The Sixth Extinction
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Summary
Elizabeth Kolbert argues that the planet is living through a sixth mass extinction, driven this time not by an asteroid or a shift in the climate acting alone but by human activity, and that a reader alive today is witnessing an event on the scale of the five that came before, each of which erased a huge share of life on Earth. The book moves in thirteen chapters between deep history and Kolbert's own fieldwork, visiting a Panamanian rainforest where a fungal disease called chytrid has wiped out golden frog populations, and reconstructing the extinction of the ammonites at the end of the Cretaceous period and of the American mastodon more recently, tracing how naturalists first came to understand extinction as a real phenomenon at all rather than something that could not happen.
Kolbert also covers the Great Barrier Reef and the ocean acidification threatening it, the last Sumatran rhinos, of which roughly a hundred remained when she wrote, the fungal blight that destroyed the American chestnut across the forests of the eastern United States, and even the disappearance of the Neanderthals, absorbed and outcompeted by modern humans rather than driven out by any single catastrophe. The book grew out of a 2009 New Yorker piece Kolbert wrote on vanishing amphibians, and that same close, specific, on the ground reporting style carries through the entire book rather than staying at the level of abstract statistics.
Kolbert closes with cautious hope rather than despair, arguing that humans are now, whether they intend to or not, deciding which evolutionary paths get shut off permanently and which survive. It suits a reader who wants hard science delivered through vivid, specific field reporting rather than through projection and modeling alone, and one willing to sit with genuinely bleak evidence before Kolbert allows any room for hope.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Elizabeth Kolbert the 2015 Prize for General Nonfiction for The Sixth Extinction, published in 2014 by Henry Holt and Company. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award the year before and later won the Massachusetts Book Award. The finalists for the Pulitzer were Anand Gopal's No Good Men among the Living, on the war in Afghanistan, and Evan Osnos's Age of Ambition, on contemporary China.
Al Gore and Michiko Kakutani both reviewed the book prominently in The New York Times, and it appeared on Bill Gates's summer reading list in 2014, the year before it won the Pulitzer. The estimate Kolbert reports from the scientific literature, that twenty to fifty percent of living species could be lost by the year 2100, has been cited widely in subsequent climate and conservation writing, and the book is now commonly assigned in university courses on conservation biology and environmental journalism alike.