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In line with its mission of promoting investment and economic development in the Island, economic development organization Invest Puerto Rico ("InvestPR"), revealed two major successes for its bioscience sector. CytoImmune Therapeutics, Inc. and Biosimilar Solutions, LLC, each committed to establishing operations on the Island to develop their biotechnology products. The relocations are a result of InvestPR's strategic plan with support from BiosciencesCorp Puerto Rico for strengthening Puerto Rico's bioscience sector. Puerto Rico has a storied past spanning six decades of excellence. Eli Lilly opened its first plant on the Island in 1960. The majority of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, including Abbvie, Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and Wyeth operate facilities in Puerto Rico. The Island, which boasts a staggering $50 billion+ in annual pharmaceutical industry production, has 100+ FDA-approved pharmaceutical and bioscience plants, and is the U.S.'s largest pharmaceutical manufacturing region, more than the next several states combined. Biosimilar's innovations are focused on biotech products including a COVID-19 vaccine (more details below) while CytoImmune Therapeutics specializes in cancer immunotherapy treatments.

Puerto Rico has the legacy of being one of the most productive pharmaceutical manufacturing hubs in the world, let alone in the United States. Puerto Rico is a unique place that competes with both U.S. and global economies. Domestically, Puerto Rico leads all states in pharmaceutical production, more than doubling the next states of Indiana, California, and North Carolina. Internationally, Puerto Rico is also recognized as one of the key pharma destinations, along with Ireland, Singapore, and Switzerland. In fact, local engineers helped develop the capacities in other hubs around the world. Here are some of the strengths Puerto Rico offers: • 60-year experience in biopharmaceutical manufacturing and ancillary biomedical services • Logistics expertise in handling and shipping time- and temperature- sensitive materials • Favorable regulatory environment governed by the FDA • Regional leadership in biopharmaceutical production with easy access to the world’s largest market • Knowledge of global regulations facilitates product supply to international markets • Given Puerto Rico’s tropical geographical location, the local biopharmaceutical industry has developed unique resiliency capabilities and business continuity plans that have been proven in the preparation for and recovery from atmospheric events. • World class STEM education and a qualified, cost-effective workforce • Logical jumping off point for companies to expand into Latin American markets • Competitive incentives for R&D, manufacturing, and exporting pharmaceutical goods matched with an already favorable tax landscape

Pharmaceutical manufacturing in Puerto Rico was not affected in the same way as in other parts of the world. The government of Puerto Rico allowed companies to continue to work despite the strict curfew that they implemented on the Island. Executive Order OE-2020-023 of March 15, 2020, did not apply to pharmaceutical companies, nor companies in the distribution chain of goods and services, businesses, and individuals that the government deemed essential that they remain working during the curfew. This was a key policy measure because 12 of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies are located in Puerto Rico and it was necessary to keep them operating at a time when medicines and medical supplies were so necessary. Puerto Rico kept pharmaceuticals and other manufacturing companies operating during the most critical part of the pandemic and they were able to keep their workforce healthy and avoid outbreaks in the companies. This is a good thing that should be highlighted and must be taken as an example for the rest of the world. Despite the success achieved so far, manufacturing companies have to maintain the controls and protocols that have prevented outbreaks in companies. History has taught us that in a pandemic it is common to have multiple waves of the disease. The first wave is more severe and deadly. This was recently seen with the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19. Manufacturing companies in Puerto Rico have to be prepared for future waves of COVID-19 or other pandemics, especially when the Puerto Rican government does not have absolute control over the entry of people into the territory. Prevention measures for COVID-19 and other similar diseases have to become the new reality for manufacturing companies. Securing the collective welfare of 100,000 employees of the manufacturing industry must be ensured. Manufacturing in Puerto Rico is, by far, the most important industry in economic terms. It represented 47% of the Island’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in fiscal 2019.

The challenges facing low-income countries have grown immensely in recent years. They have suffered from the pandemic as well as a succession of economic shocks. And today they face additional challenges from scarcer financing, high inflation, persistent food insecurity, rising debt vulnerabilities and sociopolitical tensions, especially in fragile and conflict-affected states. We have revised down our growth projections for low-income countries, whose per capita income growth is falling further behind the rates needed to catch up with advanced economies. This threatens to reverse a decades-long trend of steadily converging living standards. Without urgent action and more support, there is little chance of them making up the lost ground.

Although these experiments had scientific merit and were not conducted with malicious intent, their implications are still worrying. This is especially true given that there is also a long historical track record of state-run bioweapon research applying cutting-edge science and technology to design agents not previously seen in nature. The Soviet bioweapons program developed agents with traits such as enhanced virulence, resistance to therapies, greater environmental resilience, increased difficulty to diagnose or treat, and which caused unexpected disease presentations and outcomes.22 Delivery capabilities have also been subject to the cutting edge of technical development, with Canadian, US, and UK bioweapon efforts playing a critical role in developing the discipline of aerobiology.23,24 While there is no evidence of state-run bioweapons programs directly attempting to develop or deploy bioweapons that would pose an existential risk, the logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction could create such incentives in more unstable political environments or following a breakdown of the Biological Weapons Convention.25 The possibility of a war between great powers could also increase the pressure to use such weapons—during the World Wars, bioweapons were used across multiple continents, with Germany targeting animals in WWI,26 and Japan using plague to cause an epidemic in China during WWII.27 Non-state actors may also pose a risk, especially those with explicitly omnicidal aims. While rare, there are examples. The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan sought biological weapons for the express purpose of causing extinction.28 Environmental groups, such as the Gaia Liberation Front, have argued that “we can ensure Gaia's survival only through the extinction of the Humans as a species … we now have the specific technology for doing the job … several different [genetically engineered] viruses could be released”(quoted in ref. 29). Groups such as R.I.S.E. also sought to protect nature by destroying most of humanity with bioweapons.30 Fortunately, to date, non-state actors have lacked the capabilities needed to pose a catastrophic bioweapons threat, but this could change in future decades as biotechnology becomes more accessible and the pool of experienced users grows. What is the appropriate response to these speculative extinction threats? A balanced biosecurity portfolio might include investments that reduce a mix of proven and speculative risks, but striking this balance is still difficult given the massive uncertainties around the low-probability, high-consequence risks. In this article, we examine the traditional spectrum of biosecurity risks (ie, biocrimes, bioterrorism, and biowarfare) to categorize biothreats by likelihood and impact, expanding the historical analysis to consider even lower-probability, higher-consequence events (catastrophic risks and existential risks). In order to produce reasoned estimates of the likelihood of different categories of biothreats, we bring together relevant data and theory and produce some first-guess estimates of the likelihood of different categories of biothreat, and we use these initial estimates to compare the cost-effectiveness of reducing existential risks with more traditional biosecurity measures. We emphasize that these models are highly uncertain, and their utility lies more in enabling order-of-magnitude comparisons rather than as a precise measure of the true risk. However, even with the most conservative models, we find that reduction of low-probability, high-consequence risks can be more cost-effective, as measured by quality-adjusted life year per dollar, especially when we account for the lives of future generations. This suggests that despite the low probability of such events, society still ought to invest more in preventing the most extreme possible biosecurity catastrophes. The Impact Spectrum of Various Biothreats Here, we use historical data to analyze the probability and severity of biothreats. We place biothreats in 6 loose categories: incidents, events, disasters, crises, global catastrophic risk, and existential risk. Together they form an overlapping spectrum of increasing impact and decreasing likelihood (Figure 1).* [Figure 1 omitted] The historical use of bioweapons provides useful examples of some categories of biothreats. Biocrimes and bioterrorism provide examples of incidents.† Biological warfare provides examples of events and disasters. These historical examples provide indicative data on likelihood and impact that we can then feed into a cost-effectiveness analysis. We should note that these data are both sparse and sometimes controversial. Where possible, we use multiple datasets to corroborate our numbers, but ultimately the “true rate” of bioweapon attacks is highly uncertain. Biocrimes and Bioterrorism Historically, risks of biocrime‡ and bioterrorism§ have been limited. A 2015 Risk and Benefit Analysis for Gain of Function Research detailed 24 biocrimes between 1990 and 2015 (0.96 per year) and an additional 42 bioterrorism incidents between 1972 and 2014 (1 per year).36 This is consistent with other estimates of biocrimes and bioterrorism frequency, which range from 0.35 to 3.5 per year (see supplementary material, part 1, at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/suppl/10.1089/hs.2017.0028). Most attacks typically result in no more than a handful of casualties (and many of these events include hoaxes, threats, and attacks that had no casualties at all). For example, the anthrax letter attacks in the United States in 2001, perhaps the most high-profile case in recent years, resulted in only 17 infections with 5 fatalities.37 The 2015 Risk and Benefit Analysis for Gain of Function Research detailed only a single death from the recorded biocrimes.** Only 1 of the bioterrorism incidents in the report had associated deaths (the 2001 anthrax letter attacks).36 Based on this data, for the purposes of this article, we assume that we could expect 1 incident per year resulting in up to tens of deaths. Biological Warfare Academic overviews of biological warfare†† detail 7 programs prior to 1945.38 A further 9 programs are recorded between 1945 and 1994.39 For most of the last century, at least 1 program was active in any given year (Table 1). [Table 1 omitted] The actual use of bioweapons by states is less common: Over the 85 years covered by these histories (1915 to 2000), 18 cases of use (or possible use) were recorded, including outbreaks connected to biological warfare (see supplementary material, part 2, at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/suppl/10.1089/hs.2017.0028). Extrapolating this out (dividing 18 by 85), we would have about a 20% chance per year of biowarfare. It is worth noting the limitations of these data. Most of these events occurred before the introduction of the Biological Weapons Convention and were conducted by countries that no longer have biological weapons programs. Since many of these incidents occurred during infrequent great power wars, we revise our best guess to around 10% chance per year of biowarfare. We use 2 sets of data to estimate the magnitude of such events. The first dataset was Japanese biological warfare in China,40 where records indicate a series of attacks on towns resulted in a mean of 330 casualties per event and 1 case in which an attack resulted in a regional outbreak causing an estimated 30,000 deaths (see supplementary material, part 3, at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/suppl/10.1089/hs.2017.0028). The second data set came from disease events that were alleged to have an unnatural origin.41 In one case study, a point source release of anthrax resulted in at least 66 deaths. In a second case study, a regional epidemic of the same disease resulted in more than 17,000 human cases. While these events were not confirmed as having been caused by biological warfare, contemporary or subsequent analysis has suggested that such an origin was at least feasible. Combined, these figures provide an estimated impact of between 66 to 330 and 17,000 to 30,000. For the purposes of this analysis, we are assuming the lower boundary figures from biological warfare are indicative of events, with a likelihood of 10% per year and an impact ranging between tens and thousands of fatalities. The upper boundary figures from biological warfare are indicative of disasters, with a likelihood of 1% per year and an impact range of thousands to tens of thousands of fatalities.‡‡ Global Catastrophic and Existential Risk Unlike standard biothreats, there is no historical record on which to draw when considering global catastrophic or existential risks. Alternative approaches are required to estimate the likelihood of such an event. Given the high degree of uncertainty, we adopt 3 different approaches to approximate the risk of extinction from bioweapons: utilizing surveys of experts, previous major risk assessments, and simple toy models. These should be taken as initial guesses or rough order-of-magnitude approximations, and not a reliable or precise measure. Model 1: Survey of 2008 Global Catastrophic Risk Conference An informal survey at the 2008 Oxford Global Catastrophic Risk Conference asked participants to estimate the chance that disasters of different types would occur before 2100. Participants had a median risk estimate of 0.05% that a natural pandemic would lead to human extinction by 2100, and a median risk estimate of 2% that an “engineered” pandemic would lead to extinction by 2100.42 The advantage of the survey is that it directly measures the quantity that we are interested in: probability of extinction from bioweapons. The disadvantage is that the estimates were likely highly subjective and unreliable, especially as the survey did not account for response bias, and the respondents were not calibrated beforehand. We therefore also turn to other models that, while indirect, provide more objective measures of risk.§§ Model 2: Potentially Pandemic Pathogens Recent controversial experiments on H5N1 influenza prompted discussions as to the risks of deliberately creating potentially pandemic pathogens. These agents are those that are highly transmissible, capable of uncontrollable spread in human populations, highly virulent, and also possibly able to overcome medical countermeasures.44 Previous work in a comprehensive report done by Gryphon Scientific, Risk and Benefit Analysis of Gain of Function Research,36 has laid out very detailed risk assessments of potentially pandemic pathogen research, suggesting that the annual probability of a global pandemic resulting from an accident with this type of research in the United States is 0.002% to 0.1%. The report also concluded that risks of deliberate misuse were about as serious as the risks of an accidental outbreak, suggesting a 2-fold increase in risk. Assuming that 25% of relevant research is done in the United States as opposed to elsewhere in the world, this gives us a further 4-fold increase in risk. In total, this 8-fold increase in risk gives us a 0.016% to 0.8% chance of a pandemic in the future each year (see supplementary material, part 4, at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/suppl/10.1089/hs.2017.0028). The analysis in Risk and Benefit Analysis of Gain of Function Research suggested that lab outbreaks from wild-type influenza viruses could result in between 4 million and 80 million deaths,36 but others have suggested that if some of the modified pathogens were to escape from a laboratory, they could cause up to 1 billion fatalities.45 For the purposes of this model, we assume that for any global pandemic arising from this kind of research, each has only a 1 in 10,000*** chance of causing an existential risk. This figure is somewhat arbitrary but serves as an excessively conservative guess that would include worst-case situations in which scientists intentionally cause harm, where civilization permanently collapses following a particularly bad outbreak, or other worst-case scenarios that would result in existential risk. Multiplying the probability of an outbreak with the probability of an existential risk gives us an annual risk probability between 1.6 × 10–8 and 8 × 10–7.††† Model 3: Naive Power Law Extrapolation Previous literature has found that casualty numbers from terrorism and warfare follow a power law distribution, including terrorism from WMDs.46 Power laws have the property of being scale invariant, meaning that the ratio in likelihood between events that cause the deaths of 10 people and 10,000 people will be the same as that between 10,000 people and 10,000,000 people.‡‡‡ This property results in a distribution with an exceptionally heavy tail, so that the vast majority of events will have very low casualty rates, with a couple of extreme outliers. Past studies have estimated this ratio for terrorism using biological and chemical weapons to be about 0.5 for 1 order of magnitude,47 meaning that an attack that kills 10x people is about 3 times less likely (100.5) than an attack that kills 10x–1 people (a concrete example is that attacks with more than 1,000 casualties, such as the Aum Shinrikyo attacks, will be about 30 times less probable than an attack that kills a single individual). Extrapolating the power law out, we find that the probability that an attack kills more than 5 billion will be (5 billion)–0.5 or 0.000014. Assuming 1 attack per year (extrapolated on the current rate of bio-attacks) and assuming that only 10% of such attacks that kill more than 5 billion eventually lead to extinction (due to the breakdown of society, or other knock-on effects), we get an annual existential risk of 0.0000014 (or 1.4 × 10–6). We can also use similar reasoning for warfare, where we have more reliable data (97 wars between 1820 and 1997, although the data are less specific to biological warfare). The parameter for warfare is 0.41,47 suggesting that wars that result in more than 5 billion casualties will comprise (5 billion)–0.41 = 0.0001 of all wars. Our estimate assumes that wars will occur with the same frequency as in 1820 to 1997, with 1 new war arising roughly every 2 years. It also assumes that in these extreme outlier scenarios, nuclear or contagious biological weapons would be the cause of such high casualty numbers, and that bioweapons specifically would be responsible for these enormous casualties about 10% of the time (historically bioweapons were deployed in WWI, WWII, and developed but not deployed in the Cold War—constituting a bioweapons threat in every great power war since 1900). Assuming that 10% of biowarfare escalations resulting in more than 5 billion deaths eventually lead to extinction, we get an annual existential risk from biowarfare of 0.0000005 (or 5 × 10–7). Perhaps the most interesting implication of the fatalities following a power law with a small exponent is that the majority of the expected casualties come from rare, catastrophic events. The data also bear this out for warfare and terrorism. The vast majority of US terrorism deaths occurred during 9/11, and the vast majority of terrorism injuries in Japan over the past decades came from a single Aum Shinrikyo attack. Warfare casualties are dominated by the great power wars. This suggests that a typical individual is far more likely to die from a rare, catastrophic attack as opposed to a smaller scale and more common one. If our goal is to reduce the greatest expected number of fatalities, we may be better off devoting resources to preventing the worst possible attacks. Why Uncertainty Is Not Cause for Reassurance Each of our estimates rely to some extent on guesswork and remain highly uncertain. Technological breakthroughs in areas such as diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics, as well as vastly improved surveillance, or even eventual space colonization, could reduce the chance of disease-related extinction by many orders of magnitude. Other breakthroughs such as highly distributed DNA synthesis or improved understanding of how to construct and modify diseases could increase or decrease the risks. Destabilizing political forces, the breakdown of the Biological Weapons Convention, or warfare between major world powers could vastly increase the amount of investment in bioweapons and create the incentives to actively use knowledge and biotechnology in destructive ways. Each of these factors suggests that our wide estimates could still be many orders of magnitude off from the true risk in this century. But uncertainty is not cause for reassurance. In instances where the probability of a catastrophe is thought to be extremely low (eg, human extinction from bioweapons), greater uncertainty around the estimates will typically imply greater risk of the catastrophe, as we have reduced confidence that the risk is actually at a low level.48 §§§ Given that our conservative models are based on historical data, they fail to account for the primary source of future risk: technological development that could radically democratize the ability to build advanced bioweapons. If the cost and required expertise of developing bioweapons falls far enough, the world might enter a phase where offensive capabilities dominate defensive ones. Some scholars, such as Martin Rees, think that humanity has about a 50% chance of going extinct due in large part to such technologies.49 However, incorporating these intuitions and technological conjectures would mean relying on qualitative arguments that would be far more contentious than our conservative estimates. We therefore proceed to assess the cost-effectiveness on the basis of our conservative models, until superior models of the risk emerge.

Rodríguez is one of the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have left the island in the last decade, a migration propelled by an economic crisis and a string of natural disasters that have devastated Puerto Rico in recent years. “We love Puerto Rico. It’s our country. However, objectively speaking, we need to recognize that it’s a country in deterioration and at a political crossroads. If it doesn’t come out of it, things could get much worse,” she said. Carmen Morales Rivera, director of the Unemployment Office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with Mónica Rodríguez and Kevin Marengo in the Department of Labor building, after Maria’s passage. Carmen Morales Rivera, director of the Unemployment Office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with Mónica Rodríguez and Kevin Marengo in the Department of Labor building, after Maria’s passage. [ DAVID SANTIAGO | Miami Herald ] The island’s population declined 11.8 percent between 2010 and 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, whose results are used to determine billions of dollars in public funding. Demographers say that steady migration, coupled with a declining birth rate that’s lower than the death rate, is creating a “demographic crisis” that will fundamentally alter Puerto Rico’s society, economy and culture, as family structures change and there are fewer workers to pay for government services.

Puerto Rico’s finances are strained, and the U.S. is too dependent on China for pharmaceuticals. These distinct issues may seem unrelated, but they are very much intertwined. Puerto Rico was once America’s medicine cabinet, and it could be again. During the second half of the 20th century, it developed from one of the poorest places in the hemisphere into a manufacturing powerhouse. Through efforts to industrialize the island, U.S. manufacturers and the labor movement found common cause. Congress and Puerto Rico implemented several tax breaks for American manufacturers. One of them, enacted in 1976 and codified in Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, freed manufacturers from taxes on profits made in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories. Drug companies flocked to Puerto Rico, transforming it into a hub of pharmaceutical production. But that was then. Concerned about “corporate welfare” favoritism toward Puerto Rico vis-à-vis the states, Congress phased out the tax break between 1996 and 2006. When combined with decades of fiscal imprudence, that decision spurred the worst recession in Puerto Rico’s history. Many companies left. Unemployment rates and poverty levels skyrocketed. Government spending increased, resulting in massive debts. Fifteen years later the bankrupt commonwealth is in the midst of the largest restructuring process in U.S. history. Hundreds of thousands of educated Puerto Ricans have left the island looking for opportunities that existed there not long ago. All the while, U.S. drugmakers have grown increasingly dependent on China. It has been reported that approximately 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients come mainly from China. What was seen as an issue of “corporate welfare” has devolved into a humanitarian crisis for our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico and a national-security dilemma for the country. What should be done? Breathe new life into the pharmaceutical industry in Puerto Rico. The specifics are for policy makers in Washington and San Juan, but encouraging pharmaceutical companies to return to the territory and work under the U.S. flag is a nonpartisan objective.

The last recession was brutal for newspapers and local news. The next one could be an extinction-level event, especially for small dailies owned by big corporate chains that have pillaged local newsrooms and local leadership.

It will rapidly accelerate a transition that’s well underway. Local newspapers that used to “do it all” will be replaced by a diverse ecosystem of independent and authentically local grassroots news and information sources.

Puerto Rico main exports products are pharmaceuticals, accounting for over 50 percent of all exports. Others include medical equipment, computers, apparel, canned tuna, rum, beverage and concentrates. Puerto Rico’s main exports partner is the United States, accounting for around 70 percent of total exports.

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) was created by Congress in 1972 to replace the Aid to the Aged, Blind, or Disabled (AABD) program. SSI is a federal program that provides cash assistance to the aged, blind, and disabled individuals with limited resources to meet basic living expenses. It is available to residents of the U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. However, the old AABD program continues to operate in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), while SSI does not.

In Puerto Rico, ADSEF, a sub agency of the local Department of the Family administers the AABD program, which provides far less benefits to its beneficiaries than the SSI program. Based on data from fiscal year 2011, the Government Accountability Office indicated that if Puerto Rico participated in the SSI program, beneficiaries would be eligible to receive between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion each year. This, in contrast with actual federal expenditures on Puerto Rico’s AABD program in FY2017 of $23.7 million for benefit payments and $1.3 million for administrative expenses.

The export price indexes for the United States include Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories. Total exports for Puerto Rico amounted to $16.6 billion in 2020. That was a 19.0-percent decline from 2019 when exports totaled $20.5 billion. Export prices for pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing recorded no change from March to June. The export price indexes for basic chemical manufacturing and medical equipment and supplies manufacturing both increased over the same period.

For decades, the U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere has been largely unchallenged. However, that is changing. Now China and Russia are aggressively expanding their influence in the region. Even Iran and Hezbollah have made incursions in Latin America. It is no coincidence that Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, which have facilitated Russia’s and China’s expanding presence in Latin America, have been promoting Puerto Rico’s separation from the United States. Alas, this has happened with the silent acquiescence of the United States. We can only expect that those countries that do not share the same democratic values cherished in America will support Puerto Rico’s independence movement.

Puerto Rico’s pro-independence leadership is indebted to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela political leaders. These politicians move fast in organizing protests to oppose federal institutions and democratically elected officials in Puerto Rico but are shy in condemning the dictatorial behavior of their leaders and the undisputable suppression of free speech in those countries. One can only expect that an independent Puerto Rico would join the chorus of Latin American countries that are friendly to our adversaries.

Section II of this article reviews actions taken that have reduced the risk of nuclear terrorism. Section III reviews factors and actions that have increased these risks. A concluding section offers an updated assessment of the risks posed by nuclear terrorism from the perspective of year-end 2017. While applauding thousands of actions that have been taken by hundreds of thousands of individuals in the past 13 years to reduce these risks, reviewing all the pluses and all the minuses, my gut tells me that the chances of a successful nuclear terrorist attack in the decade that began in 2015—in effect, the second flip of the coin—are better than even. Specifically, I believe the odds of a successful nuclear terrorist attack somewhere in the world before the end of 2024 are 51 percent or higher. While giving thanks that terrorists have failed to achieve their deadliest ambitions, in my view that is not grounds for complacency, but rather a reason for redoubling our efforts. I am aware that on an issue about which I am passionate, I may have slipped from analysis to advocacy. The central point is not whether the odds of a nuclear terrorist attack are 51 percent or 15 percent. Threat equals likelihood times consequences, and in this case, the consequences would be devastating. Since the costs of actions to reduce these risks are modest, prudent policymakers should focus on the feasible agenda of actions.

This study provides new and interesting insights for two reasons. First, the author introduces a distinction between agricultural and industrial economic growth, as opposed to a single economic output indicator. Choi notes that “only some forms of economic growth are associated with terrorist activity, and even then, they only correlate with particular forms of terrorist attacks.” Second, the study measures the impact of economic growth on three expressions of terrorism, as opposed to a single, homogeneous indicator of terrorist violence. Importantly, previous studies focus on one modality of terrorism, “under the implicit assumption that terrorist groups will use the same conventional attack tactics despite the continuously enhanced security environment.” The author distinguishes between international terrorism — involving at least two different nationals — domestic terrorism — wherein the victims and perpetrators are from the venue country — and suicide attacks, when a terrorist purposefully dies in the process of carrying out his or her mission. The study’s findings include: Higher industrial economic growth is associated with lower levels of international and domestic terrorist violence: “It appears that if industrial growth increases by 1 percent, the percent change in the incidence rate of domestic terrorism is a 1 percent decrease while holding the other variables constant; for the incidence rate of international terrorism, there is a 1 percent decrease.” Growth in the agricultural sector, by contrast, does not rise to statistical significance and may have “no bearing on terrorist behavior.”

Global change driven by human population growth (131), agricultural expansion (132), and climate change (133, 134) is steadily increasing the demand for freshwater, compounding the severe water scarcity already faced by an estimated 4 billion people (135). Groundwater is critically important for human health and ecosystem functioning in many semiarid regions because of low rainfall, frequent droughts, and little permanent surface water. The conservation of groundwater biodiversity should be a low-cost by-product of water conservation programs (29), but groundwater depletion increasingly threatens biodiversity as well as the stability of aquatic, terrestrial, and subsurface ecosystems. Because most groundwater species are difficult to monitor, abundance declines are likely to go unnoticed until after populations have already been lost. Regional climate models that predict increased air temperature (136, 137), together with hydrologic models that project decreased springflow (119, 138, 139), predict that Edwards–Trinity Eurycea salamander populations and other codistributed groundwater-dependent species are highly vulnerable to extinction within the next century.

Humanity has triggered the sixth mass extinction episode since the beginning of the Phanerozoic. The complexity of this extinction crisis is centred on the intersection of two complex adaptive systems: human culture and ecosystem functioning, although the significance of this intersection is not properly appreciated. Human beings are part of biodiversity and elements in a global ecosystem. Civilization, and perhaps even the fate of our species, is utterly dependent on that ecosystem's proper functioning, which society is increasingly degrading. The crisis seems rooted in three factors. First, relatively few people globally are aware of its existence. Second, most people who are, and even many scientists, assume incorrectly that the problem is primarily one of the disappearance of species, when it is the existential threat of myriad population extinctions. Third, while concerned scientists know there are many individual and collective steps that must be taken to slow population extinction rates, some are not willing to advocate the one fundamental, necessary, ‘simple’ cure, that is, reducing the scale of the human enterprise. We argue that compassionate shrinkage of the human population by further encouraging lower birth rates while reducing both inequity and aggregate wasteful consumption—that is, an end to growthmania—will be required. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years’. 1. A sixth mass extinction: the context Five major episodes of mass biological extinction (sensu Jablonski [1]: those with at least 76% of species lost) have occurred over the last 550 million years (Myr)—that is, a rough average of one mass extinction pulse per 110 Myr across the Phanerozoic period, following the ‘Cambrian (biological) explosion’ [2]. By this measure, mass extinctions represent a rare phenomenon in the history of life. These major reductions in the biological richness of the planet have been triggered by natural cataclysmic phenomena. For example, the combined effect of global warming and oxygen loss driven by major volcanic activity that took place towards the end of the Permian period triggered the largest mass extinction in Earth's history—the Great Dying—some 252 Myr ago [3]. Similarly, the collision of the Chicxulub meteorite on what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico annihilated much of the predominant animal life of the planet, famously the dinosaurs (save for the ancestral lineage of the birds), approximately 65 Myr ago [4]. This has been a story of biological catastrophe and recovery, characterized by a long process of biological resurgence. This delay of biological revival has been shown to be complex and dynamic, and varies depending on a plethora of factors, including, for example, the evolutionary lineage, geography and the particular mass extinction. However, a common denominator of recovery is a delay of several million years [5–8]—an important lesson for humanity. On the other hand, a post-extinction tree of life evolves in a new configuration and becomes reconstructed with different terminal branches. For example, the truncated tree of animal life that remained after the Chicxulub meteorite crash became radically reconfigured. The diverse and often gigantic reptiles of the Mesozoic were replaced by a lineage of small-sized animals, the early mammals—a bestiary of dwarfed species that underwent a trajectory of expansion, diversification and colonization of all parts of the biosphere [9]. Another salient aspect of that bio-recovery is that over the last 100 Myr of planetary life, but particularly after the last mass extinction, a seemingly relentless trajectory of biological diversification (particularly on land) has occurred, with a dramatic, exponential buildup, leading over the 550 Myr of the Phanerozoic to a recent biodiversity pinnacle [10]. From an anthropocentric perspective, and relevant to our discussion here, three lessons stand out: (i) Earth's biological diversity does recover from mass extinction events, but this is a process that involves millions of years; (ii) the identity of the organisms that rise from the ashes, and the configuration of the communities and ecosystems they become part of, are very different from those of the ‘normal’ period before the extinction event; and (iii) we, as a species, have evolved just at a time in which the diversity of living companions is the highest in the entire history of life. Occurring after a shorter inter-extinction interval than the Phanerozoic average—indeed at about 60% of that average interval—there is now a clear signal of the start of the sixth mass extinction episode [11,12]. Furthermore, the cause of the sixth mass extinction is a very different type of cataclysm: expansion of one element of biodiversity to planetary dominance. In short, that is, expansion of the human enterprise—the explosion of the numbers of Homo sapiens and their domesticates and the near-instantaneous (in terms of geological time) burst of ecosystem altering and destroying technologies. That expansion has created a new geological epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene [13,14]. The term Anthropocene, meant to replace the formal, geologically accepted label of the Holocene epoch, encapsulates the consequences of humanity's activities on Earth's life-support systems. Indeed, humanity's planetary impact includes alterations of geological processes so profound as to leave stratigraphic signatures in multiple structures of the Earth's surface. These new structures are technofossils like plastics, metal junk, radioactive wastes and other synthetic material footprints [15]. Therefore, the term Anthropocene is increasingly penetrating the lexicon of not only the academic socio-sphere, but also society more generally (e.g. it is now an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary) and is useful for discussion of the sixth mass extinction. The Anthropocene includes a plethora of manifestations in terms of the activities of humanity and the translation of those into a variety of environmental repercussions [16]. The former are represented by a set of socio-economic variables underlying growth, including, for example, the growth rate of the number of vehicles, of fertilizer consumption, of water consumption, of the number of dams, of fast-food mega-businesses, or total world gross domestic product (GDP) (see magnitudes of change in [16]). The accelerated growth rate of these socio-economic variables is driven by an explosive human population growth, particularly in countries or regions of countries where the consumption of resources is inordinately wasteful. That is, civilization is living now under a syndrome of too many people, with those in ‘developed’ parts of the world consuming an unfair share of Earth's resources and all together using an unsustainable fraction of our planet's natural capital (defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity as the world's stocks of natural assets which include geology, soil, air, water and all living things; https://www.cbd.int/business/projects/natcap.shtml). Humanity in many parts of the world is overconsuming, writing cheques heedlessly on our biological resource banks and disregarding the declining balance of natural capital rather than living more frugally on its ‘interest'. The environmental translation of these socio-economic drivers includes the correspondingly accelerated rate of greenhouse emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide), leading to climate disruption on land and in oceans. Such climatic disruption encompasses global warming, with dramatic snow- and ice-thawing from polar and high-elevation lands and consequent global sea-level rise, ocean acidification and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (see [14,17]). Despite the active disinformation efforts of deniers (often sponsored by big corporations and special interest groups, in particular the fossil fuel industry; see https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-denial-machine-how-fossil-fuel-industry-blocks-climate-action), climate change-related calamities do manage to make their way into mainstream media, including movies and documentaries. This is understandable, given the increasingly vivid, short-term catastrophic consequences on humans (and their infrastructures) around the world. However, this is not the only global environmental change of the Anthropocene. Land-use change, over-drafting of soils and groundwater, rampant terrestrial and aquatic toxification, the proliferation of invasive organisms (plants, animals and pathogenic microbes) and, especially, the intimately connected loss of biodiversity are also grave manifestations of the Anthropocene [14,18]. Here we are concerned with the latter, which is one of the most critical manifestations of the Anthropocene. Save for the ethically and ecologically unsound arguments of de-extinction advocates (see [19]), the loss of biological diversity is irreversible on a time scale of interest to humanity. The loss of biodiversity could ultimately become the most pervasive global environmental change our species will face, since all taxa that have disappeared from Earth will be gone forever. Biodiversity loss is both a cause and a consequence of global environmental change. Therefore, our destruction of the global biological richness on which we utterly depend represents an unprecedented threat to the existence of civilization that could even threaten the persistence of humanity.

The unprecedented intrusion of human beings into nature has given rise to worldwide devastations. Animals and plants have been suffering on a massive scale. Newer problems keep coming into the picture on a daily basis, damaging the planet massively. Climate change has been the front runner among all the problems. It is caused by a rise in the amount of greenhouse gases, deforestation, waste generation, and population explosion. The US Environmental Protection Agency reported a release of 6677 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent of total greenhouse gases in 2018, with carbon dioxide contributing more than 80% of the total emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide were ranked second (10%) and third (7%) on the emission list. Additionally, the warming of our planet, caused due to greenhouse gases, could be irreversible for centuries. Climate change has given rise to many existential threats, including a rise in global temperatures, melting of glaciers and polar ice caps, increment in sea level, loss of biodiversity, extreme weather events, and an outbreak of uncountable diseases. The chapter discusses the various threats, arising out of climate change, to understand their likely impacts on flora and fauna. Attempts at mitigation and adaptation are extremely significant if we do not want to make our world wear sunglasses or switch on planet-sized coolers.

In the 2000s, however, inequality reemerged as a central political issue. The growing gap between the “1 percent” and everyone else, the terrible toll of Hurricane Katrina on low-income residents in New Orleans and the economic dislocations that followed the 2008 financial crisis all helped to put it back on the agenda. At the same time, evidence mounted that more concentrated wealth and political power leads to worse environmental performance—and not just in terms of air and water pollution. Researchers found that the proportion of plants and animals threatened with extirpation or extinction is higher in countries with more unequal income distributions. Rates of deforestation are higher in countries with greater corruption. Public expenditure on environmental research and development and patents on environmental innovations are lower in industrial nations with greater income inequality. More inequality has also been linked to higher carbon emissions per person and per unit of gross domestic product. These findings make sense when we consider that with less inequality, people are better able to defend the air, water and natural resources on which their health and well-being depend. Protecting the environment and reducing inequality go hand in hand.

The dangers of utilitarian modes of moral reasoning and the utopian promise of eternal life in paradise are well known. As Pinker writes, utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain. Although for Bostrom and other longtermists, the moral value is not infinite, it is astronomical. But this is more than enough, as we have seen, to justify pushing a button that trades billions of human lives for the tiniest reductions in existential risk. To quote the philosopher Thomas Nagel, writing about utilitarianism in the context of war: “Once the door is opened to calculations of utility and national interest, the usual speculations about the future of freedom, peace, and economic prosperity can be brought to bear to ease the consciences of those responsible for a certain number of charred babies.” In the case of longtermism, the issue is not the mere national interest of a state but the Ultimate Moral Interest of the Universe itself. How many charred babies is too many when the stakes are this high? One might object at this point to the association of genocide, charred babies, and the like with longtermism. “My god, no one in 23 the longtermist community is calling for anything like this! It is simply inconceivable that anyone would!” There are several problems with this reply. First, even if the leading longtermists today would ultimately side with Häggström in rejecting extreme, violent measures to secure our future among the stars, so long as the ideology remains a “legitimate” option on the marketplace of ideas, the door is open 14 for others—long-term extremists who interpret Bostrom’s words literally—to pick it up and run. In this sense, longtermism is an information hazard.15 But second, history is full of millennialist movements that rapidly flipped from one mode of eschatological thinking to another. A movement is millennialist if it holds that our current world is replete with suffering and death but will soon “be transformed into a perfect world of justice, peace, abundance, and mutual love.” In many cases, members of such movements could not, initially, have imagined their community turning to violence. It would have been unthinkable. But when external conditions change in the right way, when new circumstances trigger something in the old ideology, a community’s tolerance for bloodshed can quickly grow. As the historian Richard Landes observes, millennialism is a dynamic phenomenon, and in the course of an apocalyptic episode, a movement can literally flip from one extreme to the other. Among the classic cases, we find the Anabaptists who, in the course of their failed millennium at Münster [in Germany] from 1533-35, went from the most radically pacifist and egalitarian of the new “Protestant” groups to a violent and authoritarian group. The Anabaptists are just one of an interminable number of examples from the dusty annals of history. For example, many readers may 24 find it surprising that the notorious Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo actually began as a peaceful movement. Over the course of just a few years, it morphed into an active apocalyptic group that tried to initiate Armageddon by releasing the poisonous gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system in 1995. Since paradise awaits on the other side of the apocalypse, the sooner the apocalypse comes, the sooner believers will enter heaven. Longtermism is, of course, a “secular” rather than “religious” movement, although one could very plausibly describe it as a quasireligion whose central object of worship is not “God” but future value. Nonetheless, plenty of millennialist movements in recent history have been “secular,” most notably those driven by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism. What matters is not whether the ideology is secular or religious, but whether it contains the ingredients necessary for an “apocalyptic episode” to instigate a violent response. In this case, an apocalyptic episode might be the scenario described by Häggström: putative knowledge that there is an omnicidal actor somewhere in Germany who’s chances of success are 1 in a million. It is not difficult to imagine similar situations. All one needs is a moral commitment to Utopia and the belief that there is a greater-than-negligible chance that some actor could prevent us from reaching this prized future state. We do, after all, live in the most important moment of history—the Precipice—according to longtermists, and as the posthuman author of Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia asks: “What is Guilt in Utopia? Guilt is our knowledge that we could have created Utopia sooner.”

Extinction is not a metaphor… Extinction has become an emblem of Western, and white-dominated, fears about ‘the end of the(ir) world’. This scientific term is saturated with emotional potency, stretched and contorted to embody almost any nightmare, from climate change to asteroid strikes. In academic and public contexts alike, it is regularly interchanged with other terms and concepts – for instance, ‘species death’, global warming or ecological collapse. Diffused into sublime scales – mass extinctions measured in millions of (Gregorian calendar) years, a planet totalized by the threat of nuclear destruction – ‘extinction’ has become an empty superlative, one that that gestures to an abstract form of unthinkability. It teases Western subjects with images of generalized demise that might, if it gets bad enough, even threaten us, or the figure of ‘humanity’ that we enshrine as a universal. This figure of ‘humanity’, derived from Western European enlightenment ideals, emphasizes individual, autonomous actors who are fully integrated into the global market system; who are responsible citizens of nation-states; who conform to Western ideas of health and well-being; who partake of ‘culture’; who participate in democratic state-based politics; who refrain from physical violence; and who manage their ‘resources’ responsibly (Mitchell 2014). Oddly, exposure to the fear of extinction contributes to the formation and bolstering of contemporary Western subjects. Contemplating the sublime destruction of ‘humanity’ offers the thrill of abjection: the perverse pleasure derived from exposure to something by which one is revolted. Claire Colebrook detects this thrill-seeking impulse in the profusion of Western blockbuster films and TV shows that imagine and envision the destruction of earth, or at least of ‘humanity’. It also throbs through a flurry of recent best-selling books – both fiction and speculative non-fiction (see Oreskes and Conway 2014; Newitz 2013; Weisman 2008). In a forthcoming intervention, Noah Theriault and I (2018) argue that these imaginaries are a form of porn that normalizes the profound violences driving extinction, while cocooning its viewers in the secure space of the voyeur. Certainly, there are many Western scientists, conservationists and policy-makers who are genuinely committed to stopping the extinction of others, perhaps out of fear for their own futures. Yet extinction is not quite real for Western, and especially white, subjects; it is a fantasy of negation that evokes thrill, melancholy, anger and existential purpose. It is a metaphor that expresses the destructive desires of these beings, and the negativity against which we define our subjectivity. But extinction is not a metaphor: it is a very real expression of violence that systematically destroys particular beings, worlds, life forms and the relations that enable them to flourish. These are real, unique beings, worlds and relations – as well as somebody’s family, Ancestors, siblings, future generations – who are violently destroyed. Extinction can only be used unironically as a metaphor by people who have never been threatened with it, told it is their inevitable fate, or lost their relatives and Ancestors to it – and who assume that they probably never will. This argument is directly inspired by the call to arms issued in 2012 by Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang and more recently by Cutcha Risling-Baldy. The first, seminal piece demonstrates how settler cultures use the violence of metaphorical abstraction to excuse themselves from the real work of decolonization: ensuring that land and power is in Indigenous hands. Risling-Baldy’s brilliant follow-up extends this logic to explain how First People like Coyote have been reduced to metaphors through settler appropriation. In both cases, engagement with Indigenous peoples and their relations masks moves to innocence: acts that make it appear as if settlers are engaging in decolonization, while in fact we are consolidating the power structures that privilege us. In this series, want to show how Western, and white-dominated, discourses on ‘extinction’ appear to address the systematic destruction of peoples and other beings while enacting moves to innocence that mask their culpability and perpetuate structures of violence. As I argued in Part I of this series, extinction is an expression of colonial violence. As such, it needs to be addressed through direct decolonization, including the dismantling of settler colonial structures of violence, and the resurgence of Indigenous worlds. Following Tuck, Yang and Risling-Baldy’s lead, I want to show how and why the violences that drive extinction have come to be invisible within mainstream discourses. Salient amongst these is the practice of genocide against Indigenous peoples other than humans. …it is literally genocide. What Western science calls ‘extinction’ is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of desirable ‘human’ activities. It is an embodiment of particular patterns of structural violence that disproportionately affect specific racialized groups. In some cases, ‘extinction’ is directly, deliberately and systematically inflicted in order to create space for aggressors, including settler states. For this reason, it has rightly been framed as an aspect or tool of colonial genocides against Indigenous human peoples. Indeed, many theorists have shown that the ‘extirpation’ of life forms (their total removal from a particular place) is an instrument for enacting genocide upon Indigenous humans (see Mazis 2008; Laduke 1999; Stannard 1994). Specifically, the removal of key sources of food, clothing and other basic materials makes survival on the land impossible for the people targeted.