The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind

This book is challenging and thought provoking .....taking the reader into areas not normally considered when thinking about extinctions and conservation.....culture....agriculture....language etc as well as the more traditional branches of biological sciences. A wonderful book for those on a quest with an open mind. Informative, accurate and surprising it weaves a rich tapestry.

When Rachel Carson penned "Silent Spring" in the early 1960's she essentially gave birth to the environmentalist movement in the United States and around the world. And for the most part this was a good thing. She correctly alerted the public to the sad fact that the use of certain pesticides was decimating and even wiping out numerous species of birds all over the world. "Silent Spring" was a clarion call to action that resulted in new laws regulating many of those chemicals and helped spawn a plethora of new environmental organizations that would become advocates for clean air and clean water. For the past half century these organizations have for the most part served humanity very well. But as we enter the 21st century there are a whole host of other issues to ponder when we consider enviromental matters. In "The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind" author Terry Glavin challenges us to look more broadly at these problems and to consider the consequences of the policies we choose to deal with these important issues. It turns out that there is a lot more at stake here then merely the well-being of birds and wildlife. What is new and different about "The Sixth Extinction" is the way Glavin links the fate of wildlife, foods, cultures and language. Glavin points out that multinational corporations continue to invade more and more remote areas of this earth with their hybrid fruits and vegetables. As a consequence of this invasion the world is rapidly losing thousands of varieties of plants and a frightening number of species of birds and other wildlife. For example, consider the apple. 100 years ago there were over 7000 varieties of apples in North America. Today only about 15 varieties are considered commercially viable. Unfortunately, a large percentage of those 7000 varieties appear to have been lost forever. And as Glavin reminds us we are losing something else just as precious. Perhaps a few lines from page 219 will help me to explain: "Like the loss of language, all it takes is a single human generation to stop cultivating an old crop variety for two or three seasons, and it's gone forever. Its charactoristics are forgotten. Its distinctive strengths and various uses are forgotten. Its taste is forgotten. The stories associated with it become extinct. The techniques of cultivating and harvesting it become obsolete, and the myths and songs that grew up around it become extinct." I now understand why my wife is so adamant about planting an heirloom variety of string beans that has been handed down from her grandather's family. She guards those seeds like they were gold. And I guess they are. Likewise, Glavin talks about the conflict between the environmentalists and those like the Lofoteners from Norway who seek to continue to hunt minke whales like they have for thousands of years. Radical environmentalists are absolutely adamant that no whaling should take place anywhere in the world. There seems t

It's no longer news that the human species is now considered an "outbreak" in the sense that we are an epidemic like AIDS or SARS. We are an organism that kills other life. Our methods are more subtle than some diseases. We don't often kill off whole species directly, but our lifestyle destroys the habitat they need to survive. Given how much attention we demand our medical services give to those other outbreaks of infectious organisms, it's still perplexing that we pay so little heed to our own destructive nature. According to Terry Glavin, it doesn't take much to see the result. He's done a great deal of observing our influence on other life, and in this excellent series of essays, he shares what he's found. With penetrating insights imparted in the finest story-telling manner, this book is a needed adjunct to the growing list of environmental works. Unlike so many books covering the human devastation of our planet, Glavin doesn't overwhelm us with numbing numbers. This is, as he declares in the subtitle, "The Age of Extinctions" - the worst since an asteroid took out the dinosaurs and many other forms of life. There are some body counts, along with lists of which other animals have survived our depredations. The threat, however, is ongoing. In recent years we've seen the fish stocks - cod, tuna and salmon were once common fare on our tables - decline or disappear. Plant species, upon which many of our medicines depend, are being swathed away. A quarter of the mammals which ultimately led to us after the dinosaurs were taken out are threatened with following them. How many can we truly afford to lose? Glavin's title is indicative. At a Costa Rican reserve, where he was assured the glorious Macaw was a regular visitor, he was forced to wait until just before leaving. He and his wife waded down a stream for a better viewing spot, only to climb out to be greeted by a sign warning them of crocodiles. He's visited many places in his survey, meeting people who could describe plentiful stocks of fish present a generation ago that are now gone. Whaling, which takes up a major segment of the book, is examined carefully. The question arises: "What is a 'sustainable' catch?" The answer lies in still better observation in the field and not in more pronouncements from distant bureaucrats. Glavin isn't a withering environmentalist. He understands the needs of people. He visits little villages, conversing with those who depend on the wild stocks and who understand what habitat means to them. And to us. We are the ones who must better understand our impact on our surroundings. He stresses that the loss of these creatures is our loss. In the final analysis, of course, we are also the sole species with the power to cure the infestation. Various suggestions have been forwarded as the means to prevent further extinctions. Managed wildlife reserves is one idea, the "breeding zoo" is another. These and other proposals are desp

The statistic that a species is lost every 10 seconds sounds bad, but it's hard to connect to. What does it mean? In this thoughtful book, Terry Glavin travels around the world to examine the edge of extinctions to see what the consequences and answers might be. You'll find it a moving and thoughtful trip. As a youngster, I read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and vividly remember those passages that described birds' eggs that wouldn't hatch because of pesticides. The Sixth Extinction will place several new vivid memories into your mind about the consequences of human economic development and population growth. Are we headed for environmental disaster? It's very likely. The main encouraging sign to the contrary is that there's a strong desire among many people to save environments, species, and avoid pollution. The book opens with a visit to the Singapore Zoological Gardens, a natural-seeming zoo that provides most of the somewhat natural environment left in Singapore. Mr. Glavin goes on to point out that zoos can't replace natural settings and describes the many flaws of zoos . . . including the terrible loss of wildlife from capturing specimens for zoos. Your full horror at this will be captured by his stories about how early zoos often included aboriginal men. This is an important point because even if biotechnology allows us to save species (even extinct ones), there needs to be a proper environment for those species. More shocking to you will be the revelation that large parks are often too small to provide proper environments. They just delay the eventual extinction. The first sign of hope comes in Mr. Glavin's visit to Costa Rica to see a scarlet macaw. In Costa Rica, endangered species are being revived by the social contract that favors the tropical rain forest and ecotourism. As a result, he did see the macaw living free in the 1500 hectare Curu National Wildlife Reserve. Unfortunately, in almost every other country the tropical forests are burned to make farmland or logged at a profit . . . destroying habitats essential for the bulk of the world's land species. One problem of people loving birds is that many rare species are hunted for private collections, speeding their decline into extinct status in the wild. A visit to Russia shows that opening of "free" markets often means faster extinctions. You'll read about large fish beyond what you've probably imagined. But they won't be around much longer as people can earn a year's wages in a single night of poaching protected species. Mr. Glavin next examines the increasing number of attacks on humans by cougars. It turns out that there aren't so many cougars, but humans are filling up the spaces where cougars used to live without humans in the wild. Cougar attacks will increase, even though their numbers will probably decline from the current low levels. In a visit to Norway, Mr. Glavin looks at the logic of how whales are saved. Not all whales are on the e