THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert is a NEW YORKER writer on the environmental beat who manages to write about the impending end of civilization as we know it with wit and, yes, lightness.  This latest work is a case in point.

I haven't written much about the things I've been reading because I have been too busy with my own writing, my grandparenting, my husbanding, and all the rest.  Plus, I'm leaving for Puerto Vallarta in a few days.  The point is that I've had other things on my mind.  However, this book is compelling enough to force me down here to the computer instead of listening to Marshall Faulk explain why the Broncos are not going to the Super Bowl.

Kolbert takes us through the five great extinctions that have occurred on Earth and anticipates the sixth extinction, the one that we are going through even as I type this.  Each of these extinctions were caused by some factor--climate change, stellar collision, violent eruptions--that changed the living condition of our planet.  Those species who could not make the adjustment became extinct.  During the Pleistocene epoch, for instance, the planet teeter-tottered through periods of glaciation followed by warming reactions to the falling temperatures.  This wreaked havoc on the plants and animals of the age who either died out, or moved to different climes.

Now we are in the Anthropocene epoch and the agent of extinction is man.  Kolbert takes us on a depressing tour of places where we can see extinction in the works.  She visits a cave in New England, once the home of seemingly millions of bats, now virtually empty.  The ripple effect of such an extinction is frightening.

In her final chapters, she directs our attention to the gradual disappearance of the large apes that typifies the sixth extinction.  Homo sapiens will at once be the only large ape to survive and the reason why all the others die out.

In Kolbert's view, man was ultimately the cause of many relatively recent extinctions.  There are lots of theories about how Mastodons, for example, became extinct.  Glaciation.  Orbital changes.  Volcanic eruption like the Yellowstone caldera.  But ultimately it was man's arrival on the scene.  The mastodon's gestation period is so slow that even if a group of hunters managed to kill only one or two a year, eventually the species would die out.  The pattern is clear.  Wherever man migrates, the flora and the fauna of that area begins to change and in many cases disappear.

She ends her book with a fascinating comparison of man to the other great apes, especially Neanderthal man.  When homo sapiens made its way from the bowels of Africa to Western Europe, it met the Neanderthal, a species that was not wide ranging, but rather stayed put.  Homo sapiens did two things to Neanderthals:  killed them and mated with them.  If you have European origins, you are approximately 4% Neanderthal.  But why did Neanderthals stay put and our ancestors roam?  Ancient homo sapiens' DNA has been found in New Zealand, but none from the Neanderthal.  That means that man must have gotten up the courage to set out on the ocean on a ridiculously little boat  just to see what he could find.  Imagine how many of those boats didn't make it anywhere, but man kept persisting.

We still persist.  We send rockets to space in the hopes of finding something, anything.  If man had never migrated to Europe, Neanderthals would still be hunting giant creatures with hand axes in the forests of France.

Kolbert suggests that the homo sapiens genome must have mutated to create a "madness" gene.  We're the only species that seems to have one.  She follows some spelunkers into a cave that seems to go on forever.  They all have to crawl to get to the interior and they all carry lights.  Once inside, the cave drawings abound.  Neanderthals would never have made those drawings because they never would have been "mad" enough to crawl into the cave, to explore.  And the thing is, once you start depicting the natural world with pictures and words and ideas, you can start changing that world.  And that is exactly what man does.  He can't help it.

"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."

That's the quote I keep coming back to.  It appears in her last chapter where she tries to offer a little hope by listing some advances and some hopeful experiments that bode well for the future.  It is small comfort.