This is a book review for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction”
Rarely do scientists know the exact moment a species dies forever. Before humans discovered the great auk, a flightless bird related to the razorbill, estimates suggest they numbered in the millions. Human expeditions eventually found their way to great auk breeding grounds where the birds were killed for down, food, fish bait, and fuel*.
Some three centuries of slaughter ended in June 1844 when twelve people rowed to a small island off the cost of Iceland called Edley. A pair of great auks and one egg were the last surviving members of a once sprawling species. Three men laboriously went ashore, easily chased down the two flightless birds, and strangled them.
They left the cracked egg behind.
The Sixth Extinction
This is just one of many disturbing stories from Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. Thankfully, most aren’t this heinous, but they are all dreadful in their own ways.
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at the New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015 for her work on this book. The Sixth Extinction is one of those books that cause people to judge it before they read it. If you’re open to learning, this book reveals a lot, and everyone should read it.
State of the Natural World
The book begins with a history lesson of paleontology, which both briefly describes millions of years of natural history and tells the interesting story of how humans discovered that mass extinctions happen. She presents the science behind the five known mass extinctions and some of the theories of how they occurred. However, the book’s core is an examination of human activity and our impact on the natural world. The thesis being that humans are causing the sixth mass extinction, humanity doesn’t shine.
It was in the spirit of personal growth that I picked up the book. Initially, I judged the book by its premise, because I didn’t want to read more about global warming/climate change/CO2/etc. However, I wanted to learn something about natural history, and I have concern about humanity’s impact on the world. This book seemed a primer for that knowledge.
The beauty of reading books is that authors can dig deeper than the popular press will ever go. There is so much more to the “human versus nature” story than I’ve ever considered or learned through typical news sources. The great auk’s extinction is only one of many examples of the destructive force humans have on earth.
We All Carry an AK-47
The great auk’s demise was the end of a long history of maltreatment. Similar activities are playing out today. Thankfully, these are not as blatant or brutal, but, sadly, are progressing toward the same end.
Kolbert sums up the variety of ways humans affect the planet:
If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.
The basis of civilization—everything we do—involves, nay, necessitates the destruction of nature in some fashion. There is no getting around it. “Progress” demands a price.
Humans contribute to the death of species either directly or indirectly in a myriad of ways. The top-level methods are:
- Contributing to ocean acidification (i.e. killing coral)
- Hunting/poaching (i.e. white rhinoceros, great auk)
- Introduction of invasive species (i.e. Hawaii’s natural flora and fauna)
- Fragmenting habitats (i.e. Amazon deforestation)
A simple example of damage is the everyday clearing of land for development. Recently, I heard a guy complaining about a mole in the yard of his newly built house. It was an annoyance to him, but he said, “Well, we built our house on top of his.” Still, he’s trying to kill it. To what end? A perfectly manicured lawn? What a travesty.
Meanwhile, there are oil spills and stories of species on the brink of annihilation. Confirmed extinctions barely registers in the consciousness of daily life. Tragically, stories of unnecessary slaughter appear regularly, but societal outrage is tepid at best.
Nature is Innocent
Barry Lopez writes in his seminal work, Arctic Dreams, about muskoxen:
They were so intensely good at being precisely what they were. The longer you watched, the more intricately they seemed a part of where they were living, of what they were doing. Their color, their proportions against the contours of the land, were exquisite. They were, in evolution’s terms, innocent of us and of our plans.
We are the only species capable of executing the devastation outlined in The Sixth Extinction. Thankfully, we are just as capable of immense reflection of our impact. The muskoxen or the great auk or coral know not what we are or what we’re doing. No species does. They do what they do and react the best they know how in order to survive. They are innocent of our attack on their lives.
Kolbert doesn’t offer suggestions for improvement. It’s not really the scope of the book, so that’s fine. Though, I think she didn’t write about the logical follow-up because the state we’re in is largely hopeless. The political might needed in one state to stop hunting wolves is hard enough, let alone the worldwide force necessary to overhaul society as we know it. Society wasn’t built with conservation in mind. It wasn’t designed to be “sustainable.” Changing behavior now that we are on the brink is, I fear, too late.
What Can Be Done?
In the mid-1800s, Henry David Thoreau lamented a new telegraph line through his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Its route would connect Maine to Texas. He writes, “But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
The point is we don’t think about what happens next. Why not have a telegraph from Maine to Texas? We have the technology, so let’s do it! Only now are we beginning to consider consequences. Only now are we thinking about the long-term impact.
The predominate view of society is progress. Growth. New products. New services. Faster delivery. Easier meals. More electronics. Sure, some of this progress is for “sustainable” energy and products, but the result is the same. Many of those things have worse impact either upstream or down than the existing methods. The only way to slow nature’s demise is to begin questioning progress itself: Does the modern-day telegraph really need building?
I won’t pretend I have the answers or tell you that I’m living a zero-waste life (it’s impossible to do so). All I’m saying is that there needs to be a collective discussion about what to do. I don’t see that happening.
But books like The Sixth Extinction and Arctic Dreams contribute to my evolving views of nature and of the damage human activity does. And that gives me some hope society can somehow change.
*A method of great auk fuel extraction was particularly heinous. For those interested, the process was chronicled by Aaron Thomas, an English seaman, in 1794:
You take a kettle with you into which you put a Penguin or two, you kindle a fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate Penguins themselves. Their bodys being oily soon produce a flame.
