The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) was voted No.1 in The Guardian’s list of the 100 best non-fiction books of all time.
Not without reason. Kolbert had shown lucidly, with clear examples, how human beings are causing the sixth great extinction event on the planet.
The previous five, over the past 450 million years, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, were all due to natural events.A new paper, Vertebrates On The Brink As Indicators Of Biological Annihilation And The Sixth Mass Extinction, which was published on 1 June, lays out the severity of our impact in starker terms.