The Nature of Things

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert My rating: 3 of 5 stars “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked That famous quote from Upton Sinclair seems highly appropriate to any discussion of climate change in this country. Entrenched, very powerful economic interests control our political system and, to a great extent, our media, and those interests are determined that business as usual shall prevail in the production and distribution of energy. In other words, petrochemical companies should be allowed to operate unchecked and unregulated. That this is a recipe for worldwide catastrophe is made quite clear in this slim book by science writer Elizabeth Kolbert.   Kolbert organizes her narrative as a series of travelogues to various parts of the world where the effects of global warming are made most evident....

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert My rating: 4 of 5 stars "In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."                                  - Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich As far as science has been able to determine, there have been five mass extinctions of life on Earth in the history of our planet. The first of these occurred at the end of the Ordovician period of the Paleozoic era about 450 million years ago. The second occurred less than 100 million years later in the late Devonian period. There followed the End-Permian extinction of some 250 million years ago, the Late Triassic extinction of 200 million years ago, and finally, the last one and the one we are most familiar with, the End-Cretaceous extinction which occurred about 65 million years ago. That's the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. (Well, almost - excep...