Pre-publication
The Sixth Extinction — Hardcover
R395.00
The book in full: 13.8 billion years laid out as a single calendar year, and the two hundred years that changed everything.
We are living through the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, and almost nobody can feel it. Not because the evidence is thin — the evidence is overwhelming — but because the timescale is impossible for a human brain to hold.
This book fixes that with one simple device. It takes the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang and lays them out as a single calendar year: Universe Time. On that calendar the Earth forms on the 2nd of September. Life appears on the 9th. The dinosaurs arrive on Christmas Day and are gone by the 30th of December. Our own ape ancestor turns up at 17:39 on New Year's Eve, and modern humans at ten minutes to midnight.
Everything we call history — all of it, every civilisation, every religion, every war — occupies the final five seconds. The industrial age is six tenths of one second. And in that fraction of a fraction, one species has triggered the first mass extinction in the planet's history to be caused by something that could have chosen otherwise.
The book plots human history on the same clock to show exactly why we don't take the crisis seriously, and what happens to the argument once you can finally see the scale of it.