For decades, people have been grappling with how our perceived progress as a species is leading to the annihilation of our planet, and nobody writes about it better than Elizabeth Kolbert.
Elizabeth Kolbert is a Pulitzer winning journalist and science-writer who has published a trilogy of works concerned with climate change. While the books are not a trilogy in the traditional sense, each explores an aspect of the impact humanity has on the environment. Her first book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, covered by the first article in the series we're doing about her books, examines the consequences of climate change on global environments as well as the reluctance of people in power to exert their influence to mitigate climate disaster. The second book in the trilogy, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is an excellent exploration of the Anthropocene, the current period of the Earth’s history shaped by human impact, and how it affects all the residents of our planet. The book details the history of our understanding of extinction, discovery of Earth’s five mass extinction events, as well as our history, and present, of causing the sixth mass extinction. Each chapter is a vignette detailing animals that are endangered or extinct because of human activity. The chapters act as a throughline for the book's main message: we are in the era of humanity and the next mass extinction is being brought about by human domination on the planet.
In the prologue of the book, Kolbert provides a tale of humanity. A species that names species; a species that creates and destroys. She tells of their rise to dominate every corner of the globe, altering the environment everywhere they went. Early humanity's resourcefulness allowed them to be a global species spanning from Europe to Australia over deserts, tundras, and miles of empty ocean. She talks about how homo sapiens are the last hominid, human species, emphasizing that they are the last species with the capabilities to shape the global environment in such a drastic way. What is the limit, Kolbert implores, to humanity’s capabilities for great harm and for great bravery? Homo sapiens are a species of multiplicity: just as they are able to destroy environments and wipe out species for their own gain, they are filled with curiosity about the world and the bravery to explore it and all its creatures. She ends the prologue describing humanity’s choices, to continue devastation of the global environment or to revitalize, care for, and guard the global environment and the species that live there from total annihilation. Kolbert acknowledges that while prospects are bleak when it comes to climate change, her third book focuses a bit more on the hopeful side, that this choice to destroy or protect gives hope that the choice to preserve and repair can prevail.
A brief note on the prologue stylistically. Kolbert, much like I did in the last paragraph, tells humanity’s story in the third person. She avoids using identifying pronouns like “we" and possessive verbs like “our" instead opting for “they" and “their". This provides a layer of separation between the reader and the actions of humanity. If this book were a simple call to action it may have been better to identify the reader with humanity’s history. However, this book is about providing an in depth look on the current and historical impact of humanity on Earth’s environments and species. Kolbert tells the history in a way that allows for the reader to disassociate and look at the story more objectively which is a useful tool for cementing the understanding the book is trying to encourage. The reader may be more defensive if they feel included, but if they are able to read with distance between themselves and the actions of humanity, then they can see human’s domination over the world’s environments and the ripple of harm that causes more clearly. Kolbert makes stylistic choices in her works deliberately to help strengthen her major themes.
As an introduction to the book, she discusses a mass extinction happening today: that of amphibians globally. She intersperses discussion of the extinction of amphibian species native to the Amazon rainforest and the efforts to save them with her recounting the time she saw an article about the sixth mass extinction that served as her call to write this book. Not only does this chapter emphasize how human impacts, both intentional (deforestation) and unintentional (spreading infectious fungus through global travel), contribute to climate change and loss of biodiversity, but also acts as a great story to establish a narrative center for the book. Throughout the first and subsequent chapters, the history of our understanding of extinction as a concept as well as examples of animals directly brought to extinction by human hands are laid out clearly for the reader. The book is not hopeless, but the framing of humanity’s knowledge of extinction as parallel in some way to humanity’s propensity to cause extinction is a compelling and thought provoking one.
In the same vein, examples of environmental activism show the immense efforts people go to to preserve South American habitats. These scientists create a sterile new environment for Amazonian species of Amphibians to protect them from the invasive fungus that threatens their survival. However, this does nothing to repair the damage done to the amphibians in the wild. Habitat replication, recreating a habitat in an artificial controlled environment, is one of the most effective conservation strategies for amphibians and leads to an important question: is it too late to reverse the damage done to Earth’s natural environments? Kolbert covers sustainability efforts and this question in her third book, Under a White Sky, but the beginning of that research is here.
Kolbert pulls apart the ethics and consequences of humanity’s destruction and conservation throughout the book. Humanity’s evolving knowledge of extinction is covered in depth alongside brutal examples of people using once abundant animals so cruelly and unsustainably they are lost from the world. These ideas inform each other in this book, our knowledge of extinction as a concept is vital to understanding how to sustainably use resources to protect the environment.
The Sixth Extinction is an important work that offers insight into how humanity has had an enormous impact throughout its history. This book engages the reader to constantly reexamine long-held assumptions about human impact, forcing uncomfortable truths to the forefront. Kolbert encourages us to reflect: in the age of the Anthropocene, human societies have to choose their actions carefully, otherwise the next mass extinction will be one of humanity’s biggest legacies.
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