Freethinkers Book Club: The Sixth Extinction By Elizabeth Kolbert

Freethinkers Book Club

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Wednesday, November 29, 2023, 7:00 – 8:30 pm

Hosted by: Karen C.

The Sixth Extinction is a 2015 Pulitzer award winning book that continues to be included on many must read lists of nonfiction books. If you want to learn more about the negative impact humans have caused on the planet in the last few decades, this book will provide field-based examples of how small contributions cause large scale environmental changes. By covering previous mass extinctions throughout history, Kolbert points to why the sixth extinction would be unique since it will likely be caused by humans.

The author also examines the development of extinction as an idea, and how it has changed our view of life. In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert demonstrates that living in the Anthropocene period of planetary history is resulting in the extinction or near extinction of many species, and by 2050 up to half of the world’s species will be gone.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a science writer for The New Yorker Magazine and several other books that focus on the effects of human civilizations on our planet’s ecosystem. Her decision to write The Sixth Extinction was influenced by a 2008 proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences paper entitled “Are we in the midst of the sixth mass extinction?” Since then, numerous environmental scientists continue to expand upon this body of knowledge.

Feel free to join if you have not read the book, but if so, please take a look at one or more of these resources.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History
• Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, Politics and Prose.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhEliHx5FWk
• Author Interviews on Fresh Air. In the World’s ‘Sixth Extinction,’ Are Humans the Asteroid? https://www.npr.org/2014/02/12/275885377/in-the-worlds-sixth-extinction-are-humans-the-asteroid
• https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/elizabeth-kolbert

Please join us!

Participants are encouraged to join the Pittsburgh Freethought Community if not already a member.
https://pghfreethought.org/Become-a-member