That's what happens when you do subdue the earth

Since there is life on Earth, there have always been mass extinctions that reduced biodiversity dramatically. Five of them were so acute that they are in the English language today as the Big Five; the last and most famous before about 66 million years ago when, after a comet half of all species disappeared including the dinosaurs.

And when our ancestors thus began to develop her amazing brain, they sat in the passage, which the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert called the Sixth Extinction. It began when suddenly the man could kill animals that was bigger, stronger and faster than him. The end, for example, of mammoth and mastodon, and the saber-toothed tiger, the so namely ran out of prey. Today, we are now experiencing a climax, in which we no longer need to actively kill the animals (which we do of course, and on a large scale), but simply deprive them of livelihood. This is in any case much more efficient, but it will probably take foolishly ourselves. (And that in turn is likely the world, so it because this would be able to take some relief to the attention.)

Elizabeth Kolbert deals first with the great catastrophes of the Earth and then, in the most spectacular only at second glance examples where things are headed explained. "Cultivation" of the land, global warming, acidification of the oceans or the Columbian Exchange (the intercontinental, often fatal exchange of species) to change the world at a pace at which evolution has no chance to get behind. What does this mean for our future, one can imagine without much imagination. Whether it be, as some scientists suspect, actually this is the fact that Homo sapiens adopted and considerably more agile Rattus rattus Art world domination takes, will prove.

"The Sixth Extinction" is another excellent example of technically sound, yet easily understandable, anecdotally loosened science journalism, as it is in the English-speaking world has always been good custom. Elizabeth Kolbert lets the researchers themselves have their say and summarizes very clearly the state of scientific knowledge together without paint the moral lecture. They also need not: the examples speak all by itself. And I can not say that they are particularly widespread optimism also - that would be given the precarious situation and the weakness of action of those who could it possibly change something pretty inappropriate.

Addendum: Elizabeth Kolbert won for "The Sixth Extinction" this year's Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.