The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.57 (673 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B00FZ45FB0 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 563 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-03-29 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A Remembrance of Things Present Matt Mansfield Ah, the good old days: remember cars that got maybe 13 miles per gallon, sci-fi movies about alien things crashing into Earth to be defeated by military know-how, big game hunting safaris with triumphant pictures, whale steaks on the new food menu, cute bleached coral and lacquered fish for home decoration, traveling abroad was exotic - almost a once-in-a-lifetime experience!Sure you do. And if you're still a little wistful for those times, Elizabeth Kolbert's 2014 book, "The Sixth Extinction," is not going to be very satisfying. It may sound like a new cinema offering but it is far, far from it."The S. Kolbert spends way too much time going into painful detail about the people she meets First, I think everyone should read this book to understand the history of extinction in the world. However, I do not feel the author did a thorough job in demonstrating human's impact on Earth and how it should be avoided. Kolbert spends way too much time going into painful detail about the people she meets, how they are dressed, their personalities, but really misses the mark when it comes to providing the causation to humans. For example, in a chapter about the wooly mammoth, a great deal of time is spent on describing the life of the mammoth, but the chapter ends with a few sentences that basically. Another Important Wake-Up Call In Elizabeth Kolbert’s fascinating tour of our biosphere, I learned again how interdependent and vulnerable all species of flora and fauna are. I enjoyed this book on several levels. I haven’t studied science in many years so it helped me brush up on different aspects of geology, biology, and zoology (with a few assists from Wikipedia when I needed more info). It also synthesized in a very readable format the many crises posing an existential threat to life on our planet.The introductory chapters set the context and show the way extinction events have been viewed historically, including the
In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. This time around, the cataclysm is us. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. A ma