Extinction isn’t the end of the story—it’s the plot twist life has already survived, repeatedly. Newitz asks the only pragmatic question left: how do we make it through the next one, together.
If we learn from deep-time survivors and scale three behaviors—scatter, adapt, and remember—humanity can outlast even planet-wide catastrophe.
Newitz grounds that optimism in the fossil record (five prior mass extinctions), present-day biodiversity data (from bees to amphibians), and a clear working definition of “mass extinction” derived from Nature (≥75% of species lost within <2 million years).
Best for readers who want a rigorous, hope-forward roadmap that turns doomscrolling into design briefs for cities, public health, and space-ready civilization. Not for those seeking pure climate jeremiads or single-cause explanations—Scatter Adapt and Remember is multidisciplinary, messy, and gloriously human.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Title and Author Information.
Scatter Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction* by Annalee Newitz
Scatter Adapt and Remember sits at the intersection of popular science and futures design: part paleontology and geology, part anthropology, urban planning, epidemiology, and aerospace engineering. Newitz, a veteran science journalist and editor, weaves deep reporting with clear explanations that take readers from the Great Dying to pandemic math and space elevators. Sections span “A History of Mass Extinctions,” “We Almost Didn’t Make It,” “Lessons from Survivors,” “How to Build a Death-Proof City,” and “The Million-Year View.”
The thesis is disarmingly simple: our doom is not inevitable if we implement survival strategies that history already validates.
2. Summary
Scatter Adapt and Remember’s main arc.
Newitz opens with a sober roll call of contemporary signals—bees, amphibians, biodiversity indices—framed against the fossil record’s five mass extinctions and today’s “sixth.” In a single, clarifying move, she replaces catastrophic fatalism with pragmatic optimism anchored in three verbs: scatter (diversify locations and lifelines), adapt (engineer and evolve for harsh variability), and remember (collective memory, math, and institutions that transmit survival know-how).
The deep-time canon (Part I).
We meet Snowball Earth, Ordovician flash glaciations, Devonian “invasions,” and the Permian megavolcano nightmare that erased ~95% of species—then watch life’s comeback acts. Newitz uses these episodes to show why speed, randomness, and environmental cascades—acid oceans, anoxic dead zones, habitat collapse—select for adaptable generalists and quick reproducers.
The human bottleneck (Part II).
Homo sapiens nearly blinks out, rebounds through mobility and ingenuity, and eventually shares the planet with cities that magnify risk and resilience in the same breath. In this section, Newitz stresses population bottlenecks and adaptive generalism as our species’ defining assets.
Lessons from survivors (Part III).
“Scatter” is the diaspora instinct; “Adapt” draws on extremophile microbes; “Remember” is our uniquely human multiplier—stories, models, shared procedures—that make local hacks portable across time and space. Planning and narrative, she argues, are survival tech.
How to build a death-proof city (Part IV).
Newitz turns to tsunami labs, disaster science, pandemic mathematics, camouflaged cities, and urban farms. The point isn’t bunker-building; it’s redesigning the metropolis to absorb shocks: routing flood energy, inoculating networks, re-localizing food and energy, and designing with living systems rather than against them.
The million-year view (Part V).
Look beyond Earth: terraforming, planetary backyard caution, space elevators, optional bodies, and Titanian beaches. The goal is redundancy: scattered habitats that de-correlate risk—from asteroids to gamma bursts—so no single failure mode ends the human saga.
Highlighted takeaways (integrated across chapters)
- Mass extinctions have rules. They’re defined by scale (≥75% species loss within <2 Myr) and by systemic cascades, not single villains; distinguishing background vs. outlier death rates matters.
- Modern signals rhyme with prehistory. Bee colony losses (~30% winters since 2007), amphibian declines (>⅓ threatened), and biodiversity alarms foreshadow risk, regardless of causation debates.
- Adaptability beats purity. In post-extinction landscapes, generalists with flexible diets, fast breeding, and mobility win; specialization without redundancy is a trap.
- Cities must mutate. Stackable defenses—design for floods, breathable buildings, local bioreactors, pandemic control via network models—can turn “death traps” into life support.
- Redundancy is destiny. Scatter across terrains and worlds, adapt tools and bodies, and remember procedures through institutions that outlive individuals.
3. Critical Analysis
Evaluation of content.
Newitz does something rare: she fuses emotionally honest risk framing with falsifiable thresholds. The Nature-derived criterion (≥75% species within <2 Myr) gives readers a calibration tool; it’s not hand-wavey doom, it’s a dashboard.
She then triangulates contemporary signs: USDA surveys reporting ~30% winter Colony Collapse Disorder/bee losses; amphibian threat levels that scientists call a crisis; and long-timeline biodiversity assessments (IPBES) that put ~1,000,000 species at risk.
Crucially, she also interrogates context, reminding us that Earth always swings between greenhouse and icehouse—our job is to “prevent the next environmental shift” from blindsiding built society.
Does it fulfill its purpose / contribute meaningfully?
Yes, because it doesn’t just catalogue hazards; it methodically re-tools mindsets: from “survivalism” (isolated hoarding) to species-scale survival strategies (cities, systems, and stories), which is the only scale that ever mattered.
It contributes a durable lexicon—scatter/adapt/remember—useful across policy, engineering, and education; and it anticipates debates we saw amplified during COVID-19 about modeling, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and infrastructure as public health.
4. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths (pleasant/positive).
I found the tone bracing: neither Pollyanna nor Cassandra, just steady, testable pragmatic optimism. The deep-time storytelling is lucid—and the “death-proof city” chapters feel like briefs any mayor could hand to an urban resilience team tomorrow morning. Scatter Adapt and Remember’s insistence on remembering—from lore to math—felt human, humane, and actionable, rather than tech-fetishist.
Weaknesses (unpleasant/negative).
At times the futurecasting (e.g., the space elevator and post-biological bodies) can feel speculative or underspecified on cost curves; some readers will want firmer engineering timelines, which the field still lacks. The biodiversity stats in the opening are (necessarily) snapshots; a decade later we have more granular numbers (good!), but they need integration with updated data and policy levers.
5. Reception / Criticism / Influence
Reviewers praised Scatter Adapt and Remember’s energy and synthesis—Kirkus called it “animated and absorbing,” emphasizing its dual mission: how life survived and how humans can avoid perishing.
Publishing details confirm enduring interest (multiple formats, reprints), and Scatter Adapt and Remember has often been cited in popular discussions of resilient cities, pandemic prep, and off-world redundancy.
Meanwhile, the global evidence base that Newitz leans on has only grown: the 2019 IPBES assessment warned that ~1 million species could face extinction within decades; ongoing amphibian Red List updates report ~40.7% threatened; bee loss narratives have evolved from CCD-centric to multi-stressor models. (See BBC/IPBES coverage; IUCN/Nature updates; USDA surveys.)
6. Quotations
“We have to move from survivalist tactics, aimed at protecting individual lives in a disaster, to survival strategies that could help our entire species make it through a mass extinction.”
“Undeniably, our planet is undergoing potentially deadly environmental changes today. But it’s incorrect to say that this is the first or even the worst time it’s happened.”
“They agreed that mass extinctions on Earth can be defined as events in which 75 percent or more species go extinct in less than 2 million years.”
“Evidence from mass extinctions of the past is that the initial killing is often quite random… it’s the adaptable forms that breed fast and live at high population size that have the best chance of fighting through.”
“Over a third of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction… the Harvard evolutionary biologist and conservationist E. O. Wilson estimates that 27,000 species of all kinds go extinct per year.”
“…the only way Earth could ever transform enough to merit a new name like Eaarth would be if the planet’s environment suddenly stopped changing.”
7. Comparison with similar works
Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction documents the evidence and human drivers with Pulitzer-winning clarity; Newitz complements that with a playbook and design orientation. (Kolbert appears as a reporter of the extinction evidence inside Newitz’s own pages.)
Vaclav Smil’s work (e.g., Growth) stresses material constraints and scale; Newitz adds sociotechnical levers—storytelling, institutions, and cities as survival machines. Two other useful neighbors: Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (mutual aid after disasters) and Paul Hawken’s Drawdown (solutions compendium).
Newitz stands out by blending geologic humility with engineering audacity.
8. Conclusion
This is the rare climate-and-catastrophe book that left me more responsible than resigned. It’s evidence-dense, emotionally honest, and practical in its implications for engineering, policy, education, and culture.
If you’re an urbanist, public-health planner, emergency manager, teacher, or student looking to transform anxiety into architecture, math, and memory, read it now. If you want a single-villain narrative or apocalyptic purity tests, you’ll bristle. Read it anyway: scatter/adapt/remember is how we keep the human story going—for centuries, and then for a million years.
“Evidence” add-ons you can quote in your own arguments
- Bee losses (~30% winters) — USDA/ARS surveys; CCD now one stressor among many (mites, pesticides, nutrition, climate).
- Amphibians — IUCN/Nature updates show ~40.7% globally threatened, a worsening trend since early 2000s.
- IPBES 2019 — ~1,000,000 species at risk; widely reported (BBC/Time/Axios).
- Space elevator conferences — active community convenings since late 2000s (Seattle/Redmond, WA), showing sustained engineering curiosity.
Additional exact, short pull-quotes you can reuse
- “Humanity is at a crossroads… our doom is not.”
- “Let’s assume that humans are just getting started… How do we switch gears into survival mode?”
- “All survival strategies, however small, are signs that we harbor hope about the future.”
