Prequel to Global Catastrophe? The Dissolution of Minority Peoples Through the Lens of Climate Crisis

What is the relationship, indeed what is the interface, between disappearing biological groups of plants and animals and disappearing human cultural groups? Hardly more than a generation ago, the question itself would have been considered academically abstruse, even gauche. Today, in the high era of the Anthropocene with the natural world facing a sixth extinction, and traditional ethno-social groups founded on living relationships to niche eco-systems diminishing before our eyes, the question is more than urgent. This piece explores around the edges of this conundrum, "edges" or more precisely historic "rimlands" comprising a discrete yet "normal" eastern European and Aegean world of rich, ethnographic communities and interactions between communities across the longue dur & eacute;e, shattered not just by forces of extreme violence but also by a seemingly ineluctable nation-state-driven developmentalism. Might we consider the relentless and ostensibly irresistible "perturbations" of modernity which in the process consigned whole elements of a rich human mosaic to the marginalisation of "minority" status, through the prism of global, omnicidal forces which are bringing the entire biosphere to the brink of catastrophe? If this is the case, the struggle for human difference and biological diversity suggests a common cause, and a common solidarity.