Instaread - The Sixth Extinction: by Elizabeth Kolbert / Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review: An Unnatural History

Guide to

Elizabeth Kolberts

The Sixth Extinction

An Unnatural History

by

Instaread

Please Note

This is a companion to the original book.

Copyright 2015 by Instaread. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of these contents and disclaim all warranties such as warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. The author or publisher is not liable for any damages whatsoever. The fact that an individual or organization is referred to in this document as a citation or source of information does not imply that the author or publisher endorses the information that the individual or organization provided. This concise companion is unofficial and is not authorized, approved, licensed, or endorsed by the original books author or publisher.

Table of Contents

The Sixth Extinction is a book by award winning journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert. In this book, the author demonstrates that species are dying out at a rate comparable to the previous mass extinctions, and if the trend of global warming, deforestation, and pollution continues in its present course, the numbers of extinct species will meet or exceed that rate of destruction. This event will include the extinction of humanity. What this means is that the current loss of life today will soon justify the term The Sixth Extinction, a mass extinction like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago

When humans originated about 100,000 years ago, they began to hunt some species into extinction. Their ability to outcompete other early hominids for food led to the extinction of those species, including Neanderthals.

The extinction of species picked up steam when humans began transforming great swaths of forest and plains into farmland about 10,000 years ago. It has accelerated to a breakneck pace since the Industrial Revolution began polluting the air, water, and earth, as well as warming the climate.

In the past few decades, millions of members of some species have been wiped out. The carnage has been on land and sea, including vast forests and oceans. And it has been so extensive that an entire class of animals, amphibians, is threatened with complete extinction. Some scientists contend that if humans do not take action to stop it, half the worlds species will be gone by the year 2100.

Elizabeth Kolbert: Kolbert, the author of The Sixth Extinction, traveled to the Amazon, bird islands in the North Atlantic, the Great Barrier Reef, bat caves in New York State, and many other exotic places to obtain first-hand material for this book.

Jean Lopold Nicolas Frdric Georges Cuvier: Cuvier was a French scientist who was the first to posit that many plants and animals had become extinct. Curvier, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is sometimes called the Father of Paleontology, the study of plants and animals of the past.

Charles Lyell: Lyell was a British naturalist who contributed to paleontology.

Charles Darwin: Darwin was a British naturalist who, after extensive research in the Galapagos Islands, was the first to publish the theory of evolution in his book, On the Origin of Species.

1. The world is going through a sixth great extinction with thousands of species vanishing in a period of centuries and many more threatened.
2. The notion of extinction is only about 250 years old. Until then, most scientists thought that once an animal or plant was here, it was here for good.
3. The first five extinctions occurred because of long-term changes on earth or cataclysmic events. The sixth is being caused by humans.
4. Humans have a history of wiping out species, including the mammoth, the great auk, and the moa. But the pace of human-caused extinctions has accelerated in the past millennium, particularly in the past two centuries.
5. The human penchant for moving around has helped spread invasive species across the world at a rate never seen before. Many of the invaders are wiping out species native to an area.
6. Human activities are compromising the oceans, the original source of life and home still to much of the earths plant and animal life.
7. Logging, converting forestland to other uses, and human-induced climate change are exterminating whole species of trees and the plants and animals they sustain.
8. Humans wiped out their closest relative, Neanderthal, when the two co-existed.

The world is going through a sixth great extinction with thousands of species vanishing in a period of centuries and many more threatened.

Analysis

The sixth extinction is the ongoing extinction of many of the earths animal and plant species. Numbers tell the story of this extinction. Scientists have already recorded the extinction in recent years of many species of frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians, the most threatened animal species. But the extinctions are occurring in all branches. A third of all reef-building corals are endangered. So are a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds.

Previous extinctions, even those caused by cataclysmic events such as volcanic eruptions and meteors slamming into the earth, created such an impact that it took millions of years for the surviving species to recover. The event that triggered the extermination of the dinosaurs was a meteor that hit Mexico. The impact not only killed many plants and animals immediately, but it kicked up dust that changed the earths climate that impacted surviving species for millions of years.

Scientific estimates of todays extinctions vary widely, from 17,000 to 100,000 species a year. Even the lowest estimate of 17,000 is an alarming figure. If the trend continues, half of all plants and animals on earth will be gone by 2100. One thing that makes the sixth extinction different from the others is that todays plants and animals are dying at a rate faster than new species are emerging to replace them. The most optimistic of the scientists who have noted the rapid disappearance of species in recent decades said initially that they hoped new species would evolve to replace those lost. Sadly, their research indicates this is not the case. That makes the sixth extinction even more alarming than the sheer number of lost plants and animals would indicate [1].

The notion of extinction is only about 250 years old. Until then, scientists thought that once an animal or plant was here, it was here for good.

Analysis

The French naturalist and paleontologist, Georges Cuvier, changed the way the world thought about species destruction. Until Cuvier, who lived during the late 1700s and early 1800s, scientists and nonscientists alike believed that individual animals died, as humans did, but the species continued to thrive.

What helped convince Cuvier that entire species had died out was his comparison of bones of living elephants with mammoths and mastodons. Other scientists had maintained that mammoth and mastodon bones were those of outsized elephants rather than two separate, extinct species. A master anatomist, Cuvier recognized, and publicized, the major differences he found between the bones of living elephants and their extinct cousins. It was the first time that the world became acquainted with the concept of extinction. For these, and other contributions, Cuvier became known as the Father of Paleontology, the study of prehistoric life.