The Sixth Extinction: An Unatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert
A dramatic history about what will be our longest lasting legacy. long after every single building has been leveled to the ground. Namely the largest mass extinction event in 65 million years. Pulitzer prize winner of 2015.
“If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in thefulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.” ― Edward O. Wilson
Right after I finished this book the last male of the species northern white rhino died. There are only two females left. About 150 years ago there was at least a million animals roaming the plains of Africa. Now it is just another species we´ve doomed to extinction.
The title of the book refers to the first five major extinctions recorded in the world. The last being the extinction of most of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This book is both a love story to the wonders of the natural world, and it is also a tragedy. Because we are destroying habitats, making species go extinct left, right and center, wreaking havoc with the climate and in general behaves just like the worst invasive species the planet has ever seen. Kolbert takes us through different species around the world and shows us the trouble they, and we, are in.
The author also shows us how the idea of extinction developed at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Just around the time when Darwin was being born. Before that time most people thought that the world was created by God a few thousand years ago. The world was as it had always been. But people started to find fossils. And they didn´t always resemble known creatures. Sometimes they were of completely different build and size. I really liked this chapter because it shows how evidence slowly but surely made people change their mind. The scientific method slowly grew out of discussions and arguments like these. And paved the way for Darwins studies and later theory of evolution. Another interesting thing to note here is that even as the evidence of several mass extinctions was building up, several of the leading scientists of the day kept refusing to follow the evidence. The mass extinctions led up to the formation of the concept of transmutation of species. Which was an early attempt at explaining that species are not fixed but goes through continual change. Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the man behind this idea, but was opposed by anatomist Georges Cuvier and geologist Charles Lyell (Which in turn highly influenced Charles Darwin). Interestingly Cuvier came around to the idea of mass extinction, but refused to accept the idea of what we today call evolution.
“We need not marvel at extinction; if we must marvel, let it be at our own presumption in imagining for a moment that we understand the many complex contingencies on which the existence of each species depends.”
– Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species
Kolbert paints a rather personal picture taking us readers from researcher to researcher around the planet. She goes deep into caves in the US and tells the story of how several species of bats are wiped of the planet, she dives on the Great Barrier Reef together with scientists studying coral bleaching and she visits one of the few remaining individuals of the Sumatran rhino.
A new concept for me was the idea of New Pangea. Pangea was a huge supercontinent that existed from about 330 mia (million years ago) to about 175 mia. The continents cracked up and has been a drift ever since. This creates and closes barriers, which in turn is a crucial part of evolution. All species has a certain amount of variation within their gene pool. These variations will continue to intermix and spread until a barrier is introduced. This could be a mountain range, a strait, a river, a desert, or a large body of water such as an ocean. But now we humans bring species all over the place. We cross all borders and introduce countless species to places they would never have reached by themselves. Some biologists call this New-Pangea. We basically recreate a virtual supercontinent again. This will obviously increase competition between species and will drive hoards of them extinct. This we can already see happening in Australia, islands in all the worlds oceans, and on mainland continents too. Some calculations show that this will reduce the number of species by a great deal. We can expect the number of mammals to be reduced to one third of today, and birds will be reduced by about 50%. To put it blunty… Go for a walk and imagining killing half the birds you see, and two thirds of all mammals.
There is a fair chance we helped both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans go the way of the Dodo, and the rest of the great apes are next in line.
“with the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.”
The term Anthropocene is introduced as a term describing the time period where we humans are affecting the entire planet. Throughout the book the author show us how we humans are making thousands of species, if not more, extinct. And the pace seem to be increasing to such a level that we are well into the sixth mass extinction since life first appeared about 3,8 billion years ago. Not bad for an achievement! Some people like to mark the start of the industrial revolution as the beginning of this mass extinction.
At the end of the last ice age, much of the world was inhabited by huge animals. We´re talking about wooly rhinos, mammoths, aurochs, mastodonts, beavers the size of bears, sabertooth cats and you name it. The disappearance of this megafauna strangley coincides with human migration. Both in America, Australia, pacific islands, Madagaskar, New Zealand etc. The list goes on. There used to be thousands of endemic species on Hawaii, but the majority of them are now either completely gone or close to it. So.. It seems like we´ve basically eaten our way through the world. The last male northern white rhino was simply yet another large animal we´ve done away with.
“Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it´s not clear that he ever really did.”
– Elizabeth Kolbert
This is a beautifully written book which actually put a real downer on my mood. And for several days at that. It makes you think what we are doing to the planet. And unfortunately it does seem to get a lot worse before it possibly can improve. It the book overly pessimistic? Not really. I´d say it is probably quite realistic. It even answers the question whether life of Earth will recover. Which it surely will. It will only take a couple of million years to do it.
And who knows what kind of species that inhabit the planet then. Perhaps some large rodents with opposable thumbs, clothes and an enlarged brain will find some strange bones in the ground.
“Look at this! It seems like this planet was dominated by one large bipedal ape about three million years ago. weird…”
Rating 6/6
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