The Sixth Extinction

The Sixth Extinction is not a hopeful book.

It is a well-researched, carefully written, and fascinating book, but it is not a hopeful one.  There is no "feel-good" ending, no comforting platitudes, no moment of resolution -- nothing that would make a reader feel better after the gravity of the situation sinks in.

No.  This is a book about the real world and its consequences, and it makes no apologies.  

In that way, it is one of the most powerful nonfiction books I have ever read.

I stumbled upon this book while reading the news -- someone had interviewed author Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, about her latest work and I happened to click the link, probably because it said something about extinction and I was curious.  About half an hour later, I was totally hooked and went in search of this book in my local library.  It was pretty new, published in 2014 and won the Pulitzer Price for general nonfiction in 2015, so I expected there to be a long waiting list to get it.

There was no such list.  None.  I was the only hold in my entire area -- and I live in the suburbs of a fairly large city.

Now, having read it, I am even more depressed that no one around me seems to be paying attention.

Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction blends careful discussion of past scientific discoveries and analyses with her personal narrative of visiting important sites for the study of extinction.  I haven't read her other book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, so I can't say if this is a unique style to this book; however, I can say that it makes for compelling reading.

Using various endangered species as jumping-off points, Kolbert walks readers through the history of extinction on Earth, discussing everything from how scientific theory developed to include extinction in the 1700 and 1800s to modern studies being done to monitor and measure current extinction rates. Each of the 13 chapters uses an endangered or extinct species to tie to some part of extinction's history; the great auk for example, a large penguin-like bird that went extinct in the 1800s, is used to discuss how extinction became accepted as a scientific principal.  Other examples, like mastodons, are used to explain humanity's role in the current extinction event.

Throughout these chapters, she blends in discussions of the Big Five: the five previous extinction events in the history of life on Earth.  Each, as she explains, stems from different causes, some of which haven't been fully understood yet, but all of them reshaped our planet.  And all remain important in understanding the current event.

Here's a rough timeline:

The graphic she uses in the book is a little easier to understand -- perhaps because she explains everything as opposed to my just plopping it on here -- but this gives a rough idea of the timing and how drastic each event was.

Ours is at the end, where the number of species has skyrocketed and there's not yet a plunge to represent what's happening.

There are critics and nonbelievers, of course, but the conversation sounds a lot like that surrounding global climate change: Most scientists seem on board with it, while the loudest opponents are those who have the most to lose (politically or otherwise). And as Kolbert points out in this National Geographic interview, by the time the sixth extinction is so obvious as to be indisputable, it will be too late to save those species it wipes out.

This is one of the reasons why I'm hoping more people start reading this book.

Kolbert giving a lecture/book talk on CSPAN 2

I also have to mention that I had to look things up constantly as  I was reading.  Kolbert does a great job of explaining complicated concepts, but she also writes in a way that inspires curiosity to learn more about whatever topic is at hand.  I have never been so grateful for my smartphone.

That writing style comes from her blend of personal narrative with scientific discussion, as I mentioned earlier, and her own story adds a nice touch to the book.  So much of this research is abstract; things like the background extinction rate, plant and animal migration due to human interference, and so on simply aren't relevant to the average person.  But the stories of Kolbert's visit to the Amazon rainforest, a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, a frog sanctuary in Belize, a cave in northern New England, bring those ideas to life.  I can picture the colonies of bats on the ceiling of the cave much more easily than I can picture a plesiosaur fossil (no matter how cool that may be).  The movement of plants to new continents seems more real when I can picture the purple loosestrife blooming thousands of miles from its original home.

So many nonfiction books suffer, and even lose readers, because their writing is too dry, too boring.  This is not, and that made it an easier, and more relevant, read.

There are moments when this style backfires though.  Kolbert's narratives tend to stop rather abruptly, just before whatever realization her experiences helped her reach is fully spelled out on the page.  Sometimes, this isn't that big of a deal.  When a dozen pages are spent analyzing the important of coral as the basis of reef life, and then Kolbert walks out onto a reef to find the coral dying, the aha! moment is pretty obvious.  There, her writing doesn't need to say anything for readers to draw their own conclusions -- generally, the same ones she wants us to draw.

At other times, her realization is implied to the point of obscurity.  Now: I'm not saying she needs to employ that awful high school writing tactic of "This shows that..." and so on. (For the record, I teach my students to remove this phrase from their vocabulary.) But  an implied point leaves a lot out there between the writer's mind and the reader's.  And when readers are left to figure things out on their own, they inevitably get lost. It's not a mistake, minor as it may be, that's worth making in a book of this magnitude.

However, I generally overlooked this small stylistic issue in favor of a much greater point -- the amount of work that had to go into a book like this.  I can't even imagine the hours Kolbert spent researching her topics, interviewing scientists, and organizing each chapter.  And that doesn't include either her extensive travel or the hours of actual writing  that went into it.  When the absolutely overwhelming quantity of her research is blended so well into her writing, a little occasional abruptness is forgiven.

It's certainly not a reason to put down the book.

The last chapter of this book is titled "The Thing With Feathers," an allusion to the Emily Dickinson poem about the power and necessity of hope.
In that way, and in that way alone, it tries to end on a positive note.  But that title is the only hopeful moment, and frankly, it's a fairly deep allusion to get unless you were paying really close attention in your high school poetry class.  Even the author points out that, really, this is not a hopeful book -- and a hopeful book isn't the one she set out to write anyway.

[English Teacher confession: I did have a moment, upon opening this chapter, where I wondered about those who either ignored or have forgotten their Dickinson poetry.  Do those readers get this allusion? Do they realize that this is a reference to hope, or do they assume it's another chapter about birds?  My hope (ha!) is that this book's intended audience is educated enough to get it, but I bet there's someone out there going, "Really? Another bird chapter?" Anyway.]

So when I read the title of this last chapter, I wondered if perhaps this was going to be the part about how humanity still have time, how we can save the Earth and all its species, that we can avoid the sixth extinction.  Maybe this was the part where Kolbert offered up that hope, shouting "It's not too late!" and providing all the standard recycle, get involved, donate money, etc propaganda that's been pandered around for years at this point.  (I'm not saying those aren't good things! They absolutely are.  It just wouldn't be new information for such a powerful book.)

But it wasn't.

Instead, it ponders what happens next for humanity.  Will we, as one scientist she quotes wrote, saw off the branch on which we're sitting in the ecological tree?  Who or what will come after us?

It's a true chapter.  True to the form of the book, but also true to the form of the world: it will keep going, regardless of whether or not we're on it.
We have power over the ways in which we change our planet, not over whether or not we destroy it.

One day we'll be just a layer in the sediment of our planet, found in ice cores and canyons and fossils. The Sixth Extinction is happening, and like it or not, humanity is right there with it, intimately involved with it.

One day, we too will be extinct.

But our planet will keep going -- it may be drastically different from how we know it, but it will still be there.  Humanity will change the face of the earth, but we will not, cannot, destroy it, and we can make choices about the kind of legacy we'll leave behind.

Maybe that's where she intends there to be hope: not in the salvation of our race, but in the continuity of the world and what we'll leave behind.