"One Weedy Species" - A Review of The Sixth Extinction

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


One would have to have been living under a rock, or the most extreme kind of isolation, if one hasn’t encountered the dire news about the state of several of Earth’s species. Everyday it seems like one more species dies off, or comes even closer to extinction. Estimates vary, but scientists claim that as many as two hundred species go extinct every day, or roughly around three species per hour. There are also hundreds of undiscovered species that could be going extinct before they are discovered, because they die off before scientists can find them and give them a name. These species are also part of the “three per hour” count, which means that there are lifeforms out there—lifeforms that could exist nowhere else except this planet—that disappear before we even know they exist, before we even know what it is they do. There are interesting philosophical questions about whether or not trees really fall if there’s no one there to hear them, but if an undiscovered species goes extinct, other, bigger things are bound to follow, because that’s how Nature works: everything works together, and if something dies off, others suffer too—humanity included, though perhaps not directly, nor immediately.

Given how prevalent the message about extinction is, and how much information is out there, it can be hard to filter the sources to find a clear, understandable summation of what extinction is, how it works, what its effects are, and what causes it. One would think that the Internet could give one all the information one could possibly want about extinction, but so much of it is either inaccessible because of paywalls; is written in jargon the average reader does not understand; or is just badly-written, period. What’s needed is a text that discusses extinction with scientific accuracy, while doing so in layman’s language and a compelling journalistic style.

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