Elizabeth Kolbert's revelatory new book, "The Sixth Extinction" (Henry Hold, 319 pages, $28), about the rapid and radical changes man is wreaking on the Earth, is one of those works of explanatory journalism that achieves the highest and best use of the form. After you read it, your view of the world will be fundamentally changed.
Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has gone all over the world to walk with, talk with and debrief a cadre of eminent scientists who are tracking humanity's transformation of our global home.
Kolbert builds an effective case that the pace of change is proceeding at a rate that imperils all species, including, eventually, Homo sapiens.
Q&A with Elizabeth Kolbert
Q: You started out as a political reporter. How did you evolve into an expert on earth sciences and natural history?
A:
There's a long tradition of environmental reporting at The New Yorker, and no one was covering it. I moved in to fill that space. Knowledge was gained, as all reporters gain it, by bothering a lot of people and talking to people who know what they're talking about.
Q: You wrote about some of these issues in your 2006 book about global warming, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe." What prompted your decision to write this follow-up?
A:
Climate change is just one of the ways that people are changing the planet on a geological scale. Climate change is part of a bigger story.
Q: What has the reception to the book been in the scientific community? What have you heard from the people you interviewed?
A:
People who work in the field of conservation biology are quite desperate ... They want to get this material out to a wider audience. So far the reaction of those guys has been great.
Q: It seemed that even the experts you featured were alarmed and surprised at the state of change in their chosen fields.
A:
One of the things that astonishes people and horrifies them, if that's the word, is that things are happening that they were taught couldn't happen. With the bats, I quote this guy as saying, "If anyone had told me this could happen to the little brown bat, I wouldn't have believed it."
Q: Talk about one of the key dynamics in this process: that climate change is forcing movement among plants and animals at the same time man is creating barriers to that movement.
A:
We know that in the climate changes of the past ... we know by looking at the record, that species can move. What worries scientists about what we're doing now is that we're changing the planet really, really fast ... the world has been colder than now, but it hasn't been this much warmer in a very long time. We're putting up barriers (urban development, deforestation, among others), and we're changing the rules of the game, but we're putting up a brick wall instead of an open playing field. What will happen as a result, to continue this metaphor, is that a lot of species will end up crashed up against that wall.
In a lucid and understated style, Kolbert documents the collapse of amphibian populations and of coral reefs. She writes about the mass die-off of millions of bats in the Northeast, most likely done in by a fungus transported around the world by globalization's component parts, travel and trade.
She walks in the Peruvian rain forest with researchers tracing the effect of global warming, as they track plants that may move upslope at rates of up to 100 feet a year in search of a higher, cooler climate zone.
She tells stories of imminent extinction, such as Suci, the Sumatran rhino in the Cincinnati Zoo that can't ovulate unless she senses there is an eligible male around. In Suci's case, "the nearest eligible male is 10,000 miles away."
As "The Sixth Extinction" unfolds, a clear pattern emerges. Mass extinctions have occurred in the past (there have been five, most recently in the late Cretaceous period). But the current rate of species die-off, caused by man's exploration and exploitation of the globe, is occurring at an unprecedented rate in geologic time. Kolbert writes that the exinction rate among amphibians could be more than 45,000 times higher than the "background" rate (expected extinctions in normal times). Furthermore, "it is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion," she writes.
Man's restlessness, his intellect and his appetites are to blame: his propensity to hunt, for instance, causing the elimination of most large mammals. His urge to explore. His will to exploit — the mass clearing of forests, the CO2 emissions that are changing the climate itself. These attributes, which have driven our biological success as a species, have also altered the climate and drastically reduced the range of animal species on earth.
Kolbert does not chide or condemn. She chronicles man's indifference (and at times, cruelty) to other life on the planet, but the most disturbing aspect of "The Sixth Extinction" is that most of us are complicit in these die-offs by heedless living — driving cars, farming cleared land, buying goods that require overseas shipping. And, failing to contain a burgeoning human population.
In one of the most intriguing chapters, "The Madness Gene," she compares our own species, Homo sapiens, with its close cousin, the Neanderthals.
In many respects, Neanderthals were similar to us. But they lacked key attributes, including the ability to figure out how to cross large bodies of water. One eminent student of Neanderthals,
Swedish biologist Svante Pddbo, speculates that we may possess a sort of Faustian gene that drives us to ignore consequences and even danger in our restless explorations and exploitations.
" ... there is also, I like to think, or say, some madness there," he tells Kolbert. " ... How many people must have sailed out and vanished in the Pacific before you found Easter Island? ... And why do you do that? It is for the glory? For the immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop."
We succeeded in eliminating the Neanderthals and are currently on the road to extinguishing our first cousins, the great apes.
Kolbert is an astute observer, excellent explainer and superb synthesizer, and even manages to find humor in her subject matter. But "The Sixth Extinction" is an alarming book. The last chapter, "The Thing with Feathers," suggests hope, but it is mostly about an endangered Hawaiian crow.
Still — read it. This book gives no easy or even hopeful answers, but it does present some heroes, such as the scientist Tom Lovejoy, a tireless researcher and advocate who has greatly slowed the logging of the Amazon. Maybe this book will put other people of intelligence, heart and will on the same road.
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