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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Ebook The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
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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“Riveting . . . It is not possible to overstate the importance of Kolbert's book.†―San Francisco Chronicle“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“Surprisingly breezy, entirely engrossing, and frequently entertaining . . . Kolbert is a masterful, thought-provoking reporter.†―The Boston Globe“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“Powerful . . . An invaluable contribution to our understanding.†―Al Gore, The New York Times Book Review“Natural scientists posit that there have been five extinction events in the Earth's history (think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs), and Kolbert makes a compelling case that human activity is leading to the sixth.†―Bill Gates“[Kolbert] makes a page-turner out of even the most sober and scientifically demanding aspects of extinction.†―New York Magazine“Ms. Kolbert's lively account is thought-provoking.†―The Wall Street Journal“[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)“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
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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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Product details
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (January 6, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1250062187
ISBN-13: 978-1250062185
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.5 out of 5 stars
1,647 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I love this book. Its very interesting and well written. It wasn't too difficult of a read. I had to google a couple of things.
Yes, human-caused extinction is upon us in full force. As science journalist extraordinaire Elizabeth Kolbert tells it, we humans have been killing whatever we could whenever we could since the beginning of our tenure here on earth. First the mastodons, the giant sloths, the great flightless birds, the woolly rhino, then the whales, the gorillas, the tigers, the buffalo, etc. The first cause was ignorance. Primitive humans just didn’t know that they were destroying the source of their subsistence until they had to move on. Today we know the truth.And that truth is there is nowhere to move on to. This book is a detailed and fascinating delineation of just what we are doing to the planet and how. From the fishes in the sea to the polar bears on the ice: all fall down. Why? Willful ignorance, stupidity, and the devil take tomorrow.(But it might be said, so what if we kill off all sorts of creatures great and small? We don’t need them. We have our pigs and cows and chickens. We grow corn and soy. Yes, the little foxes are cute and the lions magnificent. But we have zoos and preserves. After you’ve seen a few elephants you don’t need to see vast herds of them.)This is the view of many people in high places in government and at the helms of giant corporations whose main concern is staying in power and improving the bottom line. But here’s the rub: with the extraordinary rate of the current extinction what we might be left with is nearly sterile oceans, stunted scrub forests, destroyed ecologies and starving humans at one another’s throats. Combine that with global warming and desperate leaders flinging nuclear bombs around, and yes, Chicken Little, the sky is falling.Okay, rant over with. Let me say a few things about this splendid book that is so readable and so full of information, humor and the kind of passion that lights up the pages. Kolbert combines research, interviews and fieldwork into a very readable, vivid and informative narrative that is so good that…well, she won the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 2015.Some notes and quotes:“The reason this book is being written by a hairy biped, rather than a scaly one, has more to do with dinosaurian misfortune than with any particular mammalian virtue.†(p. 91)“Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.†(p. 162)Kolbert notes that during the Pleistocene (2.5 million years ago to about 11,700 years ago) “…temperatures were significantly lower than they are now…,†mainly because the glacial periods tended to be longer than the interglacial periods. What this means is that most life forms are probably not going to be able to deal with the heat “...since temperatures never got much warmer than they are right now.†In other words, we are experiencing an accelerated catastrophe. (p.171)Kolbert describes the red-legged honeycreeper as “the most beautiful bird I have ever seen.†(p. 178) So naturally I had to Google it. It is indeed beautiful. The reader might want to take a look. It’s very blue with some neat black trim and those incongruous red legs!Kolbert observes that we are creating a New Pangaea because our global transport systems are sending plants and animals all around the globe. Instead of the continents moving closer together the plants and animals are moving closer together as on a single continent. (p. 208)A joke: after the journal “Nature†published proof of the existence of the Denisovan hominids because of a DNA-rich finger found in southern Siberia, there came a newspaper headline: “Giving Accepted Prehistoric History the Finger.†(p. 253)As to the “controversy†over what killed off the megafauna in e.g., North and South America, in Siberia, in Australia, Kolbert minces no words and comes down strong on the likely suspect—us. And as for the Neanderthal, ditto. See chapters XI and XII.She writes: “Before humans finally did in the Neanderthals, they had sex with them.†She notes that “most people today are slightly—up to four percent—Neanderthal.†(p. 238) Personally, according to “23 and Me,†I am 3.8% Neanderthal. --Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselvesâ€
In the excellent THE SIXTH EXTINCTION (TSE), Elizabeth Kolbert briefly discusses the so-called big-five mass extinctions, which had cataclysmic effects on earth’s biodiversity. These mass extinctions and their probable causes are the: End-Ordovician, glaciation; Late Devonian, volcanism; End-Permian, the warming of the oceans, the rampant proliferation of a bacteria that produced hydrogen sulfide, and a consequent greenhouse effect; Late Triassic, ocean acidification; and End-Cretaceous, a gigantic meteor collides with the earth.So, what is the sixth extinction and why is it different? The causes of the five previous mass extinctions were natural catastrophes. The sixth, in contrast, is man-made. And it is occurring now.As she discusses this sixth extinction, Kolbert, follows three narrative strategies. Mostly, she focuses each chapter in TSE on a particular animal that is extinct, on the verge of extinction, or that is becoming increasingly rare. Then, she examines the habitats and vulnerabilities of these animals and the human-induced causes of their decline or demise. These animals and the scourges to their existence include: the golden frog, a fungus, harmless to African frogs, that humans spread through the exigencies of pregnancy tests and fine-dining; great Auks, overhunting; corals, acidification of the oceans; North American brown bats, another fungus, this time originating with immune European bats; white-plumed antbirds, habitat fragmentation and a consequent reduction in army ant colonies, which is their primary food; and megafauna, such as the mastodon and Sumatran rhino, which are doomed by their long gestation periods and human predation.Meanwhile, her second strategy is to focus on environments. In this case, her subjects are: oceans, which are gradually becoming more acidic as they absorb the carbon humans generate through burning fossil fuels; and rain forests, which are losing species because of global warming.Finally, Kolbert examines the attempt by scientists to preserve species that are on the verge of extinction. Here, she visits a frozen zoo, where cells of threatened species are preserved in cryogenic fluid and thereby kept viable. And she discusses actual zoos that have breeding programs for rare animals.The blurbs on my edition of TSE observe that this book is “arresting, riveting, and powerfulâ€. And they describe Kolbert’s writing as “masterful, surprisingly breezy, and engrossing.†All this is true and she gets the final word. “Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals… But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion… If you know how to look, you can probably find signs of the current extinction event in your own backyard.â€Highly recommended
I labored through the first 100 pages talking about how people started finding fossils and tried to figure out what they were based on their knowledge at the time, which wasn't much. Various theories emerged including Darwinism. It mentions pervious extinction events. I expected the book to be about our current situation; the disappearance of bees, birds and butterflies. The danger of exposures like electromagnetic frequency radiation from wifi, cell towers, high voltage power lines and 5G. The harm done by glyphosate, manmade food, and all the other things that are creating disease and death. I skipped to the last few pages (265-269) which briefly finally mentioned how "We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings," but it doesn't get into much detail. Reading this book was a waste of my time. I don't plan to finish it.
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