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This post is part of Blinkist's books-in-blinks series. The series provides key messages from books that you might not have time to read in their entirety.
Here are the key messages from The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert.
This book is one of three that Stanford wants its incoming freshmen to read this summer. The other two are novels.
What is this book about?
The Sixth Extinction (2014) chronicles the history of species extinction and shows how humans have had more than a hand in the rapidly decreasing numbers of animal species on earth. Through industrialization and deforestation, not to mention climate change, humans have damaged the environment and disrupted habitats, leading to a massive reduction in biodiversity.
Who is the author?
American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine and is also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a book on the effects of climate change, published in 2006.
She was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for The Sixth Extinction.
Who should read this book?
- Scientists, environmentalists or activists concerned with climate change
- People curious about how human activity affects animal survival
- Students examining theories of species extinction
SEE ALSO: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama all recommend this book — here's what it's about
What’s in it for me? Learn about the threat of extinction, and how we can still avoid it.
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Our world has experienced five catastrophic species extinctions, a group that scientists call the big five. The disappearance of the dinosaurs, for example, was one of the five.
Yet today, even as you read this right now, a sixth extinction is happening. And it’s all our fault.
Humans are responsible, through industrialization, deforestation and the resulting climate changes, for speeding up the process of extinction for a serious number of animal species. Habitats have changed; oceans have acidified; biodiversity has dropped to alarming levels.
So what’s to be done? How can we turn the tide and reestablish some sort of balance in our world? These blinks will explain how we’ve had a hand in species extinction since Homo sapiens first threw a spear, and how if we don’t change our behavior, we just might go the way of the Neanderthal.
In these blinks, you’ll discover
- why a massive dust cloud might have made the dinosaurs extinct;
- how a lack of frozen real estate has put migratory polar bears in a bind; and
- how the ease of modern transportation has inspired a second Pangea.
How we live and how we travel the globe has directly resulted in animal species extinction.
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Right now, many species of animal are endangered. Certain animals are threatened with extinction.
Yet have you ever considered how exactly a species disappears from the earth?
Historically, extinctions are rare and occur very slowly. Yet there have been periods of environmental change that have triggered mass extinctions, in which many species die in a shortened time period.
So while the “normal” rate of extinction – the background extinction rate– is generally slow, it does vary by animal group.
For instance, according to the background extinction rate for mammals, we should expect to see one species die out every 700 years. But during periods of mass extinction, this rate spikes. So far, we’re aware of five such episodes that the scientific community calls the “big five.” The extinction of dinosaurs roughly 64 million years ago, for example, was one of these five.
But mass extinctions aren’t just limited to prehistoric times. In fact, we might be experiencing one right now. We know this by looking at the actual rate of species extinction.
Take amphibians, one of the most endangered classes of animals. The actual rate of extinction today for amphibians is estimated to be 45,000 times higher than the background rate!
So the question is: who’s responsible for this disaster?
We are, actually. Humans are both directly and indirectly responsible for species extinction.
Consider modern transportation networks. Ships, planes and trains crisscross the globe, bridging continents and indirectly causing mass extinctions by introducing new organisms into environments where they can wreak havoc on existing species populations.
Panamanian golden frogs, for example, now struggle against a deadly fungus that likely came to Central America from Europe. But other species such as the great auk have been directly wiped out by hunters as well as by changes made to its habitat.
So we’re to blame for this mess. But could we have known what a profound effect our actions would have on the environment? To learn more, let’s dig into the history of evolution and extinction.
Extinction: slow or sudden? Theories have changed over the centuries as new info is unearthed.
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The idea that a species is capable of dwindling and disappearing altogether is relatively new. In fact, we have for some time believed that the species here on earth would always remain the same.
So when did we finally understand the shifting nature of survival in the animal kingdom?
Back in the nineteenth century, a French naturalist named Georges Cuvier theorized that animal species could become extinct through cataclysmic environmental changes.
Cuvier’s theory was then challenged by British geologist Charles Lyell, who proposed that extinction occurs at the same pace as does environmental change. He said that if the environment changed slowly, so extinctions too would occur slowly – a concept favored over Cuvier’s theory of catastrophe.
But Cuvier’s theory gained traction much later, when in the 1980s geologist Walter Alvarez literally unearthed new information.
When digging through a layer of earth that corresponded with the end of the Cretaceous age, a period that ended approximately 66 million years ago, Alverez found that it contained an abnormal amount of iridium, a rare earth metal found most commonly in meteorites.
Based on this discovery, Alvarez proposed an idea to explain the circumstances leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. He called his idea impact theory.
Impact theory postulates that so many millions of years ago, a ten-kilometer long meteor hit the earth; its impact kicked up so much dust that it blocked out the sun, leading to catastrophic climate change and the rapid demise of many species of dinosaurs.
According to current research, four of the “big five” mass extinctions were interestingly a result of climate change caused by shifts in the earth’s orbit, resulting from the gravitational pull of other planets in our solar system.
Yet we know that humans have had a hand in species extinction, too. But in what fashion?
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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