What I’ve been trying to do is trace an extinction event—call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction, or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction—and to place this event in the broader context of life’s history. That history is neither strictly uniformitarian nor catastrophist; rather, it is a hybrid of the two. What this history reveals, in its ups and its downs, is that life is extremely resilient but not infinitely so. There have been very long uneventful stretches and very, very occasionally “revolutions on the surface of the earth.”
