Technological Progress Versus Degrowth as Solutions to the Sixth Mass Extinction

Assuring the long-term future of Earth’s wildlife requires more economic and technological development, not less.

Saul Zimet — May 8, 2025

Summary: Many environmentalists warn that human activity is causing a sixth mass extinction, and advocate economic stagnation or degrowth to slow or reverse the damage. Contrary to their assumptions, the long-term survival of Earth’s wildlife likely depends not on shrinking humanity’s footprint, but on expanding its technological reach. Rather than retreating from nature, advancing human civilization is probably the surest way to protect and even proliferate life of all kinds—on Earth and beyond.

Rising ocean temperatures, deforestation, replacement of grassland with agricultural land, and many other environmental effects of human activity have been taking an enormous toll on wildlife. Around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction according to a 2019 United Nations (UN) report, which states, “The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900.” The most heavily affected are insect species, among which the extinction rate is about eight times faster than among mammals, reptiles, or birds.

But despite this, the popular idea that Earth is seeing a “sixth mass extinction” is premature. According to conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas, we will only reach mass extinction after about 10,000 years if current trends continue. In response to the UN report, National Geographic explains that only “if all species currently designated as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable go extinct in the next century, and if that rate of extinction continues without slowing down” will we experience a mass extinction within the next few centuries. It is extremely unlikely that all the “critically endangered” species will go extinct so soon, to say nothing of the “endangered” and “vulnerable” species. And even National Geographic’s projection is probably overly pessimistic. As science journalist Ronald Bailey has shown, reports of mass extinction, including the UN’s, tend to assume worst-case instead of most-likely scenarios and therefore probably overestimate extinction rates.

But even if “mass extinction” fears are overblown, the increased rate of species extinctions is worth taking seriously. That is why it’s important to clear up some widespread confusion about the interests of Earth’s wildlife.

One particularly dangerous misconception is that the interests of human beings are fundamentally at odds with those of wildlife. According to this belief, continued economic growth and industrialisation may benefit humans, but only at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of nonhuman life.

The truth is quite different. In the long run, the dangers of disordered nature are so pervasive, and humanity’s potential solutions so indispensable, that advancing human wealth and economic flourishing is necessary, not detrimental, if we want to protect wildlife and maintain or even increase biodiversity.

The Zero-Sum “Man Versus Nature” Premise

The zero-sum view of the relationship between humanity and wildlife often leads humanists and environmentalists to think of each other as enemies. On the environmentalist side, perhaps the most explicit statement of this binary thinking comes from the late David M. Graber (1948–2022). In 1989, before taking up his post as the Chief Scientist for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service, where he served for over three decades, he elucidated his priorities in the Los Angeles Times:

We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

Dave Foreman, founder of the environmental group “Earth First!” and “a leading figure among a generation of activists,” according to the New York Times, likewise advocated what the Times describes as “aggressive protection of the environment for its own sake”: “a … philosophy, known as deep ecology, which holds that nature has inherent value, not just in its utility to people” and whose proposals include “returning vast swaths of land to nature, ripping out any trace of human intervention.”

In his bestselling 2022 book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet George Monbiot writes:

The more land that farming occupies, the less is available for forests and wetlands, savannas and wild grasslands, and the greater is the loss of wildlife and the rate of extinction. All farming, however kind and careful and complex, involves a radical simplification of natural ecosystems. This simplification is required to extract something that humans can eat. In other words, farming inflicts an ecological opportunity cost. Minimizing our impact means minimizing our use of land.

I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is available for other species and the habitats they need, and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which our lives might depend.

Unlike Graber and Foreman, Monbiot pays lip service to the necessity of taking human needs into account in any efforts to protect wildlife by scaling back food production. But the clear implication of the “counter-agricultural revolution” he advocates is the mass impoverishment and undernourishment of vast swaths of humanity to lessen human impact on wildlife.

Even the United Nations, in the “Summary for Policymakers” of its biodiversity report, suggests reducing economic activity and human population growth as strategies for protecting biodiversity: “The negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystem functions are projected to continue or worsen in many future scenarios in response to indirect drivers such as rapid human population growth, unsustainable production and consumption and associated technological development.” Therefore, the summary claims that, “Transformations towards sustainability are more likely when efforts are directed at … lowering total consumption and waste, including by addressing both population growth and per capita consumption.”

Among those on the pro-human side of the zero-sum premise is Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress. “I hold human life as the standard of value,” Epstein writes in his 2014 book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels: “This is the essence of the conflict: the humanist, which is the term I will use to describe someone on a human standard of value, treats the rest of nature as something to use for his benefit; the nonhumanist treats the rest of nature as something that must be served.”

Epstein is generally careful to propose positive-sum policies, but he is so focused on the case for humanism that even he often speaks in zero-sum terms about the relationship between human and non-human animals. In his 2022 book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, Epstein writes: “To the extent one’s primary goal is animal equality one will be morally driven to eliminate all human impacts on animals, including human-benefitting impacts such as the use of animals for medical research.”

Graber, Foreman, Monbiot, and Epstein don’t all agree on whether to prioritise humanity or wildlife, but not one of them questions the assumption that wildlife’s flourishing depends on human retreat and non-intervention.

Mother Nature Is a Grim Reaper

While human activity has accelerated the rate of species extinction in recent history, extinction has been the rule, not the exception, since the dawn of life on Earth. Over 99.9 percent of species that have existed on this planet are now extinct—a story overwhelmingly written prior to the ascension of humankind. Most species have perished in so-called “background extinctions,” but at least five mass extinction events have also occurred, each wiping out over 75 percent of species on Earth at the time. And the rest of non-human life is nearly certain to follow if left to its own devices. Countless threats exist, each of which may be highly unlikely to manifest in any given century, but let the clock tick long enough and the odds eventually become high.

Take asteroids, for example. The New York Times reported in 2023 that, “The world’s family of asteroid-hunting telescopic surveys have so far found more than 32,000 near-Earth asteroids.” They added, reassuringly, that “[m]ost of those capable of inflicting planet-scale devastation have been found because it’s easier to spot bigger rocks glinting in sunlight.”

Still, there are likely to be many Earth-threatening asteroids out there that have not been found. A 2022 National Geographic article reporting on new asteroid research explains that life on Earth is at risk of extinction by “a largely unseen population of space rocks—one that could threaten life as we know it.” Summarising discoveries published in the journal Science, the article explains that, “A group of space rocks stays mostly inside the orbit of Earth, making them difficult to pick out in the glare of the sun—and potentially a threat to our planet.”

As I write this, reports of an asteroid designated “2024 YR4” are all over the news. “The object, first detected in December, is 130 to 300 feet long and expected to make a very close pass of the planet in 2032,” the New York Times reported on 18 February. “Its odds of impacting Earth on Dec. 22 of that year currently stand at 3.1 percent.” (The risk has since been downgraded to a more reassuring 0.004 percent.) This particular asteroid is not large enough to destroy more than a city, but it illustrates the fact that a planetary threat could be discovered at any moment.

Asteroids are just one of many known threat categories that we Earthlings are counting on future technological advances to avert. Marian L. Tupy, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, has surveyed these natural existential threats in his article “Degrowth Means Certain Death for Humanity.” The list includes asteroid and comet impacts, the weakening or reversal of the magnetosphere, supervolcano eruptions, plate tectonics and continental drift, ice ages, ocean current disruption, methane hydrate release, supernova explosions, nearby hypernovas, gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, rogue planets or stars, black holes, solar evolution, and Milky Way collisions.

That list may be just the beginning. In his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, philosopher Toby Ord notes:

It is striking how recently many of these risks were discovered. Magnetic field reversal was discovered in 1906. Proof that Earth had been hit by a large asteroid or comet first emerged in 1960. And we had no idea gamma ray bursts even existed until 1969. For almost our entire history we have been subject to risks to which we were completely oblivious.

And there is no reason to think that the flurry of discovery has finished—that we are the first generation to have discovered all the natural risks we face. Indeed, it would surely be premature to conclude that we have discovered all of the possible mechanisms of natural extinction while major mass-extinction events remain unexplained.

In any one century, the odds of a catastrophe threatening all life on Earth may be tiny. But there are 10,000,000 centuries in a billion years. And if no existential catastrophe occurs by then, complex life will be long gone a billion years from now when the planet’s oxygen levels will have greatly diminished. That is, unless some technologically advanced species changes the odds in time.

Expanding the Scope of Human and Non-Human Life

In the future, humans may develop the technological capacity to affordably travel to outer space and terraform previously uninhabited worlds. Since many known extinction-level threats are restricted to a single planet, creating self-sustaining habitats outside Earth’s biosphere would significantly reduce the chance of some catastrophe ending all known life. Therefore, if life could become multiplanetary, species-level extinctions need not be the inevitable, almost universal rule.

This is among Elon Musk’s long-term goals at SpaceX. “If we’re a multi-planet species, it’s like life insurance for life itself. Not just for humans, but for all the creatures on Earth, because we would bring them with us. And they can’t build spaceships, so we are in effect the steward of life,” Musk has explained.

Perhaps in addition to or instead of terraforming other planets, humans will engineer giant artificial worlds, which physicist Gerard K. O’Neill first conceptualised in detail, to circumvent the many technical challenges of interplanetary travel. Progress toward the development of O’Neill cylinders, which would contain entire ecosystems and fine-tuned environments for the flourishing of life, is Jeff Bezos’s long-term goal for his aerospace company Blue Origin. These “O’Neill colonies,” as Bezos calls them, which would rotate to create artificial gravity using centrifugal force, would be large enough to comfortably hold at least a million people each and would provide attractive environments that people would want to live in, according to Bezos’s vision. He doesn’t believe that he’ll live to see O’Neill colonies himself, but he believes that future generations will.

By these or other means, humans could offer a long-term future to Earth’s lifeforms and increase the number and well-being of animal and plant species, unconstrained by the resources of Earth or of any other single planet. Once space travel and terraformation become cheap enough, entire planets or artificial worlds could be fine-tuned to benefit specific species. Perhaps this process could even be automated and expanded exponentially with the help of AI, which could provide the necessary research and manage the construction many magnitudes faster and more accurately than human beings.

Scientists are already conducting preliminary research on terraforming space habitats. In 2022, a team of University of Rochester scientists laid out a theoretical plan to terraform asteroids into Manhattan-scale space habitats. In 2023, researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center discovered how to turn moon dust into breathable oxygen. And several recent papers have offered strategies for heating up Mars for eventual habitation. Those are just a few of many recent examples.

Even sceptics tend to question only the timeline—not the possibility—of space colonisation. Jonathan McDowell, physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recently commented that Musk is “not at all” close to building “a human civilization on Mars that is self-sustaining,” but added that “towards the end of this century” we might have Mars settlements whose inhabitants could even bring their pets with them from Earth. I have not been able to find any experts who seriously doubt that we will be able to build Earth-like habitats outside Earth’s atmosphere sometime this millennium, which is a short period in evolutionary terms—short enough to prevent the next mass extinction.

A Positive-Sum Environmental Strategy

As philosopher William MacAskill has asked, “if it really is of value to have greater diversity of species, why do we not actively try and promote a greater amount of biodiversity above merely preventing loss of biodiversity?” The opportunity to terraform extraterrestrial environments is just one reason why environmentalists should set their sights far higher than mere conservation.

Areas of Earth that are currently of limited habitability such as deserts and tundra could be transformed into comparatively biodiverse paradises. We could create countless new species through practices like hybridisation and genetic modification—as has already been done with the Italian sparrow (Passer italiae), the apple fly (Rhagoletis pomonella), the yellow-flowered Yorkwort (Senecio eboracensis), and scores of others—as biologist Chris D. Thomas describes in his book Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. We could also resurrect extinct species, which is the goal of the ten billion USD-valued Dallas-based startup Colossal Biosciences, which is currently working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird, and the Tasmanian tiger.

Attempts to conserve Earth’s current ecosystems through non-intervention are doomed because change is a constant of nature and environmental change is a constant of Earth’s geology. Plus, in addition to being futile, it is pessimistic to think that mere conservation should be the highest hope of a forward-looking environmentalist movement. Human non-intervention may benefit non-human life in an unsustainable, short-term way. But acting in the long-term interest of Earth’s wildlife means protecting species from exogenous existential threats and investing in technological and scientific advances that will enable them to thrive at unprecedented levels.

As Tupy explains, “In the long run, the only way to ensure the future of our (hopefully interplanetary) species is through exponential increase in wealth and technological sophistication.” Such a wealthy and innovative economy as humans must continue to build cannot be sustained without significant environmental change. But there is no reason to assume that the damage to wildlife caused by human industry outweighs the benefits—especially possible salvation from extinction—that could accrue to wildlife through the advancement of human knowledge.

If people had not been growing the world economy by using fossil fuels, agriculture, and other ecologically disruptive industries since at least the Industrial Revolution, humans would not be much closer than chimpanzees to colonising space and securing the future of life on Earth and beyond. And as MacAskill argues in his book What We Owe the Future, “if society stagnates technologically, it could remain stuck in a period of high catastrophic risk for such a long time that extinction or collapse would be all but inevitable.” Since we can only guess when and how existential threats will manifest, every extra dollar of research, development, or education might be the dollar that gets Earth’s humanity and wildlife through the technological bottleneck and into the next phase of consciousness in the universe.

The UN’s projections suggest that population growth and economic activity have negative effects on biodiversity because their statistical models can only estimate the destructive aspects of these phenomena. Due to the intrinsic unpredictability of future knowledge, creative transformations such as terraforming other planets and reviving extinct species are outside the scope of UN projections. But this means that their suggestions about reducing production, consumption, and population growth are biased against positive-sum solutions to the point of probably being counterproductive to the advancement of human and wildlife interests alike.

It is true that technological progress is itself a source of existential risks, but unlike the alternative (stagnation in ignorance), it has salvational potential as well, and thus the demise of life on Earth is more likely without technological progress than it is with it. Plus, a positive-sum (technological accelerationist) environmentalism is more politically achievable than a zero-sum (degrowth) environmentalism. The former merely requires that technologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs are left to their own devices within a market economy, while the latter requires everyone to make major sacrifices of their own comfort and prosperity.

As Elon Musk commented in 2022, “I think it’s important that we become a multi-planet species and a spacefaring civilization, because eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on earth. So if one is a true environmentalist or cares about the future of life, it is obviously important that life become multiplanetary and ultimately multi-stellar.” That is a positive-sum environmentalist agenda with a decent shot at benefiting both human and non-human life. Conversely, when Dave Foreman advocates “ripping out any trace of human intervention” for nature’s sake, or Alex Epstein implies that achieving animal equality would require eliminating “all human impacts on animals,” or David M. Graber hopes “for the right virus to come along” to wipe out humans, they are falsely assuming a zero-sum relationship between humans and other lifeforms. They are missing the larger point that on a long enough timeline the interests of all living beings are aligned and are best served by technological and scientific progress.

This article was originally published at Quillette on 3/13/2025.

Blog Post | Human Development

The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days”

Preindustrial life wasn’t simple or serene—it was filthy, violent, and short.

Chelsea Follett — Mar 6, 2026

Summary: Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral—some people claim that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. This article addresses seven supposed negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. The conclusion is that history bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination.

When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era. Some are even claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind the popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?

“Horrible Living Conditions for Workers”

Were horrible living conditions a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards—but neither did the living conditions that preceded them.

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor . . . crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways.

“Poor Nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning.

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s.

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.”

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent.

“A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression.

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Richard Napier, a 17th-century physician, recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12 percent of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new.

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common—indeed, near-universal—experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright—who lost several of her own children prematurely—heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John.

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous Workplaces” and “Child Labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age.

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness. Jonas Hanway was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.”

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days—higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time.

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty.

“Discrimination Against Women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality—discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies.

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wifebeater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental Harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, however, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.”

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15 percent of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6 percent. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked,” for there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s large species and over 90 percent of Australia’s.

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627.

Progress Is Real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination—that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details.

The upside is that the visit would help deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come—emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress.

This article was published at Big Think on 11/19/2025.

Oceanographic Magazine | Conservation & Biodiversity

First Coral Spawning Recorded at Seychelles Breeding Laboratory

Mar 5, 2026

“A newly established land-based coral breeding laboratory on Praslin Island, Seychelles, has recorded its first successful coral spawning event – marking a significant step forward for reef restoration in the western Indian Ocean.

The facility is the result of a new collaboration between Canon EMEA, Coral Spawning International (CSI), and Nature Seychelles (NS), and forms part of Nature Seychelles’ Assisted Recovery of Corals (ARC) programme.

Operational since November, the laboratory has already produced approximately 800,000 coral embryos from 14 parent colonies of Acropora tenuis cf. macrostoma. Early results indicate that around 65,000 juvenile corals have successfully settled, an outcome that researchers have said highlights the potential to enhance both genetic diversity and thermal resilience in Seychelles reef systems.

Unlike traditional coral gardening approaches, which rely on fragmentation and result in genetically identical colonies, the ARC lab focuses on controlled sexual reproduction. This method allows for the creation of genetically diverse coral offspring – an increasingly important factor as reefs face mounting pressure from climate-driven bleaching events.”

From Oceanographic Magazine.

Fauna & Flora | Conservation & Biodiversity

Conservation Effort Triples Tonkin Snub-Nosed Monkey Population

Mar 5, 2026

“The Tonkin snub-nosed monkey has been at the centre of Fauna & Flora’s primate conservation activities for most of this millennium.

By the time we discovered a globally important population of this monkey in 2002, it was already on the brink of extinction; a mere 50-60 individuals were confirmed to be present in the forest at Khau Ca where it was found. Five years later, Fauna & Flora discovered a separate population of this monkey – subsequently confirmed as the second largest – in a forest fragment near the border with China.

Fauna & Flora has focused on engaging local communities in species monitoring and habitat protection at both these sites. In order to safeguard the largest surviving population, we worked with the Vietnamese authorities to ensure that the Khau Ca forest was given formal protection. Since then numbers have stabilised and steadily increased.

Today, the population in Khau Ca comprises around 160 individuals, more than a threefold increase in the number of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys in this location since their rediscovery.”

From Fauna & Flora.

Smithsonian Magazine | Conservation & Biodiversity

California Condors Likely Tending First Northern Wild Egg in Century

Mar 5, 2026

“Wildlife biologists in far Northern California are beaming with cautious pride, as a pair of California condors appears to be tending to the region’s first wild egg in more than a century. Scientists haven’t been able to confirm the egg, but the behavior of the bird couple suggests they’re taking turns with incubation duties—a welcome bright spot for the critically endangered creatures…

…

Over the last four decades, the species has slowly started to rebound, thanks to captive breeding and wild release programs across the country. In 2019, wildlife officials celebrated the 1,000th California condor chick hatching since recovery efforts began. And as of December 2025, the total population stands at 607 birds, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That number includes 392 individuals flying freely in the wild, while the other 215 live in captivity.

California condors are some of the first birds to recover from a former ‘extinct in the wild’ status.”

From Smithsonian Magazine.