Panamanian Golden Frog, from the Daily Dank
Zero Carbon & the Great Extinction
By Christopher Bernard
It was Sam who got me thinking, one day, after I read a book about how mankind was causing the greatest extinction of species on earth in 65 million years. Sam’s my dog, a black Labrador with deep, sad eyes. It was what I saw in those eyes that changed my mind – actually, it changed my whole life. My name is Johnny José Brennan, and I live in Davenport, Iowa, not far from the Mississippi River.
I read the book over one of my few weekends away from the office. As I read, I often shook my head in alarm and amazement. I’d followed reports on global warming and humanity’s other devastating effects on other living creatures over the years, and fully accepted these were serious issues, but I’d had no idea about this; I’d believed it was mostly a question of rising oceans and more violent hurricanes and unstable weather that would have an effect a couple of generations down the road. But this was a different order of magnitude altogether.
I vaguely remembered my Uncle Jésus (on my Mexican mother’s side) railing against what he called “ecocide” when I was little, and something he had called, with a melodramatic flourish, “the coming holocaust of the species.” My dad, an Irishman with family still in Donegal, had claimed global warming was all made up by liberals, that environmentalism was just a way for Big Science to get grants from Washington and take more of people’s rights away; he and his brother-in-law had had many a memorable shout-’n’-out (angry shouts followed by even angrier, if possible, slamming of doors) while I was growing up, so I dismissed both of them, my father’s conspiracy theories and my crazy uncle’s rants about “species collapse.” But now I wasn’t so sure.
