The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Kolbert spent years visiting extinction sites around the world (coral reefs, the Amazon, Hawaiian mountain ridges) and documented the sixth mass extinction currently underway, caused by humans. Accessible, devastating, and impossible to dismiss. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.
In the frog chapters “you'll learn more about random rainforest frogs than you ever wanted.” The formula, fly to a site, meet a scientist, describe a species, move on, reads to some as magazine pieces rather than a built argument, which tracks with its origin as an expanded New Yorker article. It ends on “a pervasive sense of doom” with nothing to actually do, no policy ask. One critique argues the book “comes close to normalising this sixth extinction,” treating it as ambient rather than tracing it to specific economic drivers. And readers already following the news find it a primer that tells them little new.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
