In language of suppressed anguish, she relates how explorers and fishermen wiped out the great auk, a flightless bird once prevalent across the northern rim of the Atlantic: The last pair was strangled on a barren rock off Iceland in 1844 to become stuffed trophies. The Sixth Extinction is a series of personally crafted portraits of life in its many different forms in flux and, in some cases, ceasing to exist - even as we. She mourns the loss of bats from a fungus that prevents them from hibernating (although her concern doesn't extend to bats killed by wind farms when the pressure waves from rotating blades cause their lungs to explode). Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact. Some 5,000 insect species-most of which we don't know anything about-are being lost each year, she says. She notes the rapid fall in numbers of the poisonous golden frog of Panama, succumbing to a fungus against which it has no protection. Kolbert, a staff writer at the New Yorker, argues that a new wave of extinctions is happening in the modern era because of us-because of what humans are doing and, ultimately, because of who we are. "The Sixth Extinction" is in part a roll call of species that have gone or are on their way to "dusty death." Ms. Very much, is Elizabeth Kolbert's answer. 'How much do you miss dinosaurs?" Ronald Reagan once asked, commenting tongue-in-cheek on the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
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