“So long, it’s been good to know you”: Sing a sad song to the bees, birds and butterflies

_{Elizabeth Kolbert, Staff Writer at The New Yorker since 1999}

At the top of its list of the 100 best non-fiction books The Guardian puts “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert. The species dying off because of man-made devastation of the planet may include us. Anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned, “Homo sapiens might not be only the agent of the Sixth Extinction, but it also risks being one of its victims”. Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich says, “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches”.

Many scientists have foreseen the end of mankind: author-neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and Martin Rees, former Royal Astronomer and president of the Royal Society, are two that come to mind. Rees wrote a book “Our Final Hour”, about the many ways in which the human species is likely to be killed off this century. This leads to the Gaia theory by James Lovelace: Absent us, the planet will bloom again.

If you have a garden in Sai Kung, don’t you notice how rarely you see a bee, bird or butterfly?

Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her book that there is hope. If global warming becomes too grave a threat, we will re-engineer the atmosphere. Really! If Earth becomes uninhabitable we will decamp to other planets. “Don’t worry, as long as we keep exploring, humanity is going to survive.”

Obviously, Kolbert writes, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. “But at the risk of sounding anti-human — some of my best friends are humans . . . Right now, in the amazing moment that counts to us as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will be forever closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have — or have not — inherited Earth.”

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert  Henry Holt and Co. (2014) ISBN-10: ‎ 0805092994 ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0805092998