1794

Pruners in Hand

by
Scope Correspondent

A review of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Henry Holt and Co, 2014
336 pages

Plectostoma sciaphilum was always hard to find. The pea-sized microsnail lived only in one place, atop a limestone hill in Eastern Malaysia. It spent its days chewing on leaf litter and toting around a shell that, in photos, resembles a soft-serve ice cream cone lit from the inside. Photos are all we have, because P. sciaphilum is gone now—the last of its kind was recently blasted to smithereens, along with the hill it lived on, by a cement conglomerate intent on the limestone within.

Throw it on the pyre. The snail is one of a score of species declared extinct in 2014, and thousands more—large and small, from all Earth’s corners—are being dragged toward the same fate. This is the doom-soaked purview of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, published last year and recent winner of the Pulitzer prize. If, as P. sciaphilum proves, her book is already slightly out of date, it tells stories that will remain relevant for as long as our particular species stays in charge.

The tree of life first sprouted about 4.6 billion years ago. For the most part, it has branched out steadily, as new species evolve faster than they are lost. It takes unusual circumstances to reverse this rule, and staggering ones—the arrival of an asteroid, or the movement of a megacontinent—to lop whole limbs off the tree. These events are called mass extinctions: times when, as Kolbert explains, “instead of a background hum” of irreversible death, “there’s a crash.” As far as we know, the planet suffered five such crashes before humans showed up.

We are the sixth, and latest, staggering circumstance. Were business going as usual, you’d expect a mammal species to call it quits about once every seven hundred years. Since 1500 AD, we’ve lost eighty-five. It’s as though we were born with pruners in hand.

Half of The Sixth Extinction is dedicated to mapping out how this happened—the many ways in which humanity, with its particular abilities, has literally changed the world. By burning fossil fuels, leveling ecosystems, and transporting species across long distances, we are “running geologic history backwards and at high speed.” And when the world changes too fast, some of its inhabitants get left behind. “This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda,” Kolbert explains.

Kolbert tracks these categories of change across and between continents. She follows forest ecologists into mountainous Peru to learn about climate change: how it shifts temperature and rainfall patterns, and strands trees in habitats they can’t handle. She attends a bat census in New York and watches a crowded cave empty out as its inhabitants succumb, little by little, to a fungal disease from across the ocean. She snorkels with worried coral experts in the acidifying Great Barrier Reef and searches in vain for rainforest birds, whose habitats have been chopped up by development and logging.

These adventures follow a pattern. Kolbert arrives in a locale, meets some experts, and is led into the thick of things. She learns what is in trouble and why, and how those experts are trying to study or reverse its decline. If this starts to get repetitive, it also makes visceral a universality she states outright: “Such is the scope of the changes taking place,” she says, “that I could have gone pretty much anywhere” and come out with nearly the same book.

Kolbert also reaches back in time, heading a series of museum and fossil digs to learn how ancient man compares to today’s model. Through these historical explorations, Kolbert argues that the scale of contemporary human-caused extinction is a difference of degree, not of kind. Men killed off mastodons and Neanderthals without the help of automatic weapons, or bulldozers, or capitalism. “Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature,” she says, “it’s not clear that he ever really did.”

Humanity’s propensity to cause extinction may be as old as we are, but our ability to diagnose it is surprisingly new. The death of an entire species was not considered possible until the late eighteenth century, when the French anatomist Georges Cuvier realized that Paris’s natural history collections were full of bones he couldn’t match with anything living. There must have been, he realized, “a world previous to ours,” one full of creatures lost to time, killed off by “events too terrible for human imagining.”

The other half of The Sixth Extinction traces the expansion and refinement of Cuvier’s theory, as well as the gradual discovery of our own involvement. Kolbert brings understated immediacy even to moments she didn’t experience, whether she’s describing Darwin’s concern for dwindling Galapagos tortoises or chemist Paul Crutzen’s spontaneous coinage, during a lab meeting, of an entirely new era: “At the next coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of conversation.”

Kolbert, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, is a reporter through and through. Her quotes are well-chosen, and the dedicated, innovative, and often flummoxed scientists she follows provide emotional cores for each chapter, whether they’re imagining the lives of ancient mollusks or arranging honeymoons for fickle rhinos. Her descriptions are evocative: Panamanian Golden Frogs are “taxicab yellow with dark brown splotches” and move like “drunks trying to walk a straight line,” and one endangered tree has flowers that “smell like burnt sugar when in bloom.” Her comparisons are as playful as they are exact: global species transport is “a souped-up version of plate tectonics, minus the plates,” and pitting an introduced fungus against an untrained bat immune system is like “bringing a gun to a knife fight.”

But—as with the talented, terrifying animal she writes about—Kolbert’s strengths come with liabilities. Her razor reportorial instincts block her, somewhat, from doing true emotional justice to her subject matter. It is (it must be) difficult to look such a large crisis in its many Xed-out eyes, but Kolbert never wails or wallows. Her responses are always measured and in service of a larger point. She’ll describe the “odd sort of pride” she experiences when a scientist she is with discovers a new species, but we never hear about what it feels like to spend years grappling with all of this death. We were smart enough to get ourselves into this mess, and, thanks to people like Kolbert, we’re starting to put together what kind of mess it is. But there is so much understanding we still lack. And it’s the kind most likely to save the rest of the microsnails, and the rest of the world, and us.

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