Extinction, or just a "nice" week?
holding death alongside life9.14.26Dear EARTH MOTHERS,
I heard on the radio, mosquito numbers across Minneapolis/St Paul are down significantly from the ten year average.
https://mmcd.org/2026/06/15/weekly-update-june-15th-cattail-mosquitoes-begin-to-emerge/
This was reported on the news in a matter of fact way, but without much context. For instance, how/does this specific week’s data relate to global insect extinction? Should we be worried? Is anyone else worried? Sure, fewer itchy bites is nice. Diseases reduced? But is this at the cost of dinner for our bird neighbors?
It’s like when the weather report highlights how glorious, beautiful, warm, and wonderful are “these summery temperatures.”
Earth Mothers, I’m worried. And not sure what to do with this worry. Am I the only one? I feel like a contrarian.
signed,
Extinction, Or just a “nice” week?
Dear Extinction,
You are not alone. As beautiful-weather days grace our lives at the wrong times of the year, EARTH MOTHERS feel soul-wrenching loss. We feel the world emptying of its extraordinarily cacophonous, entangled diversity of life. It is getting quiet around here. Where is everyone? They are gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. Precious and unique species-souls, winking out one by one.
As this immense disappearance occurs all around us, EARTH MOTHERS are learning some new things about human beings.
One: humans have a remarkable capacity for accepting and adapting to change - even, perversely, when the change brings great suffering, loss, and sadness.
Another: for all humans’ bragging about how abstract thought is our species’ unique power, the immediacy of our daily lives shapes our sense of the world much more strongly than than our abstract understandings do. We know that a lovely 70-degree day is out of place in February! And we know that this erratic weather is a human-made, climate-change-related occurrence. And yet: our bodies sure are pleased by the warmth. That pleasure lifts our spirits, even as we know there is cavernous loss all around.
This makes for a lot of cognitive dissonance. EARTH MOTHERS expect that the people around you are also carrying it. And yet they’re also being hearty, durable, embodied humans (good at adapting! Living in the everyday! Enjoying being bodies!).
Before approaching the nitty gritty of what to do, let’s zoom out for a moment. This extraordinary planet of ours has hosted extinction events before. Five mass ones and 27 smaller ones, to be precise. The first mass extinction took place 440 million years ago. The last one - the well-storied extinction of dinosaurs - was 66 million years ago. In each of these, large numbers of diverse living species expired. And in each of these, a few species - horseshoe crabs, sharks, dinosaur ancestors of birds - persisted into the next great flush of life.
Many scientists believe that we are entering a sixth, human-made mass extinction now. Other scientists don’t see that our impacts are at that massive a level (yet). This is open for debate (though the fact of human destructiveness, by our lights, is not). In either case, what EARTH MOTHERS firmly believe is this: whatever happens to humans and the species we destroy in the coming years, life will continue. This powerful planet might well shake us humans off, like a dog shaking off water. And then, it will keep on doing its glorious, extraordinary, bizarre and surprising, abundant Earth thing.
All this knowledge doesn’t negate our deep sorrow at watching humans suffer, and gorgeous beings disappear. Or our incandescent rage at the human stupidity that has gotten our species into this collective mess. But it does, sometimes, help us to hold that rage and sorrow in a steadier way.
This returns us the question of what to do. Here, we have two thoughts. First, we encourage you to cultivate your own strategies for holding your strong extinction feelings with steadiness. Zooming out is one such strategy - EARTH MOTHERS are fond of this one (holists we are). There are others. Such as getting active. Or speaking openly with people (family, friends, acquaintances) about what you’re feeling.
Another, closer strategy: in moments of despair, hone in and notice something LIVING that is thriving, is well, is doing its thing. Often, once you pause and notice that, everything shifts. Like zooming out, this too can provide reassurance that life on earth will go on, with or without humans. Indeed, in the biggest, longest, deepest time sense, life exceeds the human, and its changes are inevitable.
That inevitability leads to our second thought. For many modern humans - and very generally speaking, the more privileged the human, the more this is true - touching loss, death, and soil happens too little. We forget that ingestion and mulching of live bodies is essential - yea, foundational - to the very living of life. EARTH MOTHERS want modern humans to get better at holding death alongside life, learning to appreciate its intrinsic power and role in the world, even as we taste the bitter sorrow that it can bring. This is not to justify or belittle suffering - no, never. It is, rather, to practice living with it (in part because we know - sorry, Extinction - that there is surely plenty more to come).
To navigate hopefulness amidst loss, to feel the binding together of liveliness and death. These are human activities – organismic ones too – as old as the hills. EARTH MOTHERS encourage you to attune to these dynamics. Feel their knotty vitality. Doing so is a good practice for moving well into a difficult future. You might even think of it (if you like) as a one-small-body contribution to the ongoingness of humankind.
EARTH MOTHERS