The Sixth Extinction

"We are now the single most important agent of change in global ecology."

"The sixth extinction is significant because we are causing it. That is scary to us. We’re driving species extinct in every habitat across the planet, particularly oceans. We have not slowed down the rate of population growth and spread and use of habitat and resources and it’s a frightening thought: perhaps we are on the verge of another one of these events where we lose most of the diversity of life on Earth. Earth will recover, it might take ten to a hundred million years to do so – as E. O. Wilson points out in his books – and perhaps we will go extinct as well. I think that that is one extinction that we can probably get most people to care about. It depends how you feel about biodiversity. If you care only about humans then maybe we should be worried. In the past, life on Earth recovered. Extinctions were mostly caused by catastrophic events. We are a catastrophic event for this planet – like asteroid impacts that caused the dinosaur extinction. The Earth recovers and the species that were dominant prior to whatever that catastrophic event was go extinct and other types of species, other lineages, rise and become dominant. I think that is probably what we have to fear – that the dominant species goes extinct. But the planet will be fine, eventually."

"Well… even if we’re not technically in a mass extinction event like the one that did in the dinosaurs, it’s clear we are in the midst of a crash in species diversity and population size that is so devastating as to influence the operation of the Earth system as we know it. We’ve heard this quite a lot over the years, but Kolbert’s book brought it home in a more intimate, and a more damning way. There’s a calmness, and a detachedness in her writing that makes it that much more powerful and affecting (the same is true in her most recent book too, Under a White Sky ). She paints a picture of the global catastrophe but focuses on the stories of a handful of individual species, such as the golden frog and the Sumatran rhino, and this really drives home the message: we are on the brink here. I could also have chosen EO Wilson’s Half Earth , or the epic and compelling Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince. Huge. A monstrous amount of the planet is now given over to making food for us, and most damagingly, making meat for us. A quarter of the ice-free land on the planet is used to rear animals for us to eat. But the process of making beef is so inefficient that raising cattle takes up 83 per cent of global farmland. The Climate Focus think tank found that 26,700 square kilometres of forest are cleared each year to graze cattle and grow crops to feed livestock. This means that in terms of land-clearance, cattle are the single biggest destroyer of the planet’s ecosystems. It’s all down to the insatiable demand for beef. In the US, people on average eat 120 kg of beef per year. That figure is 4kg in India and 17kg in Kenya, but is growing and is predicted to rise by 70 per cent in the next 30 years. It’s crazy numbers. Meat production is already completely unsustainable, it can’t possibly grow more. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Plus food wastage. If ‘food waste’ was a country, it would be in third place in the list of worst contributors to greenhouse gases. It’s shocking, disturbing and under-appreciated, I think. The whole problem is very complex and tricky—not least because no one likes being told what they can and can’t eat. It’s why we need to invest in plant-based meat substitutes and lab-grown animal products. People can then happily—and sustainably—sate their desires for meat, fish and cheese."

"Kolbert, for example, is trying to tell us that climate change is the defining issue of our time, a view that I share."

""The Sixth Extinction," by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (and the more recent book of the same title by Elizabeth Kolbert). We are in deep trouble as a species."