The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Ratings110
Average rating4
Great book. Really goes in depth into ecological damage of climate without feeling boring at all.
We are the problem - humans - the cause of the sixth extinction - the sixth mass extinction that is.
Throughout the history of the earth there have been five mass extinctions, separated by very long uneventful stretches with very occasionally revolution on the surface of the earth. These are:
The end-Ordovician extinction -Intense glacial and interglacial periods created large sea-level swings and moved shorelines dramatically. The tectonic uplift of the Appalachian mountains created lots of weathering, sequestration of CO2, and with it, changes in climate and ocean chemistry.
The late-Devonian extinction - caused by rapid growth and diversification of land plants generated rapid and severe global cooling.
The end-Permian extinction - caused by intense volcanic activity in Siberia. Resulting in global warming; elevated CO2 and sulfur (H2S) levels from volcanoes caused ocean acidification, acid rain, and other changes in ocean and land chemistry.
The end-Triassic extinction - caused by underwater volcanic activity in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) caused global warming and a dramatic change in the chemical composition of the oceans.
The end-Cretaceous extinction - caused by asteroid impact in Yucatán, Mexico. This caused a global cataclysm and rapid cooling.
The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption, but “one weedy species.”
Atelopus zeteki
Mammut americanum
Pinguinus impennis
Discoscaphites jerseyensis
Dicranograptus ziczac
Patella caerulea
Acropora millepora
Alzatea verticallata
Eciton burchellii
Myotis lucifugus
Dicerorhinus sumatrensis
Homo neanderthalensis
Homo sapiens
Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust...”
This book was extremely thorough and well researched. I appreciated the breadth of topics covered and felt uplifted that I had a split basis in everything covered. I wanted to read this partially for book club and partially for grad school.
Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the five big extinctions and the small extinctions of individual species of Earth's past as well as the extinction we are currently undergoing, the first extinction caused by a single species on Earth, mankind.
A must-read.
A few quotes from the book:
“Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”
“With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.”
“One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it's changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.”
“By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens—in most cases hundreds—of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.”
“Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what's most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”
“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.”
Wow, what an incredible book. Incredibly informative and thought-provoking yet easy to read. I love how Kolbert starts each chapter off with an animal and uses the history of that animal to ease the reader into the greater arc of the story. I like how Kolbert makes her point in a matter-of-fact and non-judgemental way whereas I feel that some other climate-change-oriented literature tend to be rather sassy in a “we're screwed, this is XYZ's fault” kind of way.
Overall, such a great book and an essential read for everyone.
Wow, what an incredible book. Incredibly informative and thought-provoking yet easy to read. I love how Kolbert starts each chapter off with an animal and uses the history of that animal to ease the reader into the greater arc of the story. I like how Kolbert makes her point in a matter-of-fact and non-judgemental way whereas I feel that some other climate-change-oriented literature tend to be rather sassy in a “we're screwed, this is XYZ's fault” kind of way.
Overall, such a great book and an essential read for everyone.
This book has managed to make me slightly more optimistic than I was. Even though humans can inadvertently push individual species to extinction, I'm fairly sure there's nothing we could do that would stop life. Granted, we are destroying opportunities to study and enjoy many wonders of the nature, but do humans inherently need to do those things? What if anthropocene extinction enables evolution of a species that's more adept at solving problems of living an energy-intensive life than we will have been?
This isn't exactly a book I'd recommend, reading was a drag at times. It's also not a scientific book in any way, which isn't a critique, it's just something you should be aware of before you read it. It's a book written by a journalist and that's exactly how it reads.
The first and last few chapters were captivating, I got bored in the middle. There is a lot of interesting trivia about evolution, extinction, human beings and I bet it would be an interesting read for someone studying these topics. For a general reader, it did get a bit difficult to see her switch between the casual style of writing about her treks and expeditions to explaining serious facts about Anthropocene, Ammonites and Aragonites.
Climate change is real, humans are affecting everything on Earth making it hard to predict the future of our planet but by the end of this century, we are close to losing up to a half of the living species. Welcome to the sixth extinction.
TL;DR: It's a Pulitzer winner, read it if the subject interests you. Otherwise, just know that we are doomed. (jk)
I know I'm in the minority, especially give the fact that The Sixth Extinction won a Pulitzer Prize, but this book wasn't what I was expecting. It was included in a NY Times list of “Best Books About Climate Change,” but the focus is more on evolution and extinction rather than the details of climate change itself. The writing is chatty and frequently entertaining (I learned a lot about what every expert Kolbert met with looked like, sounded like, and frequently what they ate for breakfast), but the episodic chapters never coalesced together into a single theme of why climate change is happening and what/how we can save our planet. I would have to be made of stone to not be moved by profiles like the scientist who keeps the cells of the last member of an obscure bird species alive in a tank of liquid nitrogen, but I needed the author to connect the dots more than she did. Maybe there was a Beginner's Book on Climate Change I should have read first?
Review written during the COVID 19 pandemic, maybe nothing can affect me these days that isn't virus-related.
Kolbert has gone on many expeditions to discover the status of several animal species (Golden Frogs in South-America, the Brown Bats in America, Auk's in Iceland etc) and tells in an entertaining though disheartening fashion how they became (or becoming) extinct.
To round it all of these stories are interspersed with how humans discovered how there have been past extinctions (including the famous extinction of the dinosaurs, which was only discovered in the 80's).
I had expected that the book would have a stronger opinion on the role of humans in the sixth extinction, but it is surprisingly neutral on this. Of course it explains which effects climate change will have on the future of animal species, but it tells this in a manner of fact way and by the way, one of the other extinctions was also caused by massive climate change, so you can see what kind of effect that had.
Would recommend because:
Features a nice explanation of the different extinctions that have already taken place on earth (there were already 5, while I mostly only knew about the dinosaurs one) and what kind of effects they had.
Still curious about:
What kind of effects will the current extinction have on earth. What will the future look like with acidic oceans and animals missing from the foodchain?
I expected this to be a climate change eco-disaster book of despair, but it filled me - instead - with a strange Zen acceptance that it's not climate change that's the problem, it's humans from day 1 that are the problem.
That is, while human-caused climate change is almost certainly destroying our (current) ecosystems and accelerating a mass extinction (possibly non-linearly), Kolbert discusses the ample evidence that shows that this great, sixth, Anthropocene extinction began well before industrialization - i.e. well before the toxic changes we're making to the environment via carbon emissions and ubiquitous plastics. This was, at first, pretty Zen. Kolbert acknowledges that the Earth has been in a constant state of flux since it formed as a ball of goo, and that - if you were to zoom tens of millions years into the past - you would find a very inhospitable, unpleasant, and not-diverse place indeed. Change is constant. No one ever said this rock was supposed to look like this, and support us thinking apes, forever.
This made me think a lot about how conservation efforts are attempting to place a stake in the ground - deciding that the eco-diversity of the, say, 16th or 17th century (i.e. nostalgia trips) is the One True Ecosystem that we should always be working to preserve and protect. Save the dodo, etc.
Of course, this ignores that the ecosystem has always been changing - is, by definition (of natural selection), in a constant state of flux, and that that flux is not necessarily at some apotheosis of Most Excellent Ecosystem. Like, who cares if the dodo is dead forever? Existentially, it doesn't matter (we all survived well enough without it). Why do we consider it more of a tragedy than, say, the destruction of the woolly mammoth? I guess because we're so very guilty of killing it. But, as Kolbert writes, we tend to kill and drive to extinction EEVVVRRRRRYYYYOONNNNNNE (Gary Oldman voice) - and the myth of the noble savage (e.g. indigenous populations living in Harmony With Nature) is false. i.e. It's not just that we're killing the planet with cars; it's that cars are just the latest, most efficient and scalable manifestation of our ability/willingness/DNA-weirdness-thingie to kill the planet ANYWAY, ALL THE TIME. All this evidence points to giant charismatic megafauna quickly going extinct as soon as humans arrived on the scene - see, e.g., all the big animals of Australia (now all dead) and all the big animals of the Americas (also dead).
Anyway, this - at first - filled me with Zen fatalism, as I said. “Okay, thank God,” I thought. “The cataclysmic Second Dark Ages that are inevitably going to come once our current ecosystem crashes and we run out of fossil fuels - well, that is just inevitable, and not JUST the caused by the evils of modernity. Maybe this finally answers the Fermi Paradox?” i.e. It just feels like it's not modern American consumerism that's the eco-problem around here; it's that HUMANS are, by design, the problem. Kolbert very much emphasizes that there's SOMETHING SPECIAL (an evil gene!?) in our DNA that makes us particularly destructive, particular over-killers. We're basically a weed, and, like weeds, we homogenize the landscape and can bring fragile, diverse ecosystems crashing down.
But! BUTTTTT. This Zen fatalism quickly turned to a deeply unsettled feeling with Kolbert's penultimate chapter, on all our (now-extinct) hominid siblings: the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and homo floresiensis. All of these sibling species are now extinct and, interestingly, many of us carry some small percentage of Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA. One of the great mysteries is why they're extinct and we're not. And one of the unsettling answers is that, like every other creature we come across, we killed them until they were all dead. :/ Which is like, WHY?!
The book closes with this fundamental paradox: we, as humans, go to great lengths to save and conserve species. We wring our hands a lot about climate change (despite what American politics and Big Oil would have you believe). But, at the same time, there's some fundamental, parasitic quality to us that - even if you took away our fossil fuels - we would still basically drive everything to extinction. Including ourselves!
I liked all the big-picture talk, how the Anthropocene is (has been) causing a new mass extinction event, but my attention kept dropping at the stories of all the specific biological examples of endangered species. This is still a good book, and important, I just feel I already got the important parts from a chapter in Yuval Noah Harari's [b:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 23692271 Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1420585954s/23692271.jpg 18962767].While I am here:1. End Ordovician extinction, 444 million years ago, 86% of species lost2. Late Devonian extinction, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost3. End Permian extinction, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost4. End Triassic extinction, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost5. End Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost [source]
3.5 stars The subject is really interesting and I think it's important to be aware of the impact we have as humans on other species and the environment, but I found the way the author chose to present the information a bit boring. I felt some chapters were dragging. I am really pleased I read it though, maybe it's just because I'm not used to reading books on that topic.
I don't frequently read a lot of science nonfiction or science journalism, but this was a well-written, well-researched book that flowed well and even made me laugh at times. Worth a read!
There is enough in this book to sway me into the believer column of Global Warming, educate me on Ocean Acidification, make me feel bad about being a human, and give me comfort to know that there is not much I can personally do to make a damn bit of difference to change anything and that anything that I did or did not do would could all be changed to something completely different on a geologic time scale.
I would have preferred more information about the previous five extinctions and less talk about her travelings and things that happened with her.
One would have to have been living under a rock, or the most extreme kind of isolation, if one hasn???t encountered the dire news about the state of several of Earth???s species. Everyday it seems like one more species dies off, or comes even closer to extinction. Estimates vary, but scientists claim that as many as two hundred species go extinct every day, or roughly around three species per hour. There are also hundreds of undiscovered species that could be going extinct before they are discovered, because they die off before scientists can find them and give them a name. These species are also part of the ???three per hour??? count, which means that there are lifeforms out there???lifeforms that could exist nowhere else except this planet???that disappear before we even know they exist, before we even know what it is they do. There are interesting philosophical questions about whether or not trees really fall if there???s no one there to hear them, but if an undiscovered species goes extinct, other, bigger things are bound to follow, because that???s how Nature works: everything works together, and if something dies off, others suffer too???humanity included, though perhaps not directly, nor immediately.
Given how prevalent the message about extinction is, and how much information is out there, it can be hard to filter the sources to find a clear, understandable summation of what extinction is, how it works, what its effects are, and what causes it. One would think that the Internet could give one all the information one could possibly want about extinction, but so much of it is either inaccessible because of paywalls; is written in jargon the average reader does not understand; or is just badly-written, period. What???s needed is a text that discusses extinction with scientific accuracy, while doing so in layman???s language and a compelling journalistic style.
Elizabeth Kolbert???s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is precisely that book. At the end of the Prologue, Kolbert lays out what she tries to do with the book as a whole, and what she hopes readers will take away from it:
If extinction is a morbid topic, mass extinction is, well, massively so. It???s also a fascinating one. In the pages that follow, I try to convey both sides: the excitement of what???s being learned as well as the horror of it. My hope is that readers of this book will come away with an appreciation of the truly extraordinary moment in which we live.
Her use of the word ???extraordinary??? is interesting because the word is double-edged: both positive and negative, depending on the context. It???s not immediately clear to the reader whether or not Kolbert uses it positively or negatively, but as the reader progresses through the book, it becomes clear that Kolbert means it very negatively indeed.
The Sixth Extinction is divided into thirteen chapters, each one focused on a specific species deeply caught up in the extinction process. Some are already extinct: the great auk, the ammonite, and the Neanderthal are all gone, with nothing left of them except fossils or stuffed skins. Some species are still around, but their continued existence is balanced on a knife???s-edge: the Sumatran rhino, hundreds of amphibian species, and several bat species are all on the verge of dying out completely.
And then there???s us, Homo sapiens: ???one weedy species??? that has changed the world so extremely that we are, in and of ourselves, an extinction event similar to the Five Great Extinctions that came before: extinction events that nearly wiped out all life on Earth. We are the Sixth Extinction that gives Kolbert???s book its title.
Many readers have called Kolbert???s book ???heavy???, and this is very true, though perhaps not immediately. After all, her prose is very lucid and easy to understand, with very little jargon used???and when it is used, Kolbert takes the time to explain what the terms mean. Her narrative flow is also excellent: many nonfiction writers who don???t have a journalistic or creative writing background often have issues with their storytelling, but Kolbert???s strong journalistic background (she is a staff writer for The New Yorker) gives her the skills necessary to tell a compelling story without sacrificing the facts.
She also has a penchant for delivering bombshells to the reader in a manner that has the most impact???again, something I attribute to her journalistic background. Take, for example, this quote from the first chapter, ???The Sixth Extinction???:
Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world???s most endangered class of animals; it???s been calculated that the group???s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.???There are all sorts of seemingly disparate reasons that species are disappearing. But trace the process far enough and inevitably you are led to the same culprit: ???one weedy species.???
This is where things start to get heavy. Beginning in this chapter, which describes the beginnings of Kolbert???s interest in the concept of extinction, the book explores the history of extinction as an idea, and how those ideas relate to how we think of extinction today. It is a story interwoven with the stories of palaeontology, evolution, and geology, as well as politics and religion. Some of the players in this story are old: Darwin, for instance, crops up quite frequently, as does Charles Lyell, whose ideas helped lead Darwin to the theory of evolution. Also mentioned is Georges Cuvier, whose concept of ???catastrophism??? was criticised by Lyell, whose own concept of ???uniformitarianism??? was meant to refute Cuvier???s own idea. In the years since Cuvier and Lyell and Darwin, other scientists have proven that the nature of extinction is caught somewhere between Cuvier???s catastrophism and Lyell???s uniformitarianism, with an extra dimension created by Darwin???s own theory of evolution.
Though the history of extinction is interesting, Kolbert puts greater emphasis on the present, on scientists who are out in the field, confronting the causes and effects of extinction day in and day out. There is Edgardo Griffith, a herpetologist who is spearheading an effort to save the Panamanian golden frog from habitat loss from the deadly chytrid fungus. There are the researchers on One Tree Island, way out in the Pacific, who are trying to understand what ocean acidification is doing to the world???s coral reefs. There is Dr. Terri Roth, who is leading an effort to save the critically-endangered Sumatran rhino by pursuing a captive breeding program for the species. And then there is Marlys Houk and her fellow researchers at the San Diego Zoo, where they maintain a ???frozen zoo??? of cell cultures drawn from recently-extinct or almost-extinct species: a last-ditch effort to save what could be???or already is???lost forever.
In every chapter, Kolbert points out that extinction and the things that cause it are natural processes: the world changes, mostly gradually, but sometimes nearly instantaneously (such as when there are massive natural disasters like earthquakes, storms, volcanic eruptions, or asteroid crashes). Species that cannot adapt die off, while those that can live on. However, what Kolbert emphasises, again and again, is that the current extinction event is unnatural???not because the processes are unnatural, but because of the rate at which they???re happening. Extinction naturally happens at a rate of thousands of years???slow enough that it is often measured in geologic time, in the gradual sedimentation and fossilisation (or not) of biological remains. Enormous catastrophes???like the massive Ordovician extinction that killed up to ninety percent of life on Earth, or the giant asteroid crash that wiped out the dinosaurs???can abruptly change life on Earth, but they???re very rare, with gaps of several million years between each catastrophe.
So: what???s changed? In the book???s last chapter Kolbert points out that what???s happening now is something very, very different:
What I???ve been trying to do is trace an extinction event???call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction, or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction???and to place this event in the broader context of life???s history. ??? What this history reveals, in its ups and its downs, is that life is extremely resilient but not infinitely so. There have been very long uneventful stretches and very, very occasionally ???revolutions on the surface of the earth.??????The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but ???one weedy species.??? As Walter Alvarez put it to me, ???We???re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.???
This is why Kolbert???s book isn???t an easy read: the fact that, when all is said and done, it???s humans that are causing the current extinction event, and we???ve been causing it since our species first evolved the ability to create tools and communicate. Humans wiped out the megafauna; humans wiped out the Neanderthals; humans wiped out the dodo and the great auk; and humans are wiping out the Sumatran rhino and the Javanese tiger and many, many other species that have names, and many, many more that don???t. Kolbert ties it all together thusly:
When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda. To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn???t much matter whether people care or don???t care. What matters is that people change the world.
Note how Kolbert states that it???s ???not wrong, exactly??? that people care, that people do whatever they can, however they can, to at least slow down the rate of change currently going on. It???s an idea some people hold: that if humanity can just slow down, or change its course entirely, things can go back to the way they were before this whole mess started. But that ???misses the point???, as Kolbert so bluntly, and eloquently, puts it. Whatever we do, for better or for worse, the change has already happened, and will continue happening because we are who we are: humans, Homo sapiens, specially evolved not just to move with change, but effect it. We cannot turn back the clock and regain what???s been lost; species have already gone extinct, and while we can still rescue (or try to rescue) those that haven???t, the world to which we return them has changed irrevocably. The Edenic idea of humanity ???living in harmony with nature??? never existed in reality, not since the moment one of our earliest ancestors figured out how to use sharpened sticks and group communication to bring down a mammoth.
And even when humans disappear from the Earth, whether because our current course causes our species to go extinct, or because our capacity for innovation allows us to outstrip that extinction, the Earth will not go back to the way it was before our species showed up and started changing things around. Kolbert concludes her book with this sobering message:
Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.
Overall, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is a thought-provoking and intelligent read about what extinction is, and humanity???s role in the current wave of extinctions happening all around the world today. Kolbert combines historical research with investigative journalism and interviews of notable scientists and ecologists to tell the story of extinction: from the major events of the distant past to the ongoing Sixth Extinction caused by humanity. Humanity is a species unlike any other, one that acts as a force of change so great it can change the evolutionary course of all other species on this planet just by existing. In the far distant future, whether our species has gone extinct, or escaped any potential demise through our own ingenuity, we shall have left our mark upon the face of the Earth???and unfortunately, it is not going to be a pretty picture.
Somewhere between a 4 and 5 star review. Very well researched and a fascinating read on an important subject ... in driving other species into extinction with our human behavior, are we driving ourselves into extinction? I think The Sixth Extinction is something that everyone should read.
Clear and well written, this book paints a pretty gloomy picture about the future of the planet. Oh, humans will probably survive, even if we have to build biospheres in which to do it, but most other species will go the way of the dodo and the T-rex. (This makes me want to read more about paleontology and plate tectonics and a number of other subjects that are dealt with briefly here.)
A very well-written introduction to the subject of extinction, how the concept developed and was eventually accepted by scientists. Very good examples of how we are in the midst (geologically speaking) of a sixth great extinction brought on by the spread and movement of humans to every part of the globe (and our penchant for bringing together elements from one specific environment into another) and climate change. The examples are frightening in clearly demonstrating how quickly the extinctions are happening.