Environmental Ethics: The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Friday, January 25, 2019

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

WAKE UP!
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Kolbert discusses in depth the impact that humans have on the environment. She gave hard and on point facts on this with very compelling evidence that would leave readers diving for more information.

Kolbert wrote this book intelligently and thoroughly by giving us examples of how earth was before compared to how it is now. We had so much more existing species that contributed to our environment in a positive way. However, due to the impact that humans had due to their greed and thirst for making sure life goes according to their comfortably, we are killing our world day by day ,but nobody cares because we believe that we're fine and everything's okay.

This book needs to be reintroduced today, globally, because these are issues that should be addressed. If we look at our world today and realize the change in the atmosphere, you would sit down and reconsider your way of living. It's honestly heartbreaking that many animals went extinct, some currently endangered, that barely anyone would recognize. This is all because of human impacts that many people don't know about.

After reading the book, I feel as if chapters 6 and 8 should definitely be talked about more especially. She basically talks about how the atmosphere has changed drastically. This is due the overload of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere that depletes the ozone layer, which causes sun rays to enter earth's atmosphere. This then leads to ice caps melting, low-lying islands to be flooded, skin diseases, and a million other problems that can be mentioned. Climate change and global warming is currently a problem that's going to cause potential loss to many attributes in our environment today. This has to be settled.

In closing, this was one of the best books I have read in a long while. We as a human race need to take more notice of what's going on around daily and take initiative to make our world better today. Let's at least try to save our wildlife and environment. Many would be surprised to know how one person would make a huge impact today.

I would 100% recommend any environmental student to read this book as it is informative and gives a broader view of what's taking place.

2 comments:

PhilJanuary 30, 2019 at 8:11 AM
I agree, this is a terrific book. Kolbert has been on the front lines of top-rate reporting on climate change for many years.

"nobody cares because we believe that we're fine and everything's okay" - It can seem as if nobody cares, "helped" in large part by the ignorant spewings of uninformed politicians who confuse climate with weather and don't understand that things like the polar vortex are encroaching in places where they wouldn't be, if not for anthropogenic climate change.

But fortunately, "nobody cares" is not quite the case. Recent polls indicate that recent extreme weather has people's attention, and growing numbers are beginning to care. What to do with that rising concern is still a big question, as it becomes increasingly clear that major lifestyle/consumption changes in the way many of us live are going to have to come quickly.
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Tiara Ashley BrownJanuary 30, 2019 at 4:20 PM
I didn't want to be so direct in my article and single anybody out. I was really meaning Donald Trump when I said nobody. I didn't want to seem political. In a recent tweet, he said "...What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, We need you!". This was the most ignorant thing I have ever came across.

This baffled me because he is the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world but doesn't see Global Warming as a big issue.

I now understand that my choice of words weren't the best, but this is the reasoning behind it.
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First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx

Friday, January 25, 2019

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

2 comments:

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