When my husband takes out the trash, every now and then he surprises me by putting his hand deep into the trash bag. He proceeds to fish out a stray plastic bag that ended up there by mistake. I sometimes jokingly call him "the evangelical environmentalist". He spends an undue amount of time peeling paper off plastic bottles. Every other Indian immigrant I know comes back from visiting India with a suitcase full of snacks and spices. My husband recently came back with a suitcase full of plastic bottles that he couldn't find a way to recycle back home.

I have to admit that this inconvenient habit of his has caused me no small amount of consternation. And this has been especially true whenever I had something urgent to get done and he would sit there peeling tiny plastic stickers off fruits so he could compost their rinds. So when I read this book - The Sixth Extinction - I started feeling slightly sheepish over my behaviour. The book made me understand a lot more clearly how much of a responsibility we all have to cut down our carbon footprint.

Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of the book, is a science writer. In this book, she has done a marvelous job of cataloging the five previous mass extinctions and the theories behind them. These previous extinctions caused a sharp decline in the diversity of life on earth. Kolbert, using data and expert interviews, shows how we are heading toward the next mass extinction. One which is happening several magnitudes faster than the previous Big Five, thanks to the activities of "one weedy creature" - Homo Sapiens.

Kolbert's writing is fluid and fast. She mixes vivid storytelling with dry theories and data, and keeps the reader wanting to learn more. Whether she is describing her trek in the Amazon rainforests to look for army ants, or her night in a hammock listening to the mating call of tree frogs, or the rigor mortis of a thousand tiny bats lying dead on the floor in a cave in Vermont, she does it with clarity and energy.

Here are some curious as well as alarming new things I learned from the book.

While massive catastrophes have come before, no creature has ever altered life on the planet as much as humans have. We have changed up to half of the planet's land surface. Our fisheries have removed more than a third of marine life in our oceans' coasts. We have used more than half of the planet's fresh water runoff. We have been instrumental in the expediting the "background extinction rate" of multiple organisms compared to the eras that came before us.
Amphibians have been around for longer than mammals and since before dinosaurs. Today they are the most endangered class of animals. Show love to the frogs you encounter in your life.
Because of how connected we are, we - intentionally and otherwise - transport species around the globe. We load them onto boats, load them onto planes, and track them with us. This causes several unintended consequences including the native species not having evolved defenses to cope with the new organisms aka "the invaders" and the invaders - lacking their natural predators - overpopulating their new habitats. This is one way where we drastically impact the lives of other creatures that share the planet with us.
Every day, a single American pumps seven pounds of carbon into the sea. It's similarly excessive in other parts of the world. Thanks to all this excess of carbon entering our oceans, oceans are getting acidified. This directly impacts the marine life, and stunts the construction of coral reefs. Coral reefs are nature's ingenious platforms to support a plethora of life in otherwise nutrient-poor waters of the tropics. At the current rate of carbon entering our oceans, one third of reef-building corals are headed toward oblivion.
One popular theory is that Homo Sapiens obliterated the Neaderthals - the archaic humans. But there is evidence now that some of our ancestors mated with Neanderthals. About one to four percent of non-African human DNA is Neandarthal DNA. So, for many of us, it is hard to NOT be a Neandarthal after all!
Just like our close cousins the Neadarthals, our other cousins - the non-human apes - are being driven to oblivion too. The number of chimpanzees in the wild has reduced 50% in the last fifty years alone. Lowland gorillas are disappearing faster than that. Causes include poaching, disease, and habitat loss.

We humans are one of the most evolved forms of life on the planet. We have the ability to cause huge amounts of destruction, knowingly and unknowingly. But we also have the capacity in our brains to reflect, to research, to empathize, to plan, and to course-correct. This world is a beautiful place teeming with a variety of interesting creatures. If we do not act now, we might be silently crushing that diversity and that beauty. But it's not too late to course correct. This news last week from my company gives me hope. I hope more companies, more individuals, and more governments follow suit.

This is the decade for urgent action. It is time to take bold steps forward to address our most pressing challenges.

- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp.

I enjoyed reading this book, despite the horror of the facts it lays out. I highly recommend that you read it too, and even more highly recommend that you do your share in reducing the atmospheric carbon. Drive less, don't buy fast fashion, take your bags to the grocery store, eat more plants and fewer animals, buy local, and recycle. I can't believe I am saying this, but my husband is right. We need to take this issue VERY seriously and we need to do it NOW.