It is evident in the ashen landscape, in the bands of marauding men, in the disagreement between father and son about whether to help fellow survivors. The Struggle for Survival: Conflict and Creativityīy Jessica Flack, research fellow at the Santa Fe InstituteĬonflict is a prominent theme in The Road. The struggle for survival and other themes from The Road His tombstone will probably read, unfortunately, "He ran a good meeting."
Various field projects have taken Doug repeatedly to China, South Africa and Namibia, and he has done geological field work in various other regions as well. His latest project is a book on evolutionary innovation through the history of life, which will also explore the similarities and differences between economic and biological innovation.
Why this should happen is not clear, but it emphasizes that the aftermath of such catastrophes may not be a rebuilding of previous relationships but the construction of an entirely new world.ĭoug Erwin is the author or editor of six books, including Extinction: How Life Nearly Died 250 Million Years Ago, published in December 2005 by Princeton University Press. Understanding these events is a great scientific challenge, because new ecological communities would most likely operate with different rules than communities that exist before such catastrophes. Eventually, slower-growing species would begin to reemerge. The deforestation described in The Road would release nutrients from the land into rivers, lakes and the ocean, encouraging further growth. In the sea, many microbes and some algae spread rapidly. The first organisms to reappear are often ferns and weedy flowering plants that reproduce and spread rapidly. Geologists and paleontologists (who study fossils) have studied how plants and animals responded to the six great mass extinctions of the past 600 million years, as well as smaller events such as massive volcanic eruptions. But we do know a good deal about what happens after such events. Was it a nuclear exchange? A massive volcanic eruption? The impact of an extraterrestrial object? We don't know, and in some sense, it does not really matter. If Cormac McCarthy knows what caused the cataclysm in The Road, he's not telling, and we're all left to speculate. The End of the World: Extinction and Reemergence of Lifeīy Doug Erwin, senior scientist and curator of paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and part-time resident faculty member of SFI
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