Extinction is inevitable. Expected. Almost all (99%) species that have ever existed have died out. Those disappearances have largely occurred at consistent background rates. But in the context of mass extinctions, ecosystems are placed under immense pressure, at above-average speeds. Here, the language changes from the commonplace to the exceptional.
The most recent of these events occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, following an asteroid collision off the shore of Mexico. And 252 million years ago, at the Permian-Triassic boundary, Earth experienced its most severe loss of animal species to date when mass volcanisms pumped carbon into the air, suffocating life and acidifying oceans, killing off up to 96% of all marine species.
It is widely accepted that we are currently witnessing the start of a sixth mass extinction. Humans are dramatic ecosystem engineers – irrevocably altering environments and habitats. Past extinction events offer clues about how the Earth has previously responded to being placed under such severe pressure.
But how can we better understand this extinction? How does this knowledge reach us, as humans, readers, engineers?
In my anthology Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (2021), I argued that poetry has a unique power to explore the stakes and potential of a sixth mass extinction event. In poetry, each mechanism is part of a larger conceptual machine designed to evoke and provoke in boundless, generous ways. As I wrote, poetry “distils ideas … into their most refined and impacting state”. It’s “synaesthetic, with the freedom to join the senses and activate our understanding of a given subject in innate, unsettling, and inexplicable ways”. And it’s “economical … a compressed world ready to be opened up and expanded by the reader”.
However, poetry is also a space of necessary complication and conflict, being both expansive and limited, affective and affected by human bias. As the poet Ben Lerner notes in The Hatred of Poetry (2016) “you’re moved to write … but as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms … you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic”. This inflexible logic is invaluable, given that it shapes, defines and influences our actions on the planet.
The geologist Marcia Bjornerud has attributed rapid anthropogenic destruction, and its role in triggering a sixth mass extinction event, to narrow perspectives and shallow, linear thinking. The solution, she suggests, is in attending to the layers of an ancient Earth, contextualising differing rates of change (or tempos) with a “polytemporal” worldview.
In 2022, I joined the UK’s first Extinction Studies doctoral training programme. I sought to explore how, and to what extent, I could cultivate a “polytemporal” perspective through palaeontological study and poetic practice.
I set out to understand how words can help us to develop a deeper frame of reference that not only acknowledges but attempts to conceive of immense timescales. This work has taken me from Iceland’s melting glaciers to the ancient geological formations of the Scottish small isles, exploring chronostratigraphic boundaries – sites where eras are thought to start and end.
Engineering intersections
Poetry and palaeontology both work with strata. Strata is both literal and literary, sedimentary and metaphoric: it is to be read, to be interpreted, to be imagined around. In poetry, lines function as units of meaning: they can be categorised and contained, but they are part of a larger whole. And in poems (unlike most prose) words offer as much meaning as the silence that surrounds them; the page is not blank, but a negative space through which words resonate, into which meaning is made, or borne from.
As the poet Don Paterson writes: “Silence is the poet’s ground. Silence delineates the formal borders of the poem, and the formal arrangement of silences puts language under pressure … underwrites the status of the poem as significant mark”. Likewise, fossils offer as much meaning as the negative space that surrounds them, the sediment from which they are excavated. Absence is evidential. It may denote where species moved from extant to extinct. It may denote the environmental pressures that caused this.
The poet Jorie Graham states that silence “is the sound of the earth … [it] does not need you to interrupt it”. It’s true. Earth, and its ecosystems, do not require us to write, do not require us to make meaning of the past: to name and categorise epochs, eras and events as they layer and compress into strata. However, if we are to alter ecosystems so exceptionally, it is required that we understand the deep time context of our actions, as well as how context provides meaning; how meaning provides emotional value; how emotions drive action.
Poems are ecosystems that we engineer. They are not spaces where images are created, but where images are transformed from pre-existing vocabularies, cast into meaning against the blank space. Poems may not be so sufficiently affective or effective that they can bring an end to anthropogenic destruction. But, they do demonstrate, on a small scale, how nothing can be made, read, or understood in isolation. That human thinking is bound by certain margins: spatial, temporal, conceptual.
To comprehend extinction requires us to know how imagination works; where it reaches its limits. Poetry, as an anthropogenic art and process, shows us how to read. Poetry shows us how to recognise connections that occur on both visible and invisible levels.
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Kate Simpson receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
