End of the megafauna. The fate of the world’s hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals / Закат мегафауны. Судьба самых огромных, свирепых и странных животных в мире

Like other environmental hot-button issues familiar to us today—ocean pollution, forest loss, climate change, species endangerment, pathogen proliferation, the plasticpocalypse, and many others—biological extinction is very much in the public eye. This is surely a result of the growing realization, which now seems utterly inescapable, that humans have created, and continue to create, the kinds of circumstances in which species die out well before their time. A few generations ago people were more negligent in their understanding of many things, including our long record of environmental despoliation, because the necessary facts were either unavailable, difficult to acquire and interpret, or frankly irrelevant to their immediate concerns. In the digital age, it is no longer possible to claim ignorance or lack of readily accessible information. Although it may be true that as we have learned more about human impacts we have come to despair more, the antidote to this is knowledge, for knowledge is the essential basis for informed action. <...>