In the book of Genesis, the ark lent protection from the wrath of God and the violent judgment he rained down. Paying homage to the biblical sanctuary, England's University of Nottingham runs the Frozen Ark, a collection of iced cells containing the DNA of the world's endangered species. The Cincinnati Zoo operates the CryoBioBank. And the Institute for Conservation Research, an arm of the San Diego Zoo, hosts earth's largest catalog of chilled gene lines. Where Noah shielded life from the flood and the fury of a deity, these new vessels shield life from…us.

The story that begins with nomadic foragers in Africa and ends with the mastery of their environment can be a terrible tale, especially for things not named Homo sapiens. And we learn about the aftermath of total ecological domination in The Sixth Extinction, a new book by the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert.

Kolbert chronicles the current extinction event, which can be considered the sixth in earth's record, on intertwined narrative tracks. The primary story takes her around the world, where she reports on dead and vanishing species, like the brown bat, and the Panamanian gold frog, as well as the ruin of the Great Barrier Reef and the fragmentation of wild habitat like the Amazon rainforest.

The sections on beings that are recently extinct or on their way out are beautiful mixtures of elegy, wonder, and dark philosophical probing. Her expeditions with scientists read like treks into Jumanji. But The Sixth Extinction is also a tremendously sad engagement. According to the literature Kolbert cites, somewhere between ten and fifty percent of all living species will be headed toward extinction by 2050.

Chapter titles are laced with italic headings, the scientific names of flora and fauna that are on the brink or in the abyss. Alzatea verticillata reads one. It's a tree that, unlike other more adaptable rainforest classes, has not responded to increased temperatures by "moving" upslope, dispersing seeds where it's cooler. Dicerorhinus sumatrensis, the Sumatran rhino, is a megafauna, and like other animals of this type, has a slow gestation period. This allows the animal to rear young that grow to immense size, escaping predation. Against humans though, this reproduction strategy is disastrous. Reading the pages that follow, the italic inscriptions begin to resemble tombstones, grave markings for cherished things lost.

If this sixth extinction event is to be our legacy, will the most influential humans bother to seriously address the affect they've had on the Earth's biology? Based on the latest UN climate summit, the one held in Warsaw where 133 developing countries and many green groups walked out in protest, the answer is a Cretaceous-ending-fireball-sized no. Industrialized nations have opted to do next to nothing, clinging to the illusion that their wealth will shield them from the food shortages and drought already seen in the Global South. Those most culpable and best equipped to handle emissions, are instead preoccupied with the righteous thrill of blue recycling bins and high-efficiency washing machines, praising the small gestures of ethical consumption, which from the perspective of developing nations, must sound like a demented lullaby.

Extinction as an idea and framework, a history of scientific thought, is the secondary theme of the book. Darwin's theory of natural selection accounted for the origin and retreat of life forms, but Darwin didn't believe species disappeared due to catastrophes in earth's past. Expiration of a pedigree, he thought, like its evolution, is gradual. This reasoning, known as Uniformitarianism, wasn't seriously challenged until 1980, when geological evidence exposed the "dinosaurian misfortune" of an impact crater, later discovered buried off the Yucatan Peninsula.

Evolution is indeed a patient rat's game, but sudden and intense shifts in climate and the atmosphere can bring incredible changes to our planet's kingdom of creatures. And so can we. This new paradigm explains not only the previous mass die-offs, but suggests our own tremendous power to influence future ones. We're destroying certain bloodlines, but we're also defining the trajectory of living things that survive us. Our haphazard consumption and migration, growth and exploitation will dictate what kinds of life can be. The human age will ring long after our buildings and bones are reduced to another thin layer of sediment.

Kolbert loosens her grip for a moment at the book's end. There are no five point plans or dubious prescriptions for moral salvation; unflinching is the observation that this is what we've done with our brief time here. But doom is not the final word. Life, strangled and less diverse, will go. It just may do so without us.

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