Cataclysm Has Arrived: Man’s Inhumanity to Nature

‘The Sixth Extinction" on Endangered and Departed Species

 By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Elizabeth Kolbert Barry Goldstein

The plight of doomed, extinct or nearly extinct animals is embodied in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 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 won’t release an egg unless they sense there’s an eligible male around,” and “in Suci’s 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 othercaptive crows, despite his human caregivers’ hope that he will contribute to his species’ limited gene pool. “He’s in a world all to himself,” the zoo’s 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 mankind’s 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.

Her book covers some ground that will be familiar to readers of books like “The Song of the Dodo” by David Quammen, “The Ghost With Trembling Wings” by Scott Weidensaul and the writings of the biologist Edward O. Wilson. It even borrows the title of a 1995 book by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, which also addressed the story of the previous five mass extinction events and the human role in the so-called sixth.

 Suci, a 10-year-old Sumatran rhino at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Al Behrman/Associated Press

 

Please continue this article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/books/the-sixth-extinction-on-endangered-and-departed-species.html?_r=0

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"Warming today is happening at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and it's fallout looks to be devastating. It is estimated that 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 a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in the lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys." - Elizabeth Kolbert