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title: "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History"
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# The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes Over the last half a 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 The Sixth Extinction , two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

Review: A Sobering Yet Essential Read - "When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent of change 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, but it misses the point. It doesn't matter much whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world." Thus is the premise and sad reality stated in Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Sixth Extinction." Part travel log, part history of the world and part zoological introduction to some wondrous creatures, yet at all times a sobering look at what "one weedy species" (mankind) has done to our fair planet, Kolbert's book is a must read for anyone interested in knowing what the not too distant future holds. I saw Kolbert interviewed on Jon Stewart about a month ago and became intrigued by this book. After a couple of entertaining novels featuring shady characters and twisting plot lines I was ready for a different kind of reading experience. "The Sixth Extinction" was not as laborious a read as I feared. Kolbert keeps the writing brisk and the science light. And she takes us around the world as she visits places as diverse as the Coral Reefs off Australia, bat caves in New England and an island off the coast of Italy. Along the way we meet some splendid creatures, many of whom are already extinct or well on their way. Plus we learn the history of the first five mass extinctions, how they happened and just as importantly how scientists have been able to figure out how something that happened hundreds of millions of years ago took place. The part of the book that I found most surprising is that it's not just climate change and extreme hunting that has killed off so many species. It is the movement of man around the world (and the introduction of new species into a region where they never existed that this movement allows) that has threatened so many creatures. The book opens with the case of frogs in a South America who are dying off at an alarming rate due to a fungi that was introduced into the forests of Panama just a few years ago. The fungi is from Asia where the amphibians have evolved through the millennia to be immune from it. But in South America, the frogs never needed whatever mutation Asian frogs have and thus many species there (which are hundreds of millions of years old) have become extinct. Similar situations are happening to the bat population in the US and many other creatures. And that, as Kolbert points out is why all the "Save the Whales" movements in the world will not completely stop this sixth extinction. Kolbert also gracefully spells out the irony of man, how so many of our actions lead to these latest extinctions - yet how so many work so diligently to avoid them. (The scientist giving a handjob to a crow to extract semen being perhaps the clearest example of this "diligent" work). Ultimately the book cannot answer the question that surely every reader has: will we (mankind) alter the world to such a degree that even we become extinct? Will we create an environment that no longer supports us? Or will we, as history's greatest innovators, continue to find a way to save ourselves (even if as the book says that means establishing communities in space should earth someday become unlivable). Surely this situation will not happen in our lifetime, and probably not in our children's lifetimes or their children's lifetimes. Thousands of years are immense when measured by man. In earth time, they are but a blink of an eye. If you want an interesting book, a readable story with some amazing insights, I'd highly recommend "The Sixth Extinction." Meanwhile I'm going to bury my head back in the sand and return to novels with shady characters. Even when the endings are depressing they aren't this depressing.
Review: On the varieties of killing - Elizabeth Kolbert combines the sharp observational powers of a field biologist with the literary skill of a seasoned and thoughtful writer. In her previous book “Notes from a Field Catastrophe”, she travelled to far-flung parts of the globe to dig up stories on the deleterious effects of climate change. In her latest book she combines similar reporting from around the world with chapters from the history of science to bring us a noteworthy account of one of the most spectacular and important stories of biology and history – mass extinctions. There have been five documented big extinctions in history, with the most popular one being the death of the dinosaurs that was memorably caused by a meteorite. However we are probably now in the throes of a sixth extinction, and as Kolbert documents, at least parts of it are being caused by human beings’ destructive tendencies and our unquenchable thirst for natural resources. The concern for extinctions is not merely a discussion for the drawing rooms of bleeding-heart environmentalists; as a chemist, I am well-aware that about half of all drugs on the market are derived from natural sources. Every time we kill off another marine sponge or frog, we may be depriving ourselves of the next breakthrough drug against cancer or AIDS. Kolbert starts by telling us how we came to know about extinctions in the eighteenth century. It took a long time for scientists and the public to actually believe in such devastating events, simply because of their magnitude. It was Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist, who painstakingly collected fossils and bones of giant and exotic creatures from around the world and turned conjecture into reality. By cataloging their sheer abundance Cuvier convinced everyone of the reality of worlds lost in time that were completely different from our own. Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell who came after Cuvier also debated extinctions; but since Darwin’s theory required very gradual changes over time, he could not quite fathom how entire species of animals could disappear in an evolutionary eyeblink. Kolbert also tells the fascinating story of the Alvarez father-son duo who discovered the potential reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs by measuring the startlingly high concentration of iridium – an element found in abundance only in meteorites – in certain clay layers. The real meat of the book is Kolbert’s travels to different parts of the world and her reporting of what seem like extinctions of specific species. In one chapter she explores the impact of climate change on ocean acidification – one of the more neglected aspects of the global warming debate – on coral reefs. Ocean acidification is a consequence of simple chemistry; when carbon dioxide dissolves in water it lowers its pH, and the resulting acidic solution starts to eat away at corals which are composed of calcium carbonate. Last year I was in Hawaii and one of the most revealing experiences I had there was snorkeling around the island where Captain Cook was killed. Peering through the goggles, I could see not only a spectacular ecosystem of fishes, tube worms, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and other denizens of the deep but also how critically dependent all of them were on the coral reefs. The worms were permanently latched on to the reefs and the fishes were constantly kissing the surface with puckered lips, consuming the plant and microbial material deposited in the oxygen-rich pores of the intricate structures. Clearly the reefs support many living worlds, and as Kolbert finds out first-hand, these worlds are being depleted by ocean acidification. Even those who may be skeptical of the warming effects of CO2 emissions should take this impact very seriously. And as I mentioned before, nor is this concern purely moral; marine sponges have been the source of some of the most promising drugs against cancer and will continue to be so. Kolbert also explores the disappearance of other species spanning the spectrum of species diversity, from birds to frogs to mammals. In documenting this she travels to caves in Italy, rain forests in Central Africa and even a location in – of all places – suburban New Jersey, where traces of the K/T boundary event that killed off the dinosaurs can be found. Fungal infections seem to be a leading and particularly concerning cause of several current extinctions, most notably those of New England bats and Panamian golden frogs. Amphibians are more affected than almost any other species partly because of their sensitive skin. In a vivid chapter Kolbert locates an artificial ecosystem set up by scientists in Panama where the last few hundred golden frogs survive. By now the fungus is so rampant in their natural environment that releasing them outside would be fatal. These brightly colored creatures, nurtured by their human caretakers, are the last surviving members of their tribe and on the brink of disappearing from the face of the planet. A similar poignant chapter introduced us to a male Hawaiian crow, who just like the golden frogs, is part of a species that exists only in a zoo. All attempts by the zoo personnel to induce this crow to mate have been unsuccessful so far and one does not know how much longer his thread will stay unbroken. Kolbert wisely stays away from attributing many of these species disappearances to human activity. But in many cases there is strong evidence that does link human activity to rapid species depletion. In this context deforestation may be an even bigger threat than climate change; indeed, a universal mathematical scaling law linking number of species to area seems to encapsulate the impact of deforestation. So is the introduction of non-endemic species by air and sea travel which when introduced into a new ecosystem find themselves free of predators and start decimating the local population; the brown tree snake which was introduced in Guam and which literally ate its way through several bird and amphibian populations is a noteworthy case. The voracious zebra mussel which has wreaked havoc in waterways in the US is another example. The impact of humans is undeniable, and in measuring this impact we see the sometimes cruel and indifferent streaks of inhumanity which mark us as one of the few species on the planet which takes pleasure in killing others. Particularly barbaric was the butchering of the flightless Great Auk to extinction in Northern Europe in the nineteenth century; Kolbert talks about how hungry sailors devoured the auks not only by dunking them in boiling water but also by using them as fuel for the fire underneath. One of the simple reasons why humans can quickly render larger animals extinct is because of their slow breeding rate. This explains the disappearance of the megafauna in New Zealand for instance, where the hunting of the large, flightless moa provides a stark test case. In ecosystems untouched by humans, whatever disadvantages are suffered by creatures because of their slow reproductive rate can be compensated for by their larger size and strength. When intelligent human beings wielding weapons arrive on the scene, the equation radically changes. This is precisely why larger animals like lions, tigers and apes are the most threatened species today. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of humans’ devastating impact on other species emerges when we look not to distant species but to a very close one – the Neanderthal. One of the most significant discoveries in science during the last few years has been the realization that after encountering Neanderthals in Europe and Western Asia about forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens first interbred with them and then somehow killed them off. There is something deeply creepy about this fact. As revealed by groundbreaking recent work on sequencing Neanderthal DNA, virtually all of us have between 1 and 4 percent of this DNA in our own genome. We may even have inherited a few genes for disease from our close cousins. This work has been made possible largely by the efforts of Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo who Kolbert interviews, and his recent book provides a fascinating look at the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. What caused Neanderthals to go extinct while we lived? War certainly could be one reason; after all population sizes as well as mortality rates then were quite low. Perhaps Neanderthal populations were already on the brink of extinction when humans met them so purely on a statistical basis they may have been unlikely to survive for too long. My favorite explanation is disease. It is very much possible that interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals made the latter more susceptible to certain diseases passed on from humans. Neanderthals could also have been more prone to certain diseases to begin with. There is also some evidence that humans were more creative and intelligent than Neanderthals, so we may have been better equipped to deal with diseases than our “less evolved” cousins. Whatever the reason, the co-existence of humans and Neanderthals followed by their disappearance is another data point on the table of extinctions in which humans might have played a dominant role. The whole saga of extinctions also conceals a profound irony. In death there is life. The same great five extinctions that killed off more than 90% of species on the planet also opened up ecological niches and resources to previously suppressed creatures. Dinosaurs made room for mammals and amphibians and led to the evolution of human beings. It is also almost poetically ironic that a few members of the same human species that killed off so many of its evolutionarily distant and close cousins are also making heroic efforts to preserve the remaining members of certain species in zoos and other ecological enclaves. We don’t know how this story of extinctions is going to end. Perhaps it will end with humans killing most other species on the planet by breaking the chain of interdependencies between various animals and plants. If we do this we may be killing ourselves by destroying the intricate web of natural resources that allows us to farm, feed and clothe the world. Or perhaps we may kill ourselves more directly through climate change, overpopulation or nuclear war. In any case, the history of extinctions tells us that the planet will survive. Nature always finds a way. *First published on the Scientific American Blog Network.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #248,262 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #7 in Natural History (Books) #15 in Ecology (Books) #34 in Environmental Science (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 10,526 Reviews |

## Images

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Sobering Yet Essential Read
*by M***R on March 12, 2014*

"When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent of change 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, but it misses the point. It doesn't matter much whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world." Thus is the premise and sad reality stated in Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Sixth Extinction." Part travel log, part history of the world and part zoological introduction to some wondrous creatures, yet at all times a sobering look at what "one weedy species" (mankind) has done to our fair planet, Kolbert's book is a must read for anyone interested in knowing what the not too distant future holds. I saw Kolbert interviewed on Jon Stewart about a month ago and became intrigued by this book. After a couple of entertaining novels featuring shady characters and twisting plot lines I was ready for a different kind of reading experience. "The Sixth Extinction" was not as laborious a read as I feared. Kolbert keeps the writing brisk and the science light. And she takes us around the world as she visits places as diverse as the Coral Reefs off Australia, bat caves in New England and an island off the coast of Italy. Along the way we meet some splendid creatures, many of whom are already extinct or well on their way. Plus we learn the history of the first five mass extinctions, how they happened and just as importantly how scientists have been able to figure out how something that happened hundreds of millions of years ago took place. The part of the book that I found most surprising is that it's not just climate change and extreme hunting that has killed off so many species. It is the movement of man around the world (and the introduction of new species into a region where they never existed that this movement allows) that has threatened so many creatures. The book opens with the case of frogs in a South America who are dying off at an alarming rate due to a fungi that was introduced into the forests of Panama just a few years ago. The fungi is from Asia where the amphibians have evolved through the millennia to be immune from it. But in South America, the frogs never needed whatever mutation Asian frogs have and thus many species there (which are hundreds of millions of years old) have become extinct. Similar situations are happening to the bat population in the US and many other creatures. And that, as Kolbert points out is why all the "Save the Whales" movements in the world will not completely stop this sixth extinction. Kolbert also gracefully spells out the irony of man, how so many of our actions lead to these latest extinctions - yet how so many work so diligently to avoid them. (The scientist giving a handjob to a crow to extract semen being perhaps the clearest example of this "diligent" work). Ultimately the book cannot answer the question that surely every reader has: will we (mankind) alter the world to such a degree that even we become extinct? Will we create an environment that no longer supports us? Or will we, as history's greatest innovators, continue to find a way to save ourselves (even if as the book says that means establishing communities in space should earth someday become unlivable). Surely this situation will not happen in our lifetime, and probably not in our children's lifetimes or their children's lifetimes. Thousands of years are immense when measured by man. In earth time, they are but a blink of an eye. If you want an interesting book, a readable story with some amazing insights, I'd highly recommend "The Sixth Extinction." Meanwhile I'm going to bury my head back in the sand and return to novels with shady characters. Even when the endings are depressing they aren't this depressing.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ On the varieties of killing
*by A***R on February 26, 2014*

Elizabeth Kolbert combines the sharp observational powers of a field biologist with the literary skill of a seasoned and thoughtful writer. In her previous book “Notes from a Field Catastrophe”, she travelled to far-flung parts of the globe to dig up stories on the deleterious effects of climate change. In her latest book she combines similar reporting from around the world with chapters from the history of science to bring us a noteworthy account of one of the most spectacular and important stories of biology and history – mass extinctions. There have been five documented big extinctions in history, with the most popular one being the death of the dinosaurs that was memorably caused by a meteorite. However we are probably now in the throes of a sixth extinction, and as Kolbert documents, at least parts of it are being caused by human beings’ destructive tendencies and our unquenchable thirst for natural resources. The concern for extinctions is not merely a discussion for the drawing rooms of bleeding-heart environmentalists; as a chemist, I am well-aware that about half of all drugs on the market are derived from natural sources. Every time we kill off another marine sponge or frog, we may be depriving ourselves of the next breakthrough drug against cancer or AIDS. Kolbert starts by telling us how we came to know about extinctions in the eighteenth century. It took a long time for scientists and the public to actually believe in such devastating events, simply because of their magnitude. It was Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist, who painstakingly collected fossils and bones of giant and exotic creatures from around the world and turned conjecture into reality. By cataloging their sheer abundance Cuvier convinced everyone of the reality of worlds lost in time that were completely different from our own. Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell who came after Cuvier also debated extinctions; but since Darwin’s theory required very gradual changes over time, he could not quite fathom how entire species of animals could disappear in an evolutionary eyeblink. Kolbert also tells the fascinating story of the Alvarez father-son duo who discovered the potential reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs by measuring the startlingly high concentration of iridium – an element found in abundance only in meteorites – in certain clay layers. The real meat of the book is Kolbert’s travels to different parts of the world and her reporting of what seem like extinctions of specific species. In one chapter she explores the impact of climate change on ocean acidification – one of the more neglected aspects of the global warming debate – on coral reefs. Ocean acidification is a consequence of simple chemistry; when carbon dioxide dissolves in water it lowers its pH, and the resulting acidic solution starts to eat away at corals which are composed of calcium carbonate. Last year I was in Hawaii and one of the most revealing experiences I had there was snorkeling around the island where Captain Cook was killed. Peering through the goggles, I could see not only a spectacular ecosystem of fishes, tube worms, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and other denizens of the deep but also how critically dependent all of them were on the coral reefs. The worms were permanently latched on to the reefs and the fishes were constantly kissing the surface with puckered lips, consuming the plant and microbial material deposited in the oxygen-rich pores of the intricate structures. Clearly the reefs support many living worlds, and as Kolbert finds out first-hand, these worlds are being depleted by ocean acidification. Even those who may be skeptical of the warming effects of CO2 emissions should take this impact very seriously. And as I mentioned before, nor is this concern purely moral; marine sponges have been the source of some of the most promising drugs against cancer and will continue to be so. Kolbert also explores the disappearance of other species spanning the spectrum of species diversity, from birds to frogs to mammals. In documenting this she travels to caves in Italy, rain forests in Central Africa and even a location in – of all places – suburban New Jersey, where traces of the K/T boundary event that killed off the dinosaurs can be found. Fungal infections seem to be a leading and particularly concerning cause of several current extinctions, most notably those of New England bats and Panamian golden frogs. Amphibians are more affected than almost any other species partly because of their sensitive skin. In a vivid chapter Kolbert locates an artificial ecosystem set up by scientists in Panama where the last few hundred golden frogs survive. By now the fungus is so rampant in their natural environment that releasing them outside would be fatal. These brightly colored creatures, nurtured by their human caretakers, are the last surviving members of their tribe and on the brink of disappearing from the face of the planet. A similar poignant chapter introduced us to a male Hawaiian crow, who just like the golden frogs, is part of a species that exists only in a zoo. All attempts by the zoo personnel to induce this crow to mate have been unsuccessful so far and one does not know how much longer his thread will stay unbroken. Kolbert wisely stays away from attributing many of these species disappearances to human activity. But in many cases there is strong evidence that does link human activity to rapid species depletion. In this context deforestation may be an even bigger threat than climate change; indeed, a universal mathematical scaling law linking number of species to area seems to encapsulate the impact of deforestation. So is the introduction of non-endemic species by air and sea travel which when introduced into a new ecosystem find themselves free of predators and start decimating the local population; the brown tree snake which was introduced in Guam and which literally ate its way through several bird and amphibian populations is a noteworthy case. The voracious zebra mussel which has wreaked havoc in waterways in the US is another example. The impact of humans is undeniable, and in measuring this impact we see the sometimes cruel and indifferent streaks of inhumanity which mark us as one of the few species on the planet which takes pleasure in killing others. Particularly barbaric was the butchering of the flightless Great Auk to extinction in Northern Europe in the nineteenth century; Kolbert talks about how hungry sailors devoured the auks not only by dunking them in boiling water but also by using them as fuel for the fire underneath. One of the simple reasons why humans can quickly render larger animals extinct is because of their slow breeding rate. This explains the disappearance of the megafauna in New Zealand for instance, where the hunting of the large, flightless moa provides a stark test case. In ecosystems untouched by humans, whatever disadvantages are suffered by creatures because of their slow reproductive rate can be compensated for by their larger size and strength. When intelligent human beings wielding weapons arrive on the scene, the equation radically changes. This is precisely why larger animals like lions, tigers and apes are the most threatened species today. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of humans’ devastating impact on other species emerges when we look not to distant species but to a very close one – the Neanderthal. One of the most significant discoveries in science during the last few years has been the realization that after encountering Neanderthals in Europe and Western Asia about forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens first interbred with them and then somehow killed them off. There is something deeply creepy about this fact. As revealed by groundbreaking recent work on sequencing Neanderthal DNA, virtually all of us have between 1 and 4 percent of this DNA in our own genome. We may even have inherited a few genes for disease from our close cousins. This work has been made possible largely by the efforts of Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo who Kolbert interviews, and his recent book provides a fascinating look at the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. What caused Neanderthals to go extinct while we lived? War certainly could be one reason; after all population sizes as well as mortality rates then were quite low. Perhaps Neanderthal populations were already on the brink of extinction when humans met them so purely on a statistical basis they may have been unlikely to survive for too long. My favorite explanation is disease. It is very much possible that interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals made the latter more susceptible to certain diseases passed on from humans. Neanderthals could also have been more prone to certain diseases to begin with. There is also some evidence that humans were more creative and intelligent than Neanderthals, so we may have been better equipped to deal with diseases than our “less evolved” cousins. Whatever the reason, the co-existence of humans and Neanderthals followed by their disappearance is another data point on the table of extinctions in which humans might have played a dominant role. The whole saga of extinctions also conceals a profound irony. In death there is life. The same great five extinctions that killed off more than 90% of species on the planet also opened up ecological niches and resources to previously suppressed creatures. Dinosaurs made room for mammals and amphibians and led to the evolution of human beings. It is also almost poetically ironic that a few members of the same human species that killed off so many of its evolutionarily distant and close cousins are also making heroic efforts to preserve the remaining members of certain species in zoos and other ecological enclaves. We don’t know how this story of extinctions is going to end. Perhaps it will end with humans killing most other species on the planet by breaking the chain of interdependencies between various animals and plants. If we do this we may be killing ourselves by destroying the intricate web of natural resources that allows us to farm, feed and clothe the world. Or perhaps we may kill ourselves more directly through climate change, overpopulation or nuclear war. In any case, the history of extinctions tells us that the planet will survive. Nature always finds a way. *First published on the Scientific American Blog Network.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The planet will recover in some measure; we may not
*by D***L on September 5, 2017*

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 Ourselves”

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