Toby Ord is a philosopher at Oxford University, and the Precipice is the kind of book that forces you to reflect on after reading it. The central argument of the book is that humanity has gotten to a point in history where for the very first time, we possess the power to permanently destroy our future. It does not only cause our suffering or set ourselves back, but we close the door on everything that could ever come after us, this he calls existential catastrophe. Ord spend the entire book asking two major questions; how did we get here, and what do we do about it?
Why this book is important for the people of Jo is because Ord did not restrict his argument to nuclear bombs or science fiction, he was deliberate in show casing how the biggest risks facing humanity are not sudden acts of God rather it is the slow and deliberate choices made by human beings. Choices about what to dig out of the ground, what to release into the air, and what warnings to ignore. Every chapter of the book is a mirror help up to the world, that is asking us to take an honest look at what we are doing to ourselves.
The Ground Beneath Our Feet
In the Precipice, Ord devoted a generous amount of time to expound what he calls anthropogenic risks, which is a technical way of saying risks we create ourselves. He draws a sharp contrast between natural disasters, which humanity has survived for over 200,000 years with relatively little existential danger, and catastrophes that have been induced by humans that have multiplied drastically in the last century. His analysis showed that total natural extinction risk is below 0.05 percent per century, but total human-induced existential risk in this century maybe as high as one in six.
Drawing a parallel with Jos, the Plateau has been mined since the early 1900s, for different reasons and by different people; by government, by large companies and artisanal miners sometimes working without permits, without safety equipment, and almost always without any serious thought for what they leave behind. The impact of these mining activities glaring to anyone who is driving from Jos toward Bukuru or through the Rayfield area. There are open pits that’s filled with stagnant water, displaced topsoil that has turned entire hillsides brown, streams that run a strange colour when it rains. This is not natural. This is a landscape that has been systematically altered by human decision, and consequences have compounded over time and still compounding daily.
Ord quotes the Australian case of rabbit calicivirus, where scientist released a biological agent on a small island to control the wild rabbit population and it escaped quarantine within week, spreading across the entire mainland and killing a significant amount of rabbits. His is not about rabbits but to show that when you introduce something into an ecosystem without understanding the full consequences, the ecosystem will not ask for your permission before responding. Mining on the Plateau is not so different. When the topsoil is stripped from a tin-mining site without rehabilitating the land, that piece of the ground is not just lost, it has also altered the water tables, accelerate erosion, reduce the ability of surround land to support food crops, and create conditions where flooding downstream becomes more severe and common than it would have been. An example of this, is the 2023 flood in Wase and communities along the Gongola River basin these serves as a reminder that what happens on the Plateau does not stay on the Plateau.
One of the most useful ideas in the book is what Ord calls the risk landscape; it is the full picture of all threats facing humanity, mapped together so you can see which ones are the largest and how they interact. He argues that risks do not arrive in isolation; they compound. A great-power war does not just cause direct casualties; it accelerates biological weapons development as well as breaks down climate agreements and makes almost every other risk worse. In Jos, we have our own version of this compounding problem. Mining degradation weakens food production, the weakened food production increases poverty which drives young men into illegal, unregulated mining. The illegal mining then accelerates land degradation further and the degraded land in turn stir up community conflict over whatever productive ground remains. Each step makes the next one worse, and what started as an economic activity becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of environmental and social damage.
Ord is very clear that most existential catastrophes do not arrive suddenly. They build slowly, through decisions that seem reasonable in the moment, made by people who are not monsters but who are not paying enough attention to the long-term picture. He writes of scientists who enhanced the transmissibility of a dangerous bird flu strain in the name of research, without adequately considering what would happen if it escaped the lab. The same pattern applies to a mining company in Jos that extracts tin or columbite from Plateau soil, books the profit, and leaves behind a pit lake that the surrounding community will live with for generations, with no research into the long-term health impact of heavy metal contamination in the groundwater.
The Lesson About Self- Destruction
The strongest lesson in The Precipice is about self-destruction, and it is disturbing because it is not about accidents or ignorance. Ord shows repeatedly that humanity tends to destroy things it depends with a level consciousness at some point that it is doing so. Ironically, the people making these decisions are not the ones facing the consequences. This is exactly what’s at play on the Plateau. The economic argument for mining is real; it creates employment and generates revenue. But the communities in Rayfield or Bukuru or Barkin Ladi that lives downstream from an abandoned mine pit does not receive revenue proportionate to what they lose in clean water, arable land, and generational health. Ord calls this one of the core structural features of existential risk: those who benefit from the dangerous activity and those who pay for it are almost never the same people.
Ord is not asking us to stop all human activity, he is asking us to be honest about what we trading away and to make sure the people doing the trading have taken into the consideration the long-term impact on the people. On the Plateau, the question work asking is this: if the current rate of unregulated mining and land degradation persist, what would the future of Jos be in the next 50 years. What would the water table look like? What would the farms look like? What would communities look like being built on land that has been chemically altered and structurally weakened by of extraction?
What This Book Expects from Us
Ord ends the book not with despair but with a call to seriousness. He computes that the chance of humanity surviving this century with its potential intact is five in six, and he holds that as a ray of hope. But he insists that this outcome requires deliberate effort that it does not happen by default. For Jos, this means that the decisions being made now about how mining is regulated and whether abandoned pits are rehabilitated alongside how affected communities are protected are not administrative details rather they are decisions about what kind of future is available to people who will live here in 2050 and 2070. The window to make different choices is open, but it won’t stay indefinitely open. Jos has survived a great deal for more than a century of mining, farming, and conflict. But survival is not the same as flourishing, and the difference between the two is a function of the decisions made by leaders.
Reading this book has made me realize that there is an urgent need for awareness creation for both community leaders and members of the community. The blessing of natural resources in the state should not be an avenue for destruction rather it should enhance the flourishing of the state by preserving these God-given means of wealth and the existence of the community. I will recommend this book to anyone in my circle especially leaders.
