This is affecting in itself but the lessons are too brief and basic. The script is, essentially, a cri de coeur, staged with footage of endangered flora and animal life.
West is always engaging, quietly in command as she takes us from the big bang to our present state of human-made climate emergency, which, we hear, has left our planet on the brink of its sixth extinction.īut the meta-fiction feels like a weak premise for Naomi’s plaintive sermon. So begins a play apparently created on the hoof about the value of life, the inevitability of death and the science of extinction. href: Img400.Always engaging … Lydia West.The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted.
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARĪ major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes
0 kommentar(er)
