The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Extinction at Its Best While one tends to have the general idea as to what’s happening around the world, it isn’t until someone comes around and tells you exactly what’s going on that you become truly aware. This thought was the first to cross my mind while I was reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. Before getting into the details of this book review, I would like to preface it by saying that before beginning this class I had an idea of what was happening around the globe. I was not so uninformed as to say that I didn’t know the climate was changing and species were gradually disappearing, but rather I was unaware as to just how quickly this was taking place. I can say that in the back of my mind there has
always been a concern about global and ecological welfare, but I had also felt like the threats humanity had been causing wouldn’t amount to anything serious during my lifetime. This book changed that. One of the biggest overall scares for me was the repetition of the year 2050. Apparently that’s when everything will go downhill for humanity if our actions are not immediately remedied. There was a repeated use of the year 2050 which indicated that it would be the point at which, according to the author and the evidence she had provided, our seas would absorb a level of carbon emitted due to our actions that it would become too acidic for most forms of life to survive in the oceans, global temperatures would rise by a predicted value of two degrees Celsius, and the biodiversity of the globe will have drastically dropped. Ethically speaking, in light of the evidence brought forth by Kolbert, it would be wrong to deny that we are in the midst of a sixth extinction, or rather we will soon see one if it hasn’t begun just yet, and the ethics of why will be touched on more later. Getting into the details of the book itself, I really loved how Kolbert gave a concise but very detailed history of what gave birth to the ideas of evolution and uniformitarianism and other explanations as to how extinctions occurred historically, specifically her focus on Cuvier’s and Darwin’s exploits from chapter two on and really the struggle to determine what causes a species to go extinct. I really enjoyed this because for the first time ever we are witnessing a mass extinction in progress and we have explanations as to why it’s happening and rather than focusing on preventing the next extinction, we are still so focused on the history of it all and what happened back then rather than the now. Although I’ll say that it is important to inform reader on the history of it all, but the events of the past won’t help us prevent the events of today. As stated earlier, I was unaware of the extent and the rate at which the extinction event is taking place and even Kolbert herself commented on the rate it was happening at.
In chapter 11, she quoted the book The World of Life saying that “I am convinced that…the rapidity of extinction of so many large Mammalia is actually due to man’s agency.” (pg. 229) and I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. This quote of course is referring to the large mammals of the modern age and the Megafauna of the past, but in reality it goes well past that. Thinking about the actions of humanity, look at the evidence presented and the effects of them. Either, directly or indirectly, humanity is responsible for a widespread elimination of species. Through the means of trading and transportation, invasive species have spread across the globe and inserted themselves into ecosystems where they don’t belong, like Kolbert’s rats that she keeps talking about, the white fungus that killed millions of North American bats, Zebra Mussels killing fish, and the direct actions being our hunting birds and other animals to extinction and cutting down acres of rainforests destroying the habitats of hundreds of species. The big picture here being this: we did it, we finally proved we’re the greatest. All it took was killing off so many species because it’s more important to fuel our expansion and maintain our lifestyle than to maintain a proper balance in the world. All I can say is that it saddens me, it
really does. Carbon emissions are high, demand for living space and materials are up, and we need food.
So who cares if a bird or two goes extinct? Or an elephant? Or a bug? To most people it doesn’t really matter. But species extinction is a great moral wrong. Every species has a role in its ecosystem and by intruding on the natural balance of things and thus causing the early extinction of species we are throwing the natural balance out of whack and reducing biodiversity. Biodiversity is key in surviving ecological hardship. When difficult situations arise, it is up to species to adapt and evolve to overcome. By intervening and accelerating the hardship of not just one species, but entire ecosystems, we are creating so much stress of the species present that they simply cannot adapt or evolve quick enough in such a short span of time. Thus, human actions are directly responsible for the extinction of many species, which directly correlates to a decrease in genetic and biodiversity. It is hard to deny that we rely on, and take for granted, all of the species and their roles in their ecosystem and how they keep things afloat. And by irreparably damaging these systems, we are directly relating to our ability to gather supplies such as food sources and lumber and agriculture in the future. Thus it falls upon humanity to act accordingly to try and prevent the damage we will cause if we continue “business as usual” in the
future. The rest of the ethics does not fall upon the effect of our actions, but the actions themselves. As we have mentioned in class, we are putting out an amount of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans that is far too great to be absorbed or used. The carbon is acidifying the oceans and increasing global temperatures which is affecting the animals, and even the trees as mentioned in chapter nine, and the earth cannot keep up with this. If humanity does not find ways to drastically reduce its output of carbon, and the rate of deforestation, then there won’t be much of a planet to live on. And the scariest part is that most of us will live to see the year 2050, which Kolbert has been warning us about, and we will see the outcome of our actions. We must change the course of our actions if we are to avoid the sixth extinction. Denying that there is a massive amount of species dropping off of the face of the earth is morally wrong and foolish. Is it really worth it, benefitting in the short term, rather than caring about the future of the world? Personally, I don’t wish for our generation to go down in the annals of history as the ones responsible for the “Anthropocene extinction”, do you?