The word “fossil” was used to describe anything dug from the ground, as in “fossil fuel”. Later, in Roman times, Pliny’s Natural History includes descriptions of animals that are real, or fabulous, but none that are extinct. Until this moment in the western intellectual tradition, not even Aristotle (in his 10-volume History of Animals) had so much as considered the possibility that animals had a past. While the concept, as she puts it, “may be the first scientific idea that kids have to grapple with”, as they play with their toy dinosaurs, Kolbert instructs that, actually, it’s a comparatively recent idea that dates to Enlightenment France. Part of Kolbert’s concern is to educate the modern reader in the history of mass extinction. In 13 emblematic episodes, exquisitely narrated, Kolbert, a magazine journalist with the New Yorker, explores the possibility of our impending doom through the lives of, for instance, the Panamanian golden frog, the Sumatran rhino and the black-faced honeycreeper of Maui, “the most beautiful bird in the world”.

Part of Kolbert’s concern is to educate the modern reader in the history of mass extinction, a comparatively recent idea With this difference: the impending cataclysm is… us. Sure enough, in our postmillennial century, she finds that scientists around the world are now monitoring the next mass extinction, possibly the biggest devastation since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. The history of these catastrophic events, notes Kolbert, tends to be recaptured just as humanity comes to realise that it is about to cause another one. During the past half billion years, she tells us, there have been five mass extinctions on Earth, when “the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted”. Kolbert’s perspective is both awe-inspiring and fearsome, but utterly engrossing, as you’d expect from a book whose premise is “we’re all doomed”. On the opening page of her investigation into the future of our planet, Kolbert quotes the great biologist EO Wilson: “If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfilment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.” This warning note sets the mood for the 13 chapters that follow, an urgent contemporary report on “the sixth extinction”.

The sixth extinction book