Overview
Elizabeth Kolbert documents the ongoing mass extinction event caused by human activity.
Kolbert, a New Yorker writer, published The Sixth Extinction in 2014. The book argues that human activity is causing the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, comparable in scale to the five earlier ones (most famously the one that killed the non-avian dinosaurs). It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2015.
Key Ideas
We are the asteroid
Human activities are driving extinction rates hundreds of times above the natural rate.
Extinction is irreversible
Once a species is gone, its unique heritage is lost forever.
Amphibians are the canary
Frogs are disappearing worldwide, indicating the broader ecological catastrophe.
Who should read this
Readers who want environmental writing grounded in specific field reporting rather than abstract policy argument. Kolbert visits researchers in the field — Panamanian golden frogs, Great Barrier Reef corals, Peruvian jungles — and builds her argument from cases rather than aggregate claims. The reporting is the book's distinctive feature.
Who might skip it
Skip if you're already in the environmental field and know the material — the book is pitched at informed general readers rather than specialists. Skip also if you're feeling particularly fragile about climate news; Kolbert doesn't soften her findings.
The verdict
The clearest, most accessible book on the extinction crisis I have read. Kolbert writes without hysteria or false consolation, and the book's cumulative weight — case after case of species vanishing — is more persuasive than any summary of the science could be. Required reading for anyone serious about biodiversity loss.
"We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed."
— Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
If you liked this
Under a White Sky, Kolbert's 2021 follow-up on geoengineering. The End of Nature by Bill McKibben for the founding climate book.