At first, Resaint had found it easy not to care about extinction, because the arguments against it were so feeble.
Yes, we were losing tens of thousands of species a year. But what was seldom mentioned in the news stories about extinction, illustrated with adorable fennecs and resplendent macaws, was that vertebrates made up only about eighty thousand of the millions of species on earth. So if you picked a doomed species at random, it almost definitely wouldn’t be a species people genuinely cared for, like a bear or a waterfowl, or even a species people had some faint curiosity about, like a frog or an eel. Far more likely it would be some total nonentity.
After all, the vast majority of animals on earth were extremely parochial parasites. Almost every species visible to the naked eye had at least one parasite that was specific to that species and could survive nowhere but its body; often it had several such dependents and sub-dependents (“. . . and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum.”) Nobody gave a shit about any of those. You could tell because, when the WCSE had resolved early on to exempt all such microscopic parasites from its purview, essentially rendering them nonpersons, not even the most radical greens had so much as muttered in protest. They had about as much value in their own right as a proprietary cable for some discontinued smartphone.
Even if you took the hangers-on out of the equation, it was still insects who constituted the bulk of the many millions. And although some of them might have slightly bolder careers than the monoxenous parasites, in practice they were still as distant from human apprehension as any species that died out with the dinosaurs. Nobody had ever set eyes on most of the endangered bugs, not even the naturalists whose job it was to compile the catalogs. Therefore nobody could pretend to miss them. They were “precious” only in the abstract. New ones evolved, and old ones went extinct; this churn had been going on since the Ordovician period. To wring your hands over it would be absurd. And the tiny fraction of species that were genuinely mourned were certain to have DNA on file, which meant that at any time they could be resurrected like the giant panda. (As she sat in the hotel restaurant recalling these old attitudes, Halyard nodded as if they sounded pretty sensible to him.)
There were some technical arguments for why the extinction of some fameless critter might be a bad thing, but these always felt rather strained. For instance, every species played some role in its ecosystem, so in theory its removal could have an unpredictable ripple effect. But most of the time there would be dozens of other species who were almost indistinguishable from it and would be quite happy to fill its shoes; after all, how could there be several million types of insect if most of them weren’t basically just trivial variations on each other? The truth was, most biodiversity was redundant. And in any case, at a time when the air was turning hot and bitter, when the rain was claggy with microplastics and endocrine disrupters, when the entire planet seemed angry and nauseous, it was difficult to care that much about how the loss of some aphid might perturb the food web of the subtropical hollow in which it had lived, or even how the loss of a hundred different aphids might perturb the food webs of a hundred different subtropical hollows. Our ecosystems had bigger things to worry about.
Sometimes it was noted that these bugs might take unsuspected treasures with them to the grave. If the Brazilian hornet Polybia paulista had gone extinct before we’d studied it, how could we have isolated the compound in its venom that dissolved tumors? Or if the Ecuadorian cockroach Lucihormetica luckae had met such a fate, how could we have copied the asymmetric microstructures in the luminescent spots on its back to improve the efficiency of our LEDs? But most of the time, when people made these arguments, you could tell their hearts weren’t really in it. The biodiversity enthusiasts were trying to talk to capitalists in the language of capitalism, but they knew as well as the capitalists did that it just wasn’t a strong pitch. Only a tiny minority of species had anything unique and packageable to offer. After all, if the rainforest was really “nature’s medicine cabinet,” oozing with new penicillins and improved morphines, then the big pharmaceutical companies would have been buying up Brazil for a thousand euros an acre. But in fact none of them had ever bothered. So either they didn’t like making money, or they understood that, actually, nature didn’t pay for itself. The most exciting discoveries were now being made by algorithms working millions of times faster than evolution could. We didn’t need to infringe on Mother Earth’s intellectual property any longer.
And Resaint felt the same way about the crustaceans and the mollusks and the amphibians as she did about the insects. The lizards, too, and the fish and even most of the birds. If they hadn’t mattered to anyone when they were alive, they couldn’t matter to anyone when they were dead; and anyway, there were still so many left, and evolution was always making new ones.
The only partial exception to Resaint’s indifference was in the realm of her own livelihood: intelligent species. She could at least respect the argument that the loss of one of those was a terrible loss. Any complex mind very different from our own will parse the universe in ways that we can’t. As Darwin once wrote, “He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.” Back when primatologists first started teaching sign language to chimpanzees, that seemed to be the closest any human being could come to communicating with aliens.
And yet Resaint couldn’t help but notice that, even after decades of research into the minds of apes and crows and octopuses, there had still been very little in the way of philosophical revelations. Yes, we recognized a lot more animals as thinkers, and we knew a lot more about their thinking. As that woman at the wedding had promised, Resaint found the science engaging, which was fortunate because otherwise her job would have been a slog. But the hope that these little brains would have anything profound to teach us now seemed as specious as any proverb about wisdom coming out of the mouths of babes. The truth was, most of the time, talking to a chimpanzee was more like talking to a child than it was like talking to an alien; which is to say, it was like talking to a very stupid adult. That was all.
This was how she felt while she was studying to become a species intelligence evaluator, and continued to feel for her first four years of assignments. But then she met Adelognathus marginatum.
She had gone to Western Ukraine to study a critically endangered bird, the Ruthenian tawny bunting Emberiza campestris. An agricultural company called Kalynove AgroProduct, which owned about 1.2 million hectares of sunflower fields, the largest such holding in the country, was proposing to replace its entire crop with a new strain genetically modified to resist pests. The buntings, whose population was already very diminished, relied on these pests as their main source of food, and a computer model of the ecosystem projected about an eighty percent chance that the newly pristine sunflowers would starve them into extinction. Also probably finished off would be a rare parasitoid wasp called Adelognathus marginatum. The buntings were similar enough to some highly intelligent passerines that an evaluation was felt to be necessary—perhaps they were secret tool-users—but she would have no business with the wasps, which had a mere forty thousand neurons in their heads (compared to a million in even a cockroach or a honey bee).
And yet it was the wasps that caught her attention, because they shared with several other parasitoid wasp species a particularly devious method of self-perpetuation.
Marginatum would look around for a small stripy spider called Metapanamomops bohemicus (like marginatum, bohemicus had no common name in any language). It would sting the spider, temporarily paralyzing it, and then drill an egg into its abdomen. After about an hour, the spider would regain control of its limbs and go on about its business. Over the next few weeks, the wasp larva would grow from the egg, feeding on the spider’s blood like an ectopic pregnancy. And then, when the larva was almost ready to pupate, the spider would build a web. But this web would not have its usual meticulous pattern, spiraling inward around a couple of dozen spokes to weave a mesh as tight as a tennis racket. Instead, the web would be a primitive-looking thing of just four thick cables, an X suspended between the sunflower stalks with extra strands duct-taped around the intersection. Once the spider had finished this web, the larva would poison the spider, disembark from its abdomen, and suck out its juices. Then it would waggle over to the center of the web and build the cocoon in which it would grow its wings.
The point of all this was to furnish the wasp larva with a cradle where it could complete its metamorphosis. A standard spiderweb was strong enough to catch flies, but not strong enough to stand up to strong winds, heavy rain, or marauding ants—so it was no use to the larva. However, Metapanamomops bohemicus also knew how to weave a much sturdier web when it needed a comfortable place to shed its exoskeleton. So the larva’s trick was to release ecdysteroid hormones into the spider’s bloodstream, fooling the spider into thinking it was about to molt, so that it would supply a web that better met the larva’s needs.
As if this wasn’t humiliation enough, marginatum also ran an additional scam on Metapanamomops bohemicus—a scam that had been scientifically described for the first time only a few years earlier, and was, as far as anyone knew, unique among the parasitoid wasps. If you watched the larva dragging itself out of the spider’s abdomen, you would notice that it was wearing a sort of birth caul around half of its body. This, too, the spider had inadvertently provided for it. At the start of the whole cycle, when the wasp jammed its egg into the spider, sirens would go off in the spider’s immune system. It would begin forming a layer of white blood cells called a granuloma around the invader, an abscess intended to wall it off from the rest of the spider’s insides. Under normal circumstances, the process would finish once this granuloma was of a serviceable thickness, but here, too, the wasp larva released a treacherous hormone, this one disorienting the spider’s immune response so that it just kept slapping on more and more coats of paint. Later on, once the spider was dead and the larva was ready to start on its cocoon, it would hold on to this granuloma, which was perfectly fitted to its body, and use it as an inner lining, allowing the cocoon to be finished much faster. In other words, it twisted what was supposed to be a defensive measure into another gift for itself.
One evening Resaint watched a video of an Adelognathus marginatum larva climbing out of a Metapanamomops bohemicus carcass with the granuloma around its shoulders. It was one of those videos from invertebrate reality where the physics look wrong, so it feels like you must be watching the footage backwards or upside down—the larva that strained for escape but didn’t pop out until exactly the moment when it seemed to have gone slack; the granuloma that looked gummy and soft but still tore right through the spider’s cuticle—and you feel compelled to play it over and over again because you can never quite assimilate its strangeness.
The next day, on a call with one of Kalynove’s population biologists, she mentioned the video. “Have you watched it?”
“No.”
“You should. They’re a pretty interesting species.”
The population biologist gave a little shrug. “Probably gone soon.” And then she moved on.
Probably gone soon. Resaint had never felt grief in the course of her work before, but those words stayed with her like a papercut that won’t stop bleeding. There was something about the biologist’s casualness that threw it into relief: marginatum’s breeding cycle had played out hundreds of millions of times a year for ninety million years, but one day soon, somewhere in a field in Western Ukraine, there would be a final performance, and then never again.
Yet the reason she found this so hard to accept was not because of the improbability that it could all just peter out after a quadrillion rounds, but because of the improbability that it should ever have happened in the first place.
Evolution was a monstrous maker, a blind heedless thing inching along in no particular direction, the whole disaster fueled by spilled blood and wasted effort, Amazon rivers of both. All of it was premised on random mutation, which was like editing a novel by simply copying it out again and again in the hope that the typos you made would not just spare the meaning but actually render new insight. What could be more absurd? And yet this clusterfuck had yielded Adelognathus marginatum, which could mind-control a spider with counterfeit hormones in order to swipe its best handiwork for the larva that has just drunk its lifeforce like a smoothie. Somehow, inert matter had organized itself into something so convoluted and delicate and whimsical and cruel. If, somewhere in space, a scattering of asteroid fragments happened to drift into the shape of a perfect tetrahedron a thousand kilometers wide, it would be no greater miracle.
Resaint thought about the number of wasps that had to die for marginatum to evolve its abilities; the number of different metabolites that various larvae must have dribbled into various spiders before they found just the right molecule to hijack bohemicus; the number of false starts, wrong turns, near misses, interesting follies; the number of times the code was cracked a million years early but the wasp in question got eaten by a tawny bunting before it could breed. All of this happening without intention or direction, just a tumbling and jittering in darkness until form emerged; a story told in numbers that boggled any human reckoning, until, by human carelessness, those numbers were at last reduced to a more familiar scale, a thousand, a hundred, five, four, three, two, one, zero.
Okay, so what was new? It wasn’t as if this was the first time she’d watched a video of a critically endangered species showing off a clever talent, nor were the principles of evolutionary biology some kind of revelation to her. So why, over the days that followed, did she feel like Adelognathus marginatum had laid an egg in her brain?
Even now, she had no answer to this. Her turnaround was as abrupt as it was unexpected. Perhaps it was only a question of timing, and any species that came along at just that moment would have had the same effect. Or perhaps it was because marginatum and its dark arts were almost unobserved, even by marginatum itself, and that clarified things for her.
In hindsight, of all the beliefs that had to be overturned to make Resaint’s epiphany possible, the most fundamental, the most axiomatic, was that a tragedy could only be a tragedy if it hurt somebody. In other words, if something happened in the universe, and it didn’t impinge on the conscious experience of any living being, human or non-human, real or potential, then that was not a moral matter.
Well, if that was true, the extinction of the Adelognathus marginatum was an absolutely meaningless event. “What is it like to be a golden-headed langur swinging through the forest? What is its unique and ineffable experience of life? Can we bear to erase that from existence?” Sentimental questions like that could not be asked about Adelognathus marginatum and its forty thousand neurons. “What is it like to be a parasitic wasp larva injecting hormones into the bloodstream of your host?” It was like nothing. Marginatum was basically a mechanical process, like a virus or weed. Save marginatum? For whose sake? In whose interests? Marginatum had no interests, was void of sake.
“But think of how much future generations of nature lovers will be missing out on!” No. A meeting of marginatum’s global fan club—a few biologists who’d studied its behavior; Resaint herself—could probably fit in a small hotel room, and those numbers were hardly likely to swell as the years went by. On the contrary, parasitic wasps were so repugnant to the soul that they had become a classic argument against creationism: “I cannot persuade myself,” wrote Darwin in 1860, “that a beneficent and omnipotent God could have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.” Nobody made remarks like that about pandas. Nobody ever said to Chiu Chiu, “You prove there is no God who loves us.”
And yet, despite all that, it was self-evident to Resaint that Adelognathus marginatum had some sort of inherent value. How could this brilliant, intricate, hilarious thing—the fluke result of an unrepeatable process, the legacy of some dizzying number of past individuals, all of them, in hindsight, striving unconsciously toward a single invention—not be valuable in itself? What did it matter if anyone appreciated it, if it did any good for anyone? The more Resaint thought about it, the more any conception of value that did not include Adelognathus marginatum seemed nonsensical. A tragedy could only be a tragedy if it hurt somebody? Now she saw that was obviously false. Imagine that nobody had ever discovered Adelognathus marginatum, so it had no cult at all. In that case an erasure could not have hurt anybody, it would not have impinged on the conscious experience of any living being real or potential. Yet it would still have been a terrible loss to the universe. The absence, in this case, of the weaker arguments against extinction—wouldn’t we be sad to lose this cute little fellow?—made space for Resaint to feel the truth of this far graver argument.
It was at this time that she had the first intimations of what she later called the Black Hole. The name was appropriate even at this early stage, because in the same way that astronomers often come at their discoveries sideways, deducing that some cosmic body must exist even though they don’t yet have telescopes big enough to observe it directly, Resaint felt a prickle of awareness regarding her own Black Hole, an early sense of something in the numbers, long before she was capable of looking squarely at its darkness. For many people, the conversion from moral apathy to moral commitment requires some sort of vivid first-hand experience: meeting a survivor, visiting a slum. Peculiar, maybe, that for Resaint it involved watching a video of a wasp grub shimmying out of a spider husk, but then she had never really been a person whose deeper feelings were called forth by straightforward means.
The statistics about species dying out were not news to her, any more than the science of species coming into being; she worked, after all, in the extinction industry. Ten thousand species a year, about a hundred times the rate that would be expected in the absence of human activity. (Those were estimates, arrived at by multiplying other estimates; like the Drake Equation for the number of other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, it was really just a mille-feuille of unknowns, although now that biologists could census the forests and oceans with little drones, there was more and more reason to think the truth might lie somewhere in that range. The figure the guy with the gun would later quote to her—a hundred thousand extinctions a year—was at the very highest end of what was considered plausible.)
The statistics were not news to her, but the force of them was. To go from caring about this not at all to caring about it more than anything was like being turned inside out. Ten thousand marginatums. Probably gone soon. The Kalynove biologist’s casualness on that phone call came to represent for her the general casualness with which this great bonfire was allowed to burn. Yes, she was at the center of a vast and elaborate bureaucracy theoretically intended to prevent extinction, but that bureaucracy’s willful uselessness only emphasized the point. What gripped her at this point was not grief or rage but puzzlement and incredulity. A single extinction was an unspeakable tragedy; and many thousands of them were happening a year; and nobody was really doing anything about it, including her. Those three things could not be true simultaneously, any more than A=B and B=C and A≠C could all be true simultaneously. It didn’t make logical sense. The Black Hole was beginning to reveal itself to her, but in the same way that an astronomer might disbelieve her own numbers at first, she kept feeling like there had to be some kind of mistake.
She watched videos of some of the more remarkable species that had recently vanished: the Christmas frigatebird, which relentlessly hassled other birds until they puked from sheer exasperation, and then ate the vomit; the oyster mussel, which snapped its shell shut to trap a fish inside, and then released larvae which attached themselves to the captured fish with little hooks; the Japanese crested ibis, which secreted a kind of tar from its throat, and then dabbed the tar on its face like eyeshadow to attract a mate; the aye-aye, which tapped a tree up and down the trunk until it made out the sound of a hollow place, and then gnawed through the bark so it could pull out the grubs inside with its extraordinarily long third finger. In each case, as with marginatum, Resaint felt awed by how evolution had not only wound its way toward this weird, snaggly, marginal way of life—so many options and you choose this one?—but held on to it, continued to sharpen and perfect it, until it was no longer marginal but was in fact a triumph, a raison d’etre for a whole species. An astonishing story, now ended.
She began her experiments on the Ruthenian tawny bunting, in a laboratory Kalynove had rigged up for her in one of their farm buildings about forty kilometers outside Khmelnytskyi. As the weeks passed, her captive experimental subjects grew to trust her, but every time one of the buntings ate out of her hand, she found herself thinking, “You shouldn’t be doing this. You should hate me. You should be pecking out my eyes, because I am your doom.”
Maybe that sounded dramatic, but she believed it. If you imagined concentric circles of culpability in the bunting’s extinction, at the very center would be the Kalynove executives who pushed through the plan to switch to the new strain of GM sunflowers even after the population models had warned that it would lead to extinctions; next would be the whole apparatus of Kalynove employees and contractors and investors who made its operations possible; a few circles beyond that would be everyone who had ever eaten a meal cooked in sunflower oil made in one of Kalynove’s crushing plants; and beyond that would be everyone whose carbon footprint and resource consumption had contributed to the rapid climate change and habitat loss that left the bunting population in such a precarious state to begin with. She was not a Kalynove executive, but she was in all those other circles. Indeed, almost every human being in the developed world was in that outermost circle (a fact the WCSE framework made no attempt to capture, despite some fringe proposals early on). That was why the buntings should have raged at her. But they didn’t blame her for what she’d done, the same way you can chain up a dog and starve it to death and even as its organs fail it won’t love you any less. Animals were like very stupid adults. They didn’t know any better.
At night, in her company apartment in Khmelnytskyi, she thought about the Black Hole. Ten thousand marginatums a year. If evolution gave her a sense of the sublime—so many billions of animals over so many millions of years, just to devise one species—then the extinction crisis did too. She called it the Black Hole not just because it was like a vast leak into which so much was irretrievably disappearing, but even more so because in moral terms it was a cosmic singularity, a region of infinite horror. The Black Hole warped spacetime around it: in comparison, any other moral question seemed irrelevant, vanishingly small. The Black Hole was shrouded by its own enormity: you couldn’t properly examine it because it just swallowed up your regard in its blackness. It was a breach like no other breach that had ever preceded it, a breach that could not be measured on any existing scale. The diversity of life on earth was (as far as anyone knew) the most majestic thing in the universe, and human beings were (as far as anyone knew) the only living things with the capacity to appreciate that majesty, and yet human beings were also the ones who were stamping that majesty out, not deliberately but carelessly, incidentally, leaving nothing behind but a few scans and samples that nobody would ever look at.
If every man and woman on the planet were tortured to death, she was beginning to feel, it would not be a sufficient penance.
In 1997, in the far east of Russia, a hunter called Vladimir Markov had been killed outside his cabin by a Siberian tiger. Nobody knew for certain what had happened, but it was believed that Markov might have shot and wounded the tiger after the tiger came to feed on the carcass of a boar Markov had downed. The tiger escaped, and sometime later it found its way to Markov’s cabin. Markov was out, so the tiger chewed up everything it could find with Markov’s scent on it: his latrine, his beehives, even his saucepan and axe. When Markov finally returned home, the tiger ripped him to shreds. It was not so fanciful to suggest that the tiger was taking premeditated revenge on Markov; certainly the locals, who understood these animals better than anyone, believed as much.
But of course the tiger didn’t know that its species had been winnowed by poaching and deforestation from a population of seventy-five thousand at the beginning of the twentieth century to a remnant of just a few hundred. Its vengeance was short-term and personal, but it could have had a much grander scope, if only the tiger had realized the perfectly good reasons it had to loathe Homo sapiens on behalf of its own diminished race. This idea came to obsess Resaint. She tasted in it the possibility of a burden lifted, a debt redeemed. It wasn’t really that she wanted it; rather, it felt like the only permissible outcome. Humans deserved a terrible punishment for their crime; but this punishment ought to be enacted by that crime’s victims; and that enaction could be meaningful only if those victims recognized it for what it was. She knew it was a bit sloppy to talk about victims at all, when the whole premise of her conversion had been that there did not need to be an injured party for an extinction to be wrong. The last thing she wanted was to become one of those people who worshipped Chiu Chiu like a martyred saint. But if the Black Hole was to have any terrestrial champion, it had to be the animals themselves.
For humans to begin paying in blood even an infinitesimal fraction of their debt, you would need to find a species that had been driven by humans to the brink of extinction, that actually understood as much, and that wanted to take revenge.