Summary Of The Sixth Extinction By Elizabeth Kolbert

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Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece The Sixth Extinction immediately introduces us to the cataclysmic events that have shaped our world, and our own fragile place within it. As a highly regarded American journalist and a “visiting fellow of Williams College”, she is known worldwide as an expert in the topic of climate change (New Yorker).
The Sixth Extinction challenges us to start at the beginning of our planets history, before the arrival of the very first human beings. We see how their migration started only a short time ago. Kolbert forces us to redefine our sense of time, as it is not the human lifespan in which change is measured but tens of millions of years. She tells us how there have been “five major mass extinctions during the history of …show more content…

Both works send a strong ecological message to the reader, and show us the tenuous but tenacious place that humans occupy within the world. “Under the hot, brilliant blue sky”, readers are first introduced to the idea that flooding in Miami is unfortunately a normal occurrence (Kolbert). We are confronted with “water gushing down the road into an underground garage” (Kolbert). What caught my attention was that nobody was panicking- it has become an everyday occurrence in Miami that something somewhere will flood. Kolbert talks about how at the end of the century, sea levels could rise by as much as three feet. This would be a complete disaster for the city of Miami, and also other coastal cities across the world. Entire towns would be flooded, and billions of dollars would be lost. We also have to consider the human factor- where would we relocate the people who have lost everything they had? In the case of The Sixth Extinction, we saw how before our modern era the only way to survive was by remaining in tune with the earth and by living off the land. However with the development of modern technologies we are introduced to new ways to grow and sustain life- but at what cost? We saw how costal cities such as Miami are undergoing extreme shifts, and in the very near future they could become completely deserted due to the increased amount of flooding. Nonetheless, nobody seems to realize that humans are the ones who have caused this extreme

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