White House .

All of which is to say that October of 2017 is a scarily opportune moment to talk about nuclear war or to talk about climate change—or to talk about climate change and nuclear war. But I am going to try to do something different. Instead of looking at the fate of Earth from our anxious perspective, from a human perspective, I’d like to try to

Annals of Technology

The Fate of Earth Humanity’s survival on this planet seems more uncertain than ever. But what happens when

we look at ourselves through other creatures’ eyes?

By Elizabeth Kolbert October 12, 2017

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look at it from the viewpoint of the millions and millions of non-human species with which we share the planet. This represents a different kind of imaginative exercise. It requires us not to imagine events that might happen but to look at events that have happened through different eyes—or even without eyes, since so many of our fellow- creatures lack them. We will always fall short in these exercises, but I think it’s important to try, so I hope you will indulge me.

I want to start off with an individual animal, who went by the name of Toughie. Toughie, as I understand it—and I never had the pleasure of meeting him, though I did meet one of his siblings, or perhaps cousins—was a very charming fellow. He was born in the cloud forest above the town of El Valle, in central Panama, a beautiful, rugged area that’s unusually rich in biodiversity. Speci cally, Toughie was born in a tree hole. It was lled with water, the way most things in the cloud forest are lled with water. His mother deposited her eggs there, and then, when Toughie and his siblings were tadpoles, their father took over, and he cared for them. Up in the tree hole, there wasn’t much for the tadpoles to eat, so Toughie and his sisters and brothers sustained themselves by literally eating the skin off their father’s back. Toughie was living in the cloud forest in 2005, when he was found by a group of herpetologists. Eventually, he came to live in the botanical garden in Atlanta.

Toughie was, presumably, a pretty typical representative of his species, the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog. This species was discovered only in 2005, and named only in 2008. The reason it was discovered, which is the same reason that Toughie came to live in the botanical garden in Atlanta, is that biologists were desperately trying to catalogue the amphibian life in central Panama before it disappeared. They had watched in horror as a plague had swept through the western part of the country, wiping out frogs and toads, and they could see that this wave of death was moving east, toward the central part of the country, which is home to some really spectacular amphibian species, including the Panamanian golden frog.

So these biologists—some were American, some were Panamanian—were, as I said, trying to catalogue what was out there before it was lost. And they were also collecting live animals, with the idea that, if they could save breeding pairs, they could create a

A Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog. Photograph by Brian Gratwicke / Flickr

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sort of ark. In the case of the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, only a handful of animals were caught before the scourge hit. Researchers had managed to collect a few females and a few males, including Toughie, but, although they were brought together in various con gurations, they never produced viable offspring. Meanwhile, efforts to collect more members of the species were unsuccessful; the frog has a distinctive call that sounds like a dog’s bark, and though many man-hours were spent listening for it, it has not been heard in the forest since 2007. The last female Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog died in 2009, the second-to-last male in 2012. This left just Toughie. And when he died, in September of 2016, it is likely that the species went extinct. A notice of Toughie’s death ran in the Times, under the headline, “

.”

The cause of this extinction, the cause of the , was a chytrid fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd. No one knows exactly where the disease originated, or how it moved around the world, but it showed up on different continents almost simultaneously, which means that, almost certainly, it was transported by people. One theory is that it was carried across the globe on African clawed frogs, which were exported from Africa in the nineteen-forties and fties for use as pregnancy tests; the frogs would be injected with a woman’s urine, and if by the next day they’d produced eggs, then this showed that the woman was pregnant. African clawed frogs, it turns out, can carry Bd but are not affected by it. They may account for the spread, but this is still an active subject of research.

Seen through the eyes of Toughie and his ilk—and frogs have very interesting eyes; they can see colors in the dark, something humans certainly can’t do, and it’s possible no other animals can do—Bd looks a lot like germ warfare, like a biological weapon designed to spread and in ict maximum damage. One of the most disturbing sections of Schell’s book about nuclear war, “The Fate of the Earth,” is the chapter titled “ .” In that chapter, Schell writes, “We have always been able to send people to their death, but only now has it become possible to prevent all birth and so doom all future human beings to uncreation.” This is what the spread of Bd has done to the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog: all future generations have been doomed to uncreation. And it’s not just this one species. Many other frogs and toads have been doomed by this same pathogen. Gastric brooding frogs were remarkable animals that gestated their young in their stomachs and gave birth through their mouths. There were

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two species that lived in Australia, until Bd swept through. Both are now extinct. The same goes for the sharp-snouted day frog, also native to Australia, and the golden toad (no relation to the golden frog), which was native to Costa Rica. Many, many populations of frogs in North America have crashed owing to Bd. All in all, the fungus has been implicated in the extinction or catastrophic decline of at least two hundred species.

Bd is just one of several pathogens that we can be pretty con dent have been moved around the world by people and that are now having devastating, biological-weapons- scale impacts. Another is what’s become known as . You’ve probably heard about this disease. It was rst detected in upstate New York in 2007, near Albany, and it has since killed millions and millions and millions of bats. White nose is also a fungal infection. It comes from Europe—genetic analysis is pretty clear about that—and it was probably brought to New York on the shoes or backpack of some unsuspecting tourist. Over the past decade, it has spread to thirty-one U.S. states and ve Canadian provinces. And the problem with white-nose syndrome, as with Bd, is that, once it gets into the environment, it can spread on its own, by putting out spores, or it can be spread by other animals or by people.

his is a photo of me and an official of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, Scott Darling, in a cave. Something like three hundred thousand

bats used to spend the winter hibernating here, but because of white-nose syndrome that number has dropped by about ninety per cent in the past decade. Darling and I are standing on a carpet several inches thick, made up entirely of dead bats.

Of course, it’s not just microorganisms that people are moving around the globe. We move plants; . Sometimes we do this purposefully, but much more often we do it by accident. It’s estimated that, on any given day, ten thousand species are being moved around the world just in the ballast water of our supertankers. Mostly, the results go unnoticed; the species that’s being moved to a new place can’t survive there, or doesn’t reproduce. But sometimes the results are so world-altering that we can’t help but attend to them. And the more species we move around the planet,

In the southern gastric-brooding frog, now extinct, tadpoles developed in the female’s stomach and emerged as

fully formed froglets.

Photograph by Michael J. Tyler / Science Source

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through global trade and global travel, the more of these impossible-to-overlook events we’re going to get.

There are thousands of examples—in fact, whole databases full of them. Hawaii used to have about a hundred species of native tree snails, which were found nowhere else on Earth. Now, because of competition from non-native snails introduced by people, there are only about twenty- ve species left, most of them highly endangered. The Guam

ycatcher (a bird) and the Guam ying fox (a bat) were both driven to extinction by the introduction of the brown tree snake, which was probably a stowaway in military cargo brought to the island during the Second World War. In New Zealand, the huia and the Stephens Island wren are two of a whole slate of bird species that were with the introduction of European predators such as rats and weasels.

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The list could go on and on. We humans think of moving organisms around the globe as very ordinary; many of the plants in our back yards come from other continents, as do many of the crops and the domesticated animals that we consume. But when we look at this from the perspective of other creatures, from the perspective of a Hawaiian snail, say, or a Guam ycatcher, or a huia, the process looks very different, very out of the ordinary. Over most of evolutionary history, plants and animals didn’t just show up

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A pair of huias—male on the left, female on the right—from the Canterbury Museum, in New Zealand.

Photograph by Frans Lanting Studio / Alamy

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on new continents or in new ocean basins, or, if they did, they did so only very rarely, perhaps as a result of a tsunami or some other violent event. Without a lot of help, a land animal can’t cross an ocean, and a marine creature can’t cross a continent.

Two hundred and fty million years ago, toward the end of the Paleozoic era, all the world’s landmasses were squished together into one giant supercontinent, Pangaea. Today, biologists point out, we are, in effect, creating a new Pangaea by bringing all the world’s ora and fauna together. And this reshuffling of the biosphere, this creation of a new supercontinent, is a development that’s unprecedented in Earth’s history. It took many millions of years to form the original Pangaea, and here we are putting the new one together in a matter of centuries. We are running geologic history backward, and at warp speed.

This rearrangement of the biosphere is one reason that scientists argue we no longer live in the Holocene epoch but have , the age of man. Whether this new nomenclature should be formally adopted is still a matter of debate, but the term has already been adopted informally, and it appears all the time now in popular and scienti c publications. And this represents a really basic and disorienting shift in how we think about ourselves.

Thinking scienti cally about man’s place in the world used to mean acknowledging our insigni cance. Charles Darwin’s mentor, Charles Lyell, taught us that the time in which we live is not in any way special. Earth has been around for eons, and the same processes of change—erosion, for instance, or volcanism—that shape the planet today were shaping it in the days of the dinosaurs. Darwin taught us that our species was just another species. Like every other living creature, it had evolved slowly, from more ancient forebears. Even the qualities that seem to set humans apart—love, say, or a sense of right and wrong—must have arisen just as other adaptive traits did, through the process of natural selection.

The Anthropocene forces us to see ourselves differently, as remarkable, even unique. No other creature in the history of life on Earth—and at least 3.8 billion years, maybe longer—ever dominated the planet as we do now. No creature has ever changed it at the rate that we are changing it right now. This is true whatever we do, whether we start a nuclear war or don’t start one, whether we replace our coal plants with wind turbines, or our gas-powered cars with electric ones.