The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert

The history of life thus consists of “long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.”

This sort of intercontinental reshuffling, which nowadays we find totally unremarkable, is probably unprecedented in the three-and-a-half-billion-year history of life.

“When you find one thing that depends on something else that, in turn, depends on something else, the whole series of interactions depends on constancy,”

Thus a single supertanker (or, for that matter, a jet passenger) can undo millions of years of geographic separation.

One way to try to answer the question “What makes us human?” is to ask “What makes us different from great apes?” or, to be more precise, from nonhuman apes, since, of course, humans are apes.

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes that we’re willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos and handjobs on crows.

INSECTS were among the first animals to colonize land. This happened more than four hundred fifty million years ago, during the early Ordovician period,

“We’re going to decarbonize.” But, he added, “it’s going to be too late for a lot of the organisms I love.”