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

[G_j]

6. awesome interview

HERE: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=275885377&m=275949683

The dinosaurs were killed during the Fifth Extinction — which scientists suspect was caused by an asteroid. Now, we are living through an epoch that many scientists describe as the Sixth Extinction, and this time, human activity is the culprit. As one scientist put it: We're the asteroid.

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of the new book The Sixth Extinction. It begins with a history of the "big five" extinctions of the past, and goes on to explain how human behavior is creating a sixth one — including our use of fossil fuels and the effects of climate change.

"We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach," Kolbert tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. " ... We're sort of unraveling that. ... We're doing, it's often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don't know what the end point is going to be."

Climate change was the subject of Kolbert's previous book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Her research for the new book took her around the world, to oceans, rain forests and mountains — as well as a place nearly in her backyard — where scientists are studying disappearing plants and animals.

"Amphibians have the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals," she writes. "But also heading toward extinction are one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and sixth of all birds."

http://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-extinction-are-humans-the-asteroid