This is the second installment of a muti-part slow motion book review. The first is here if you missed it.
There is widespread agreement that we are in a new geological era, the Anthropocene. I just finished The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and it is all about the Anthropocene. There are some who think this era started when man began to use fossil fuels a few hundred years ago but they are wrong. Homo Sapiens and yes even Neanderthals altered the world tens of thousands of years ago. The extinction of large mammals can be associated with human migration. Being large was a survival advantage until smart hunters came along. We were also responsible for the extinction of our retaliative, the Neanderthal, but not before we had had enough sex with them to leave all of us of with European or middle eastern descent with 3 to 6 percent Neanderthal genes. It’s estimated that up to 90% of the Native American population was killed not by European weapons but European diseases.
Human caused global climate change may only be the most important because it may result in man’s own extinction. There have been shifts in the climate of the planet before but the thing that makes this different is the speed it’s occurring. The ocean is dying, because of acidification the corral reefs will all be dead by 2050. The combination of entire ocean ecosystems dying and over fishing will result in the starvation of millions and perhaps billions who depend on the sea for food. It is also estimated that up to 50% of all species on earth in 1900 will be extinct by 2050. While it’s easy to blame the Koch brothers and Exon/Mobile how many of us are willing to give up our energy intensive life style? This post has been written from both my desktop and laptop computers. I have a large screen TV and I stream movies and TV shows. I don’t drive or own a car but this is because of vision problems and I probably would if I could. So I plead guilty, I’m part of the problem.