5/30/2023 0 Comments Book review the sixth extinctionDuring the past half billion years, she tells us, there have been five mass extinctions on Earth, when “the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted”. Kolbert’s perspective is both awe-inspiring and fearsome, but utterly engrossing, as you’d expect from a book whose premise is “we’re all doomed”. On the opening page of her investigation into the future of our planet, Kolbert quotes the great biologist EO Wilson: “If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfilment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.” This warning note sets the mood for the 13 chapters that follow, an urgent contemporary report on “the sixth extinction”.
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