The extinction happening now

The geological record shows five moments when life on Earth was catastrophically reduced — the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous extinctions. Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, published in 2014, makes the case that we are currently living through a sixth.

Kolbert spent years travelling to research stations, coral reefs, and ancient fossil sites to report on species under pressure. She visits the Panamanian cloud forest to find frogs wiped out by a fungal disease spread partly by the global trade in amphibians. She dives on the Great Barrier Reef and documents the acidification threatening coral systems that took millions of years to build.

The book's power lies in its specificity. She is not describing a future scenario; she is documenting losses already recorded. The great auk, the Sumatran rhino, the golden toad — species disappearing at a rate Kolbert estimates is between one hundred and a thousand times the background extinction rate.

Her argument is not that humans are uniquely evil but that we are uniquely effective at disrupting habitats, moving species across natural barriers, and altering the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans simultaneously.

Kolbert does not offer easy comfort. The Sixth Extinction is a work of witness, written with the rigour of a New Yorker journalist and the patience of a scientist. It asks the reader to sit with an uncomfortable fact: the current crisis is not a prediction but a record.