Don't Look Now.. Cataclysm Has Arrived: Man’s Inhumanity to Nature [View all]

[G_j]

This literally tears at my very soul, and probably yours too.. This is why we need leaders who really, really get it. There is absolutely no time left for political games. (and a shout out to Will Pitt, who gets it)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/books/the-sixth-extinction-on-endangered-and-departed-species.html?_r=0


The plight of doomed, extinct or nearly extinct animals is embodied in Elizabeth Kolbert’s arresting new book, “The Sixth Extinction,” by two touching creatures.

Suci, a 10-year-old Sumatran rhino who lives at the Cincinnati Zoo, is one of the few of her endangered species to be “born anywhere over the past three decades.” Efforts by her caregivers to get her pregnant through artificial insemination, Ms. Kolbert reports, have been complicated because female Sumatrans are “induced ovulators”: “They won’t release an egg unless they sense there’s an eligible male around,” and “in Suci’s case, the nearest eligible male is ten thousand miles away.”

A Hawaiian crow (or alala) named Kinohi, one of maybe a hundred of his kind alive today, was born at a captive breeding facility more than 20 years ago and now lives at the San Diego Zoo. He is described as an odd, solitary bird, who does not identify with other alala, and has refused to mate with other captive crows, despite his human caregivers’ hope that he will contribute to his species’ limited gene pool. “He’s in a world all to himself,” the zoo’s director of reproductive physiology said of Kinohi. “He once fell in love with a spoonbill.”


In these pages, Ms. Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former reporter for The New York Times, uses Kinohi and Suci and the stories of other imperiled or already vanished species vividly to illustrate the fallout of what some scientists have called the sixth extinction — caused not by some unstoppable force of nature (like a falling asteroid or plummeting temperatures) but by mankind’s transformation of the ecological landscape.)

Ms. Kolbert wrote a lucid, chilling 2006 book about global warming (“Field Notes From a Catastrophe”), and in “The Sixth Extinction,” she employs a similar methodology, mixing reporting trips to far-flung parts of the globe with interviews with scientists and researchers. Her writing here is the very model of explanatory journalism, making highly complex theories and hypotheses accessible to even the most science-challenged of readers, while providing a wonderfully tactile sense of endangered (or already departed) species and their shrinking habitats. She writes as a popularizer — or interpreter — of material that has been excavated by an army of scientists over the years and, in many cases, mapped by earlier writers.

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Today’s deadly change agent, Ms. Kolbert observes, is man himself. And by the end of this book, she’s left us with a harrowing appreciation of the ways in which human beings have been altering the planet: hunting to death big mammals (like the mammoth or giant sloth or, more recently, elephants and big cats); introducing alien (sometimes invasive) species to regions where they disrupt a delicate ecological balance; and altering the geologic surface of the earth (damming major rivers, mowing down forests and cutting up habitats in ways that impede migration).

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