Reddit reviews The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
We found 19 Reddit comments about The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Henry Holt Company
You're right not to get worked up about it. It's just that it's an amazing example of the power of nukes.
And yes, the Earth's ecosystem has survived much worse over billions of years, but that's an empty argument. It's like saying that there's nothing to be bothered about when you're exposed to asbestos, because your country's population will be fine. You're not concerned about the country's population, you're concerned about your own health.
We're not concerned about the ecosystem for its own sake, we're concerned about our own species's wellbeing. Nuclear weapons are particularly bad for people.
And yes, ecologically there are a lot worse things going on. I'm not saying there aren't.
As I said at the beginning, the point isn't how terribly nuclear weapons tests have already poisoned everything, it's that it's amazing that trace amounts of them have already spread all around the globe--and that's a warning that continued use of nukes could lead to notable harm. Harm has been mitigated by things like the switch to exclusively underground testing, followed by the complete ban on nuclear weapons tests. It's silly to downplay the danger of nukes when the only thing keeping it in check is the wariness of the world's nations about nukes.
Apparently you've been living under a rock! If you really want data, here is where I'd start:
Climate change The IPCC provides scenarios. The worst of these has avg temperatures at 6C above baseline. It's generally agreed that this level of temperature increase could not happen w/o collapse of civilization as we know it. I'd recommend the works by Martin Weitzman as an intro. This podcast with Weitzman explains how dire the situation is. I like pointing people here because these are conservative economists sounding the alarm on how bad climate change really is.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/weitzman/home
Mass Extinction We are currently living in the 6th mass extinction events, this one caused by humans. Here's a recent popular book on the topic.
Human Impact on the Ocean I like this video by Jeremy Jackson as a good starter.
There are three camps of people as I see it:
I always send people to the classic: The Limits to Growth. The conclusions of this book still hold. It's amazing how few people have even heard of this book.
https://www.clubofrome.org/report/the-limits-to-growth/
If you want an updated take on Limits to Growth, there are updates, like this 2012 video from the Smithsonian by Dennis Meadows.
Beyond all this standard stuff, I like to point people to two other books related more to social collapse:
I personally believe we are headed towards a 21st century collapse, and there is a social aspect to this beyond all the technical stuff. If humanity survives (which many people argue it will not), we will need to transition from capitalism to something else. What that something else will be, nobody knows, but it's worth talking about, whether or not this sub is the place for it.
Kind of collapse related, but I really like the Lewis Mumford take on things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
Depends upon what you mean by what "fine" means. Within a couple decades, there will be no coral reefs. We have already caused the 6th biggest extinction event in Earth's history and humans continue to cause unprecedented destruction to the biosphere. It is kind of like a massive asteroid is hitting the planet over the span of 200 years.
Human destruction to the planet is happening in many ways; it is a lot more complicated that people think. But "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert does a good job illustrating the variety of ways that we are damaging the planet in irreversible ways.
No, the planet is not "fine" and it will not be fine if we continue this path of destruction.
There was a book written about it. https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/0805092994
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Related, grimly. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blue-spixs-macaw-parrot-that-inspired-rio-is-extinct-in-wild/
Probably a lot of readers of /r/water have read Cadillac Desert.
I own a copy of, and have made two false starts reading, The King Of California as recommend by the anonymous author of the blog On The Public Record.
I highly recommend A Great Aridness, a worthy heir to Cadillac Desert.
Also on my to-read list is Rising Tide. I would like to find a book that does for the Great Lakes what Marc Reisner did for water in the American West with his book Cadillac Desert.
A few things I've read this year that have little to do with water:
EDIT: Oh, and Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
You want to read this book then.
https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/0805092994
Great book on this topic
I strongly suggest you read "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert. In short, it details a series of extinctions - some mass some minor - and weaves in the narrative of humanity's future into it. The thesis revolves largely about climate change, but we too often think of climate change as weather. Here, Kolbert goes out of her way to explain to the reader all the ways in which smalls changes in things from ocean acidity to Amazonian ecosystems can have large scale ramifications for previously dominant species.
For example:
>Since the origin of life on earth 3.8 billion years ago, our planet has experienced five mass extinction events. The last of these events occurred some 66 million years ago when a six-mile-wide asteroid is thought to have collided with earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous extinction event dramatically changed the composition of biodiversity on the planet: Marine ecosystems essentially collapsed, and about 75 percent of all plant and animal species disappeared.
>Today, Kolbert writes, we are witnessing a similar mass extinction event happening in the geologic blink of an eye. According to E. O. Wilson, the present extinction rate in the tropics is “on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate” and will reduce biological diversity to its lowest level since the last great extinction.
>This time, however, a giant asteroid isn’t to blame — we are, by altering environmental conditions on our planet so swiftly and dramatically that a large proportion of other species cannot adapt. And we are risking our own future as well, by fundamentally altering the integrity of the climate balance that has persisted in more or less the same configuration since the end of the last ice age, and which has fostered the flourishing of human civilization.
I strongly suggest reading the book even if this minor tidbit won't change your view. I don't consider myself much a climate science evangelist - I acknowledge it's correct and should be fixed, but I never found it especially interesting or galvanizing. After reading this book and gaining an understanding of the history of the science of extinction - which is frankly extraordinarily new - and how many minor extinctions that occur in the background can have a cumulative cataclysmic effect, I've taken a stronger interest because it will have a major impact on humanity's future on this Earth.
Lol, we seem to have a misunderstanding
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/0805092994&ved=0ahUKEwjzxcPi5LvTAhVB6mMKHR7yC7IQFgh9MA8&usg=AFQjCNGAc9HC-5JWUNKFCNXPWtbYmvLXWQ&sig2=xKK_RBsoAR4peNTuhImi2Q
http://www.worldwatch.org/bookstore/publication/family-planning-sustainability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexploitation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
http://the-ipf.com/2016/07/11/overpopulation-family-size/
https://www.populationmatters.org/take-action/consume-less/small-family/
https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/0805092994
https://www.amazon.com/Maybe-One-Case-Smaller-Families/dp/0452280923
http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2016/life-expectancy-three-years-longer-for-children-born-into-smaller-families%20in-developing-world.html
Those wiki links all have research. The UN has written books on the matter. But a little common sense will go a long way - humans use resources, those in the Western world use the most of all. If you switch to a Prius but have 9 kids and then those 9 kids have 9 kids and they have 9 there's now 729 humans using even more resources on an already stressed planet, and that switch to a Prius didn't really do a damn thing.
http://www.census.gov/popclock/
Population keeps growing yet we're overfishing and acidifying the oceans, we're cutting down massive amounts of forests and not replanting them, we're destroying what little arable land we have while draining freshwater aquifers across the globe. Because humans use resources.
http://www.carbonmap.org/#intro
http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/
http://waterfootprint.org/en/resources/interactive-tools/personal-water-footprint-calculator/
You are correct. There is a book about just that.
http://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/0805092994/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395707418&sr=1-1&keywords=6th+extinction
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0805092994/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_7?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0805092994?pc_redir=1396030836&robot_redir=1
Shout out to Elizabeth Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction pretty good read about evolution,extinction and the anthropocene. Full of cool info but keeps it very narrative.
ITT: People who are trying to argue with people without trying to change their minds.
I'm no expert, but I'll paraphrase words from people who are.
The single best piece of material I've ever seen on the mass extinction we are living in (not the mass extinction that's coming; the one we are currently witnessing) is this. The Sixth Extinction (well, mass extinction) does a really good job of simplifying complex stuff into what normal people like myself can digest. Yes, by definition, this is a mass extinction; the rates of background extinction are currently hundreds to thousands of times higher than before significant human activity and approaching that of the fallout of the comet/asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Please search up background extinction rates and read some material before attempting to argue about this.
Climate change is tremendous, but it is only part of a series of problems that are about to fuck us in the
buttholemouthearbellybuttonset that includes all of our orifices. Ocean acidification, habitat fragmentation, flora/fauna trying to migrate and failing (yes, flora. Tree populations spread up slopes faster than down slopes with climate change, especially around warmer climates). The loss of megafauna that comes with poaching and habitat fragmentation.On top of that, by spreading around the whole globe, we spread life and disease in places where the environment has not evolved to place density-dependent limiting factors on them. We have new invasive species coming into California every week.
I understand your concern that we have more pressing matters, and that we have more time to solve this issue. But we don't. The youngest generation will witness significant changes. Last time we had this much CO2 in the atmosphere, the oceans were about 100 feet higher.
We are currently past the point of being able to solve the problems. We would need a way to cleanse the atmosphere, cut our population, stop expansion, shut off the car, and end globalization if we are to have the people five generations from now not worry about how to survive.
There is no happy ending to our story. There is only a later ending. We release the most carbon emissions in the world. And we just elected Donald Drumpf.
GOOD JOB AMERICA!
That's why I made the remark at the end about separating the signal from the noise. If you get to n = 200, at that point, you need to start questioning your sources. That shouldn't be conflated with questioning the event itself, which of course can be done, but it should be a separate effort.
If you read the book about disasters I listed above, the problem wasn't with people making mistakes because n was 200, but that people stopped listening even when n = 2 or 3. That's a human nature problem, and we should all be aware we have that potential blind spot when we find ourselves digging our heels in.
And finally, I don't know why people don't see climate change as n = 1 at this point, to be honest. This is unlike anything in the past - there is so much evidence out there, so much consensus, so many ecosystems falling apart so quickly right now (here's one book on it), and so many economic and social impacts we're already dealing with, it seems dated to be discussing if. In scientific circles at least, the conversation has long ago moved on to how we can respond to it, but at present it doesn't seem like things will end well.
The Sixth Extinction
I'm currently reading baby books... but my backburner book that I want to be reading but am only 50 or so pages into is The Sixth Extinction and I'm really into it. But more into learning how to not kill my baby.
I just finished The Sixth Extinction
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805092994/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_GaFvtb1Z57C8X
Exciting, startling, readable and current.