When a Generation Knows—and Still Must Live

I read that we’re losing species at rates not seen since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and I had to put down my morning tea. Arash was drawing elephants at the kitchen table—elephants he might never see in the wild, elephants whose children might not exist by the time he has children of his own.

We are the first humans in history to know, with scientific precision, that we are causing a mass extinction. Our ancestors might have driven local species to extinction, but they couldn’t see the global pattern, couldn’t comprehend the scale. They didn’t have graphs showing biodiversity collapse, satellite images of disappearing forests, data tracking the last members of dying species.

We do. And we keep going to work, paying bills, making plans as if this knowledge isn’t the most important thing we’ve ever learned.

There’s a psychological weight to being the generation that knows. Every previous generation could live with the assumption that the natural world was permanent, that tigers would always exist somewhere, that coral reefs were as eternal as mountains. We know better. We know that within decades, our children will inhabit a planet emptier than any humans have ever known.

We’re not just witnessing extinction—we’re causing it through the ordinary acts of living in industrial civilization. Every time I turn on a light, buy food wrapped in plastic, or take a rickshaw instead of walking, I’m participating in systems that are unraveling the web of life that took hundreds of millions of years to create.

The species disappearing now aren’t just statistics—they’re the end of evolutionary stories millions of years in the making. When the last Sumatran rhinoceros dies, an entire lineage that survived ice ages and continental drift dies with it. We’re not just causing individual deaths; we’re ending evolutionary possibilities that will never exist again.

But perhaps the heaviest part is knowing that future generations will ask how we could have known and done so little. They’ll study our era the way we study other catastrophes—with the bewildered question of why people didn’t act when they understood what was happening.

We are living through the earth’s sixth mass extinction, and unlike the previous five, this one has historians. This one has witnesses who understand exactly what they’re witnessing. This one will have a record of people who knew and chose convenience over consequence, comfort over continuity.

The weight isn’t just moral—it’s existential. We’re the generation that has to decide whether humans are a species capable of wisdom or just very clever destroyers. We’re writing the final chapters of thousands of other species’ stories, and we’re the first to know we’re doing it.

Every extinct species takes with it relationships, knowledge, possibilities we’ll never recover. We’re not just losing animals and plants—we’re losing the intricate connections that make ecosystems stable, the biological solutions to problems we haven’t even discovered yet.

We know. And knowing makes us complicit in ways that ignorance never could.