The Sixth Mass Extinction

The five that came before

The Ordovician, 445 million years ago: ice locks up the oceans and 85% of life dies. The Devonian, 375 million years ago: the seas suffocate. The Permian, 252 million years ago — the Great Dying, and the closest life on Earth has ever come to ending completely, with 96% of marine species gone. The Triassic, 200 million years ago, which cleared the stage for the dinosaurs. And the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, which cleared it again — taking not just the dinosaurs but three-quarters of everything alive, and handing the planet to the mammals.

Every one of those was caused by something the planet did to itself, or something that fell out of the sky.

The sixth is different

Species are currently being lost between 100 and 1,000 times faster than the natural background rate. Wild vertebrate populations have fallen by around 70% in the last fifty years. Insect biomass — the base of nearly every food web on land — is collapsing in every region where anybody has bothered to measure it. Half the world's coral is already gone.

None of this was done by an asteroid. It was done in under half a second of Universe Time, by one species, most of whose members have never been shown the clock.

Why nobody panics

Because two hundred years feels like forever to an animal that lives for eighty. Our sense of time was built to remember last winter and plan for next summer — not to perceive a trend that runs across ten generations. We are not stupid. We are simply using the wrong clock. That is the entire argument of this book.

Every previous mass extinction was an accident. This is the first one with an author.