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Search tags: Extinctions
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review 2014-03-07 14:49
Fascinating, eye opening, sobering
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - Elizabeth Kolbert

It sounds strange to say I enjoyed reading this book about the increasingly profound and potentially devastating impact humans are having on our home planet, with an especial focus on the animals and plants who share Earth with us, but enjoy it I did. It’s a riveting topic, the history of our world and our species, and Elizabeth Kolbert has the knack of writing about science so it retains all its natural fascination while still being accessible to laypeople. She takes the reader with her back in time and around the world as she accompanies researchers in places ranging from the Andes mountains to the Great Barrier Reef.

 

One particular fact has really stuck with me--as human activity increasingly homogenizes the global environment by transporting plants and animals all over the planet biodiversity is increasing on the small scale, so that where you live is likely to have more species than it did formerly, but because invasive flora and fauna can wipe out native plants and animals global biodiversity is rapidly shrinking as the total number of species on the Earth continues to dwindle. And that’s the point of the title, The Sixth Extinction. There have been five periods of mass extinction on our planet and some scientists are finding evidence indicating that we may be on the cusp of or even in the midst of a sixth wave of mass die offs, this one caused by the activities of humans, a chilling realization.

 

Source: jaylia3.booklikes.com/post/815502/fascinating-eye-opening-sobering
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review 2011-05-13 00:00
Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About the Fate of Earth's Largest Animals
Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About the Fate of Earth's Largest Animals - Sharon Levy Less than 15,000 years ago in an era that scientists refer to as “near time”, humans roamed the earth with megafauna like woolly mammoths, 8 foot long beavers and enormous saber tooth cats. These were creatures our ancestors knew intimately, and in Europe and Asia they made vivid cave paintings of the giant beasts. Then, seemingly all at once, most of the animals disappeared. The ones that survived shrank. Was it climate change? Human hunting? In this awe inspiring book Author Sharon Levy does a thorough job examining all sides of the extinction debate and the people involved in trying to solve the mystery. The answers might hold lessons for preserving today’s large animals, like elephants, tigers, bears, wolves and kangaroos. Since megafauna can have a beneficial impact on the environment, some scientists go as far as promoting “rewilding”, which in the American west would involve reintroducing the ancestors of formerly native Pleistocene animals like lions, elephants and camels. Others want to use the newly decoded woolly mammoth genome to bring them back to life with the help of modern elephants, their closest living cousins. While we may never have lions prowling the Great Plains again, this book is both informative and surprisingly thrilling.
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