Tuesday Intro

It’s time for another entry for, First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intros. Thank you to Yvonne, from Socrates’ Book Reviews who hosts this meme. As a reminder this is your chance to post a bit from a book that you are reading or planning to read. My entry comes from a book I’ve recently started:

“Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name — nothing does — but it has the capacity to name things. As with any young species, this one’s position is precarious. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again — some would claim nearly fatally – to just a few thousand pairs.”

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, the book’s premise is that the earth is the midst of a sixth extinction. There have been fix mass extinctions over the last half-billion years where life on earth has dramatically changed but this extinction, and this one is predicated to be the most devastating and is one that is man-made.

You are probably thinking we are in a pandemic why read this? Isn’t there enough gloom and doom? Well, at the beginning of the year my mom and I were watching a news report about a finding of 2,000 mammoth bones in Mexico City, which were unearth during the current construction of a new airport. The finding is the largest collection in one place.

I was fascinated by that story and the efforts they are making to ensure that they take precautions in case of further findings and what the plan is afterwards. I hope that one day I can go and visit the planned exhibit. I am sure I’ll be in awe.

In the meantime though that made me think of animals that are no more and just how the world has changed and how little time we are on it yet how much of an impact our actions have. So I remember hearing about this book especially around nonfiction November and I thought it’s time to read it.

Anyway let me know what you think and if it’s a book you’ve read or would read.

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