The Sixth Extinction
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Five extinctions before us. We are the sixth. She documents it.
For you if
you want to understand the biodiversity crisis as something happening to specific creatures in specific places rather than an abstraction called extinction
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
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The planet has experienced five mass extinction events in its history — asteroid strikes, volcanic winters, catastrophic climate shifts. Kolbert spent years traveling with scientists to document the sixth, which is happening now and is caused entirely by one species. She visits a Panama research station watching amphibians vanish, a reef bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef, a cave in upstate New York where bats are dying by the millions, a site in the Peruvian Amazon where species are migrating uphill to escape heat. Each chapter is a different species, a different front in the same war. Pulitzer Prize winner. The most readable and most devastating account of what we are currently doing to the living world — not in the future but right now, species by species.
Where This Book Lives
Part of a Reading Journey
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky
One fish built the colonies, fueled the slave trade, then vanished.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Last Chance to See
Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine
He found the last ones. Some are gone now. He was funny about it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Fathoms: The World in the Whale
Rebecca Giggs
A whale died on her beach. The whole world was inside it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
