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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
by
Elizabeth Kolbert
4.13 · Rating details · 46,816 ratings · 5,086 reviews
Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, The New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. (less)
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Hardcover, 336 pages
Published February 11th 2014 by Henry Holt and Co. (Georg von Holtzbrinck)
Original Title
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
ISBN
0805092994 (ISBN13: 9780805092998)
Edition Language
English
Literary Awards
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (2015), Helen Bernstein Book Award Nominee for Excellence in Journalism (2015), Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology (2014), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (2014), PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Nominee for Shortlist (2015) ...more
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How factual is The Sixth Extinction?
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Deep Gill The initial chapters that establish our current knowledge through past events, and historical works and discoveries are sourced either in footnotes or…more
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Was anyone else amazed that Darwin's theories of evolution as a gradual process have now been clouded by research about when/why/where extinctions occur?
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Ksenia A generation before Darwin's life time, the idea of evolution (generally "change over time") was already accepted among scientists. Darwin (and, at th…more
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Feb 11, 2014Amanda rated it really liked it
Shelves: blog, non-fiction
Seemed a good time to float this bad mama-jama (spoiler alert: we're screwed):
Looking for a good horror novel that will keep you up late at night? One that features the most remorseless, inventive, and successful serial killer to ever stumble into the written word? One whose body count grows exponentially as his appetite becomes more ravenous, never sated? One who is so adept at killing that he does so without even seeming to try? Well, I have just the ticket: The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. This is as frightening as it gets, people, and the villain here is us: me, you, and everyone else inhabiting this little blue marble called Earth.
Throughout history, there have been five mass extinction events: the Cretaceous-Paleogene, the Triassic-Jurassic, the Permian-Triassic, the Late Devonian, and the Ordovician-Silurian. All of these involve a cataclysmic shift in environmental conditions, some the result of an external impact. And now Kolbert reports that there may be a sixth extinction: the Anthropocene, caused by the impact of humanity on the environment. Many may believe that this is a byproduct of the Industrial Age, but Kolbert shows us how humans have always had a knack for wreaking wide scale environmental havoc. Always needing and wanting more from our natural resources, we, like kudzu, multiply rapidly, take over every inch of land available to us, and choke out the life that surrounds us.
Kolbert makes the case for recognizing the Anthropocene as a mass extinction event by exploring its casualties and its future victims. As she relates the extinction of the American mastodon, the great auk, and the Neanderthal, as well as the near extinction of the Panamanian golden frog, Hawaiian crow, Sumatran rhino, and several types of bats, one truth becomes increasingly clear: most of these extinctions began to take place when humans entered the environment.
Despite the disheartening nature of the topic, Kolbert writes with dry wit and gallows humor which (for me) always made an appearance at just the right time before things became too depressing. While there is a lot of science here, Kolbert keeps it accessible for those of us who don't while away our days reading scientific journals (you know, while our basic needs and consumer choices destroy everything around us), and her first person narrative keeps it from veering into textbook territory.
There's a lot here that I enjoyed, but three highlights stand out:
1) Kolbert's early chapters about men like Cuvier, Lyell, and Darwin, who were among the first to speculate on extinction and evolution. From our modern perspective, it's easy to forget that extinction, in particular, is a relatively new idea. There was a time when many scientists believed that nothing could become extinct over the natural progression of time; the discovery of fossils began to shift human understanding of the world and of creation. Reading as these men stumble in their understanding of the world, shifting and revising hypotheses, and ultimately discovering that there was a world that existed before mankind is fascinating.
2) The chapters on the sea and corals (which may eventually become extinct, taking with them several organisms that live symbiotically with corals) is particularly interesting for someone like myself who is happily landlocked. For those who don't live near or have a relationship with our seas and oceans, it's easy to see it as a vast nothingness and forget about the world teeming below our waters. The rate of ocean acidification is frightening.
3) The concept of a new Pangaea is an intriguing one. The ease with which we travel to other states, countries, and continents has, in a sense, reconstituted Pangaea in that we knowingly (and unknowingly) introduce new and often invasive plant and animal species into new environments. In doing so, these new host environments haven't developed nature's evolutionary safeguards to keep the balance between predator and prey, often with disastrous results.
While Kolbert makes all of this lucid and entertaining, as well as terrifying, I must admit to some fatigue when I got to the final chapters. Reading about mass extinction can really take a toll on someone whose worldview can basically be summed up as "people suck." Reading such incontrovertible evidence, and knowing that I myself cannot escape the guilt of this accusation, is, in the words of Kolbert on The Daily Show, "kind of a downer." However, we need more downers. We need to be more educated about what we're doing to our environment. Early man deserves a pass: you come into a place and think, "Damn. Look at all these mastodons. We can feast like kings!" So you settle in, live a life filled with mastodon hunts and mastodon meat, have several children, dress them in mastodon onesies, kill more mastodons, always assuming there will be more. After all, you've found the great all-you-can-eat mastodon buffet! You have no concept of the impact your consumption is having on the environment. You haven't seen Disney's The Lion King and therefore don't know of the majestic power of the circle of life (nor of the comedic gold of pairing a warthog with a meerkat). Such days of ignorance should be behind us. We know better, so we should do better.
Although, many of us are 4% Neanderthal because apparently early homo sapiens just couldn't resist the seductive power of a ridged brow. So maybe we're not so smart after all.
Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder (less)
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Apr 11, 2018Mario the lone bookwolf rated it it was amazing
Shelves: 0-biology, 0-environmentalism, 0-social-criticism
Ecocides could only be justified with the primate madness gene in Prehistoric times, but nowadays it´s inexcusable.
Archaeologists of the future in millions of years would wonder what has happened, how such devastation could be done in such a short time. They compare volcanic eruptions, climate change, meteorites, changes in the earth's magnetic field, solar storms, gamma ray bursts, etc. with the unique event or people find the ruins of a vanished high culture in the course of the colonization of space. And wonder what might have led to their downfall.
In the retrospective, they are most astounded by how they could notice and know everything about such fatal developments and continue whistling cheerfully, saw on the branch they are sitting, poison themselves comprehensively by contaminating the environment, bite the hand that feeds them, and play Russian Roulette with an automatic weapon. To murder the mother, who has lovingly raised them, secretly and viciously for profit or neglect and let her languish in front of them until she dies as a result of negligence.
The extrapolated development illustrates the explosiveness. In 100 or 250 years, humanity will have eradicated almost all species and only a few adaptable wild species and parasites will represent the remaining fauna and flora.
Everyone else will vegetate in zoos if they are lucky or be stuffed out to be gazed at in extensive areas of natural history museums for extinct species. Since the addition out of the education and culture budget for millions of extinct species will be too expensive, one will probably give away the excess exhibits or throw the stuffed last specimens of the species in the trash, burn them, or give them to the stores of the companies who helped to exterminate for decoration purposes in shop windows or for kids to play with while the parents are shopping. It would be a consistent continuation of the treatment of nature by humans to spit on the grave too after the total annihilation.
The homogenization and massive reduction of biodiversity is in two ways more subtle than direct extinction through habitat destruction. By breeding fewer, more productive species, non-lucrative farm animals and the economical completely worthless wild species are driven to the brink of extinction. The spread of invasive species destroys helpless, natural ecosystems and few very aggressive expanding species and the spread breed, genetically enhanced varieties remain. Globally, habitats are becoming more and more similar, the physical equivalent of the, in the cultural and sociological area, much-criticized Americanization.
The lack of empathy is limited to animals and plants. Genocide is, for just about a century, the most outrageous and disturbing thing that people can be confronted with. Before that, humankind was acting consistently, and with equal rights for every group of victims, so far as that he/she eradicated her/his equals too. Now destruction in unprecedented dimensions is accepted as the inevitable collateral damage of human development and the stupid, endless, exponential economic growth of a self destructive system of madness. "It's just ecocide, that's not so bad. They have no soul or something like that, so calm down, tree hugging hippie leftist."
The conviction that everything can be restored with technology is naive and shortsighted. Human-made machines and infrastructures can be built, maintained and modified, removing a mountain is already a more complicated task, but to bring back to life a sea that only consists of death zones or a desert that once was a forest, borders to an impossibility on the momentary state of the art.
In the very long term, the damage to the natural infrastructure needed for biodiversity can be compensated with the corresponding financial, technological, and material resources using robots, gene- and nanotechnology to remove toxicity and build new habitats, etc. But this is like making a lovely house for a dead person with extreme expenses and an interior decorator in the morbid hope that would bring the person back to life. And extinct is even more definitive than dead, it´s not as if there was indirect immortality with grandkids or something, we are talking about truly forever gone.
Furthermore, ecosystems have evolved over millions of years in circumstances that we do not understand and aren´t interested in investing money to learn more about. Even now there are more open than answered questions and factors and often an element was changed with good intention and had fatal effects instead. At the moment it´s impossible to rebuild a complex ecosystem from an empty, human-made pseudo natural space, just the microbiological part with the right soil conditions is far too tricky. A habitat is needed that not only preserves itself but also stands in a complex and balanced interplay with climate, weather, landforms, and adjacent, other ecosystems, and adapts to evolutionary and climate changes.
Fresh, by humans, decontaminated and reforested habitats will be empty because one will not have genetic samples like the ones from mammoths and dinosaurs because nobody takes them, because the animals die out without it even being noticed and because it´s seen as too expensive to freeze probes from the last survivors in zoos before they die in many places, especially if it´s no cuddly panda, but a nasty snake, critter, or ugly fish, yuk. Surely one will be able to create chimeras, cheap wannabe replicas or classic fantasy creatures. Just the biodiversity, the breadth of variation, and the ingenuity of nature in millions of expressions, which has developed in billions of years, will be lost forever.
Homo Sapiens will not be severely affected or interested in the results anyway. People will not die out, no matter how poisoned and hostile the planet will become because the same technology that allows the destruction of nature will save the destroyers and bring them longer and healthier lives. It will merely make more economic sense to turn the planet back into a habitable and not immediately deadly state when leaving the secure zones or underground bunkers.
It will be a pretty empty planet. The limited creative power of humankind will conjure bad copies of the former biodiversity, but nothing will come close to the original range of variation and diversity of natural evolution some of us are still privileged to see when going outside.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrop...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodive...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct... (less)
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Apr 10, 2018Emily (Books with Emily Fox) rated it it was ok · review of another edition
Shelves: audiobooks, 2-star-y-am-i-doing-this-to-myself
This is officially the most boring book I've read this year.
There were some interesting moments but they were too few to compensate.
You'll learn more about random rainforest frogs than you ever wanted...
Also I find that while reading some non fiction you have to like the author to a certain extent and I just couldn't here. One moment during the book she writes about how she tried to visit a certain location and asked the lady working at the gift shop to give her a tour. The employee obviously told her she was busy and I couldn't help but resent the author for being salty about it as she wrote that "as far as she could tell they were the only ones there". Like come on.
Don't recommend. (less)
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Dec 27, 2019BlackOxford rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: american, technology, sociology, epistemology-language, science
Better Dead Than Read
In the Book of Genesis, God creates mankind last, as if anticipating the theory of Darwinian evolution. But the text is somewhat ambivalent about his accomplishment. Whereas all his other creations - time, space, light, plants, sentient creatures - are explicitly deemed ‘good,’ human beings are merely lumped in with everything else as God surveys the world. The biblical author seems to be hedging the blessing (mitzvah: both a command and a favour) of human ‘rule’ over everything. If so, his caution has turned out to be justified. Putting the inmates in charge of the asylum has turned out to be a profound design flaw.
But perhaps not for much longer. The species Homo sapiens seems to have run its course. It has overwhelmed the creative matrix which produced it. And it has done so in an evolutionary blink of an eye. Its facility for communication through complex language, as Emil Cioran has said, has filled creation with a glut of consciousness, an intellectual burden which it cannot sustain. The threat is not mankind’s greed, or hostility, or sexual urges but thought itself. Thought, which is language in action, produces cooperative effort, which produces technology, which removes all impediments to the spread of the species.
Except, of course, one impediment: the success of the species itself. It is a species which consumes everything it encounters. This it calls ‘finding a use for,’ or sometimes ‘making life better.’ This is an expected consequence of language-use. As Yuval Harari observes, it is gossip which propelled the species into poll position in the evolutionary race. Members of the species gin each other up to want more of everything: more children, more food, more air, water, minerals... well just more of everything. Isn’t this what ruling is all about? Making things better? Enhancing existence? Realising one’s full potential, as well as that of the species? Isn’t that the practical definition of salvation? Striving for perfection?
One of Stanislaw Lem’s stories turns the tables on the evolutionary story we tell ourselves about being the most developed species, the top of the food chain, the acme of known existence. For Lem all this striving, this wanting to be better, bigger, stronger, more secure, to be something other than what we already are, is an obvious evolutionary defect, a dead end genetic branch that will wither as creation moves on. And what it will move on to is the inertia of what the species now sees dismissively as ‘dead matter.’ This is, of course, obviously the case. Look in any grave yard for confirmation; or in the fossil record; or for that matter into the maw of the nearest astronomical black hole. Entropy, that is to say, that silent, peaceful equality is the heaven that awaits us, the omega point of Teilhard de Chardin.
Meanwhile we are effectively trapped in this bubble of language. We can’t resist it, or dispose of it, or in any way mitigate its profoundly destructive consequences - for us as well as for the other species with which we live. We are doomed to destroy them, as in a Ted Chiang story, simply by perceiving them. Even by naming them, we endanger their existence because it means we have become aware of them as a potential resource. We are prisoners of ourselves. Stories about future threats to human existence through developments in Artificial Intelligence are actually distractions from current reality. Language already controls us.
In this light, it helps to look at the record. The Ordovician extinction occurred over a period of a million years as global temperatures dropped, and was caused by silicate rocks sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 86% of all species perished. The Devonian extinction, triggered by the development of plant life on land releasing nutrients into the oceans, thus wiping out 75% of marine animals. The Permian extinction was the big one, the proximate cause being methane-producing bacteria. 96% of life on each disappeared. The Triassic extinction has no agreed upon cause; but it wiped out 80% of contemporary species. The Cretaceous extinction, the one with the asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico as its final coup, was relatively mild; only three quarters of known species were eliminated. It too seems like the revenge of dead matter.
Isn’t it interesting that each of these events was precipitated by material, both living and dead, rather far down the purported evolutionary ladder than the most ‘advanced’ organisms then in existence. Evolutionary development carries with it inherent vulnerability to changes in the environment. The less developed, that is the closer to dead matter, the more likely the chances of survival. And dead matter probably only goes extinct in some sort of cosmic singularity like a black hole. Language simultaneously makes us aware and insulates us from this reality. Inside the bubble of language we can rationalise our inevitable fate - science will save us; God has another world waiting for us; the mathematical probabilities for another similar event is low, etc. We know deep down that language is deceiving us but we act like it’s just part of reality.
The implications are obvious. Neither God nor human beings created language, thus contradicting our fundamental language-based conceit. Language evolved from us but is independent of us. And we are addicted to it. We resent the power of language, even as we pretend to use it to further our own. We are at its mercy and we intend, unconsciously but deliberately, to stop its hegemony. Like every other extinction event, this one too is being executed by an ‘inferior’ species upon one which has emanated from it. We are determined to wipe out language, or at least to scramble it so profoundly that its meanings are irrecoverable. The elimination of so many other species along the way is merely collateral damage, unfortunate but necessary. This perhaps is the true significance of the story in Genesis chapter 11 of the Tower of Babel. And it certainly explains Donald Trump’s appeal to the mass of Deplorables.
Kolbert has the trajectory correct but the mechanism wrong. Nothing about the Sixth Extinction is accidental or unwanted. It was inevitable from the moment an idea and a sound or gesture popped into some primitive head and were linked. That was the start of the rot. And there are plenty of folk out there who are willing to go to the wall in order to stop it. Better Dead Than Read is their motto. Heed them; they are serious and dedicated. And they are winning. (less)
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Apr 29, 2014Riku Sayuj rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: ecology, history, science-evolution, pop-eco
Dial M for Murder
This is a dark and deeply depressing book, trying hard to be hopeful — on the lines of Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See.
Kolbert's book reminds us that we could be the last couple of generations to witness true diversity, maybe the last to see such magnificent and delicate creatures as the amphibians.
The story of the Sixth Extinction, at least as Kolbert has chosen to tell it, comes in thirteen chapters. Each tracks a species that’s in some way emblematic — the American mastodon, the great auk, an ammonite that disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous alongside the dinosaurs.
The creatures in the early chapters are already gone, and this part of the book is mostly concerned with the great extinctions of the past and the twisting history of their discovery, starting with the work of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier.
The second part of the book takes place very much in the present—in the increasingly fragmented Amazon rainforest, on a fast-warming slope in the Andes, on the outer reaches of the Great Barrier Reef.
Martyrs to Awareness?
Kolbert’s book also spends much ink tracking the history of humanity’s (well, western at least) awareness of extinction and then the science of studying it. It starts from the biblical conception of all creatures as eternal and changeless to the gradual awareness that some animals might be rare or extinct and eventually to the awareness of Natural selection and the importance of change for life on Earth.
Thomas Kuhn, the twentieth century’s most influential historian of science, has much to say about such paradigmatic revelations: about how people process disruptive information — Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework: hearts, spades, clubs. Signs of mismatch are disregarded for as long as possible—the red spade looks “brown” or “rusty.” At the point the anomaly becomes simply too glaring, a crisis ensues—what the psychologists dubbed the “’My God!’ reaction.”
This pattern was, Kuhn argued in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , so basic that it shaped not only individual perceptions but entire fields of inquiry. Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. “In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,” Kuhn wrote.
But then, finally, someone came along who was willing to call a red spade a red spade. Crisis led to insight, and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, “paradigm shifts” took place.
The history of the science of extinction can be told as a series of paradigm shifts. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the very category of extinction didn’t exist. The more strange bones were unearthed—mammoths, Megatherium, mosasaurs—the harder naturalists had to squint to fit them into a familiar framework. And squint they did. The giant bones belonged to elephants that had been washed north, or hippos that had wandered west, or whales with malevolent grins. When Cuvier arrived in Paris, he saw that the mastodon’s molars could not be fit into the established framework, a “My God” moment that led to him to propose a whole new way of seeing them. Life, Cuvier recognized, had a history. This history was marked by loss and punctuated by events too terrible for human imagining. “Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world” is how Kuhn put it.
Are the early participants of Humanity’s ‘Mega Kill’, the ‘Sixth Extinction’, if you will, martyrs to humanity’s self-awareness as immoral killers -- required to make us finally think through to the consequences of our actions?
Anthropocene & Morality
Humanity might finally be capable of perceiving the change that has been wrought, and moving into the most crucial understanding of all — that our survival depends on preserving Earth as close to how we inherited it as possible!
The emblematic extinctions are valuable because they serve as blazing sign posts. The eco-system might be too slow in its actions to warn us in time, but our aesthetic sensibility might be capable of warning us in advance when we are too far off the tracks. That might in turn finally engage our moral responsibility for creating an Anthropocene in which most of our co-inheritors of the planet cannot survive. ‘Love thy neighbor’? Can we? Or will we continue to shy away from any moral colorings to the argument? Even as we commit to and associate ourselves with blatant Ecocide?
Our biggest threat is ecological, human-induced change and, to be more specific, rate of change:
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. (less)
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Aug 29, 2014David rated it really liked it
Recommended to David by: Preeti
Shelves: archaeology, biology, natural-history, ecology, science, geology
This book is a very engaging examination of extinctions of animal species through the ages. Elizabeth Kolbert adds a wonderfully personal touch to many of the chapters, as she describes her visits to the habitats where various species are dying out. She accompanies scientists and ecologists as they delve into extinctions, past and present. Some biologists are gathering up endangered species, putting them into special reserves and zoo-like habitats where they might be able to survive.
There is no single cause for the various massive extinctions. Some were due to sudden changes in climate, some due to catastrophes like meteors, some due to disease, and some are due to humans. For example, the mastodon's extinction coincides with the spread of humans. The original penguin--the auk--became extinct due to a combination of factors, including volcanoes and human hunters in the nineteenth century. Coral reefs are dying off because of increasing acidification; much of the excessive carbon dioxide produced by humans is absorbed by the ocean, where the ph level is become less base.
Homo sapiens lived at the same time as other hominid species, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. Visually, Neanderthals were not so different from us. If you gave one a shave and a suit, a Neanderthal might look like this:
So, the question comes up why did these other nearly-human species go extinct, while humans survived? The question is especially appropriate, as there is DNA evidence that humans interbred with some of these other species. The answer is very possibly that humans killed them off.
What makes this book so special, is Kolbert's writing style. She makes me feel like I'm "right there" with the biologists and ecologists. She personally visits the habitats, and goes into some depth talking with the specialists. Each chapter becomes an adventure. Sometimes the subject matter becomes depressing, as it is about the dying (or killing) off of species. But the writing is so engaging, that I highly recommend this book!
(less)
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Nov 15, 2016Helen 2.0 rated it it was amazing
Shelves: non-fic, faves, read-16
*hides in apocalypse-safe bunker and cries*
A goosebump-inducing nonfiction read! The Sixth Extinction is told in a part textbook, part narrative style; the author gives readers hard facts mixed into detailed personal accounts of her research trips. In 13 chapters, she tells the stories of several species, some long extinct, some still teetering on the brink of extinction, all with one common enemy - us.
The best part of the book is that Kolbert isn't trying to blame the human race or make her readers feel guilty. She only explains the effect we have on our earth and where this could lead (possibly to world domination by giant tool-making rats.) The message is simply, "Here is the information; you decide what to do with it."
Would recommend highly. (less)
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Product details
Hardcover : 319 pages
ISBN-10 : 0805092994
ISBN-13 : 978-0805092998
Product Dimensions : 16.64 x 2.88 x 24.36 cm
Publisher : Henry Holt & Company (11 February 2014)
Language: : English
Best-sellers rank 72,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
35 in Endangered Species
76 in Futurology
120 in Natural History
Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,133 ratings
Product description
Review
[The Sixth Extinction] is a wonderful book, and it makes very clear that big, abrupt changes can happen; they're not outside the realm of possibility. They have happened before, they can happen again. --President Barack Obama
"Fascinating." --USA Today
"[An] excellent new book...The Sixth Extinction is the kind of book that helps us recognize the actual planet we live upon." --New York Review of Books
"Surprisingly breezy, entirely engrossing, and frequently entertaining... Kolbert is a masterful, thought-provoking reporter." --The Boston Globe
"Thorough and fascinating . . . Kolbert is an economical and deft explainer of the technical, and about as intrepid a reporter as they come . . . Her reporting is meticulous." --Harper's
"Riveting... It is not possible to overstate the importance of Kolbert's book. Her prose is lucid, accessible and even entertaining as she reveals the dark theater playing out on our globe." --San Francisco Chronicle
"A fascinating and frightening excursion... Kolbert presents powerful cases to bring her point home." --The Washington Post
"Your view of the world will be fundamentally changed... Kolbert is an astute observer, excellent explainer and superb synthesizer, and even manages to find humor in her subject matter." --The Seattle Times
"What's exceptional about Kolbert's writing is the combination of scientific rigor and wry humor that keeps you turning the pages." --National Geographic
"Beautifully written. An excellent book." --Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
"[Kolbert] makes a page-turner out of even the most sober and scientifically demanding aspects of extinction. Combining a lucid, steady, understated style with some enviable reporting adventures... she produces a book that is both serious-minded and invites exclamation points into its margins." --New York Magazine
"Powerful . . . Kolbert expertly traces the 'twisting' intellectual history of how we've come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we've come to recognize our role in it. . . An invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances." --Al Gore, The New York Times Book Review
"Arresting . . . Ms. Kolbert shows in these pages that she can write with elegiac poetry about the vanishing creatures of this planet, but the real power of her book resides in the hard science and historical context she delivers here, documenting the mounting losses that human beings are leaving in their wake." --The New York Times
"[Kolbert] grounds her stories in rigorous science and memorable characters past and present, building a case that a mass extinction is underway, whether we want to admit it or not." --Discover Magazine
"Throughout her extensive and passionately collected research, Kolbert offers a highly readable, enlightening report on the global and historical impact of humans... a highly significant eye-opener rich in facts and enjoyment." --Kirkus (starred review)
"The factoids Kolbert tosses off about nature's incredible variety--a frog that carries eggs in its stomach and gives birth through its mouth, a wood stork that cools off by defecating on its own legs--makes it heartbreakingly clear, without any heavy-handed sermonizing from the author, just how much we lose when an animal goes extinct. In the same way, her intrepid reporting from far-off places--Panama, Iceland, Italy, Scotland, Peru, the Amazonian rain forest of Brazil, and the remote one tree Island, off the coast of Australia--gives us a sense of the earth's vastness and beauty." --Bookforum
"Kolbert accomplishes an amazing feat in her latest book, which superbly blends the depressing facts associated with rampant species extinctions and impending ecosystem collapse with stellar writing to produce a text that is accessible, witty, scientifically accurate, and impossible to put down." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Rendered with rare, resolute, and resounding clarity, Kolbert's compelling and enlightening report forthrightly addresses the most significant topic of our lives." --Booklist (starred review)
"Solid [and] engaging." --Library Journal (starred review)
"An epic, riveting story of our species that reads like a scientific thriller--only more terrifying because it is real. Like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction is destined to become one of the most important and defining books of our time." --David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z
"I tore through Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction with a mix of awe and terror. Her long view of extinction excited my joy in life's diversity -- even as she made me aware how many species are currently at risk." --Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter
"With her usual lucid and lovely prose, Elizabeth Kolbert lays out the sad and gripping facts of our moment on earth: that we've become a geological force, driving vast swaths of creation over the brink. A remarkable addition to the literature of our haunted epoch." --Bill McKibben, author Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
"Elizabeth Kolbert's cautionary tale, The Sixth Extinction, offers us a cogent overview of a harrowing biological challenge. The reporting is exceptional, the contextualizing exemplary. Kolbert stands at the forefront of what it means to be a socially responsible American writer today." --Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams
"The sixth mass extinction is the biggest story on Earth, period, and Elizabeth Kolbert tells it with imagination, rigor, deep reporting, and a capacious curiosity about all the wondrous creatures and ecosystems that exist, or have existed, on our planet. The result is an important book full of love and loss." --David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo and Spillover
"Elizabeth Kolbert writes with an aching beauty of the impact of our species on all the other forms of life known in this cold universe. The perspective is at once awe-inspiring, humbling and deeply necessary." --T.C. Boyle, author of San Miguel
About the Author
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
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Jon Morgan
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, insightful, disturbing
Reviewed in Australia on 8 January 2017
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This book suggests that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event, and that it is human caused.
There are really two threads interleaved through this book.
The first is a discussion of the past five mass extinction events: how we learned about them, what we know (or guess) about their cause, and what the results were.
The second is a discussion of (mostly) human caused extinctions in the recent past, and current threats.
How we have subverted the "natural order" to stay alive and to spread round the world, and some of the consequences (mostly unintended) of our resource hunger and need to control and shape the world.
It comments on the curious fact (probably not coincidental) that we only started to learn the full magnitude of past extinction events as we set up a present one. Without global travel we might never have known the full diversity of life and how much geographical isolation was responsible for it. But that same global travel completely undermines that geographical isolation and changes the balance of species. We are picking the winners and losers: sometimes deliberately, but often accidentally.
One of the most important things I took from the book was the reminder that the traits that make an animal successful don't guarantee that that animal will stay successful. There are times when the rules change. Faced with the unexpected, those successful characteristics could even become fatal. This has been shown in past mass extinction events (most famously the dinosaurs), and more recently when humanity came to the party and drove mammoths, mastodons, and our own Australian mega-fauna to extinction. It is shown in the present as more species slide to endangered and then "presumed extinct". And it is true for humanity, as well. We have been spectacularly successful, and now cover the globe and dominate it. But that is no guarantee that we will continue to be successful.
Finally, an interesting reminder: mammals were around when the dinosaurs ruled, but really only got their chance when the dinosaurs were wiped out in the last mass extinction. That has resulted in much of the biodiversity we see around us, including us. If we fall, in a mass extinction event of our own making, what new species will emerge? How will the world look? Among other things, this book suggests that the adaptability and global spread of rats could put them in a good position to diversify, grow in size, and ultimately perhaps develop intelligence and take over.
It is not a history that any of us will see (none of us can really expect to see the extinction of humanity), but it is interesting to think about.
What would highly intelligent giant rats look like?
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Rymkervic
5.0 out of 5 stars For those of you who have little interest in environmental protestors
Reviewed in Australia on 23 March 2016
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I purchased this because l googled top selling books and this was one of them - l was looking of a good story to read. I loved this - it is such a easy read, the author has shared humanity's history with us in such a conversational manner. It has made me think, and it has made me care. I walk past environmental protestors with little interest ... this book will make me put coins in their collections. Well done!
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skeptical observer
5.0 out of 5 stars The evolutionary success of Homo has been at the expense ...
Reviewed in Australia on 23 December 2014
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The evolutionary success of Homo has been at the expense of other species. The capacity to manipulate the environment improved our our survival capacity but accelerated the extinction of other species. Now that the world has exceeded the sustainability limit and there is accumulation of the toxic by products of our existence, the extinction rate has accelerated even further. Kolbert in a very readable way documents vignettes of research that have demonstrated this trend.
The real tragedy is that the social behaviours that have allowed us to succeed are now blocking change that could prevent the environmental collapse that is coming. But this is what evolution is about - if we, as a species cannot change environmental change will reduce our population, perhaps catastrophically.
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Meredith Leamon
5.0 out of 5 stars How mankind ruins everything.
Reviewed in Australia on 26 July 2019
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Very interesting and disturbing tale of mankinds selfish thoughtfulness.
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paul_h007
5.0 out of 5 stars The Sixth Mass Extinction has begun - Cause: The rise of Homo Sapiens Sapiens
Reviewed in Australia on 11 June 2015
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This book is a wake-up call and a must read for everyone who cares about what kind of a world we are leaving for the next generation(s). At them moment we are carbonising our air, acidifying our oceans and depleting the world's fauna and flora diversity. As a species we are committing slow suicide and selfishly taking millions of species with us to the grave. If you need the impetus to act - read this book!
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LeReviewer
2.0 out of 5 stars Slow Delivery and sticky covers
Reviewed in Australia on 2 May 2020
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Book came with a bunch of other's sticky and finger marks everywhere
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely brilliant book
Reviewed in Australia on 5 February 2019
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Everyone should read this. I was completely engaged from start to finish. Challenging and confronting topics that we must address and confront together
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jatheist
5.0 out of 5 stars What climate change is capable of
Reviewed in Australia on 2 February 2020
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This boo showed me just how grim our future is and just what What climate change is capable of
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Womble
4.0 out of 5 stars and an explanation of why our assumptions of the resilience of the earth's systems may be horribly wrong. The only odd note in the book ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 December 2017
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A fascinating look at the evidence for the world currently being at the start of a sixth extinction event, and how extinctions are driven by human activity. There's a background to the theories of evolution, and an explanation of why our assumptions of the resilience of the earth's systems may be horribly wrong. The only odd note in the book is the author's writing style, where scientific explanations and historical background are shot through with very specific, apparently-irrelevant personal details: one person she meets has different-coloured eyes; kangaroo meat forms part of the meal taken with a bunch of Israeli scientists; she has a dream about a frog smoking a cigarette. But perhaps this is the extreme of a writing style that, while humanising the experts, in the process imparts a great deal of information, not just about them but specifically about their work. The scope of this book is remarkably broad, and the author does a very good job of explaining both how extinctions are taking place, and how they are being researched. I bought this expecting a far more straightforward "science" book, but it was a surprisingly compelling read.
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Mark Hayward
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reaading
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 August 2017
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Purchased through a third party, maybe because the title is out of print. I can't understand why it would be as it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the environment, wildlife, Earth science etc. It is well informed and written stylishly. Although a detailed discussion of extinction and fully referenced, it engages the reader throughout and I found it difficult to put aside.
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Mr. Alex Buxton
5.0 out of 5 stars A wake up call
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 April 2015
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I bought this book as it was on Bill Gates' summer reading list. What I read was shocking.
I have been to the Great Barrier Reef but found out that, since I was there, about half of it has gone due to ocean acidification as a result of an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
We learn that humans have always been destructive, making over 150 mega fauna mammals (mammoths etc.) extinct due to overhunting over the millennia. As our population grows and we travel around more, we have brought extinctions up to around 1,000 times the background rate. At this rate, the world will be very different in 35 years and unrecognizable by the end of the century.
We are doing the same amount of damage as an asteroid and the only way to reverse it, or even slow this phenomenon is through education. This is what this book provides and I sincerely believe it should be compulsory reading in schools.
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Mr C I Mackenzie
5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone should read this book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 December 2019
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This is a beautifully written book about the way that humans in the last two hundred years or so have been ruining the world. It was interesting to read this book after reading "Factfulness" which is full of hope that the problems of the world can be solved. I fear that the surging populations of Asia, Africa and South America and their demands for a better life will make it impossible to reverse the tide of climate change and rising acidity in the oceans which will dominate life over the coming decades.
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bog
5.0 out of 5 stars Great lecture
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 February 2019
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It took me some time to read it, but I can say it was one of the best lectures I've had. I'm not a huge fan of books - I don't read often, and somehow this book kept me interested and the content was awakening.
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