‘The Sixth Extinction’ , by Elizabeth Kolbert / A Sexta Extinção.

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

Without a Trace

‘The Sixth Extinction’ ,  by Elizabeth Kolbert

By AL GORE / FEB. 10, 2014 / http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/the-sixth-extinction-by-elizabeth-kolbert.html?_r=0

Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.

Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.

In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.

For example, we continue to use the world’s atmosphere as an open sewer for the daily dumping of more than 90 million tons of gaseous waste. If trends continue, the global temperature will keep rising, triggering “world-altering events,” Kolbert writes. According to a conservative and unchallenged calculation by the climatologist James Hansen, the man-made pollution already in the atmosphere traps as much extra heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. The resulting rapid warming of both the atmosphere and the ocean, which Kolbert notes has absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide we have produced, is wreaking havoc on earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems. It threatens both the web of living species with which we share the planet and the future viability of civilization. “By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”

The earth’s water cycle is being dangerously disturbed, as warmer oceans evaporate more water vapor into the air. Warmer air holds more moisture (there has been an astonishing 4 percent increase in global humidity in just the last 30 years) and funnels it toward landmasses, where it is released in much larger downpours, causing larger and more frequent floods and mudslides.

The extra heat is also absorbed in the top layer of the seas, which makes ocean-based storms more destructive. Just before Hurricane Sandy, the area of the Atlantic immediately windward from New York City and New Jersey was up to nine degrees warmer than normal. And just before Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, the area of the Pacific from which it drew its energy was about 5.4 degrees above average.

Our oceans, a crucial food source for billions, have become not only warmer but also more acidic than they have been in millions of years. They struggle to absorb excess heat and carbon pollution — which is why, as Kolbert points out, coral reefs might be the first entire ecosystem to go extinct in the modern era.

The same extra heat pulls moisture from soil in drought-prone regions, causing deeper and longer-lasting droughts. The drying of trees and other vegetation leads also to an increase in the frequency and average size of fires.

Food crops are threatened not only by more pests and the disruption of long-predictable rainy season-dry season patterns, but also by the growing impact of heat stress itself on corn, wheat, rice and other staples.

Earth’s ice-covered regions are melting. The vanishing of the Arctic ice cap is changing the heat absorption at the top of the world, and may be affecting the location of the Northern Hemisphere jet stream and storm tracks and slowing down the movement of storm systems. Meanwhile, the growing loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland is accelerating sea level rise and threatening low-lying coastal cities and regions.

Viruses, bacteria, disease-carrying species like mosquitoes and ticks, and pest species like bark beetles are now being pushed far beyond their native ranges. Everywhere the intricate interconnections crucial to sustaining life are increasingly being pulled apart.

This is the world we’ve made. And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us. The result is a clear and comprehensive history of earth’s previous mass extinctions — and the species we’ve lost — and an engaging description of the extraordinarily complex nature of life. Most important, Kolbert delivers a compelling call to action. “Right now,” she writes, “we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”

Kolbert expertly traces the “twisting” intellectual history of how we’ve come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we’ve come to recognize our role in it. When mastodon bones were first studied, in 1739, many scientists reasoned that the large and unique bones belonged to an elephant or hippopotamus. But in 1796, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier presented evidence of an entirely new theory: The bones belonged to a lost species from “a world previous to ours.” Cuvier collected and studied as many fossils as he could, eventually identifying dozens of extinct species, and over the next several decades, with the contributions of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, extinction evolved as a scientific concept.

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Since the origin of life on earth 3.8 billion years ago, our planet has experienced five mass extinction events. The last of these events occurred some 66 million years ago when a six-mile-wide asteroid is thought to have collided with earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous extinction event dramatically changed the composition of biodiversity on the planet: Marine ecosystems essentially collapsed, and about 75 percent of all plant and animal species disappeared.

Today, Kolbert writes, we are witnessing a similar mass extinction event happening in the geologic blink of an eye. According to E. O. Wilson, the present extinction rate in the tropics is “on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate” and will reduce biological diversity to its lowest level since the last great extinction.

This time, however, a giant asteroid isn’t to blame — we are, by altering environmental conditions on our planet so swiftly and dramatically that a large proportion of other species cannot adapt. And we are risking our own future as well, by fundamentally altering the integrity of the climate balance that has persisted in more or less the same configuration since the end of the last ice age, and which has fostered the flourishing of human civilization.

As early as the 1840s, scientists noticed large gaps in the fossil record — time periods in which earth’s biodiversity declined rapidly and could not be explained by a static system. Some scientists theorized that abrupt climate changes had caused past mass extinction events. But in the modern era, three factors have combined to radically disrupt the relationship between civilization and the earth’s ecosystem: the unparalleled surge in human population that has quadrupled our numbers in less than a hundred years; the development of powerful new technologies that magnify the per capita impact of all seven billion of us, soon to be nine billion or more; and the emergence of a hegemonic ideology that exalts short-term thinking and ignores the true long-term cost and consequences of the choices we’re making in industry, energy policy, agriculture, forestry and politics.

“People change the world,” Kolbert writes, and she vividly presents the science and history of the current crisis. Her extensive travels in researching this book, and her insightful treatment of both the history and the science all combine to make “The Sixth Extinction” an invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances, just as the paradigm shift she calls for is sorely needed.

Despite the evidence that humanity is driving mass extinctions, we have been woefully slow to adopt the necessary measures to solve this global environmental challenge. Our response to the mass extinction — as well as to the climate crisis — is still controlled by a hopelessly outdated view of our relationship to our environment.

Fortunately, history is full of examples of our capacity to overcome even the most difficult challenges whenever a controversy is finally resolved into a choice between what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. The anomalies Kolbert identifies are too glaring to ignore. She makes an irrefutable case that what we are doing to cause a sixth mass extinction is clearly wrong. And she makes it clear that doing what is right means accelerating our transition to a more sustainable world.

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

An Unnatural History

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Illustrated. 319 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $28.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert, review

The havoc humans have wreaked on our fellow species may be our undoing

By Philip Hoare6:00PM GMT 11 Mar 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10677720/The-Sixth-Extinction-An-Unnatural-History-by-Elizabeth-Kolbert-review.html

In the aftermath of the recent storms that have done so much to reshape the soft coast of southern England, I found a dead guillemot on the beach. It had died, like hundreds of others, from a combination of exhaustion, hunger and the unseen effects of pollution. As it lay there in the shingle, with its plump white belly and black back, stubby wings and leathery webbed feet, it resembled a northern penguin; an exotic bit of flotsam washed ashore from some far ocean, rather than the English Channel.

In one of the most affecting chapters in her remarkable book, American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert brings us face to face with the guillemot’s long lost relative: the great auk. During its brief acquaintance with humans – from the 16th century to the mid 19th – the auk, the original “penguin”, was so numerous that large flocks thronged entire outcrops of Iceland and Newfoundland.

These flightless birds, like the dodos, were ready for the taking, providing meat and mattress stuffing. “You do not give yourself the trouble of killing them,” reported an English sailor, “but lay hold of one and pluck the best… You then turn the poor penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leisure.”

The last hapless auk perished one June evening in 1844, strangled by Icelandic hunters. It joined a long line of animals driven to extinction by man, a line that is getting longer than the queue for a secret concert by Prince. By the latest estimation, one third of reef corals, one third of freshwater molluscs, one third of sharks and rays, a fifth of all reptiles, a quarter of all mammals and a sixth of all birds will go the way of the auk this century.

Oddly enough, extinction is a relatively new concept as far as humans are concerned – contemporaneous, ironically, with the Industrial Revolution that triggered our current period of global warming. It wasn’t until the 1790s that the French naturalist Georges Cuvier began to consider the provenance of fossilised megafaunas, wondering why these large beasts no longer stalked the Earth. By 1800, Cuvier had assembled a “fossil zoo” of 23 species that had existed in “a world previous to ours”.

Such evidence of mass extinction was slow to find supporters. Even Darwin was equivocal: “As we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world!” It wasn’t until the 1970s, when an American geologist, Walter Alvarez, found a narrow clay layer in the strata of an Italian hilltop, that the cause of the last great extinction was confirmed: a giant asteroid ended the Cretaceous period – and killed three quarters of all known species.

“The worst day ever on planet Earth” also gave us our evolutionary chance. “The reason this book is being written by a hairy biped, rather than a scaly one, has more to do with dinosaurian misfortune than with any particular mammalian virtue.”

Now, in our new era of the Anthropocene, we apes have used our skills to wreak havoc, despite the fact that our “great works” will be reduced to a future sedimentary layer the thickness of a cigarette paper.

Kolbert is a witty, deft writer with an eye for vivid colour. She takes us from sun-blistered desert islands on the Great Barrier Reef to the sopping Peruvian jungle, where she joins her guides chewing coca leaves to sustain her Andean trudge. But her most urgent warning is about the condition of our oceans.

Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide absorbed by the sea has increased by 30 per cent. The specific result of this is to prevent calcifiers – animals from corals to bivalves, and even some plants – from forming their structures, with disastrous effects for the marine food chain. The acidifying oceans mean that all coral reefs – which support up to nine million other species – will have dissolved within 50 years. Does that matter? It depends on what value you place on our world.

Natural history – from moas to the great whales, from Neanderthals to Hawaiian crows – bears witness to our voracious dominion, and shows how we have sowed the seeds of our own destruction. Kolbert concludes with a quote from the ecologist Paul Ehrlich: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.” Hers is a deadly message, delivered in elegant prose, and we can’t afford to ignore it.

A era do Homem e as suas consequências, na sexta extinção

O livro A Sexta Extinção é um guia detalhado da ação do Homem sobre o meio ambiente e as suas consequências. O cenário não é catastrófico, mas anda lá muito perto.

DIOGO QUEIROZ DE ANDRADE / 6-7-2014 / OBSERVADOR

As épocas geológicas definem a idade da terra, exatamente do mesmo modo como a infância, a adolescência ou a velhice definem a idade aproximada — e as características — de um ser humano. A principal premissa do livro A Sexta Extinção é que hoje vivemos numa nova era geológica, o Antropoceno, que se define pela alteração das condições de toda a biosfera pelos seres humanos. Para justificar a alteração radical do planeta, a autora Elizabeth Kolbert junta dois eventos aparentemente independentes entre si: as consequências da introdução de espécies invasoras em climas impreparados; e as alterações climáticas provocadas pela era industrial, que estão a ter impactos relevantes (e catastróficos)  nos oceanos, nas florestas, nos pólos e em toda a biodiversidade.

E é assim que Kolbert junta os pontos de um cenário trágico, em que a ação do homem é sentida ao ritmo avassalador em que as espécies estão a desaparecer. Por vezes é catastrofista, como quando espalha a ideia de que os ratos irão dominar o planeta (p.142), mas a maioria das vezes mantém o rigor científico, até porque o cenário que se apresenta é verdadeiramente dantesco — de que é bom exemplo a situação dos corais (p. 180). O livro mantém um registo de educação científica, conseguindo manter momentos de bom humor: Ao justificar porque não foram os anfíbios a herdar o planeta (p. 123), Kolbert explica que a “razão pela qual este livro está a ser escrito por uma bípede cabeluda, em vez de uma escamosa, tem mais a ver com a sorte dos dinossauros do que qualquer virtude particular dos mamíferos.”

Não por acaso, o termo “antropoceno” é da autoria de Paul Crutzen, um dos vencedores do Nobel concedido ao estudo dos efeitos da destruição da camada de ozono. Há vários exemplos das consequências das alterações climáticas no trabalho dos cientistas que são apresentados no livro, mas este vai mais longe, abordado também questões como a extinção das espécies (um termo desconhecido até ao século XVIII) e a discussão sobre a seleção natural darwinista.

Elizabeth Kolbert é uma jornalista norte-americana que esteve quinze anos no New York Times e está desde 1999 na New Yorker, tendo aproveitado algumas das viagens que fez para reunir material para este livro. E a obra é um caleidoscópio de esforços de conservação de habitats e espécies um pouco por todo o mundo. Começa no Panamá, onde uma estranha epidemia está a ceifar os sapos dourados, terminando em San Diego onde se tenta manter viva uma espécie de corvos havaianos que já só existe em cativeiro — pelo meio passa-se por uma pequena ilha na islândia que foi o último reduto do arau-gigante, pelo mar Tirreno onde se estuda a acidificação dos oceanos, por Albany onde os morcegos estão quase extintos e por Leipzig, onde se estuda a extinção do homem neardenthal às mãos do homo sapiens.

E é nesses relatos que fica óbvio o paradoxo assumido deste livro: nele mostra-se a ação criminosa do homem, através do esforço de conservação envidado pelo próprio homem. O que quer dizer que o livro se ocupa em apresentar um cenário catastrofista, assumindo que muitas das alterações efectuadas no Antropoceno são já inevitáveis, mas ao mesmo tempo dá margem para alguma esperança graças ao esforço de investigação e conservação feito pela comunidade científica. E a esperança mais relevante talvez venha mesmo de um conceito brilhante que é apresentado ao de leve no livro (p. 335): a eventual existência no ser humano de um gene fáustico, um gene criativo e artístico que tenha permitido a evolução do homem de neanderthal para o humano moderno. Talvez essa criatividade permita minorar o cenário catastrofista da sexta extinção.