The Ends Of The World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, And Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen

It is perhaps too much to be hoped for that a book about prehistory, namely the evidence that exists and the various theories that have been proposed for the mass extinctions we find in the geologic record, that we could avoid politics. Indeed, one of the foremost reasons why we seek to understand the past is to better understand the present and, we hope, build for a better future, or at least avoid the worst possible futures that could exist. When we study human history, a field I am quite familiar with, it is much the same. We study the past not merely to understand the past on its own terms, as laudable as that would be, but in order to understand the present and future. And it is in seeking to understand and communicate what we think and feel about the present and future where our political problems and worldview issues become the most serious. This book, to the extent that it is written about the past, is a generally good book. The author even manages to dispel a lot of the fear-mongering that goes on about the near future that one can easily read in other books. However, it is in the author’s understanding of the present where he goes astray.

This book is about 300 pages long or so and it is divided into pretty obvious thematic chapters, chronologically discussed. The book begins with an introduction as well as a discussion of the earth’s beginnings and the slow march of life throughout prehistory in glorious narrative fiction (1). This is followed by a discussion of the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician era with anoxic seas (2). Then there is a discussion of the end of the Devonian period, where a world of sea creatures appears to have been ended by the rise of trees (3) and the Appalachian mountains. This is followed by a discussion of the Great dying at the end of the Permian where life came closest to extinction thanks to what appears to be massive volcanism (4) and a decline in speciation leading to extinction by attrition. The lesser but still impressive dying at the end of the Triassic period also seems driven by volcanism and ocean acidification (5). The famous extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period (6), the one that killed off the dinosaurs, is discussed with relation to the possible combination of a giant asteroid and the resulting explosion of the Deccan traps. The author then tackles the proposed mass extinction event some people think we are in now, which has taken place over the past 50,000 years or so, scientists say, as mankind has pushed to extinction the large animals wherever it has expanded to (7). The author speculates on the near future (8) before closing his book with a discussion of how life will end on earth thanks to the changes of the sun in the next hundreds of millions of years (9). The book then ends with acknowledgements, a bibliography, and an index.

It is a shame, given how generally good this book is, that the author runs into a predictable issue that many scientific writers struggle with, and that is his relationship with political conservatives, particularly religious ones. Many ignorant scientists and science writers are of the mistaken belief that people of faith are hostile to science, when they are only hostile to scientism, a worldview that many (foolish) scientists confuse with science itself as a field. The author’s continual jokes and jibes about religious people and political conservatives comes off rather poorly. This need not be the case, indeed the author himself recognizes, when looking at the past, that geology’s scientific rigor has been greatly harmed by the field’s deliberate attempts to proclaim a uniformitarianism that seeks to avoid confirming what could be taken as a religious catastrophe-based view of the world, one that is in keeping with reality. That the author seeks that negative views of the Bible and Christianity have limited science’s insight while not being able to see how his own anti-religious bias harms his ability to relate to scientifically-inclined people of faith in the present who may not be hostile to his discussion of prehistorical mass extinctions and their implications suggests the difficulty of avoiding negative and biased judgment. That said, despite this flaw, the funniest moments of this book show the author seeking to understand the nature of the geological record all over the world (and especially in the United States) as he looks at the connection between geology and local lore, as well as the economic use of shales that indicate the catastrophic lack of oxygen at a particular time in history.