By Elizabeth Kolbert
Humanity's role in causing mass extinction
Subject
Themes
A small, physically unremarkable species of ape emerges in eastern Africa some two hundred thousand years ago and, through sheer resourcefulness rather than speed or strength, spreads across nearly the entire planet. Wherever it goes, it leaves a wake of disappearance: a stockier human relative interbred with and eliminated in Europe, herds of giant tortoises and towering ground sloths wiped out on every continent it reaches, flightless birds and dwarf hippos on remote islands undone within decades of its arrival. This pattern, playing out over tens of thousands of years and then accelerating catastrophically with industrialization, forms the argument at the heart of the book: humanity has become a geological force capable of triggering a sixth mass extinction, joining five previous catastrophes that have periodically emptied the planet of its diversity since complex life began.
A small, physically unremarkable species of ape emerges in eastern Africa some two hundred thousand years ago and, through sheer resourcefulness rather than speed or strength, spreads across nearly the entire planet. Wherever it goes, it leaves a wake of disappearance: a stockier human relative…
Published in 2014, this work arrived at a moment when the term Anthropocene, coined by the chemist Paul Crutzen barely a decade earlier, was migrating rapidly from informal scientific shorthand toward serious consideration as a formal geological epoch. The book helped popularize that shift for a…
For most of Western history, extinction simply was not a category available to the human mind. Aristotle catalogued animals as though the roster of living things had always been fixed; Enlightenment thinkers imagined every creature as an unbreakable link in a divine chain of being. When mammoth…
Since the industrial revolution, humans have added hundreds of billions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere, and this single fact drives two distinct but intertwined catastrophes: rising global temperatures and a fundamental shift in ocean chemistry. Both are frequently discussed as though they were…
Life on earth is not distributed evenly. A hypothetical trek south from the North Pole along a single line of longitude illustrates the point vividly: no trees at all across the frozen Arctic Ocean, a single ankle-high willow on the islands beyond it, roughly twenty tree species scattered across the…
Across the book's later chapters, conservation efforts reach extraordinary, sometimes almost absurd, degrees of dedication. At the Cincinnati Zoo, veterinarian Terri Roth performs ultrasounds on a Sumatran rhino named Suci and attempts artificial insemination, having spent years puzzling out why the…
Long before smokestacks or combustion engines existed, humans were already reshaping the fate of other species, and the same basic pattern recurs with startling consistency across tens of thousands of years. Wherever modern humans arrived on a new continent or island, megafauna vanished within a…
In the volcanic-crater town of El Valle de Anton, Panama, market stalls once sold countless figurines of the golden frog, a toxic, taxicab-yellow amphibian considered a national lucky symbol. A decade earlier the frogs were so common that a nearby creek was nicknamed Thousand Frog Stream. Then,…
In 1832 William Whewell coins the term catastrophist for scientists, himself included, who believe earth history has been shaped by sudden violent events, contrasting them with a young geologist named Charles Lyell, whom he dubs a uniformitarian. Lyell, a former barrister turned geologist after…
A 1949 Harvard experiment shows students confronted with anomalous playing cards, a red six of spades, a black four of hearts, initially forcing the mismatch into familiar categories before finally reacting with confused alarm. The historian Thomas Kuhn later cites this as a model for how entire…
On One Tree Island, a tiny coral-rubble outcrop at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, a bleeding loggerhead turtle struggles unsuccessfully to dig a nest in broad daylight on jagged rubble before giving up and crawling back to sea. The station manager warns of dangerous currents,…
North of Manaus, Brazil, Reserve 1202 is a twenty-five-acre square of untouched rainforest surrounded by cleared scrubland, part of the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project. Conceived by biologist Tom Lovejoy in the 1970s, the project exploited a Brazilian law requiring ranchers to leave…
At the Cincinnati Zoo, Dr. Terri Roth performs an ultrasound on Suci, a Sumatran rhino, checking whether a hormone injection and artificial insemination attempt succeeded. Suci did not ovulate, disappointing the assembled keepers. The Sumatran rhino, a twenty-million-year-old lineage and closest…
At the San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research, researcher Marlys Houck retrieves vials from a liquid-nitrogen tank containing cultured cells from the last known po'ouli, a Hawaiian honeycreeper that likely went extinct shortly after a failed 2004 rescue attempt captured only a single,…
By Elizabeth Kolbert
Subject
Themes
A small, physically unremarkable species of ape emerges in eastern Africa some two hundred thousand years ago and, through sheer resourcefulness rather than speed or strength, spreads across nearly the entire planet. Wherever it goes, it leaves a wake of disappearance: a stockier human relative interbred with and eliminated in Europe, herds of giant tortoises and towering ground sloths wiped out on every continent it reaches, flightless birds and dwarf hippos on remote islands undone within decades of its arrival. This pattern, playing out over tens of thousands of years and then accelerating catastrophically with industrialization, forms the argument at the heart of the book: humanity has become a geological force capable of triggering a sixth mass extinction, joining five previous catastrophes that have periodically emptied the planet of its diversity since complex life began.