The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“in the face of climatic change”: Thomas E. Lovejoy, “Biodiversity: What Is It?” in Biodiversity
II: Understanding and Protecting Our Biological Resources, edited by Marjorie L. Kudla, Don E. Wilson,
and E. O. Wilson (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 1997), 12.
CHAPTER X: THE NEW PANGAEA
“the water I find”: Charles Darwin, letter to J. D. Hooker, Apr. 19, 1855, Darwin
Correspondence Project, Cambridge University.
But the results, he thought: Charles Darwin, letter to Gardeners’ Chronicle, May 21, 1855,
Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge University.
The tiny mollusks: Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 385.
It was no mere coincidence: Ibid., 394.
“The continents must have shifted”: Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans,
translated by John Biram (New York: Dover, 1966), 17.
During any given twenty-four-hour period: Mark A. Davis, Invasion Biology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 22.
“mass invasion event”: Anthony Ricciardi, “Are Modern Biological Invasions an
Unprecedented Form of Global Change?” Conservation Biology 21 (2007): 329–36.
The poet Randall Jarrell: Randall Jarrell and Maurice Sendak, The Bat-Poet (1964; reprint, New
York: HarperCollins, 1996), 1.
It’s also been proposed: Paul M. Cryan et al., “Wing Pathology of White-Nose Syndrome in
Bats Suggests Life-Threatening Disruption of Physiology,” BMC Biology 8 (2010).
In 1916: This account of the Japanese beetle’s spread comes from Charles S. Elton, The Ecology
of Invasions by Animals and Plants (1958; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 51–53.
Roy van Driesche, an expert on invasive species: Jason van Driesche and Roy van Driesche,
Nature out of Place: Biological Invasions in the Global Age (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), 91.
Of the more than seven hundred species: Information on Hawaii’s land snails comes from
Christen Mitchell et al., Hawaii’s Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy (Honolulu: Department
of Land and Natural Resources, 2005).
“is precisely what Homo sapiens”: David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in
an Age of Extinctions (1996; reprint, New York: Scribner, 2004), 333.
it made up close to half the standing timber: Van Driesche and Van Driesche, Nature out of
Place, 123.
“not only was baby’s crib”: George H. Hepting, “Death of the American Chestnut,” Forest and
Conservation History 18 (1974): 60.
According to a study: Paul Somers, “The Invasive Plant Problem,”
http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dfg/nhesp/land-protection-and-management/invasive-plant-
problem.pdf.
Although earthworms are beloved: John C. Maerz, Victoria A. Nuzzo, and Bernd Blossey,