Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on Sixth Extinction can help. Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive.
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sixth Extinction , which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Until very recently, golden frogs were an extremely common sight in El Valle. This species was known to be extremely toxic. Thus, when the golden frogs of El Valle began to disappear, few people saw it as a crisis. Active Themes. Mass-extinction and Morality. Around the same time, Kolbert came upon a scientific article arguing that the world was in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, which would be devastating for amphibians and many other life forms.
According to the article, there had been five previous mass extinctions, the most recent of which took place during the Cretaceous period, when, famously, the dinosaurs died out. Kolbert was so struck by the article on mass extinction that she bought a ticket to Panama to learn more—surely a mass extinction, one of the rarest events in the history of life on Earth, was worth researching.
Edgardo Griffith , the director of the EVACC, is a young man who has spent most of his adult life studying different amphibians. Griffith claims that the world is losing frog species before people even know they exist. Today, there are at least 7, different frog species, which inhabit environments as different as the Arctic Circle and the Mojave Desert. Different classes of animal go extinct at different rates, and, traditionally, frogs are an unusually resilient class of animal.
What, the passage implicitly asks, could be killing frogs, given that they can survive in the Arctic and the Mojave? Why are frogs going extinct in the 21st century? One might think that frogs are disappearing in areas where many human beings live; however, frogs that live in pristine areas, where no humans live, are also going extinct. She also visits the tropical rainforests of South America, where she sees the phenomenal diversity of life there. At the same time, the total amount of available land for wild creatures is constantly decreasing, thanks to the deforestation of the rainforests by farmers and ranchers.
Some rainforest species will survive the environmental changes facing the planet, but others will not. Furthermore, the extinction of even a few rainforest species will have a massive impact on the overall biodiversity of the rainforest, since rainforest species are connected to one another very closely. Another important factor in the Sixth Extinction is human travel. Since prehistoric times, different species have been confined to different ecosystems; each ecosystem has developed a complex equilibrium, predicated on its isolation from the rest of the world.
Due to modern human travel and transportation, however, different species have traveled around the world, upsetting the equilibrium of the new ecosystems they enter for example, the introduction of toads to Australia in the s caused the extinction of dozens of different plant and insect species.
In an effort to stave off the Sixth Extinction, some scientists have been trying to get endangered animals, such as the rhinoceros, to reproduce more quickly. Yet the only reason that rhinos and other large animals are on the verge of extinction is that humans overhunted them. Indeed, humans have been hunting large mammals for tens of thousands of years.
Kolbert travels to Germany, where she learns about the Neanderthal—an early, humanoid creature that went extinct thousands of years ago.
Based on their genetic research, scientists believe that early human beings, migrating from Africa, interbred with the Neanderthals, meaning that some modern human beings have Neanderthal DNA. Perhaps the Neanderthals were a more peaceful, docile species, and human beings either outcompeted them or actively wiped them out. Kolbert acknowledges that her book paints a bleak picture of the human race. Humans need to continue working to preserve endangered species, and to recognize that, no matter what they do in the future, their actions have already ushered in a Sixth Extinction that will shape the world for millennia.
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