Elizabeth Kolbert Promotes New Book: The Sixth Extinction

From National Public Radio’s Fresh Air to The Daily Show, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert has been making the rounds through the media to promote her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. For those of us who have been following the scientific discussion of species loss, it may come as a surprise that this topic is just now making its way to the mainstream. Whatever connections she may have to line up all of these interviews, Kolbert deserves tremendous credit for bringing this issue to public attention.

In her book, Kolbert, a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer, “draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human” (Amazon synopsis).