Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction

"Again, this is a wonderful book. It looks at the idea of extinction, which we take for granted now, and at a time when extinction was first becoming something that people talked about—in the post-Darwinian age, when we realised that there were life forms on Earth that weren’t with us any more, and the discovery—although I hate the word discovery—of bones that didn’t match anything on Earth that they knew. Those findings were revelations that made people rethink their relationship with the environment. She documents this in a compelling and very compassionate way. She also writes about its coincidence with the colonial project by European powers, and how this new paradigm of extinction, the idea of extinction, in a way made it okay for colonial powers to exterminate groups of people unlike them. So the first half of the book is about people, and the second half of the book is about animals. There’s a bit about plants in there as well, which I really appreciate, because plants often get left out of the history of extinction. She has a very nice chapter about the Wollemi pine, which was found in a remote gorge in the Blue Mountains in Australia as a ‘living fossil.’ It’s a book about the ramifications of science together with colonialism and how those two things came together to create some of the problems we still have today. I think, for me, the thread running through all of these books is that you cannot separate science from society. That the decisions we make in the cultural milieu in which we exist, in 100 years time, someone will look back on and think: My goodness, why did they do that?"