The Sixth Extinction, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Elizabeth Kolbert

 

The Sixth Extinction, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Elizabeth Kolbert

Review

By Ed Meek

According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab “3 billion breeding birds have been lost during the last fifty years across Canada and North America.”

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose number double every forty years. Either the host dies. Or the virus dies, or both die.” —Gore Vidal

Acknowledgment: we acknowledge that England and much of Europe was once inhabited by the Neanderthals and that Homo Sapiens without provocation invaded those lands and engaged in the genocide of all Neanderthals (some of whom Homo Sapiens had sex with). Homo Sapiens also wiped out the Denisovan people of Asia. We further acknowledge that the Clovis people of North America killed and ate all the large mammals who once roamed North America including the saber-toothed tiger, the mastodon, the woolly mammoth, the giant sloth.

If you missed The Sixth Extinction when it came out ten years ago, now is a good time to read it. According to Elizabeth Kolbert, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. The last mass extinction is the one we are all familiar with. Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs were destroyed when an asteroid struck the earth and made the climate uninhabitable. The impact resulted in volcanos spread ash that blocked the sun and global freezing killed the plants that fed the herbivores and the dinosaurs that ate them. Prior to that, there were four other mass extinctions. Elizabeth Kolbert argues that we are now living in an era called the Anthropocene in which humans are the dominating force on the planet rather than just one of its inhabitants, and that we are rapidly altering and displacing other forms of life. Part of this process is tied to climate change, but not all of it.

Elizabeth Kolbert is an accomplished writer. Her method is similar to Joan Didion’s. She observes and gathers material to build an argument. She traveled around the world to explore areas where scientists are recording what is happening to animals and their ecosystems. She went to the tropics of Peru, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, New Jersey, San Diego, Paris and Scotland. What she finds is that humans and climate change are having a devastating effect on ecosystems, altering the habitats of animals and plant life, replacing forests and deserts with cattle ranches and housing developments. “Habitat and species loss leaves just 3% of the world’s ecosystems intact according to CNN.

Critically endangered animals include species of elephants, rhinos, tigers, gorillas, orangutangs. The “merely” endangered list is much bigger. Orangutangs are closest to humans, but more and more research is confirming that many animals are intelligent including dolphins who communicate with each other, elephants who mourn the dead and adopt strays, crows who make their own tools, and octopuses who escape from aquariums. Other animals may not rival us in intelligence but share emotional connections as dog and cat and horse owners will attest. Cows, sheep, pigs and chickens all have feelings and animal rights activists Nussbaum and Grandin have won rights for animals including more humane deaths. Doris Lessing once said that humans in the future will wonder how we could possibly kill and eat sentient animals.

Recently, geologists met and proclaimed we are not living in the Athropocene epoch yet (eras usually last thousands of years and our environment has only been undergoing radical changes since the Industrial Revolution). But the dominance of humans and the catastrophic results of our burning fossil fuels are getting harder and harder to ignore.

Since The Sixth Extinction came out there has been some progress in recognizing the value of animals and plant life. We’ve seen the revival of eagles, condors, pelicans, bison, etc. due to the work of animal rights groups. California has committed to “rewilding” 30% of lands and coastal waters. We’ve also made inroads to slow climate change. According to the World in Data, 30% of the world’s electricity now comes from green energy. When The Sixth Extinction came out, it was both prescient and groundbreaking. Today, it is still well worth reading.

As Kolbert says: “Right now, in the amazing moment that counts as the present, we are deciding without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open, and which will close.”