BOOK REPORT: THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT

AT THE SAME TIME I WAS READING Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction, I was also reading a collection of non-fiction by the late science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr.* In one letter, written in 1972, Tiptree (the pseudonym under which American writer Alice Sheldon published her work) describes part of the Yucatan where she was staying:

I am writing this in the moonlight on a coconut plantation on the “wild” shore of Yucatan. The jungle was homesteaded in 1936 and worked by a few Maya families. Miles of nothing but white coral beach, the Caribbean making slow music on the reef, shadows of palm-fronds wreathing over the sand. The moon is brighter than my lantern. A pelican crosses the moon, looking like a wooded bird from some mad giant’s cuckoo-clock. Paradise…

Alberta Tar Sands (or Mordor?)

The letter, as a whole, is a plea to recognize how human rapaciousness and greed are destroying the biosphere. She describes parts of the world she grew up in and traveled as being (in 1972) “[g]one under the concrete and plastic and bombs and oil and people and garbage unending, growing and spreading daily.” Later she says, angrily, despairingly

…to love our Earth is to hurt forever. Earth was very beautiful with her sweet airs and clear waters, her intimacies and grandeurs and divine freakinesses and the mobile art works that were her creatures. She was just right for us. She made us Human. And we are killing her.

Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.)

Her letter conveys the urgency she feels for all of us to change how we live. And Sheldon was not optimistic. She ends with the image of humans surviving in a hardscrabble, ruined world, “gasping our own poisons and scrabbling for algae soup as the conveyor belt creaks by.”

Both women write of ecological disasters and climatic emergencies. Kolbert’s book is a journalistic exploration of threatened landscapes, biodiversity decline and climate disruption. She reminds us that, in the past four hundred and fifty million years, there have been five times where massive die-offs in complex life occurred due to, at different times, volcanic activity, glaciation, a rapid rise in CO2 levels and comet impact. The last is what everybody thinks about when they hear the word “extinction”, with the death of the dinosaurs, but the other events had equal or even greater impacts on the amount and viability of the Earth’s flora and fauna. 

Chillingly, Kolbert states that our age, dubbed the “Anthropocene”, is unique in how rapid CO2 levels are rising and how markedly biodiversity is declining; it is a gravely dubious distinction, of course. And it is unprecedented because most prior extinctions occurred over thousands of years; ours seems to be happening over the course of centuries, even decades, making adaptation to the changes difficult or impossible for many species, including our own. And by "extinction" it is meant the dying off of whole families of species, both plant and animal, as well as the degradation of lands, seas and the air. She says, “By disrupting these systems—cutting down tropical rain forests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the ocean—we’re putting our own survival in danger.” 

Elizabeth Kolbert

And Kolbert, like Sheldon, is not optimistic. “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 griping an ax, or better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on you lap.” She ends by noting it is the earth that abides in the end, “long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.” Thus, our legacy, what we bequeath to future generations, will be determined by our actions in the coming critical decades.

Both writers present sobering portraits of the great, existential dilemma facing modern civilization, and I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction (but not for a relaxing bedtime read!)

Cheers.

* Jeffry Smith, Ed. Meet Me At Infinity, The Uncollected Tiptree: Fiction and Nonfiction. Tor Books, 2000.