My hope is that readers of this book will come away with an appreciation of the truly extraordinary moment in which we live. In the pages that follow, I try to convey both sides: the excitement of what’s being learned as well as the horror of it. If extinction is a morbid topic, mass extinction is, well, massively so. One chapter concerns a die-off happening more or less in my own backyard (and, quite possibly, in yours).
Such is the scope of the changes now taking place that I could have gone pretty much anywhere and, with the proper guidance, found signs of them. I chose to go to these particular places for the usual journalistic reasons-because there was a research station there or because someone invited me to tag along on an expedition. The second part of the book takes place very much in the present-in the increasingly fragmented Amazon rainforest, on a fast-warming slope in the Andes, on the outer reaches of the Great Barrier Reef. The creatures in the early chapters are already gone, and this part of the book is mostly concerned with the great extinctions of the past and the twisting history of their discovery, starting with the work of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. Each tracks a species that’s in some way emblematic-the American mastodon, the great auk, an ammonite that disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous alongside the dinosaurs. The story of the Sixth Extinction, at least as I’ve chosen to tell it, comes in thirteen chapters. When it is still too early to say whether it will reach the proportions of the Big Five, it becomes known as the Sixth Extinction. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. They interbreed with these creatures and then, by one means or another, kill them off.
On reaching Europe, they encounter creatures very much like themselves, but stockier and probably brawnier, who have been living on the continent far longer. Everywhere they settle, they adapt and innovate. In coastal regions, they gather shellfish farther inland, they hunt mammals. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. They are, however, singularly resourceful. The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again-some would claim nearly fatally-to just a few thousand pairs. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. The species does not yet have a name-nothing does-but it has the capacity to name things.Īs with any young species, this one’s position is precarious. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. Prologueīeginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the next, and most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
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