![]() As science journalist extraordinaire Elizabeth Kolbert tells it, we humans have been killing whatever we could whenever we could since the beginning of our tenure here on earth. Welcome to the latest geological era: the Anthropocene. Reviewed in the United States on SeptemYes, human-caused extinction is upon us in full force. The real revelation of 'The Sixth Extinction' is much darker. ![]() Now, with our CO2 emissions, our intensive farming and fishing, our prodigious output of nitrogenous fertilizers, our encroachments on the natural environment, we are a geological agent to rival any other. ![]() Elizabeth Kolbert quotes an expert on the loss of the megafauna – mammoths, giant sloths, sabre-toothed tigers, etc – around 10,000 years ago: "a geologically instantaneous catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it".īut we now know that geological change can happen quickly: the world warmed by around 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) around 11,600 years ago, over a period of perhaps less than a decade. They are usually thought to be incompatible, a decade being a long period in history, but 100,000 years no time at all in the history of the earth. We are in the disconcerting position of living simultaneously in both geological and historical time. Gabbie Berg Edwin Elias SOAN 101 November 18th, 2017 Book Review The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert is a story about a. ![]()
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