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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDon't Look Now.. Cataclysm Has Arrived: Man’s Inhumanity to Nature
This literally tears at my very soul, and probably yours too.. This is why we need leaders who really, really get it. There is absolutely no time left for political games. (and a shout out to Will Pitt, who gets it)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/books/the-sixth-extinction-on-endangered-and-departed-species.html?_r=0
The plight of doomed, extinct or nearly extinct animals is embodied in Elizabeth Kolberts arresting new book, The Sixth Extinction, by two touching creatures.
Suci, a 10-year-old Sumatran rhino who lives at the Cincinnati Zoo, is one of the few of her endangered species to be born anywhere over the past three decades. Efforts by her caregivers to get her pregnant through artificial insemination, Ms. Kolbert reports, have been complicated because female Sumatrans are induced ovulators: They wont release an egg unless they sense theres an eligible male around, and in Sucis case, the nearest eligible male is ten thousand miles away.
A Hawaiian crow (or alala) named Kinohi, one of maybe a hundred of his kind alive today, was born at a captive breeding facility more than 20 years ago and now lives at the San Diego Zoo. He is described as an odd, solitary bird, who does not identify with other alala, and has refused to mate with other captive crows, despite his human caregivers hope that he will contribute to his species limited gene pool. Hes in a world all to himself, the zoos director of reproductive physiology said of Kinohi. He once fell in love with a spoonbill.
In these pages, Ms. Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former reporter for The New York Times, uses Kinohi and Suci and the stories of other imperiled or already vanished species vividly to illustrate the fallout of what some scientists have called the sixth extinction caused not by some unstoppable force of nature (like a falling asteroid or plummeting temperatures) but by mankinds transformation of the ecological landscape.)
Ms. Kolbert wrote a lucid, chilling 2006 book about global warming (Field Notes From a Catastrophe), and in The Sixth Extinction, she employs a similar methodology, mixing reporting trips to far-flung parts of the globe with interviews with scientists and researchers. Her writing here is the very model of explanatory journalism, making highly complex theories and hypotheses accessible to even the most science-challenged of readers, while providing a wonderfully tactile sense of endangered (or already departed) species and their shrinking habitats. She writes as a popularizer or interpreter of material that has been excavated by an army of scientists over the years and, in many cases, mapped by earlier writers.
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Todays deadly change agent, Ms. Kolbert observes, is man himself. And by the end of this book, shes left us with a harrowing appreciation of the ways in which human beings have been altering the planet: hunting to death big mammals (like the mammoth or giant sloth or, more recently, elephants and big cats); introducing alien (sometimes invasive) species to regions where they disrupt a delicate ecological balance; and altering the geologic surface of the earth (damming major rivers, mowing down forests and cutting up habitats in ways that impede migration).
...more..
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)G_j
(40,366 posts)Herodotus already understood, over two millennia ago, a lesson we struggle with in modern times: that technology, neutral in itself, provides tools. Xerxes' men could build a great bridge. But Xerxes forgot what it was to be a man.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)In_The_Wind
(72,300 posts)KoKo
(84,711 posts)G_j
(40,366 posts)The dinosaurs were killed during the Fifth Extinction which scientists suspect was caused by an asteroid. Now, we are living through an epoch that many scientists describe as the Sixth Extinction, and this time, human activity is the culprit. As one scientist put it: We're the asteroid.
Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of the new book The Sixth Extinction. It begins with a history of the "big five" extinctions of the past, and goes on to explain how human behavior is creating a sixth one including our use of fossil fuels and the effects of climate change.
"We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach," Kolbert tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. " ... We're sort of unraveling that. ... We're doing, it's often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don't know what the end point is going to be."
Climate change was the subject of Kolbert's previous book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Her research for the new book took her around the world, to oceans, rain forests and mountains as well as a place nearly in her backyard where scientists are studying disappearing plants and animals.
"Amphibians have the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals," she writes. "But also heading toward extinction are one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and sixth of all birds."
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-extinction-are-humans-the-asteroid
PasadenaTrudy
(3,998 posts)reading her book..
G_j
(40,366 posts)a must read, but devastating.