The dinosaurs dealt with much worse climate change than us (the air was literally on fire) and somehow survived. The terrible lizards got shrunk down to rotisserie size, but they were still alive. After thousands of years, they even thrived, coming back as ‘terror birds’ in time. As I’ve written, we should be so lucky.
As Riley Black wrote in her book The Last Days Of The Dinosaurs, there’s a few lessons we can learn from the dino’s ‘demise’ as we face our own decline. I’ll cover the two lessons here. One is that extinction is avoidable, but that shrinking our ambitions is not.
1. Extinction Is Avoidable
The first lesson is that the dinosaurs did not go extinct. This has been hotly debated, but is now mostly settled. Birds are dinosaurs, ergo extant, not extinct. As Black said, “Birds were not simply waiting in the wings when the asteroid struck. They were part of the great flowering of dinosaur diversity, their roots anchored deep in the Jurassic.”
What did go extinct are the big dinosaurs. These unfortunate beasts got alternately fried, baked…
