Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare. The notion that a sixth such event would take place right now, more or less in front of your eyes, struck me as, to use the technical term, mind-boggling. Surly this story, too-the bigger, darker, far more consequential one – deserves telling If Wake and Vredenburg were correct, (two american scientists) then those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rares events in life’s history, we are also causing it “One weedy species,” the pair observed, “has unwittingly achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other on this planet.”
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
By Elizabeth Kolbert
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