It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.Part travelogue, part history lesson, and part science journal, in The Sixth Extinction author Elizabeth Kolbert assembles more than enough evidence to support a fairly uncontroversial claim: Throughout the history of the Earth there have been five major extinction events (like the presumed asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs), and while it may be happening too slowly for us to realise it, we are in the midst of the sixth such extinction event -- a catastrophe in the making which can be laid squarely at the feet of the Earth's "weediest" species: man.
While Kolbert explains how current global warming and the acidification of the oceans will lead to an acceleration of the loss of climate-sensitive species, she also outlines how, from first contact with the Neanderthals in Europe or with the megafauna of North America and beyond, humans have always been the extinctionators, wiping out every species that can't keep up reproductively with our marauding ways. This is a risky line of reasoning, however, as it removes any responsibility to change: we've always done this, it's human nature, the fruits of sitting at the apex of evolution, and really, if there hasn't been an appreciable consequence for killing off the mastodons, what's really the harm of melting the ice caps and saying farewell to the last of the polar bears? There are aesthetic and certainly moral reasons for protecting them, but Kolbert doesn't get into all that.
In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert travels the globe, joining researchers as they monitor at-risk species. Whether golden frogs in Panama, brown bats in New York State, or a Sumatran rhino at the Cincinnati zoo, you get the sense that Kolbert is getting there just in time to say goodbye to creatures who will never be seen in the wild again, and while these looming extinctions can be blamed on human actions, I couldn't have prevented any of them and again this removes any sense of responsibility or even urgency regarding them. (Apparently all the Central and South American amphibians and North American bats are being decimated by -- two different -- fungal infections introduced by international travellers, and in addition to the loss of habitat and poaching that we all know has put large forest animals at risk, Southeast Asians are now snorting ground rhino horn as a high-class party drug.) Again, what's really missing is how all of this is going to affect humans: will the loss of all the amphibians and bats lead to swarms of West Nile Disease-spreading mosquitoes? Will the acidification of the oceans stop at killing off the coral reefs (admittedly tragic) or lead to the collapse of the food chain and the fishing stocks that we actually rely on (an outcome that we'd be more likely to fight against)? Remember Sean Connery in the movie Medicine Man, finding the cure for cancer when he ground up one particular bug that lived in one particular flower in the Amazonian Rain Forest? Imagine him shouting, "I found a cure for the plague of the 20th century, and now I've lost it!" and then read:
As we don't know, even to the nearest million, how many tropical insect species there are, we're not likely to notice if one or two or even ten thousand of them have vanished.Imagine not knowing to the nearest million! And then imagine, providing that they don't actually hold the cure for cancer, that even a million tropical insect species disappear overnight -- does it matter? Some local, specialised food chains will be disrupted (from plants to birds to mammals), they'll probably even all go extinct along with the insects they relied upon, but other species will move in (from plants to birds to mammals) and humans will probably not even be affected -- or notice. That's cold-hearted, and doesn't really represent how I think, but nothing in The Sixth Extinction rallies against it; indeed, there's very little concluded at all.
To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.Big ideas -- things we as individuals can affect, like climate change -- are not really the focus of this book. Rather, it asserts that we are a species who have always changed the balance of diversity and we continue to do so, perhaps even to the detriment of our own lives; we may be ushering in the age of the intelligent rat society. Or perhaps not -- we are great adapters, after all. If anything, this book made me more optimistic that we can survive the extinction event that we're causing (that we have been causing for tens or hundreds of centuries), and I'm sure that wasn't Kolbert's point. But what was her point? This bit near the end left me scratching my head:
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 in your lap.This is the first time that Kolbert lays responsibility on the reader and it only made me feel defensive: I didn't strangle the last Great Auk, I'm not snorting ground rhino horn, and I'm not the Typhoid Mary who infected all the golden frogs with Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. And know what else? I didn't spend four years jet-setting around four continents to gather research for a book. But I know, I know, like Al Gore and David Suzuki, Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental sins don't count because she's getting the message out. However, in this case, I don't know what the message was.
