The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Book by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, 2014
Book Review by Herb Rubenstein
Introduction
At an Inter-Faith Thanksgiving service at Our Lady of Refuge Church in Brooklyn, there was a focus on the earth and all that it provides for human existence. Leaders of several faiths quoted the Iroquois nation’s leaders invoking the idea of the Great Spirit and Mother Earth. A Rabbi stated that humans needed the earth, but the earth did not need human beings. In all, the service spoke of caring for the earth, but little was said about how humans are actively, and knowingly, destroying the earth.
In late 2019 in the New York Times there was a lengthy article describing the high tides inundating Key Largo, Florida. Waters are rising and when the waters that are rising are salt waters, when they come into contract with trees and grasses that have not been touched by salt water before, the salt waters destroy the life of the trees and grasses, and the basic ability of the earth to sustain human and animal life. So, our fight to save the earth is not simply a concern about normal “flooding,” and human migrations due to climate change. It is a concern that rising saltwater will destroy our land’s ability to produce food, support trees to stop erosion, and will make areas of the earth no longer areas of vegetation, but rather be areas of devastation, permanent devastation.
And fresh water is rising is as well with similar destructive forces. 2019 has been one of the wettest years on records. In the US farmland has been so wet that it could not be farmed. The Mississippi River has been so high that the Bonnet Carré spillway has had to “open” and release water downstream twice in 2019, when for many years it never releases water. The releases sent downstream a torrent of more than one trillion gallons of water toward the gulf coast. Oysters and shrimp that thrive in their habitats along the gulf coast and provide livelihoods to many fishermen and women, and much needed food supplies for the region need saltwater to survive, not fresh water. So, they died off in record numbers destroying the fishing industry along the gulf coast in 2019.
With this background, the book, The Sixth Extinction, was a timely book in 2014 and is still a timely read today and forever.
In this excellent book, Elizabeth Kolbert has written three books; a history book regarding the first five extinctions, a documentary about the present state of how humans are destroying the earth and causing the “sixth extinction,” and a futurist-oriented book. The futurist section of the book is optimistic that humans can change their course and help save the earth. I return to this section of the book at the conclusion of this book review.
The First Five Extinctions
Throughout the book Kolbert documents the great work by great ecologists, entomologists, biologists, zoologists, biologists, and paleontologists who work in the most remote parts of the world to analyze sedimentary samples to extract the “history” of living beings from millions of years ago. In essence the process is simple. The earth gains layers of sediment over time. In some layers there are remains of many distinct animals. In other layers those animals have disappeared. Scientists do their best to come up with a theory as to why there is this die-off of animal and plant life, but often the record in the sediment only gives us a few clues.
About 450 million years ago there were the earliest land plants. In what is called the “End-Ordovician Extinction”, the first extinction, many died off. We know little as to what caused this first extinction, but all extinctions seem to be related to changes in temperature, changes in our oceans, and possibly changes in available sunlight. One theory is that “glaciation” period took over when CO2 levels dropped possibly due to mosses covering the land.
About 370 million years ago, before the earliest reptiles, there was another extinction, called the Late Devonian Extinction. This was the second extinction. Little is known about its cause, but many believe it could have been asteroid activity, changes in temperature on the earth, sea level changes, oxygen deprivation, or plate tectonics.
The third extinction was the “End Permian Extinction,” and took place around 252 million years ago. This extinction devastated both plant life and animal life on the planet. It was likely caused by a massive emitting of CO2 where seas warmed up by 18 degrees and became acidified. Reefs collapsed, marine life suffocated as oxygen levels dropped precipitously and this extinction took between 100,000 and 200,000 years to unfold. During this extinction 90% of the species in the world were eliminated. With the heating of the oceans, it is believed that this provided a breeding ground for bacteria to produced hydrogen sulfide, a poison to almost every species. Many scientists believe that a large crack opened up in the earth in Sibera and molten lava came up and covered much of the earth. This heated lava “cooked” rocks and CO2 was released in massive amounts.
The fourth extinction was the “Late Triassic Extinction,” and took place around 200 million years ago. Significant increases in ocean acidification are seen as one of the causes of this mass extinction.
After the fourth extinction, birds and flowering plants were found on the earth. And before the first primates were found on the earth, about 60 million years ago, there was the fifth extinction, the “End Cretaceous Extinction,” approximately 70 million years ago. This extinction was followed by the Ice Age soon after the first great apes inhabited the earth. Likely, the Fifth Extinction, at the end of the Cretaceous period, was likely caused by a huge asteroid hitting the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico that caused such a dust storm that sunlight was diminished causing the earth to become very cold.
The Sixth Extinction – The Current Event
Over the past 150 years there has been a startling observation. Human activity is killing off species after species, causing “extinctions.” Before Darwin’s time, and even during the early part of Darwin’s incredible scientific career, there was a belief that evolution “improved” plants and animals and this improvement killed off some species. This was called “survival of the fittest.”
However, it was also assumed that it took a very long time, sometimes millions of years for a single species to die off due to “survival of the fittest,” and “death to the unfit.” The contrast to today’s time is that the sixth extinction is occurring over hundreds of years, not thousands or millions of years that have been common with other “mass extinctions.”
The book cites the earliest published work predicting a causal relationship between increasing carbon emissions on earth through burning fossil fuels and increases in the earth and the oceans’ temperature. That first paper was written by Savante Arrhenius in 1896.
Kolbert takes the reader from one remote region of the world to another, and then another to study the disappearance (and apparent extinction) of certain types of frogs, mammals, trees, plants, birds, and insects. One of the ways that humans actively kill off species after species is through human travel, which transmits disease, fungi, and other bacteria which kill plants and animals quickly. Before humans traveled by boat, car, plane, and other means, it took thousands of years for some killer bacteria or fungi to travel across the globe. Now it takes hours.
The basic hypothesis of the book is that the “earth” is not just the water and land and subsurface and the atmosphere. The “earth” is an ecosystem of species and over time each species has carved out a unique and supportive role in the ecosystem for other plants, animals, water-based systems, and the atmosphere. Now that humans have conquered so much of land mass on the planet and use it to feed and power the human race, human activity is actively destroying species after species very quickly in geologic terms. In addition, humans are destroying the water, the land, the subsurface, and the atmosphere we call “earth.” The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent, and the concentration of methane, has more than doubled, in the last two centuries. And the amount of carbon, methane and greenhouse emissions is growing even today and projected to grow for at least another half-century.
The huge number of species on this earth is what we refer to as “diversity.” When one species is killed off, when one part of an ocean rises in its acid or carbon content, many other species die off quickly. While it used to take millions of years for a species to become extinct due to evolution, there is now acknowledgement that humans are rapidly killing off species after species. Kolbert uses the Mastodon and the great “Auks” as two great examples of humans killing off every last one of these animals in these species.
Not only are animals being destroyed. The deforestation of much of the earth has robbed the earth of its best “carbon capture and sequestration” system, and when trees are felled, by definition they are no longer able to store carbon, and carbon increases in the atmosphere.
As carbon increases, one-third of this increased level of carbon, or 150 billion metric tons of carbon, created by humans, has gone into the oceans, thus increasing acidification. Kolbert traveled to Castello Aragonese off Naples Italy where vents in the ocean spew out carbon dioxide. The gas bubbles up through the water, the temperature rises, and very little marine life exists in the area where the carbon is concentrated in the water. Thus, we have a solid glimpse into the future where the oceans will be so filled with carbon that they cannot support marine life, which is so instrumental in supporting human life.
The oceans are thirty percent more acidic than in 1800 and in 2100 will likely be 150% more acidic than when the industrial revolution began. In addition, to the carbon problem, when it comes to marine life, the over-fishing of Cod off the northeast US coast and other areas of overfishing have gone a long way to destroying not only the fish, but also the ecosystems the fish need to reproduce. Overfishing also promotes the growth of algae and algae compete with coral reefs. Our coral reefs will likely completely be out of existence before the end of the century.
The Future
The rapid heating up of the earth, the oceans, and the atmosphere, and the rising acidification of the oceans due to carbon emissions and the burning of fossil fuels is now a scientifically documented certainty. While some efforts to restrain the continuation of unacceptable levels of carbon pouring into the atmosphere are taking place, they are too little, and for many areas of the globe and species, too late. Some species will adapt. Many will not. Those who do adapt will move to a place where the climate was what they were used to, cooler waters, or trees that move up the mountain to higher elevations.
Water levels will rise and many populated areas will be underwater for such a great amount of time each year that they will become uninhabitable by human beings on a year round basis. Half of the species of the earth may not make it to 2100, and 30 percent of the species on the earth will be headed to unavoidable extinction by 2050.
For those who say this is all “naturally occurring phenomena” E.O. Wilson published the results of his research in this area in Scientific American and estimated that the current extinction rate was 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring rate. So much for the “business as usual” argument.
Passing laws like the Endangered Species Act of 1974 attacked the symptoms and some of the causes (over industrialization in sensitive areas), and now even that fundamental law is coming under attack from economic hawks who support economic growth now at the expense of the earth in the future.
Kolbert returns to the theme that it is the rate of change, the quickening of this extinction period over all others, that makes it so catastrophic. While humans are expected to “survive” as a species, life as we know it will be degraded into wars over fisheries, drought, wildfires, hot weather that causes deaths and misery, large population migrations and the political and social upheaval caused by “climate change refugees.”
The book concludes with an upbeat note that humans are causing the earth “not to be fine anymore” and humans can help fix the problems we are creating. Obviously, it will be too late for all of the coral reefs, the plants, insects, and animals that have gone extinct, and for areas that have run out of fresh water that sustains life.
Conclusion
What is missing from this book is any sense of the politics of this “sixth extinction.” Some political parties and people act as if this is not happening, the oceans are not rising, ice is not melting, species are not becoming extinct, and oceans are not becoming more acidic. Others who are concerned and acting to help “repair the earth we have damaged” are having trouble finding their voice although 99% of the world’s scientists agree that humans are a major cause of climate change and the destruction of so many species.
Until those who want to “repair the earth” by cutting carbon emissions significantly win the political argument, on a permanent basis, this earth will spiral downward toward even faster extinctions of species and harm to human life itself. This book provides no path forward to helping those the author supports find that convincing message so that opposition to efforts to reduce climate change and carbon/methane in the atmosphere is eliminated once and for all. Galileo was put in prison by the Church for saying the Earth revolved around the sun. The Church was wrong and now even the Church has no supporters of the sun revolves around the earth theory or belief.
Ultimately, humans are a function of what they we believe. Despite the “enlightenment,” humans still are guided by their beliefs and belief systems. If humans believe, or our leaders say, “the earth will be fine,” we are doomed.
Today is not the day for unsupported optimism about the future of the earth. Today, 2020 is the time for a new realism about the human-caused catastrophe that has already engulfed the earth and its waters, and is increasing daily toward an even more wretched state than now exists.
There are certainly great people working every day on discovering the damage humans are causing the earth and fixing it. There are not enough of them. Fixing the earth, reducing carbon and methane and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must become more than a cause, it must become a way of life that all people and governments support 365 days a year.