I am interested in history. This wasn't something I expected earlier in my life: I never excelled at it, nor really had a lot of interest in my history classes all the way up through college. It wasn't until I was hired to teach history along with my English skills that I started seeing the appeal of history. With that growing (albeit still nascent) ability of appreciating nonfiction came a renewed passion for prehistory. There's always been a love for dinosaurs in my nerdy heart, but it really increased thanks to my training on understanding history. And, in a lot of ways, that's not surprising: Prehistory is still history. Additionally, I love science fiction, with its predictions and predilections about the future, the ways in which mankind may (but likely won't) go. From The Expanse to Battlestar Galactica to Star Wars and Star Trek, I like seeing what may be. The future is an exciting place to be. And, since I won't be going there myself--no warp drive is likely in my lifetime, alas--it's great to visit the future, if only in my imagination. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert is a future-history-prehistory. By that I mean that it looks at the deep-past extinctions--a topic I'm interested in not only because of its connection with dinosaurs, but also because I'm trying to write a story about dinosaurs and need to fill the well with extinction data--and describes the evidences of them. Of the big five extinctions (Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian-Triassic (part of when almost 90% of life on earth died off), Triassic-Jurassic, and Cretaceous-tertiary), none perfectly follows the others. That is, though there are common threads, there's never a root cause that matches its fellows. The most famous mass extinction, the Cretaceous-tertiary, happened because of an extraterrestrial impact. Though there's plenty of evidence to show massive volcanic activities during the time of the death of the dinosaurs, it has become more and more clear that the huge loss of life that transpired about 66 million years ago came because of a rock the size of Manhattan slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula. This is unique to the K-Pg event. We don't see the Great Dying (the Permian-Triassic) transpiring because of space rocks. That's what I mean by the idea of it being a book about prehistory. But it also talks about the minor extinctions, brought on because of human interaction with the environment, that can be traced throughout the recorded history that we have created. Kolbert talks about all sorts of species that have been dying off at an accelerated rate ever since we've been able to track these things. Some of the extinctions came about because of happenstance--a change in the environment brought about by humans accidentally wiped out a species. Others, however, were deliberately hunted to extinction, like the flightless moa. Their extinction coincided with the arrival of humans to New Zealand about 600 years ago. More recent examples also abound throughout her work. As Kolbert walks through the causes, effects, and implications of the sundry extinctions--all minor, in the grand scheme of things, yet taken as a whole add up to something really unsettling--she shifts from history toward future-history. What are the possibilities if human behavior continues in the way that it has? Like every other mass extinction, there's a unique factor, something that makes a difference. In the case of the current mass extinction, that factor is human behavior. Part of what might make the claim difficult for some to process is the brevity of a human lifespan. The entirety of written human history is so short that the same time frame, rolled forward from the catastrophic event at the Chicxulub Crater, probably still saw the earth covered with dinosaurs. In other words, these events are geologically rapid, but as far as day to day? Well, they take time. Nevertheless, even within the finite perception of what we can perceive in the world, it's clear that we have a significantly less diverse Earth now than we did in the past. While the viability of the planet for human life* is in question, there's no concern about losing "all life on Earth". If nothing else, learning more about these extinctions--and the background extinctions that are accelerating around us--has helped me to see that, in the immortal words of Dr. Ian Malcolm: ---
* Since I'm a Mormon, I probably should point out that my religious tradition teaches a millenarian concept of "the end of the world" that takes the Book of Revelation pretty seriously. I can't pretend to know what God is thinking in those terms, of course, but I don't think it's impossible that a Second Coming could come about simply because we've poisoned our world. It's a deus ex machina ending, but it might be the most fitting. Nothing can save us from ourselves: Only God can do that. Though I won't be around to see the continued ramifications of the ways that humans have manipulated the world, it's fair to assume that things will get a lot worse long before they get better. In this, science and religion agree. Comments are closed.
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