The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

this were a different kind of book, I would.
Though many of the preceding chapters have been devoted to the
extinction (or near-extinction) of individual organisms—the Panamanian
golden frog, the great auk, the Sumatran rhino—my real subject has been
the pattern they participate in. What I’ve been trying to do is trace an
extinction event—call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene
extinction, or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction—and to
place this event in the broader context of life’s history. That history is
neither strictly uniformitarian nor catastrophist; rather, it is a hybrid of
the two. What this history reveals, in its ups and its downs, is that life is
extremely resilient but not infinitely so. There have been very long
uneventful stretches and very, very occasionally “revolutions on the
surface of the earth.”
To the extent that we can identify the causes of these revolutions,
they’re highly varied: glaciation in the case of the end-Ordovician
extinction, global warming and changes in ocean chemistry at the end of
the Permian, an asteroid impact in the final seconds of the Cretaceous.
The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a
massive volcanic eruption but “one weedy species.” As Walter Alvarez
put it to me, “We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused
by human beings.”
The one feature these disparate events have in common is change and,
to be more specific, rate of change. When the world changes faster than
species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops
from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda. To argue that
the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more
and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it
misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t
care. What matters is that people change the world.
This capacity predates modernity, though, of course, modernity is its
fullest expression. Indeed, this capacity is probably indistinguishable
from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness,