extinctionist
- noun
- /ɪkˈstɪŋkʃənɪst/
- Offensive
- The extinctionist argued that certain invasive species must be eliminated to protect native ecosystems.
Examples
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The extinctionists are wrong to think they are imagining a world we can understand.
Academic text (2003) -
The evolutionary claims put forward by the extinctionists lead naturally to the question of what is to be done if their vision of the nonhuman future is not to prevail.
Academic text (2003) -
There are many reasons to think that the extinctionists themselves have failed to achieve it.
Academic text (2003) -
But he has caught the inhumanity of the extinctionists dead on.
Academic text (2003) -
Under these circumstances, it may not be absurd to think of how we might respond to the possibilities raised by extinctionists.
Academic text (2003) -
Nevertheless, the extinctionists do their best to claim some kind of strong necessity behind the developments that will lead to the end of human beings.
Academic text (2003) -
The vision of what the extinctionists claim will be a better world cannot really relate to what that world will seem like to its inhabitants or to us.
Academic text (2003) -
Part of any battle against the extinctionists, then, as against the biotechnologists, is to recover and refine the human understanding of human things.
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Given these psychological realities, it seems amazing that extinctionists are willing so quickly to write off the bodily component of who we are.
Academic text (2003) -
But the extinctionists illustrate the hollowness of grand claims for new orders and how easy it is, in pursuit of them, to end up worse off than we are now.
Academic text (2003)
How Committed
Surface Forms
Morphology
extinctionist = extinction (transparent) = extinct + ion + ist
The noun 'extinction' is a regular formation from 'extinct' + '-ion', and adding '-ist' yields a standard agent noun meaning a person who advocates or practices extinction.
Etymology
The word extinctionist joins extinct ('no longer living') and the ending -ist ('someone who supports a belief'), which you can remember from the idea of extinguish ('to put out'). So an extinctionist is a person who supports ending a species, group, or population on purpose.