Are You Reading It Yet?

I'm sure, due to all my hyperbole and ultimatums,  you are well into Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, but if you haven't finished, don't get discouraged, as the book has a slightly upbeat ending-- though the evidence is nearly incontrovertible that not only are we inadvertently killing off species at a unprecedentedly rapid rate -- with climate change, ocean acidification, and a reshuffling of native and invasive species -- but there was probably no time in the Anthropocene when humanity was "one with nature,"as the "pulse" of colonization of primitive people's across the globe went hand in hand with a devastating loss of super-awesome mega-fauna -- nothing makes more more melancholy than the list of animals early North American natives hunted to to extinction (glyptodonts, cave bears, dire wolves, wooly mammoths and rhinoceros, giants beavers, giant sloths, giant camels and llamas, American lions, American cheetahs, etc. etc.) . . . and not only that but we also wiped out our main humanoid competition, the neanderthals, but due to the "leaky-replacement hypothesis" and some very adventurous swinging souls, the good news is that present day homo sapiens posses 1-4 % neanderthal genes -- so the neanderthals aren't totally extinct, they survive inside of us . . . and while there may be no way to stop this sixth extinction, Kolbert admires the folks that are trying, as these are the kind of people who will "give a Hawaiian crow a hand-job," stick their arm up a Sumatran rhinos anus, and cryogenically freeze and preserve the genes of many species just in case we can resurrect them in the future . . . but it all may be too little, too late, but perhaps next time around, in a few million years when creatures have had a chance to evolve diversely once again -- if we are still in the picture-- we will do a better job of it.



6 comments:

zman said...

Aren't humans just as much a part of the ecosystem as a woolly rhino or a giant beaver? Why should we frown upon some ancient hunter-gatherer's need for protein?

Clarence said...

I'm still reading David Coperfield by Edmund Wells. And Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying.

rob said...

i've got at least two years worth of 'sentences' of dave to get through before i can read any books.

zman said...

I'm watching David Coppafeel.

Dave said...

it just makes me sad that they killed all the really big mammals. although we'll probably get eaten by a grizzly this summer in yellowstone, that will show me . . .

Anonymous said...

Summer traffic in Yellowstone is worse than exit 8a. Get pumped.

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