Lord Reiseng's Rambles

Oct 28

The Sixth Extinction

I don’t consider myself a misanthrope, but whenever I read a book about climate change, my immediate emotional response can be summed up as: “KILL ALL HUMANS.”
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert is an excellent book. It also won the Pulitzer Prize, which is only one of many reasons why you should read it. It details the current trend of mass extinction throughout all corners of the globe, a trend caused directly by human activity. Scientists are increasingly using the word “Anthropocene” to describe this new epoch, and it’s just as dramatic (if not more so) than the five mass extinctions which have previously occurred on Earth.
There’s honestly nothing that we, the human race, can do about the species which have already been lost. There are strong hints to suggest that even before industrial times we were responsible for the extinction of almost all species of megafauna - the mammoths, the woolly rhinos, and so on. We had sex with Neanderthals and somehow drove them to extinction at the same time, just like a bad boyfriend. Much as we might be inclined to romanticise the past and think of our ancestors as being in tune with nature, the truth is that we’ve been wreaking havoc on ecosystems from the time we’ve been, well, human.
Yes, there are things that we may be able to do in the here and now to protect the ecosystem. There are lots of things we are doing right now, from building conservation parks to developing alternative energy sources. Ironically, our human capacity to empathise and cooperate with each other is precisely the X factor that has enabled us to become such a destructive force of (un)nature. It would be easy to moralise about the role humanity has played in extinctions, but that would also miss the point about why these extinctions have happened at all.
The Sixth Extinction does not end with a list of suggestions for what humans can do to save the planet. Plenty of other climate change books do that already, and quite effectively at that. The Sixth Extinction is not so much a call to action as it is a document of human legacy. And it achieves this effect, not by telling a narrative about humans but by telling it about animals, oceans and entire ecosystems that have evolved over the span of millions of years. It answers basic questions like why we know what we know, what the fossil records tell us about the extinctions of the past and how they differ from the extinctions of today.
The takeaway message of the book is, as you can expect, rather sober, but it’s not all doom and gloom. For its subject matter, it really is a surprisingly breezy read. Kolbert is a journalist, not a scientist, and so she manages to convey a whole lot of dense information with a non-specialist touch. Her account of the sixth mass extinction is frequently laced with descriptions of her visits to different ecosystems and the passionate scientists she meets there. It’s both enlightening and (there’s no other way to put this) utterly humanising. But yes, it did make me want to kill all humans, unfortunately. That’s one surefire way to save the planet.

Oct 26

[video]

(via runedevros)

hanayo-and-rice:

xyzismywaifu:
マーメイド凛ちゃん [Mermaid Rin-chan]

(via lightningsabre)

[video]