Homo stuffensis

The Real Cost of Plundering the Planet's Resources

…"So Much Stuff" and "Material World" each make strong points; taken together, the books are even more compelling—and alarming. Consumption patterns in the Global North—and South, increasingly—simply cannot be sustained. Everyone who's read the news lately, or just ventured outside into this summer's smoke-filled, record-breaking heat, knows this. But that knowledge doesn't seem to change much. Conway explains this failure as a function of modernity. The industrialized world was built out of mountains of sand, iron, and copper, and it cannot operate without vast quantities of these or other materials. Colwell traces the problem back even further. Our special talent as a species is our ability to refashion raw materials—first rocks into tools, then, eventually, quartz into integrated circuits. We are, he suggests, Homo stuffensis, a creature "defined and made by our things." We should change our ways—we must change our ways—but this long history is against us. ♦︎

--Elizabeth Kolbert won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for "The Sixth Extinction." Her latest book is "Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future."