WINNER FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE

From the author of Field Records from a Catastrophe, a powerful and important function about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural background and field reporting into a compelling account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.

Over the last half a billion years, there were five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on the planet instantly and dramatically contracted. Researchers around the world are monitoring the sixth about The Sixth Extinction extinction, forecasted to become the most devastating extinction event because the asteroid influence that destroyed the dinosaurs. These times, the cataclysm is us.

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in two a dozen disciplines-geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree range since it climbs in the Andes, and marine biologists who dive off the Great Hurdle Reef. Elizabeth Kolbert, two-time champion of the National Magazine Prize and New Yorker writer, accompanies many of these researchers into the field, and introduces you to a dozen species-some already eliminated, others facing extinction-that are suffering from the sixth extinction.

Through these stories, Kolbert offers a shifting account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its initial articulation by Georges Cuvier in innovative Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction may very well be mankind’s most long lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the essential query of what it means to be individual.