Kolbert Investments
Much as we like to think our legacy will be the sum of our great works of art and science, humans might go down in geologic history as the force behind a tiny, extraordinary line of dirt. Even a casual observer of the fossil record looking back 100 million years from now could not miss the stark and sweeping decline in biodiversity that shows up alongside the advent of Homo sapiens. It will look like the fossil demarcation caused by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Only this time the asteroid is us. We're a geologic force, careening through natural history. This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. When all of human civilization thus far has been 'compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper,' as Elizabeth Kolbert describes it in her excellent new book 'The Sixth Extinction,' what will a future paleontologist (human or otherwise) see?
A mass die-off the likes of which has only occurred five other times in the last half billion years. In that time, extinction has been relatively rare. Species disappear at a 'background extinction rate' all the time, usually so low that you'd be unlikely to witness one in your lifetime. But so far scientists have discovered only five times when that rate exploded, wiping out life-forms tens of thousands of times faster than normal, over the course of just a few hundred thousand years — a geologic instant.
We're living through just such a period of precipitous decline now. 'The Sixth Extinction' shows us that it might be our fault. Traversing four continents and animating scientists both living and long dead, Kolbert's narrative can be mesmerizing and awe-inspiring. It's also a bit terrifying. As evidence of our role in the current mass extinction event mounts, Kolbert illuminates this scientific mystery with a mix of history and field reporting. She weaves together the story of biological calamity, from the concept's first articulation in revolutionary France to the front lines of numerous extinctions today.
Tellingly, these stories traverse land and sea, from remote Oceania to the author's own backyard. The catastrophic events that did in today's fossils were caused by a variety of factors — climate change, ocean acidification, an extraterrestrial collision — but today's culprit appears to be, in the words of scientists David B. Wake and Vance T. Vredenburg, 'one weedy species.' It's not exactly a whodunit, although the Homo sapiens we find behind the trigger of our current mass extinction event is unfamiliar.
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Sort of like the portrait you get of someone by only looking at their trash. It's not how we like to see ourselves, but maybe this mirror is more honest. By spewing greenhouse gases, altering great swaths of land, and shuffling species around the globe with heretofore unheard-of speed, we're effectively running geologic history in reverse. Ours is a 'mass invasion event,' in the words of invasive species specialist Anthony Ricciardi. The McGill University professor describes our remixing of the world's flora and fauna as 'without precedent' in the planet's history. During any given 24-hour period, it's estimated that 10,000 species ride around the world just in the ballast water that stabilizes large ships.
We're creating what some biologists call the New Pangea, referring to the ancient landmass home to all terrestrial species until plate tectonics broke that supercontinent apart. With the continents spread out as they are today, evolution ran its course in parallel — isolated islands like Australia and Madagascar developed entirely different creatures than Africa and Asia, which were different still from Europe and the Americas. What we're doing today is having disastrous results for biodiversity. In her four years of research for 'The Sixth Extinction,' Kolbert found evidence of past and present extinction events everywhere. There's Panama's El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center, where a meticulously maintained refuge for imperiled frogs resembles 'an ark mid-deluge.' In Vermont, a limestone cave where bats have likely hibernated by the hundreds of thousands since the end of the last Ice Age is littered with tiny brown corpses.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s revelatory new book, The Sixth Extinction, about the rapid and radical changes man is wreaking on the Earth, is a work 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.
In a lucid and understated style, she 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. Corel Draw Software Free Download For Windows Xp 32 Bit here.
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). But the current rate of species die-off, caused by human exploration and exploitation of the globe, is occurring at an unprecedented rate in geologic time.
Kolbert writes that the extinction 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. Human restlessness, our intellect and our appetites are to blame: The human propensity to hunt, causing the elimination of most large mammals. Our urge to explore.
Our 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 human 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.
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. Doing Economics Greenlaw Pdf Merge. 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. Hear an interview with the author on KERA-FM’s Think at www.kera.org/2014 /02/24/are-we-next/. The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt, $28).